The Official PC building thread -3rd Edition

AFAIK That's a bone stock Athlon XP. I've seen tons of them and even own a few. There's a 2200+ in my current laptop. I'd recommend Arctic Silver Ceramique due to the small surface area. In case some gooshes over the sides it's non-conductive so you won't fry anything.

Wanna talk old CPUs I have several Pentium 1s, a few Pentium MMXs, a Pentium Pro, several Slotted Athlons and Pentium 3s, a few odd assorted 486, 386, and 286 chips I'm not sure if they work and a few others I can't name ATM. The Athlon XP is actually a comparatively newer design believe it or not.

 

OmN7,
Be careful of the edges of the die, as they are razor sharp. I have a 2500 Barton core, 333 fsb, 512 L2 cache, if you are interested.

http://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/K7/AMD-Athlon XP 2500+ - AXDA2500DKV4D.html

Russ

 

Nice Russ I remember most of those OCing reliably to a 3200+. One of my friends had one OC'd with a GeForce 6800GT and it was a sweet setup

 

Because you can unlock the extra pipes on the AGP 6800. I still have mine on a shelf as my "known good" AGP card for troubleshooting that generation machines

 

I'm afraid the board will only take as much as a 2100 Athlon XP. That's the limit of its potential Pretty outdated. I'm hoping that it will beef it up enough to convince the netflix player that it's good enough. Now it'll have the SSE instruction set, which is apparently required. Where it wasn't before!

Apparently it just quit again though. He told me before work today that it was restarting itself, and wouldn't boot into xp. I'll find out tomorrow...Poor thing...it sat in a garage to long

PSU's a bestec. Probably the culprit...

Unfortunately, i've not seen to many PSU's in the proper form factor for this particular case. The PSU has to smaller than usual. It has the typical hight and width, but the depth needs to be shorter, or it pushes into the optical bays...

 

I just had my second experience with Win 7! I am not a happy camper at all!

First thing is my Optical sound no longer works. I went to GigaByte and downloaded the latest sound driver for Win 7, and installed it. Still only Analog! On a scale of 1 to 100 they get a total fail on the way things work, and a total lack of anything intuitive. I guess that people who survived Vista, can understand it, but I'll be damned if I can! Things that were so simple with XP are now complex tasks. Why they couldn't leave well enough alone and leave the video adjustments exactly as they were with XP. It was all there, and easy to understand! I'm going back to XP! Tonight, or should I say, this morning!

Very disappointed,
Russ

 

Sorry to hear about your troubles russ. I've not had any bugs quite so...extreme. Surely there is another reason? I've not heard of anybody else with that particular problem. But, this is a pretty big planet The only bug I'm currently witnessing is a minor one. The file transfer calculator is a bit buggy. It seems to think that flash drives are quicker than they are.

 

mmm russ have you tried the windows updaet tool?

 

Yep the Bestec PSU is your main suspect. I can't even begin to count the number of Bestec PSus I've replaced. Probably over 50 now

Maybe find an elcheapo ATX case and just stick it with an Antec 380W?

Hmm interesting as my onboard optical works when plugged into my sister's surround setup. Using DFI though. It might be an issue with Gigabyte's hardware specifically. My main gripe with both Vista and 7 has been the lackluster sound support but that was mainly the exclusion of EAX. Which BTW is mostly fixed [for me] with Creative ALchemy.

I might add that my onboard sound is currently disabled in favor of my Creative X-Fi card. If you like quality a sound card is paramount.

Honestly Windows 7 may not be for you considering your needs. I'm a gamer so it was only natural to upgrade for me but you use your machine as an HTPC and workhorse. If Windows XP works for you right on! Maybe consider a dual boot though? 7 does have some advantages, HDD transfer speeds being a major one for me.... I'll also add that you'll have an easier time with Creative sound cards in XP. You need to buy a more expensive "X-Fi" branded card or use hacked drivers to properly use a sound card in Win Vista and 7.

 

so the intel larrabee has been cancled this week, and coincidently the AMD and Nvidia shares shot up 8 and 13% respectivly.




and i was getting happy to see a 3rd wheel in this aswell. competition = win.

 

Omega: A Bestec PSU? I think you know what the culprit is...
Russ: Because it's Windows 7's fault that Realtek's drivers are a little buggy? That's like blaming XP for the fact that your graphics drivers won't run a certain game....
The video adjustments are pathetic, and that is something I'm wholly disappointed about (only affects Win7, they were still there in Vista).
Overall, Vista is a better OS from an interface perspective than Win7, but Win7 does have fewer bugs. The number of bugs is still I would say perhaps 5-6 times higher than XP in pre-service pack state. For example, I was banned from mapping network drives last night, and will need to reboot to re-enable my permissions.
In general though, Optical sound is a complete farse. It takes so many hours of hard work to get it working as you want it, it isn't worth the effort. The surround quality is better for films, but the actual audio fidelity itself is essentially indistinguishable.
Since I'm an Audigy SE owner, I'm not allowed to use anything but onboard sound since I run Windows 7. I would eventually like another card that can stereo upscale better than just my speakers' stereo copy, but buying a genuine X-Fi is too expensive at the moment. I also notice Creative withdrew MIDI support from their entire range of sound cards, so should I want a MIDI card I'd have to look to music-industry grade cards only, since there are no other PC sound card manufacturers aside Trust (whose software is aparently non-existant) and Asus. Even negating my existing prejudices I've heard enough bad things about Xonar cards to not want one.
Shaff: Indeed, Larrabee was cancelled, to my complete lack of surprise. The tech demo of it was an absolute disgrace. They'd never be able to get the performance of it high enough to compete in the market. They obviously realised that and withdrew from the market. It's simple, Intel don't know how to make graphics products. I don't know why, but for getting graphics performance they seem absolutely clueless.
Quite frankly, a third wheel would be nice, because it's starting to turn into a one-horse race. With the complete elimination of the GTX275 and GTX285 from the UK market, the lack of a GTX300 series any time soon, and the lower-end cards priced so high that only fanboys would buy them, it's an ATI-only market out here at the moment - far from good from the competition. It should speak volumes that nvidia's midrange market control is so weak the HD5700 series is weaker than the 4800 it replaced, yet it costs substantially more. They still sell like hotcakes of course, because they're still better value.

 

That power supply was bought before I genuinely cared. Now, much like Ram performance, the PSU is extremely important. In fact I believe it to be the most important component. It sure is a shame that newegg does not have any corsair's in that form factor. Perhaps corsair does not make them though. I'll have to visit their site. Surely they do. HTPC's don't require a whole lot of power. And HTPC's make up a decent percentage of the market im sure...

Live and learn

Hmm, looks like newegg offers almost all, if not all of Corsair's PSU's. Unfortunate.

Looks like PC Power & Cooling has some fairly small PSU's. 5.5" depth. Which is what it currently has I believe. 4.5-5" would be preferable though. Much more comforatable, and would probably run cooler.

Ω

 

The Corsair VX series is about as small as standard PSUs get. The only smaller PSU size is that employed by the Nexus Value 430W unit, which is rare in that sense.

 

DDR3 ram speeds mean practially nothing though.

 

Sam,
My point with the Realtek drivers is that they had worked with Win 7 before, so why M$ decided to change things on us I'll never know. More security, I guess! As far as the Optical Sound goes, I wouldn't go back to Analog! It's never been a real problem to install and get working. The only problem I ever had was with the Amp, not XP. It only uses Optical in Video mode, not in DVD mode. I doubt that I spent ten minutes setting it all up, mostly setting the sound in WMP 11. As far as the difference in sound quality goes, for me it's easy to hear given my instrument of choice. Things that play somewhat muddied by the Analog Sound, are much clearer with the Optical. It's much easier to hear all the pipes. For the most part when I'm playing the sound at ridiculous levels, it sounds like I'm behind the console playing, since you are facing the pipe chambers to begin with! It's as close as it gets to live!

I recently played a Privately Owned 3 Manual Moller that has 32" bass notes. What the Analog does to the sound of them, is a crime! It's not that the Analog sound is bad, it's just the optical is so much better. When I say you can feel the notes, I mean you would not want to be playing bass notes like that on an empty stomach. You get this odd feeling in the pit of your stomach like you get when a bass drum passes you at a parade. You can hear everything. Every pipe, every sound, just like you are there playing it. Not the same magnitude, for sure, but still most impressive given the Dynamic Range of the instrument!

My biggest gripe with Win 7 is the total lack of familiarity with anything but Vista. The simplest things become a chore, just to figure out how to do what! It's not in the least intuitive, and there's no "Classic Menu" option! Doesn't Microsoft understand that XP forced MS's hand and caused Win 7 to be introduced, in the first place? It was a compromise that was brought on by XP users, and those that hated Vista, but the most noise by far, was made by XP users. There will be some form of "Classic Menu", when the screaming get's loud enough, and it will! LOL!!

As far as the speed difference, it may make a world of difference with gaming, but with the things I use a computer for, there isn't enough advantage to even be noticed! Win 7 does boot a little faster, but that's about the extent of it for me. Whatever it's faster at, I haven't found it yet!

Best Regards,
Russ

 

Well...it was not the PSU. It was the 9yr old HDD. It had a long life anyway. I tried installing XP on it, and it nearly hung up during install. The slowest setup process i've ever seen. Slapped a spare HDD laying around in it, and away it goes. Now I can move on with all the other stuff

 

http://forums.creative.com/t5/Sound...-2-0-07-31-2009-AudigySE-Value-LS/td-p/533291

Follow the directions and you get absolute full functionality from your card. I have 2 friends using that driver right now with an Audigy SE and Win 7 and they get every single feature from XP including a few previously X-Fi exclusive features. I'm currently using the X-Fi version of those drivers as well and they also work fine.

I can also verify that the rapidshare link does work. Just did a full DL to test and the whole file is there.

After you install, reboot in safe mode and navigate to where you extracted the files. Click the Crystalizer activator and let it do its stuff. Reboot again and boot normally and you have the full featured, uncut driver suite. Minus the bloatware of course just the control panel and the audio control center. Everything is there including CMSS Stereo surround and ALchemy for EAX games

http://img163.imageshack.us/img163/6382/examplee.png

Also Audigy SE users get the same X-Fi control panel and Crystalizer support with the unlocker.

The HDD wasn't a Quantam Fireball was it? lol

 

LOL! No. My buddies 1999 compaq has one though. No, the one that quit was a 80Gb Western Digital. It seen probably 100X its capacity though, so that ain't bad if you ask me. HDD's apparently don't like being neglected and require exercise much like people do. It sat for over 1.5Yrs, so I guess im not surprised given its age. It was a WD800BB. I think it had a measly 2mb cache LOL! Though it performed better than it's seagate replacement while running...

 

I actually have a scheduled nightly defrag as per Auslogics to keep my disks fit. And when they're not defragging they're usually being downloaded to.

 

Russ: I know you are very anti-MS, which is fine, most people are, but don't assume that because a driver doesn't work every time it must be because Microsoft decided it shouldn't. You can blame Windows 7 in the sense that a particular company hasn't produced effective drivers for it, but not MS itself for buggering with driver support. I really don't think that's how it works here. I personally haven't had any grief with Realtek drivers in Win7, but then I'm using Gigabyte's own frontend for them.
As for muddled analog sound, there's no reason for it to be, unless there's something odd about your amp, or the sample rate of the PC isn't set properly. 48KHz will be ample.
I tested optical sound with various types of music thoroughly, and with what I would call an excellent (granted not studio grade) speaker system, I could hardly tell any difference. I think you should perhaps try some monitor headphones instead, or a different amp / analog cables.
I don't switch to Win7 because it's faster. it isn't. Faster than Vista yes, faster than XP no, not by a long shot. I use it because (apart from it being mandatory to run more than 2 GPUs) it is just the more modern OS. It has a much more modern interface, it has better support for new and upcoming hardware technologies, and above all, it's supported right now by all developers. XP support is slowly being phased out by lots of hardware and software designers. Using Win7 is if anything, keeping up with the times. It's not perfect, but it's not bad enough for me to want to change back to XP, even if Creative make its use a living hell.

Jeff: That driver's not compatible with my system, the sound output is so corrupted it is completely unusable. Daniel_K drivers work in XP, but what's the point? So do the creative ones there...