The Official PC building thread -3rd Edition

They didn't add anything decent because they knew there would always be people who buy Ultimate simply because 'it's the best' and if it means they can offer more value to people with a better money to sense ration then you can't really complain.

 

Oh, I'm not complaining LOL! I simply think it might have been a better business decision to put something more tempting on the ultimate edition. But then, perhaps he was cutting the little guy a break In which case, Thank you Bill

 

I don't think there's any reason at all to go higher than Professional. That is unless you specifically need a feature from Ultimate. Which I doubt most home users will.

 

Wow! If I were buying another Gigabyte board, this would sure be the one! GA-790FXTA-UD5
But, I already have an AM2+ processor. And that board is exclusively AM3. And my Phenom II 940 is plenty for me right now. Besides, dropping nearly 200$ for a SLIGHT improvement on cpu capability, and lower TDP just ain't happening. Probably if I had the money though But honestly, their isn't even a smidgen of USB 3.0 devices or Sata III for that matter. I imagine Sata III devices will be exploding their way onto the market pretty quickly though. With SSD's eking their way into existence

I fear my current board quitting on me. Yet it has paid for itself. I don't fancy the idea of going through the customer service loop holes. So i'm looking for another board. Don't know when it'll happen, but the sooner the better. I'll be generally looking at all brands. But from what i've been reading, if you go AMD, gigabyte is generally the flavor to stick with. Perhaps a simple replacement is all I need then...

I'm not starting some Brand war. I'm simply noting what the majority of my internet browsing has come up with. If Jetway is your brand of choice, then more power to you

LOL! I think I just made up my mind again. Tee hee. Im gonna RMA through gigabyte. As much as I really don't wanna do that. Because it puts me without a Quad for 2-3 Weeks, and very few drives. For the sake of discovering this curious USB problem, I gotta know! The curious USB problem as some of you know is a weird Static discharge, which causes the MOBO to restart indefinitely, until I power down the PSU.

 

Jetway? You have to be kidding@!!!

Here's some ASUS picks (best rating at top)

 

I updated GM. Sorry.

I think im gonna make my next build asus, depending on technology and pricing at the time. but currently, it would be wisest for me to deal with Gigabyte support in combating my curious mobo issue. The Media burning is only one of the problems...

 

Let's not forget:

Gigabyte

MSI

DFI

 

Russ: Thanks for the picture of the S-ATA adapters, I've only seen stuff like that as part of hard drive silencers, not on their own. They don't really serve a great deal of purpose unless you're after excessive wire management (in which case you'd probably braid cables anyway to tidy them up) or to assist with mounting in an enclosure of some sort. The included bracket for mounting SSDs is one such example, but Deadrum's sentiment is exactly how I feel, the cables are unnecessary really. As stated, all power and data connectors for SSDs are identical. I know, I've seen pretty much al of them
Jeff: Duly noted on the headset repair, I'll bear that in mind when my housemate's inevitably breaks (she breaks a lot of headsets )
Omega: The time I'm buying an SSD that big, I would damn well hope it's an SLC Also, I could achieve the same result myself with lots of small SSDs and a RAID card for a similar price
I'll gloss over the motherboard/software issues because they look like they're solved.

Will: I think I use http://www.dll-files.com

On the installing windows partitions, NEVER, EVER do any formatting work within the windows setup wizard unless you have ONLY the drive you wish to format plugged in. The drive letters are almost always switched into a seemingly random order (perhaps by S-ATA port?) and you will likely format the wrong drive, especially if you use multiple drives the same Doesn't make SMART analysis very easy either - 'WD10EADS' - great, but which one?
Oh, also, agreed on the sentiments of S-ATA cables. I went the first year or two without major issues, but I find myself increasingly cursing the quality of S-ATA cables, because I tend to point to more complex and potentially unreliable components as the cause first.
Omega: Never had any grief with Win7's integrated GPU driver at all, my friend plays all his games on it since there's no Win7 support for his X1950 - you'd never manage THAT on xp!
New OCZ SSD looks very nice, however, I'm looking at its random read performance, ultimately the most important of all - it's still behind the Gen2. It's difficult to justify this costing any more than the Gen2 when the most important performance attribute is slightly worse. Grats to OCZ for finally finding a decent controller for their otherwise excellent SSDs, but really, unless these are cheap (they won't be, 30 gig Vertex 1s are 3/4 the cost of an 80 gig Gen2) I won't be buying one

Hope you guys all had a good new year's, better than mine at least
new year's eve spent indoors due to an ill baby, a week without internet (oh noez!) the return journey taking 9 hours instead of the usual 6, and arriving home to discover my USB hard disk enclosure is dead... Ah well, such is life.

 

Haha don't worry Sam it wasn't much for me either. I had some plans with friends but that failed epically so I stayed home and drank a few small glasses of peppermint schnapps while playing Runescape XD

 

We had a few lol games of Pictionary over the course of the week, but nothing much on actual new years' eve. Still, a week of good food isn't all bad. I may be reconnected to the world of technology when I get back, but my eating habits leave a lot to be desired

 

Sam,
Welcome back. You are welcome about the S-ATA adapters. I wasn't even aware of them before I looked them up. I don't know about braiding the Data cables though. I don't think it's a very good idea!

BTW! When I formatted my hard drive with the other drive hooked up, it formatted the 38GB C partition and formatted the 116GB F drive as well. Because if the size difference between them, it only formats a portion of the larger drive. That's why you wind up losing about 30% of the Data on the drive. I never had that problem with IDE or SCSI drives, ever!

Best Regards,
Russ

 

I just read on Wiki, that Sata Rev 3.0 (6Gbit/s) is backwards compatible with Sata 2.0. So if I had 2 Solid state drives (Sata II), and Raid 0 them, and they both have 250Mb read peaks, then they can reach a theoretical 500Mb read speed. Correct? As well as double their write speed. And...on top of that, you still have your Sata II channels. So you have a theoretical 9Gbit/s Ceiling, correct? Or would it amount to the southbridge, or whether or not they had dedicated chips? Oh, I suppose so LOL! Well now, that is interesting though isn't it. If they simply put those Sata III ports on the same southbridge/Chip that all your other bandwidth is using, then what good will that be! I certainly hope that they all have their own dedicated chips

So I don't think that im gonna be replacing my board now through gigabyte, LOL! Yes, I changed my mind again LOL! The way I see it, is i'll be losing time and money while I don't have my Quad core board for the 2-3 weeks. In that time, I can damn near save up enough, to make the switch to AM3, and get one of those badboy boards with the USB 3.0 as well as Sata III. Oh yah! It is a bit of money though, isn't it. almost 200 for the board, almost 200 for the processor, plus a hundred or more for DDR3 Ram. Thank goodness it's almost Tax return time

 

Oman7,
I'll be keeping my eye on this one!
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128416
I've got two AM3 CPUs in the house now!

Russ

 

LOL Russ! I've been eyeing that one, as well as the GA-790FXTA-UD5
I'm extremely close to upgrading to AM3 now. Tax return time is coming, plus money coming in from other directions

 

S-ATA data cables have the advantage (or disadvantage, depending on how you see it) that the connector at the end is of a similar size to the cable itself, so the entire cable can simply be run through a shroud. The more advanced braiding, for instance for the 24-pin ATX connector, requires de-pinning and re-pinning the connector to apply the braid, which in my mind, was always far too much hassle to go to in order to braid a power connector. The irony is, most PSUs you buy these days already come with a decent braiding on the power cables anyway.
I'm not sure I know what you mean about the formatting size Russ. Are you saying that if there are two partitions on the same drive and you try to format one, both are formatted regardless?
Omega: All S-ATA versions are backwards compatible with each other, hence why S-ATA 1 drives still work on S-ATA 2 controllers, and vice versa. The limit of S-ATA only applies to the cable. If you have a set of drives in RAID to a controller, the only limit is the speed of the controller, which if a full 16x PCIe hardware RAID card, is around 600MB/s.
S-ATA3 is a little needless right now unless SSD speeds improve yet further, as no SSD I've seen can achieve a sustained transfer rate of 375MB/s, nowhere near it.
Sounds like your upgrade period is going to cost a similar amount to mine, it's £150 ish for the i5, £170 or so for the P55A-UD5 (not looking forward to that!) and probably near enough £100 for the RAM I want.

 

Sam,

When I installed my OS, I told windows setup to format the C partition on the boot drive, which was 38GB. It also formatted the first partition on my second hard drive (E), at the same time. That partition was 116GB. On re-boot after XP was installed, it automatically ran chkdsk/f to repair my E drive. It takes about 30-40 minutes to recover the data, and then you lose about 30-35% of it. I think it attempts to format both drives as 38GB, which screws up the NTFS File Allocation for the 116GB E drive. chkdsk/f repairs and recovers the drive, but everything involved in the portion of the second hard drive actually formatted, gets lost and isn't recoverable! I guess it attempts to use the backup file allocation file for the logical drive, but can't recover what has already been written over by the format. Why this doesn't give some sort of an error message before it formats anything, is beyond me! It also created an F drive for the boot, with C un-accessible from windows! With all the security that's built into XP-Pro, it can't even protect the data on a second HDD partition from being lost! how's that for being ironic?

I did it twice, once by accident and once deliberately, because I restored the 116GB E: drive from my backup, and very carefully started all over again. I made absolutely certain the 37-38GB partition was the only drive checked, and it did the same exact thing again! It again also formatted E, and had the same problems with recovering the files! I unplug all HDDs but the drive I'm installing the OS on, and it works like a champ! No errors or strange drive letters anymore!

Oman7,
Unless you need two Lans and three video cards, I can't see spending the extra $45 for the GA-790FXTA-UD5. Both it and the GA-790XTA-UD4 have Sata 3, two internal, and both E-Sata ports on the rear of the motherboard. Both motherboards have two USB 3 ports on the rear panel as well. Unless you are planning to use three way CrossFire, it's money wasted, in my eyes! If you need the extra Gigabit Lan, a Gigabit Lan card costs about 1/3 of the price difference of the two motherboards!

Best Regards,
Russ

 

Down the road, I may toy with 3 GPU's. Not sure yet. But i'm not buying both boards. I'd rather spend the tiny bit of extra, and have the option later And yes, I would like dual Lan

 

welcome back sam, hope you had a good time

for my next update itll be a 1.5TB green for backup/movies and a WDTV media hub that plays 1080p mkvs on TVs, and a F3 1TB (500GB per platter) drive for the OS/games.

im waiting on the i3 530/540 till i go to my next upgrade. reason being paired with a £80-£120 uATX mobo and 4GB ram, will cost me less than £300, and itll be a huge increace over my 3.6GHz E5200. they are dual cores aswell, but with hyperthreading, so any games/apps that need more than 2 can have them, and they are overclocking to over 4.2GHz with STOCK coolers! thats some insane overclocking power.

would love an SSD but with flash prices constantly rising now, and predicted to rise till 2011 i dont think i will. though intel manufacture and use their own flash so this doesnt affter them hense why their 80GBs now dont cost the same as a 128GB indlix drive. and apparently a refresh is on the cards for them to keep their price and double the storage, SO i will wait for that/G3.

and to accompany the new i3s i want to got the corsair H50 watercooler, but i need a new case (one with a 120mm fan) so ill be getting the Silverstone Sugo SG03 or the SG04.

 

Hmm, that's a bizarre incident. I'm afraid I don't have any experience of reformatting a drive that already has two partitions on it using the windows setup util - suffice to say I much prefer using the built-in format wizard over the one built into the setup unless when necessary! Taking that story into account only adds more weight to this argument. Did I read earlier that you suggest this is a S-ATA only issue? I'm not entirely sure I understand how...
As for UD5 vs UD4, I'm mainly buying for Dual LAN. That comes in handy on several occasions.

The i3s are looking like resonable CPUs, but they're nothing special over the Wolfdales really. If anything, I don't see as much of a benefit i3 vs E8 so far as I do i5 vs Q9. I'm guessing because the current i3s are low-end versions, I don't know. In essence, i3 @ 2.93Ghz doesn't look much better than E8400 @ 3Ghz, whereas an i5 750 @ 2.66Ghz is certainly more powerful than a Q9650 @ 3Ghz, plus it's a real quad core, not just hyperthreading, can be bought with 4GB of RAM and a motherboard for £320 all in. The i3 doesn't change my 'CPU of the month' for now - I'll wait and see what the newer versions are like.
The Gen2 SSD from Intel was, and still is on my upgrade list, but with such a vast list of other things I will see more of an immediate benefit from, it's been shelved until probably after easter. Right now, using the WD1001FALS as a boot drive isn't ideal, but is certainly liveable, and if anything feels noticeably faster than the HD753LJ preceding it. That said, it's running Win7 versus Vista SP2, so that's up for debate.
Buying a case with no 120mm fan slots... Hmm, I just couldn't bring myself to do that