The Official PC building thread - 4th Edition

Will likely be getting one of the newer Intel drives though when I'm not sure. 60GB or similar should suffice. Just having an SSD makes a bigger difference in this case.

Already gearing up for a rather sizable upgrade to most of the system and one or two new storage drives. Am rather strapped for HDD space ATM. I also have a PSU and X6 series Phenom II with a new-ish motherboard to pay for next month, and possibly a 2GB 6970 to trade up for, which now seems to need the help of XFX's wonderful double lifetime warranty.

So just for the record, I do realize my system needs an update badly, and am hoping to put it in far better stead very soon. If I do look at an SSD, it will have to be a mid range or budget model.

If only I had the cost of living I had right after highschool, I wouldn't be waiting to upgrade ;P

By the way, how is that new CPU performing Russ? Would like to see some apples to apples comparisons with Phenom IIs.

 

Estuansis,

Comparisons will have to wait until after my O2 Concentrator comes. I don't have the energy right now to walk back and forth to the mailbox, which is all of 100 feet, round trip! i.e. I run out of Oxygen! You go to breathe in, and you can't! All you can do is gasp in tiny bits of air, and you have very little time to do something about it. It sure isn't for lack of desire!

My Classic 87 Fiero GT arrived Friday night. I had to look at it from the windows! This morning, I went out early and sat in it for about 2 minutes. I needed help to get out of it and back to my air conditioned cave! LOL!! Why A/C? This is my theory! I reasoned that since colder air contains more, but slightly smaller O2 molecules, so when you breath near an AC unit's outlet, the cold air is warmed by your body heat, which expands all the molecules, raising your O2 level! Trust me, it works! I owe my life to coming up with that neat idea in under a minute! I'm very good handling extreme pressure like that. I wish I was that good handling more normal pressures. LOL!!

BTW I have a practically brand new Phenom II 965BE for sale if anyone is interested. PM me if interested!

The Intel 120Gb SSD, is on sale for $110

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820167121

Best Regards,
Russ

 

The 965 Black was a wonderful little Gem. Whoever gets it will be happy

Bit of a problem here. Bought a USB touch panel, with the intention of adding it onto a Dell E153FPb. Well... As you can see from the image, I have a fair conundrum going on. The cable that has 4 wires. Usually, things are "if the shoe fits..." but not in this case. There's no documentation telling me exactly how to connect these wires. The white connector is pretty logical. Only one way to connect it. But the black connector has two possibilities on each end. And I don't wanna fry it obviously This monitor is quite common, I'm surprised I can't find more people doing what I'm doing :S

 

sluggishness hoo up?

That auto-suggest on mobile devices creates some real gems sometimes

Depends what's slow, it may be what I should start calling 'hogware' - applications that you install, find you don't like, uninstall them, yet they still have an impact on system performance long after the're gone. If I spend a night trying to achieve something that requires a large number of these programs be tried and then uninstalled, system performance in general will have dropped slightly afterwards. Reformatting roughly annually is a requirement of Windows still, unfortunately, at least as long as you're not using a strictly controlled environment.

That said, the obvious stuff like running Malwarebytes is pretty useful.

 

Still format roughly once a year myself. Had a format of XP going for 3+ years on my server box that never saw many changes and ran just fine until it got replaced with Win 7. Windows 7 is better at keeping itself clean and running properly but unfortunately bogs down just the same.

On my main PC I have become accustomed to reformatting only after I know I've got a virus, lol. So about once a year after I've spent a tired night looking for homebrew software or similar, lol

It should be noted that if you have a little familiarity with the Windows file structure, a good amount of bloatware can be removed completely or at least you can remove the impact it has on your performance. I make frequent forays into the C: drive and the registry to clean up after removed programs.

Also noteworthy is that there are several "cleaner" programs available that can do basic maintenance of temp files, registry errors, etc. CCleaner is my personal favorite. It's very basic though, so other than just plain temp folder trash and basic registry cleaning, it has limited abilities. It does have a handy startup entry editor that can sometimes reveal things that MSConfig won't, but this is also very basic.

I tend to run the basic cleaning routine with CCleaner maybe once a week just to clear my browser history, temp folders, registry after installs, etc. Running CCleaner a few times on an older OS install that's never been maintained can work absolute wonders for performance. This is especially true of the all-too-common "ancient factory XP install."

It's great for general maintenance but is very limited in what it can detect and fix in the registry, so I still find myself doing certain specific things manually.

It sucks to grow old man. My dad finally gave in to using a cane after 10 years of hobbling around, and he's only 56. Myriad of problems, but doesn't want to admit he's aging. I can understand that, and will probably go through the same process in my later years.

 

Estuansis,

It's especially a bummer when you have spent most of your life, playing sports. Football, baseball, tennis, ice hockey. I had a bad heart attack one day, and can't do any of that anymore. It makes you feel like you've been betrayed or something! LOL!! Golden Years, my ass!

Best Regards,
Russ

 

I ended up contacting the seller. I don't even know what brand it is. The only thing I've been able to figure, is Red is 5V, Black is ground(naturally), and Green/white are data(signal). But that doesn't help me know whether it's this way, or the other way They really should design them to fit one way only.

On the other hand, I may actually learn something here LOL!

Bingo!
http://www.cyclotouch.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=46&Itemid=56

The site above is useful, but I actually believe I have this brand though.
http://www.touchkit.com/4_wire_touch_screen.htm

And now it's broken!!! Had to try and reverse the panel, because the touch side was down. The double sided tape was so strong, that when I tried to remove it, it cracked. Lesson learned...

 

Sounds great! That 2 gigs will get you into all the new games! (But I'm asking myself, what does the tradeup cost you compared to a $300 outlay for a 3 gig 7950 HIS IceQ, lol?)

For Russ and all, I would recommend an $11 (incl shipping) book available hard cover on Amazon called The Power of Now. I've sent out about 6 copies of it so far to friends and relatives. We don't need golden years, we need golden minutes. One minute at a time.

The book helps put everything in perspective, and I do mean EVERYTHING, including traffic tickets, ddp (just kidding) and oxygen deficiency.

The basic concept is that we are all so heavily identified with our mind, and our mind-made ego, that we have lost intimate touch with the real being that we are, behind the mind. Recapturing the full immediate realization of the miracle of life requires the process of learning to turn off the mind, to put it aside from time to time, like the extremely useful tool it is, like setting aside a solder iron.

Per the author, Eckhart Tolle, the ultimate goal is enlightenment. Easier said than done, but realizable, not just for historical figures like Buddha and Jesus Christ. (I apologize if anybody is offended.) So far, 5 mins every morning reading another few pages, having started about a year ago and on my 3rd of 999 passes through the book, has produced a lot fewer stressful moments with siblings.

It's nice to have more inner control - more calm. What could have turned into a vicious argument ends pretty fast - it takes 2 to fight - those words are true. Some fascinating reading for sure.

Rich

 

Performance-wise the trade-off will be nil. In perfect 100% scaling conditions, my cards together are roughly as fast as one 6970, maybe a bit faster. Combine that speed with no variable scaling and some extra memory, and I believe the 6970 will far outstrip these two cards in most games.

Price-wise there really is no contest. I would be trading one or both 6850s. My friends and I have a good agreement in place about hardware

As to anyone being offended by your book recommendation, none happening here. Have some rather mixed views myself... the universe and existence and omnipotence and all that.

 

I've had maxed out storage scores on RAM drives that only have a few GB free, so I don't think that the capacity is the only factor in that score.

 

Actually, that does affect SSDs. Like with hard drives (although for different reasons), filling an SSD up usually slows it down along a somewhat exponential curve (how much of a problem this is depends on the SSD, it varies greatly). Having only 1GB free is probably related to your sluggishness issue.

 

Surely this is what TRIM is supposed to deal with?

 

It can't deal with it if it doesn't have enough clearable space to work with. TRIM can't fix anything if you fill up the drive until it has no more free space to juggle with and not enough data getting deleted to alleviate the lack of free space. TRIM is good at cleaning things up, but it needs space to work with.

If the drive only has 1GB of space left and nothing is getting deleted to increase the free space, what is TRIM supposed to do? It has nearly no space already except for a little over-provisioning (hardly any in a 60GB drive) and unless you keep deleting stuff, it can't get any more free space.

Filling up an SSD has the potential to be much more harmful than filling up a hard drive because if data can't get moved around, some cells will get more worked than others no matter what Trim tries unless it reduces performance to give it enough time to juggle data around for wear-leveling and then you get sluggish performance. Perfect storm.

 

sammorris,

Question for you Sam! I'm thinking of buying another Intel 330 SSD for Russell's new computer (1090t). I'm waiting on GigaByte for the new motherboard, ATM.

What I'm thinking about doing is keeping the 60GB Patriot and use it as a cache drive for the new Western Digital WD Black WD1002FAEX 1TB SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive. It's a fairly fast drive to begin with, but I think the WD would be faster that way. I figure since it's a storage drive, it would speed up data transfer with the external (sort of) cache. I say sort of because it's much faster than a COAST chip from years ago, and with far greater capacity.

What do you think?

Russ

 

I've been agonising over making the same decision since my existing WD1001FALS is full to capacity in my games PC. From time to time batches of WD1001FALS drives keep showing up again at discounted prices, presumably they're refurbished, but none of the sites have advertised them that way.

When you say cache drive, do you mean fully employing it as a cache? Because if you can, I think using a proper SSD as a full OS drive is far superior to a hybrid arrangement.
Hybrid SSD/mechanical drives only really make sense to get better performance out of a single drive, or for reduced cost if you can't afford both an SSD and a mechanical.

 

Sam,

I only want the 1TB WD cached! The OS would be on the Intel 330 SSD, with the patriot SSD used for the cache drive for the 1TB WD drive. Can that be done?

BTW you can get the 240GB Intel 330 for $129, after a $30 MIR, but there is only 7 hours to go!

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/searchtools/item-Details.asp?EdpNo=3702410&sku=I69-7034

Russ

 

You can do what you want and it would probably help significantly, but IDK how much. It'd probably depend greatly on what caching software you use and how you use the data drive (IE how much throughput the workloads you use actually require to make good use of it and how much capacity they need to effectively utilize it).

 

Blazorthon,

Thanks! Any software you could recommend? This would be for moving large several GB files, and anything that can speed up an already fast drive would sure cut down on the transfer time.

Thanks again,
Russ

 

Sorry, but I'm not very experienced with the subject beyond that it can be done- you might be better off doing a Google search and doing a search or two on a few of the consistent results. I'll try that and report back, but IDK if I'd do it any better than you.

I know that Intel's Z series boards have support from Intel for it (up to 20GB or 40GB can be used for cache on an SSD for a hard drive, IDR which), Crucial has some software for it, and a few others have it as well as there being some open-source caching software, but IDK which is the best or if different situations have different preferences among these programs.

Sorry for not being more helpful

 

i Have uninstalled BF:BC2 from the SSD, now i have about 10GB free, but still quite sluggish. time for a full format, after work, methinks. sit down and smoke a shisha while fresh installing an OS. Might aswell look for a 4.2 ROM for my galaxy nexus. sounds like a plan. will take before and after shots, of SSD read/write/iops etc. What would be the best tool for that?