The Official PC building thread - 4th Edition

So their price may be justified? Meh, I'm probably just gonna steer clear of it. If I spend more on a drive, I'd rather just buy a black drive, and have the warranty

 

Here's a little reading for you on the subject!

http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/op/heads/op_Height.htm

Russ

 

That's a very interesting read Russ! I'll never look at a hard drive the same way. Millionths of an inch. That simply boggles my mind LOL! Solid state drives should be our salvation. For we are no doubt reaching the limit of typical Mechanical drives. It now makes me nervous buying super large mechanical drives. Mankind is impressive, but I just don't see mechanical drives holding out too much longer

 

Oman7,
Speed won't be enough though! The price will have to be competitive too, especially when you consider most of the speed of the SDD will never be noticed by the average computer user! A wide variety of mechanical HDDs will still be with us for at least 5 more years yet, and large mechanical storage drives should last at least another 5 years. Picture the cost of a 2TB SSD, even with a slow, cheap SSD. It's going to take some serious break-troughs and time to get the price low enough for something like that! Until then, the large mechanical HDDs will continue to rule storage!

Best Regards,
Russ

 

It doesn't take much to show people the difference between two pieces of technology. E.g. Standard definition and High definition video. Show a person how a computer runs with an SSD, and a typical mechanical drive, and the actions speak for themselves. Application load times, OS boot time, etc. If enough people buy the technology, it will drive the cost down. And they will look to producing the drives cheaper and quicker.

Mechanical drives will of course be here a while longer. Heck, I still don't trust SSD LOL!

 

The whole concept really of mechanical components in computers given how advanced the rest of the technology is, is pretty laughable. I think there's been a bit of a business monopoly going on to keep mechanical storage as it is, as I'm pretty certain SSDs could be a lot better than they currently are. You notice how SSDs are a lot smaller than HDDs and use a lot less power. If they were the same 3.5" size and used the same amount of power, you can imagine how much bigger they would be, even on the same process they are now, they'd just be more expensive.

 

Sam,
While this is all true, there is no SSD Counterpart to a 2TB HDD at the moment! And there won't be for a long time to come! Whether you could build a 2TB SSD to fit in the space of a 3.5" HDD with the current technology, might be a problem as well. I think the technology will have to improve greatly, before we see SSDs of that size cheap enough to afford, and with proven reliability, before the HDD finally get's replaced for storage by an SSD for good!

Russ

 

Not a 2TB, no, but 1TB SSDs do exist. The problem is, because the technology has been relatively hindered by the continual investment in mechanical drives, they're currently ludicrously expensive. Still, at £2100 for a 1TB, they have come down in price immensely. It wasn't that long ago a 180GB SSD cost almost that much.

 

One day there will be 2Tb+ SSD drives. Perhaps sooner then we think too. 64Gb SDXC cards are pretty impressive. It's only a matter of time. It's only the price that's difficult

 

Yeah well that's it, the technology does exist, it just isn't affordable yet.

 

And another Nvidia chipset bites the dust. It's an asus board too...Sure doesn't help their image. What's left of it LOL!

My buddy gave me a computer yesterday(HP pavilion a1748X), and said If I could fix it, I could have it. I told him sure! I opened up the computer and immediately noticed the cheap power supply(Bestec). I was really leaning that way too. But my buddy also said it would power up, but it would black/blue screen. I told him there's a number of reasons that can cause that. Well...Right upon entering windows, it froze. Just like my last MSI Nvidia mainboard. While powered up, I reached in and grabbed the northbridge Heatsink. Or what I believe to be the northbridge heatsink anyway. It was semi-cool. I then proceeded to the southern large chip with the nvidia logo on it. As indicated in the picture. It has to be pushing 70C or more. It nearly startled me the temperature is sooo hot! I guess I found the culprit. My guess is it's the onboard graphics chip. If that's the case, I have no idea where the southbridge is LOL! At least I got a few free components out of it An Athlon 3800(2.0Ghz), 1gb of DDR2 6400Ram, A decent looking case, Spare fans(always use those), and a card reader. Man I love being the go to guy Maybe even yet another optical drive. I currently have too many of those though. Heh heh.

Of course I won't even bother trying to cool the S-O-B. Already played that game

A8M2N-LA

 

That's the southbridge. The northbridge is under that miniscule heatsink in the middle.

 

People asking $88 bucks for that board. lol

http://www.cnsunnyit.com/products/A8M2N-LA-HP-motherboard-5188-5622_597.html

Motherboard Specifications

http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/...docname=c00757531&dlc=en&product=3339286#N124

 

Oh yeah I get a lot of the same. A friend and I have a large collection of Pentium 4s when pooled together. Just over 40 at last count. The machines are so common so they come in handy for beefing up friends' computers XD

 

And 20$ shipping! Friggin ridiculous. You can get a lot better for that money.

Never knew a Southbridge could overheat like that. Almost wonder if the voltage is wrong. Why else would a southbridge overheat?

40 Pentiums? Wow! I think I may have 6 extra old processors laying around LOL! The 3800 is probably the most powerful extra I have.

 

As an update I am happy to say my hackintosh is running 95% OK. Sound card/midi controller has no official snow leopard support and i can't get the hacked driver working, possibly because the entire machine is a hack and the 2 are cancelling each other out LOL, I dont know. No PCI support on Intel based Macs/Snow Leopard, "old" technology crapple seemingly stripped it from the code...I have onboard sound, line-out to a stereo receiver but i wanted EVERYTHING to work for an all in one solution.

Running Snow Leopard 10.6.4 (on vertex 30GB SSD) dual with win7 64bit ultimate (on VErtex2 50GB)
Gigabyte ga-x58-ud3r
Gigabyte ATI 5770 "Batmobile"
i7-950 Bloomfield
6GB Corsair XMS3 DDR3 1600
high point RAID control card (4TB RAID-5 array)
M-audio audiophile2496 works a treat on windows, no apple solution

Oh and if you ever try this at home, save yourself time and use USB mouse/keyboard from the start. Long story...

 

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/Brand-New-Del...&otn=5&po=LVI&ps=63&clkid=5465208923801989217

so badlt wanna buy, any reason not to?

 

Any Reason? That's a lot of money. Is it worth it to you? I prefer the 16:10 aspect ratio, but the sheer size of that bad boy nearly makes up for it. I think I'd prefer the 30" myself
Totally out of the question at the moment...

 

no real reason, just not upgraded my monitor in about 3 years, im not sure what i would do with my other 24", maybe sell them for the one 27", but not sure i can go back to using a single monitor.

spur of the moment. maybe i should save up for sandybridge instead? haha

 

That's cheap for a U2711, I paid basically that much for my 2407FPW when I bought it back in August 06.
Remember the 2711s have the S-IPS screen quality of the 3008/3011, but in a 16:9 aspect ratio, and a higher pixel density than almost any other desktop monitor. (2560x1440 at only 27" res)
The IQ they offer is absolutely stunning.

Saving up for sandy bridge is, as I said before, a waste of time. We already know it's only 10% faster per clock, and overclocking is disabled unless you buy the K series CPU. Personally, even now, the i5 760 on LGA1156 is a much better buy.
Intel are just fleecing the non-enthusiast market before AMD catch up in stock performance.