The Official PC building thread - 4th Edition

As far as I'm concerned, it's worth paying a premium for the Phenom II X6 as in a general case it's the best AMD CPU for now. Still, the FX-series chips are starting to come into their own for gamers at long last, with modern games engines finally making good use of their unique architecture. They've still some way to go to catch Intel's gaming performance, but the lower-priced offerings do a reasonable job.
Still, if I was using a machine day to day for all sorts of stuff, I'd still take an X6 over an FX, even if I had to pay more for it.

 

Intend to have one!

 

Quite amusing - my i5 750 turns 3 on the 11th February. Although several have been in use longer, as the CPU in my main/gaming PC, that already makes it the longest serving CPU I've had since my very first CPU - the P3 450, having now bested the 2y5m attained by the XP 3000+, which itself was prematurely retired due to failures with other components in that system - to be replaced by the X2 4200+ which was switched to my file server after 8 months for the E4300 - the X2 4200+ served a total of just under 2 years, after the failure of the third and last Asus motherboard rendering it a sitting duck, and the E4300, although still active in Phoenix, was retired from the server after a further 18 months when Darkstar II was built (using the E5200 passed down from Princess), at a similar time to the arrival of the i5.

At any stage with these CPUs, as fond as I may have been, a new 'big thing' was available to lust after - with the XP, the new Athlon64 X2 was a huge leap into the dual core age - with the X2, the allure of a 75% overclock on the Core 2 Duo was too great an opportunity to pass up, and with the E4300, moving up to a quad core with the Q6600 (serving the shortest period at 3 months, due to its lack of overclocking ability - a fine CPU in every other respect, was sold at almost its purchase price to a LANmate) was another huge leap up, and likewise from the Q9550 to the i5 - better overclocking and a faster CPU to start with.

But where to go from here? In all honesty, upgrading to the best in the form of Ivy Bridge really doesn't enthrall me, for two reasons - one because it's a lot of expense for not a whole lot of numerical gain, and secondly because I've pretty much hit "fast enough". Aside from encoding videos slightly faster, I'd see no tangible benefit from a faster CPU, there's nothing, certainly not in the gaming arena it can't handle fluidly. It'll take a big quantum leap to make me voluntarily upgrade (and I see none forthcoming), otherwise, heaven forbid, it'll just be by force, whenever it or its board should fail. Here's to many more years of 4Ghz+ service from it

 

Well I certainly feel like I made a wise decision LOL! I probably won't overclock it much, and I'm sure my encode times should see a sharp decline

Amazon still has a couple by the way.

 

I just bought this to drive my PC speakers with do you think it will be powerful enough to game with? I could get a second one and run them in bridge mode if not? LOL

Crown XLS 1500 DriveCore Series Power Amplifier

 

Rofl 500W per channel stereo - you got any neighbours within a quarter mile of your house? Not sure they'd be too impressed.

 

I do have a neighbor that is a real pain and she has called the cops when I was cranking my Yamaha 120w so I'm sure you're right, she really won't be happy now. The cops couldn't doing anything because I wasn't breaking any decibel levels mandated in the area I live in so she was screwed. I had the house sealed up well so she really couldn't hear it that loud, pretty much like an old transistor radio at best outside the house and not loud at that.

I get a kick out of some of these kids I work around as they don't get why you would need more than your iPod and earbuds to listen to music. If they could grasp what they are missing.

Get the XLS next week, can hardly wait.

 

Yes, I was talking about xp 32 bit, and when I talk now about W7, I am talking 64 bit. I was shocked that my 32-bit xp actually saw the 8 gig pagefile.sys, and correctly knew the file size. If I had known that, maybe I would have put the entire 16 gig pagefile.sys on the xp drive.

I am still surprised - if 32 bits can't count higher than 4 gigs - while I suppose that xp can't write to a file larger than 4 gigs, how can it correctly identify the pagefile.sys size as 8 gigs - by simply reading the ntfs file allocation table? Is that all that is going on?

Yeah, lenuarim, what the h are you talking about? LOL

DDP - don't bother with lenuarim, he's obviously smoked something funny like Stevo's inquisitive neighbor with over-active hearing. How about finally breaking out of "God mode" with at least one pic of your favorite battleship models?

Rich

 

Windows XP can read and write to larger than 4GB files so long as they're on an NTFS partition. XP is compatible with NTFS and can access files just as well as any other operating system (regardless of bit width) on NTFS can. Windows XP x64 can also address more than 4GiB of RAM, so XP isn't even limited to that either. 32-bit operating systems such as most XP installations don't agree with 3TB partitions even with NTFS, but any XP installation can work with greater than 4GB files so long as the files are on an NTFS partition.

 

Actually you can patch FAT32 to read larger files too but why bother when when NTFS can handle them without the issues of patching.

 

DDP. Once again, that is exactly word for word, something I have said. My guess is it's a spammer. What they're up to is beyond me...

The good news is, I didn't go broke buying the 1090t processor In fact, I'm still pretty well off

 

The 120GB Intel 330 SSD came yesterday afternoon. Even the packaging design is very impressive and well thought out, and the mount that comes with it, works in any 3.5" internal or external drive bay, either screw or screw-less! Nice!

Russ

 

Oh, thanks - I thought you were just holding out. Okay, I'll wait, lol.

Russ, keep us informed - I'll probably pick up the same SSD.

 

All this hardware is tempting. Eventually here I'll be making some changes of my own. Have the parts fabbed up for my new side panel w/ 140mm fan and am making plans for a few new parts

Sadly the HAF AMD Edition really needs a sidefan for the video cards, or at least with Crossfire. The cards do pump out some heat and aren't really rear exhaust, instead sporting Zalman type coolers under a shroud.

 

I'll be polite and not say anything about that

The amusing thing is, since going from the hothouses that are HD4870X2s over to HD6970s, I haven't really used my side fans at all, though of course there is still ventilation there.

 

the corsair f60, i have had now for a year. it been under 1GB form for 90% of that time, and i am yet to feel slowdowns. considering ti was 60 quid, second hand, from a modder so must have had abuse before hand, i am quite happy with it.

i would like an upgrade my Q6600, but as i am curently strapped for cash,its not that it feels slow at all

 

There's only one reason, and one reason alone that I would need a 6 - 8 core processor. X264. 4 cores is plenty for most people, including enthusiasts. But given the encode jobs I have stacking up, a 6 core processor will substantially decrease the running time

Plus multitasking will be improved of course