The Official PC building thread - 4th Edition

WD Blues are not that bad in fact I've gone through several lately and none have failed. If you have 6 of 6 failing there is something else wrong in Denmark. Even when Seagate was having massive problems as of late, you would almost never get a 100% failure rate, in fact the odds of that happening is astronautical.

Failure rates are typically well less than 1% on hard drives these days, you can verify that at any of the hard drive manufactures websites.

I definitely don't love WD drives and have had compatibility issues with them way more than the others MFG's.

As to Newegg I would account most of the negative ratings (problems) to the buyers, I typically don't put much weight on Newegg reviews but do weed them out based on experience.

 

4 of them had controller failures within a year of Manufacture date, the last two had head crashes. this was some time in 2009 i haven't bothered with the blue drives again.

WD Blacks are great been using them for over 4 years now with no issues.

 

Agreed! I regret selling my other 2 WD1001FALS drives :'( But, my green drives seem to be good too. Only a few flags.

 

I wouldn't believe failure rates advertised on manufacturers' websites for obvious reasons. I haven't used WD Blues much of late - the last I used were prior to the colour scheme in the form of the SE16 range (which then became the blue). Now that the 'bad' brands of Samsung and Maxtor are out of the way, only HGST/Toshiba/WD (a bizarre three-way interleave that represents a partnership at each side, but not all the way through) and Seagate are left. Seagate drives are known to now have higher failure rates than the other brands, and correspondingly lower warranty periods but lower prices. They are now the 'budget' option, in a marked turnaround from times of old. Typically enterprise customers still use Seagates as the cost of replacing failed disks at regular intervals is pennies compared to what they save on a batch load of disks. Of course, to businesses that would be charged a callout to replace disks, or for home users, this is the exact opposite of what you want.

Aside from the woeful reliability of 3TB+ partitions, I haven't had too much grief with WD drives given the volume I've purchased. Given the alternatives, it would take a few sudden failures to get me to look elsewhere.

 

I have processor power management turned on in windows, as well as the comparable setting in the bios. Windows isn't very quick, regarding seamlessly returning to power where needed. Flash-based gaming for instance, doesn't run very smoothly at times. Is there an application that handles it better? Perhaps easytune? Haven't used it before. I recall Russ, speaking about it before. Not sure what his "take" on it was.

Yeah, just played a fast paced flash game. It seems that it favors the cores more(50% usage compared to 18% @ 3.2Ghz), at lower voltage and frequency. It never exceeded 800Mhz, and 1.168V I'd say that's rather impressive, but slightly rough in some flash-based games. Impressed... but could use some work

I wonder just how much better HTML 5 will be.

 

Turn power management off and you'll be fine. Are you worried about Global Warning or something ridiculous like that?

 

Yeah, it's fine when the bios alone handles it. Windows increases, or rather DECREASES the power use further. I suppose I can still use windows too, but a more practical toggle would be nice

I'm conscientious about our electric bill. Any and all things I can do

 

Your PC isn't going to be a big impact on your electric bill unless you are OC'n it hard and gaming all the time and then you definitely don't want any green nonsense turned on anyway. But I get it, not so much with PC's though, but I only use lights, aircon, heating, and other power devices when needed. However I don't unplug my TV's and other devices like my PC's when I'm not using them and that over time could make a difference. Power saving settings on your PC are more of an annoyance then they are worth for the little bit of power you save, truly.

I've had the same problems as you have when running sims too, it's extremely annoying!

Nothing wrong with saving resources if you can,
Steve

 

Have you thought about turning on SLEEP, when not in use?

 

I do indeed use sleep. Right before bed, I tell it to go to sleep Oh wait... I haven't setup speech recognition again yet :S

Are bill averages around $200, which is down from nearly $300. Just trying to nudge it a bit further, LOL!

 

Hp pavilion XE813. Worst, Case, Ever!!! The design is pathetic! SO glad we moved away from this design!

 

Wow, that's an oldie. Do they use the standard BTX form factor HP use in their PCs now? That's actually not all that terrible, though I've never had to have a board out of one.

Despite requiring screws, I much prefer the HP microtower standard design to the Dell tool-less ones, as the tool-free clips seldom work without a lot of tugging and swearing after they've been in use for a few years...

 

Not sure about their current form factor regarding cases. I scrapped 3 towers today. 2 of the boards were quite old. The one I referenced above, uses the typical copper rails throughout the board. The other two, have what appears to be gold I have a box that I throw used/worthless circuit boards in. Later, I plan to reclaim the gold. I realize it will take a great deal to make it worth it. Believe me... I've done a great deal of research into this

I'll be damned if my local scrapyard get's even a molecule of this stuff! LOL! .07 cents a pound for steel! What a bunch of con artists!

 

I would take the HP cases over Dell any day although I really don't want either. Dell cases make a good anchor if you ever need one in a pinch for boating.... LOL

 

My bill has actually gone down a tiny bit since switching to the single video card, lol. Probably a combination of things but the timing was funny

Dell cases are usually very solid, but always have some asinine "gimmick" when 90% of users will never be opening them. Have worked on dozens of industrial Dell Optiplexes and Precisions with clamshell style cases that had a very heavy duty feel to them. They were a hassle to get open and took some doing to get back shut. If another tech had worked on one before me it was usually all bent up and very hard to get the case to close properly. Internal mountings in these cases were usually pretty decent. All proper ATX/BTX form factor stuff with the option to remove the tool-less mechanisms if they were even present. A shame most of the machines I worked on were victims of capacitor plague. Whole row of caps along the rear of CPU socket blown on about 80%.

HP I wouldn't touch with a ten foot pole. I have serviced far more HPs than any other brand. Usually cheap, junky cases. I'd rather have a solid case with room for expansion and put up with the gimmicks than have a flimsy death box with questionable structural integrity.

 

True on HP's hardware/software solutions but if you were to salvage the case only I would prefer HP over Dell, but you're right they are both horrible and if we are talking using about what computer is better Dell vs. HP I'm totally on board with you Jeff.

 

Free is a very good price. I sometimes hate being the "Go to guy". But it does have its perqs. People are constantly giving me their "garbage". Little do they know, that they often have tiny amounts of gold!

 

The oddball plastic bits on Dell cases usually come off. The electronics are solid, but the plastic attachments to the case (which are important as they include the latch to keep the case closed) are very tacky and do not give the impression of a solidly built piece of hardware. At least we've progressed from the days where Dell PCs could only sit horizontally due to being a convex shape.

Generally, the HPs do use cheaper quality components, e.g. Asus motherboards, Liteon PSUs and the likes, but we manage a fleet of a few hundred of them across our customers and I don't find they go wrong hugely often in ways attributable to HP. The only ones we've had much grief with are, surprise surprise, the ones with Asus boards and nvidia chipsets. Some of the old Sempron 3600+ boxes are starting to get power errors now and need the power cable pulling/replugging every few days, but if it weren't for the fact we'd converted them to thin clients, they'd be end of life by now anyway. There's the odd disk failure here, the odd RAM failure there, but overall, I'm pretty satisfied with their longevity as a whole. The 'ease of access' to the case underneath made some of the work we had to do on them as part of the conversion process (getting access to the existing hard disks to create VHDs of them) very easy. Dells are far more difficult to handle.
As an interesting sidenote, not that it's a fair test as the sample size was far smaller and the units were older, but the HPs all worked with our IGEL thin client software (except the nvidia chipset ones which still worked, but you could only select 4:3 screen resolutions), the Dells didn't, at all. You got an effect on the screen when they booted similar to what happened with dirty NES cartridges...

The scumware that comes with HP PCs out of the box is horrific, but after a 20 minute cleanup process they can be tidied up quite nicely. The Dell PCs I doubt are much different in this regard, but I haven't 'out of box'ed a Dell unit recently.