The Official PC building thread -3rd Edition

You're exactly right about the difference though Russ, and it looks like i7 is Intel taking a leaf out of AMD's book which is interesting, but either way, fact remains, the Intel on the broad side of things is the faster chip to own still.

 

cincyrob,

When I eat, I eat like a guy weighing 300 Lbs. I weigh 145! LOL!!

I don't think so, as the AMDs are what they are, inexpensive decent performers! I think Intel will wind up hurting themselves more, or risk surrendering the middle ground to AMD, given the present prices if they drop the lesser processors.

They will have to continue with the C2D qnd the Core2 Quads, or lose that market to AMD, unless they can sell enough Core i7s. The average non-enthusiast won't be buying them, but they'll go for something cheaper! It's a catch 22 as the additional cost of a new MB, memory and CPU cooler won't be worth it to them! Only a small segment of the end users out there are going to spend that much money! Given the plummeting economy, Intel may well have shot themselves in the foot! Again! LOL!! People will upgrade what they have first before springing for so many extra bucks! It's going to be a very good time for those that want to upgrade what they have! Whatever intel does, it's the enthusiast's like us, that will benefit the most! Even the server market is going to suffer!

I've said it before, how fast is fast? People won't give a rat's a$$ about how much faster the Core i7 is! All they'll look at is how much more it will cost! They'll be looking at replacing that crappy Celeron in their 775 MB with a C2D or Quad, which should be a very cheap upgrade!

Best Regards,
Russ

 

RedRob boozer is right.

Russ I may be a few months late in my statement. lol. They've already gone DOWN quite a bit. I think this is the CPU that I was looking at about a year ago when I came across the Q6600 "deal" . IIRC it was something around $300 at the time. I think AMD stuff is good and I used them on my first 2 builds and therefore on a few "re-builds". lol. btw I did use AMD on my office build and could have gone any number of ways. It was cheap and a friend helped me as well. btw that mobo way outshines the cpu, NO offense but I think you would like it too Russ!!!

...gm

 

yea i know your right. and being border line diabetic, and been to a couple classes about diabetic's i know the proper routine..lol

no offence ment here.. but its allways a skiny dude telling the fat dudes how to eat...lol hell we know how to eat, how do ya think we got to be 300lbs?
sorry for the off topic.. its just funny thats all.. nothing bad ment by that boozer.. i know what ya mean..

 

lol Who says I am skinny? I was about 200 lbs when I was 15. I exercised, lifted weights, and ate healthier. I'm at 160 now!

 

I'm crying here!!! I can't stop laughing!!! heheehe.

boozer NO offense from either party. lol. I weigh over twice what you do and that seems skinny to me. lol. It's all relative on how you look at it. lol. A runway model would think you're FAT... hehehe...

....gm

NOw what were we talking about??

 

greensman,

Nuts and bolts, Nut!

LOL!!

 

No I mean being 200 at 15 is kinda fat.

 

Man I'm installing Rainbow Six Vegas 2 right now and my PC is using 3.95 GB of RAM. I don't even know what the hell it's using it on. Looks like more of Vista's prefetching, but my PC running kinda slow right now.

NVM, it got much speedier after I stopped watching the Daily Show. I guess installing games really takes it out of a computer while watching Videos and browsing the Web?

 

thanks for the help Mort and Russ

I set the FSB Freq. at 425 which set the memory at a perfect 1066MHz DRAM running at 2.2v , vcore at 1.3v

and i seem to be stable at a OC of 3.4GHz temps are

CPU 35C

mobo 32C

this baby flys now!!!!

 

ZoSoIV,

Glad it all worked out for you. Nice OC BTW! Have you physically checked to see how hot the memory gets? The reason I ask is my Dominators are 2x1GB and yours are 2x2GB. I was just wondering about whether there's a difference in heat. I ran prime95 for about 45 minutes last night and popped the cover and felt the mmeory with my fingers and it was still very cool, barely warm. Sam says the memory he uses will burn his fingers, although he does use some very low fan speeds, so I'm curious how your memory temps feel to you. Careful, they could be quite hot!

Best Regards,
Russ

 

Lol @ price gouge:
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=GX-101-HT
I knew OcUK would overcharge, but that's even more than I was expecting - still, they currently have the entire UK batch, no other shop has been given stock yet.

Abuzar: I've never seen memory usage in excess of 1GB when installing a game. Perhaps that installer has a memory leak...

 

I figured it out. It was Poweriso. When I loaded up the image file it was running it from my RAM and the left over from the HDD! Made my computer slow as hell, but when I quit the program my memory usage went down to 700 and everything was snappy again. I wonder why it does that. Load the image to the RAM.

 

No idea, I don't know of any other ISO program that does that...

Hit a bit of a snag with my PC rebuild - Compaq use a non-standard PSU size! It's a full ATX unit but it uses a 92mm fan, so it's narrower, but taller than usual, meaning that the 380W Earthwatts I got to replace it won't fit in the slot. I would use the old PSU, but it doesn't have a 24-pin connector...

 

Can't you mod the case a bit?

 

sammorris,

Makes you wonder how and why!

Speaking of the HD 4870 X2, that is one hot running noisy video card. It makes as much noise as the GTX 280 does with two cards in SLI. The power consumption is way up there too! What does it tell you about heat when there are warning signs pasted on the heatsinks. You could cook Hot Dogs with this thing. 91C is very much burn your hand hot! It's also going to need one hell of a PSU too! Another interesting thing is that the transistor count is exactly double that of a single HD-4870, which means it's essentially a crossfire setup in a single card, that amounts to 2 complete video cards inside. PCI-E bandwidth might suffer though, using only 1 16x slot instead of crossfire's two!

I also think that techreport is a bit out of line and just a tad biased. They constantly (when it's convenient) compare the 4870x2 to the single GTX 280, instead of two in SLI. I think Anandtech was a lot more honest in their tests! Yes, it technically is the worlds fastest video card! It would be more honest if they said that it was the worlds fastest single card solution, since it's really two video cards that run off of one PCI-E slot!
http://www.techreport.com/articles.x/15105
http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3354

Best Regards,
Russ

 

You know what Russ. I disagree. lol

4870x2 equals one video CARD. Yeah, so it has two GPUs. Just because my quad core has four cores doesn't mean it's four processors. It still one CPU with four cores. Also if you look at the hothardware reviews, the 4870x2 is neck to neck with the GTX280 in SLI. It performs a little worse, and then outperforms in other games.

The fact is, THEY ARE THE SAME PRICE. When it comes out, it will be the same MSRP as the GTX280. Now, why would you compare it to TWO GTX280s again? For the same price, you can have two 4870X2s, so it's only fair to compare 4870x2 in Crossfire with GTX280 in SLI.

 

We've already been over why I don't like Anandtech. If you're not happy with The Tech Report's testing, then look at Driver Heaven. They've run comprehensive tests on cards in the past and their results with the 4870X2 were nothing short of spectacular, it's slightly faster than two normal 4870s in crossfire... Clearly the interface bandwidth isn't an issue.

Thetechreport are also right to compare the HD4870X2 to single GTX280 instead of the SLI pair - yes it's a dual card, but so what? It uses a similar amount of power to the GTX280, generates a similar amount of heat (even the HD3870 had the heat warning sticker on it, graphics cards have run into the high 80s/low 90s for years) and most importantly, is similarly priced. Two GTX280s are what, $900? The HD4870X2 has a $500 RRP, so is that really a fair comparison?


edit: lmao, Abuzar wrote almost exactly the same thing in tandem...


Should you compare two 4870X2s to two GTX280s? Yes. Why not three GTX280s, since you can do that? The performance of three GTX280s in SLI is rubbish, Triple SLI only works in two of the main titles out there, at least for the 280s currently. The scaling for Quad crossfire looks promising.

 

Yeah, 90C isn't really an issue. Lots of other video cards run hot too.Even the G80 core 8800GTS ran into the 90s.

 

The problem is though, the R600/700 architecture is rendered unstable above about 95ºC. The older R580 cards could tolerate 100 celsius plus without issue. This means there's only about 3ºC tolerance before the cards will crash on a regular basis, hence everybody who bought an HD4850 and put it in a budget or silent case gets crashes because it gets too hot. They either return the card for a 9800GTX (common), up the fan speed using catalyst profiles (very common) or put an Accelero S1 rev 2 on it (also common)