The Official PC building thread - 4th Edition

You probably have a better chip than I as well 3.55Ghz was as far as I could take mine. But I didn't fool with the Northbridge much at all. My 965 required a Northbridge voltage bump, to stabilize at 3.9. Since my settings of 3.5Ghz are SOOO solid on the 940, I'm afraid to mess with it :S It feels PERFECT the way it is LOL! You know?

 

The Core i7 950 is roughly analagous to a 4.2Ghz Phenom II X4, or in fully multi-threaded scenarios, a 2.8Ghz Phenom II X6, not far off the 1090T's stock clock. Therefore, in order to be more powerful than an i7 950 per-core, AMD need to make their next CPU at least 30% more powerful. I'm near-certain that Bulldozer will be a much bigger leap in performance by comparison to Sandy Bridge, but Intel don't really need to do much to counter a sizeable 50% jump from AMD. (The biggest leap I can recall in recent history is that of from Pentium D Presler to Core 2 Duo Conroe, which was about 90% per clock, and 280% per watt per clock - yup, for every watt of power used, a Core 2 Duo does 4x the work of a Pentium D!)

 

May as well stick it in here, updated my PC specs blog and re-formatted it so it's tidier. New URL is in my sig.

 

I'm about as jealous as they come Though 2 PC's is really all I need. At least in my current housing situation. I can see myself doing soo much more, if I could just change my life around. It'll work out eventually

 

Yeah as mentioned, only two of the systems have really seen any use in the last six months. Still, handy to have though. If I can get hold of a cheap graphics card for PC3, it'll see use at LANs this year.

 

Here's a new one for everyone, at least I never came across it before. I had an IDE drive "BSOD" a customer's computer. The opening screen with the bar running across It runs for about 3 seconds and you can hear the computer load down, just before the BSOD! Booting with an XP install disk, when you get to the screen where you choose where to put windows, it just says "Unknown Drive and Unknown Format". It's about 5-6 years old. A new drive should be here on Monday.

I tested it with an old 10GB drive, and laid a quick copy of XP on it, and it works fine! I just thought I would mention it because it's kind of a rare thing to have happen.

Best Regards,
Russ

 

Have a PC specs page myself, though admittedly much shorter. Just click my name

Very interesting Russ. Had the same thing myself recently, but an IDE optical drive. I do believe one of the pins on the drive connector was broken off, might be the same case for that HDD maybe?

 

Had a strange one when fitting my fan controllers. PC hung at the windows 7 splash screen every time, and the startup repair utility crashed. Stuck the DVD in the drive and ran repair install, and it said almost immediately 'problems were found with your startup settings, fix?' as soon as I hit enter the PC rebooted, and windows works fine again, but for the fact that all the versions of windows on the other HDDs in the system that I no longer use appear in a boot manager and I have to select (there is no auto countdown to the correct OS). Looks like another reformat is due, only 1 week after the last one...

 

Ah yes. NTLDR message. I received that message one day on my HP pavilion 7905. At the time, I knew Damn little about computers. Fact is, I knew near nothing about hardware. I broke down and took it to the local shop. They discovered that the sound card was causing the fuss. If I had just removed one unnecessary component at a time, I could have tracked it down, and saved 50$. But it is exactly that error, that inspired me to work on my own stuff xD Not quite ready to open my own business, but I know a few things

 

Wasn't anything to do with NTLDR, I've no idea what caused it.

 

I wasn't suggesting...

I was simply reminiscing

 

i never need to reformat but i do anyways, but i have found that about 6 months into a reformat, windows 7 (and vista when i used it) get very slow. very very slow. constant HDD usage and hanging. i cant even leave it on for a few hours before a reboot. could it be software i am using (eset antivirus) OR is it jsut vista/win7?

 

Gotta be software. I've ran windows 7 closer to a year, without reformat and had it running good. Usually the OS is not the culprit, though it does happen At least in my experience...

 

Shaff,
Re-Formatting is not always the answer. I know that I've come across several installations of Vista and Win 7 where if you didn't wipe the drive, you couldn't install XP on it. Something in the Boot sector needs to be removed, I guess. I know I won't be going back to a Dual Boot configuration this time. My Win 7 is already registered with M$, so it's going to sit for a while. I'm also less than pleased that Win 7 can do things without my knowledge or permission, while I am running XP!

Let's get real here. The only reason M$ dropped the active Internet activity icon, is so they could do things without you knowing it. When I see my internet activity light flashing for no reason, I investigate to see why. I'm not always happy with the answers I get!

Russ

 

hmm time to find this culprit software then.

best recomendations for antivirus/spyware etc? willing to buy if nessessary.

 

Usage habits? LOL! I think I know what you mean. People find my computers very fast. And yet the computers they use should be nearly as fast. Its almost as though computers adapt to our style At least it sure seems that way to me. My moms quad should almost keep up with mine. One of the only differences is that it has only the OS drive. I've recommended that she have a separate storage drive for her masses of pictures though. That way the OS does not have to sift through irrelevant files

AVG tends to hang Firefox on startup. But with a Vraptor it isn't too bad I think SSD's are gonna revolutionize the users experience

 

Not using chrome are you? If you are malware scanning needs to be turned off.
Also Russ, I'm sorry, but I'm not readily believing those conspiracy theories