The Official PC building thread - 4th Edition

Also have had stand-offs ground the board out on a few machines if they are loose. They wobble and touch the sides of the holes on the board. When properly installed they pull tight and center themselves.

I snug my standoffs with a bit driver.

Omega, recently had a problem with stability as well and it turned out the RAM needed the contacts cleaned and reseated. Would crash quite often and failed to POST at times. Just cleaned the contacts with an eraser and it ran Prime 95 for 12 hours overnight and into the next day.

 

Thanks for you opinions guys. I love hearing from the experienced Never heard of using an eraser on Ram contacts. Does make sense though. I still wonder about a flaky PSU though. I'm probably gonna just strip the supply for it's copper content. I have a little side hobby that I use the copper for. One day, I may post about it LOL! I certainly wouldn't sell it, and I won't trust it in my own setups!

I may elect to use the PC Case for my secondary. Needs a paint job though. I have an interesting idea. Perhaps I'll post about that too one day

 

On some cases I've had to go to plastic or insulated stand-offs as it wasn't that they wobble but more so their alignment to the board. A friend found this to help as well when he had some board issues like mine.

Erasures are great for cleaning up all sorts of contacts on connectors too! It's an old trick from before even my time, that's a long way back!

I've painted many of old beige cases to revive them for use today and it works well when prepped properly and use of good paint. I haven't powder coated any yet but that is next on my list to do!

 

So just been guaranteed a 1090T when my buddy gets back from Enfield, UK. He's been hinting at selling it for a long while but hasn't seen the need to upgrade. He's convinced he wants Bulldozer for no other reason than being a shameless fanboy and he has a Zalman ZM850HP XD

Even better for me because due to my failing CPU I have been looking at alternative upgrade paths. Now I can leave everything intact and not spend a single unnecessary cent! Being a tightwad FTW.

 

So far so good with my ZM850-HP after 3y7m. Although this is more common nowadays, that was about the first PSU to be able to provide up to 700W DC at less than 15dB in an open-box environment, such as that provided by the HAF 932.

 

Sam, your 850w be quiet is still going fine aswell. To be honest these components have been fine for a long time now. I haven't made major changes in a long time.

 

Only because you're underloading it!
That unit has put me off ever using BeQuiets in the future. One faulty component wouldn't normally stop me from buying from a brand, but with PSUs you just can't afford to take chances.
What amuses me is that I've recommended countless Corsair PSUs over the years, and still do in some cases, yet I've only ever owned one for less than a year. Pursuit for performance with silence has led me to other brands. Apart from the fan controllers, the hardware inside my gaming PC is essentially unchanged for more than 18 months, and a lot of it is older than that...

 

Well Bulldozer OCs fairly well and he wants me to do it for him so that's part of my fee. Not a bad trade considering the 1090T hold 4GHz effortlessly and I am confident it goes higher.

 

Even if you had to pay a little I'd go for it Jeff.

To be honest I'm still shocked this mobo hasn't given up the ghost considering it's been 4 years now.

 

My April 2008 X38-DS4 is still functional although the onboard NIC is shall we say 'network unsafe' (i.e. it brings down an entire network if plugged in!), and one of the rear audio ports doesn't work. Still, although it's not running anything overclocked, it's still perfectly stable in a normal environment. Has only very recently been retired as my main server board after serving that role for a little over 2 1/2 years, then having been displaced from the gaming PC after about 18 months' service there.

The July 2009 X48-DS4 is still as far as I can tell faultless, and has recently been introduced as the board for my server after running the anciliary machine for the last 2 1/2 years, and the gaming PC for its first 7 months (and a month or two later on during the diagnostic period of the 5970s we do not speak of!)
The February 2010 P55A-UD4 is still going strong with the i5 750 @ 4.116Ghz - there are some odd things going on with the NIC, but I'm pretty sure this is software and 'reformat time' rather than anything wrong with the board.

 

Do you mind if I ask what is your friend going to use his computer for and which Bulldozer CPU does he plan on using? Is it for gaming, general purpose performance, or something else? Also, Piledriver CPUs seem to be launching soon (maybe not, but Tom's is getting spec sheets and such for it and from what I've heard, AMD has been saying either late 2012 or very early 2013 is when it launches), so maybe you could tell your friend about that. It's a very large improvement over Bulldozer and is considerably better than Phenom II even without the core-configuration *mod* that I've previously mentioned.

 

It's not going to be for a month or two and we haven't decided which model to get. I also have told him to wait a short bit and see what happens with Piledriver.

He's mostly a gamer and photo editor so I'd say general performance with an emphasis on gaming. His video card is a single 6970 2GB, so for his uses any Bulldozer at 4GHz would be over-powered. He's mostly looking for an excuse to spend money AFAIK. Who am I to argue? lol

His motherboard is an 890FXA-UD5 ie AM3-only so he might be selling me his board for cheap too. Essentially a very beefy version of the board in my sig.
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For the record:

Gigabyte GA-X38-DS4 - about 3 1/2 years IIRC, bought right after Sam's, no issues

Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 G0 - Same age as X38, no issues holding original OC @ 3.7GHz 1.45v

2 x 2GB Mushkin XP Ascent PC2-6400 CL4 w/ 2.1v - Same age as above board and CPU, Holding a 25MHz OC problem free

MSI 8800GTS G92 512MB - About 4 years, moved over from original Intel dual core rig with E6750 @ 3.6GHz, no issues

Corsair 620HX - About 4 years, bought for original Intel dual core rig. AKA "OLD FAITHFUL"

Corsair 550VX - About 2 1/2 years, bought to build my secondary box when I moved back to AMD

AMD Phenom II 955 BE - About 1 1/2 years, bought to replace room heater 940BE, slowly losing OC stability past 3.7GHz

Gigabyte GA-890XA-UD3 - Same age as 955BE, bought to replace poorly cooled but otherwise excellent DFI LanParty DK-790FX-M2RS

2 x XFX HD6850 1GB Crossfire - 1y 7mo, bought January 2011 brand-new, one RMA'd for cooler replacement due to seized fan bearing

 

Blazorthon,

Would you by chance have a link for that mod. I would like to read up on it a bit myself. I have a 1090t on a GigaByte 990-XA motherboard @3.725GHz, so I'm in a good enough position to stay put until after Piledriver get's all sorted out. It seems I moved to an AM3+ motherboard and DDR3, at just the right time! LOL!!

Best Regards,
Russ

 

2 1/2 years that must be quite a late 550VX, IIRC they stopped making them a little while after that.

 

It might be a bit older. I'd have to remember how old my Raidmax case is as they were bought together. Probably have the invoice floating around somewhere

EDIT: Actually I recall running it as an AMD rig for a while. lol duh. X2 5000+ BE and 7750BE. Fun times So 3 years, a little more maybe.

 

Blazorthon,

Would you by chance have a link for that mod. I would like to read up on it a bit myself. I have a 1090t on a GigaByte 990-XA motherboard @3.725GHz, so I'm in a good enough position to stay put until after Piledriver get's all sorted out. It seems I moved to an AM3+ motherboard and DDR3, at just the right time! LOL!!

Best Regards,
Russ[/quote]

http://techreport.com/articles.x/21865

This is the best that I have. This is simply modified thread scheduling, not true disabling, and the improved thread scheduling tests had a lower frequency than the standard core configuration tests, yet they had a 10-20% performance advantage over the standard core configuration (usually closer to 20%).

Disabling one core per module would eliminate the sharing of resources within the module completely, a more thorough method than mere thread scheduling improvements, so it would probably have a somewhat greater impact in performance per Hz. It would also decrease power consumption greatly (think 30-40%) and that would increase the thermal headroom for overclocking the CPU frequency.

After all of that, you can also overclock the CPU/NB frequency that controls the L3 cache from its stock 2.2GHz up pretty significantly, further improving the performance per Hz of the CPU frequency.

Realistically, you could take an eight-core Bulldozer CPU and it can compete with even the K edition i5s in overclocking performance if you know what you're doing. It does effectively turn the eight core CPU into a quad-core CPU, but the lightly threaded performance quite literally skyrockets (as does efficiency) and that's more important for most games. This is only the beginning of what can be done. AMD's modular architecture has a lot of room for personal customization with these CPUs.

You can organize them specifically to focus on any performance target that you want (highly threaded, lightly threaded, or a mix with say two full modules and two modules that have only one active core). There is a lot that can be done and AMD doesn't get nearly enough credit for this (probably because those idiots deny this and deny the fact that they still can compete with Intel in performance, albeit not in performance per watt).

Given that even the Trinity APUs have a decent performance per Hz boost over the Bulldozer CPUs in their standard core configuration (something like 10-15%, pretty spot-on for AMD's estimations) and stock CPU/NB frequency, the Piledriver CPUs that do have L3 are probably a more than 25-30% improvement. That might be the difference between having the eight core FX CPUs compete with the i5s with Bulldozer and competing with the i7s even in highly threaded performance and beating them in lightly threaded performance with Piledriver. That's also ignoring the fact that Piledriver can clock higher than Bulldozer can at the same voltage, an even greater advantage.

AMD's not out of the game just yet for enthusiasts who know how to use their CPUs well even though they don't know it. The problem as I see it (and I'm sure many others do too) is that it shouldn't take enthusiasts jumping through hoops to get great performance from AMD. AMD should sell some CPUs that are like this by default. However, this is still an option and a pretty darned god one at that. It's difficult to beat the FX-8120 in performance per dollar when you consider everything that can be done with it.

Heck, doing these such tricks with the six-core FX CPUs would mean that they can soar past the similarly priced i3s and Pentiums. I find it pretty interesting.

I also have a Phenom II x6 1090T BE and I can say that although it's not as fun to mess around with as those Bulldozer CPUs seem to be, I agree, it is quite powerful. I would like to get an FX-8350 to replace my 1090T, but it's holding steady at over 4GHz with my Cooler Master Hyper 212 (that's the regular version, not a Plus or Evo, it's considerably weaker) without heating issues. I think that I could go farther, especially with a better cooler, but I don't want to push the voltage too far.

 

I prefer wait for piledriver myself. I'm very tempted by either 1090t/1100t or even bulldozer (Given my encoding needs). If Piledriver is very soon on the horizon, I think it's worth the wait Probably just as well, since I can't afford much right now. The second job has been very slow. Which allows me time to study Java language Once I have that, I'll move on to C Sharp, and then C++. But that could take a few years!

 

Remind me, what's the next AMD arch?

I heard that Piledriver is only going to be a c.10% benefit over Bulldozer, and that the next architecture will be the one to look out for...

 

After Piledriver will be Steamroller and after that is Excavator. Piledriver actually seems to be more like a 10-15% performance per Hz improvement while being able to hit much higher frequencies at the same power consumption, so actual performance improvement seems to be more than 20%. Trinity beats Bulldozer significantly and it doesn't even have L3 cache like Piledriver based AM3+ CPUs do. Steamroller and Excavator are both supposed to be big improvements, but Excavator is supposedly the biggest.

AMD might be able to kick Intel into gear to speed up their tick-tock cycle or at least make more improvements in each cycle. Steamroller and Excavator are supposedly going to alleviate the front-end bottle-neck of AMD's modular architecture so that the disabling core method that I've mentioned might not be necessary for improving per-core efficiency. On that note, it might make it even more effective, so we'll just have to wait and see.

 

Always said AMD could make a monster out of Bulldozer with a Phenom II-esque rework. Just have to wait and see if it's anywhere near as large an improvement.