The Official PC building thread - 4th Edition

Asus stuff is dire, they're down there too, but all my previous favour of sapphire cards was based on reference products. The non-ref stuff they produce themselves has been cack, huge failure rates, and not even basic fault testing at the factory for even their $1200 flagship product...
Maybe saying sapphire were bottom of the quality ladder was a little harsh. Asus are probably further down still!

 

That happens to me too sometimes Mr-Movies. I usually wait 5 min to make sure it didn't post. Usually, if it doesn't show up after 3 minutes, it won't double post. That's how it works for me anyhow. Usually the information is sent, but it appears to freeze.

 

Hey sam, how do you like having 6 of the scythe 1900 fans? I've thought about having 4 on my side like you have. And do you think that 2 of those is better than the stock top 230mm fan? A little on the spendy side, but I think it could be worth it How would you rate the noise level, with all 6 at 1200Rpms?

 

The HAF side panel is very sensitive to vibrations, any case fan you use (even Nexus Realsilents) will be quite noisy, as they suffer quite badly from blade frequency resonance (if you've ever heard an xbox 360 console, you'll know the noise I'm talking about). Since I've had the 6970s, the side fans haven't really been on at all as they aren't necessary. They were certainly necessary with the X2s though, especially with a chipset underneath on the X48 board. The lack of a chipset to cool does wonders for your required case cooling (or lack of).

 

Thanks for that info Steve, will place the ram as you say, I was gonna get 2 4gig sticks but Russ talked me out of it as I'm sticking with XP, no need to waste all extra ram as more than 3 gig is not needed with XP anyway, I know I'll get flack over here about XP but for my needs and all the other equipment and software I have runs nicely with XP, no need to mess with W7 right now as 8 is just around the corner anyway, plus XP is good till 2014, so 7 is the least of my worries, and if I'm still alive when 8 comes around I can always add another 2 sticks.

As far as the Video card and PSU, even though you can't always beleive all the comments, there were enough there that were plenty satisfied, I'm not a gamer so that card should be plenty, plus the fact there were a ton of comments on how quiet it was, and I hate a noisy PC, I didn't read anything on the PSU being noisy, if it is as sammy says I'll just get a can of insulation foam LOL.

I've never had a CPU with 3ghz or over not even my last new build which I think was 2.8, plus it's suppose to have 6 cores whatever the hell that means, so I hope this baby rocks even just a little, anything will be an improvement from this crappy HP, I just hope none of the parts are dead as you all know sending things back is a pain in the ass, especially since this PC of mine keeps crashing daily and gets worse as time goes by, so, am I excited, you bet your jammies I am, almost feel like a little kid waiting for a new bike.

I'll let you guys know how I make out, and Omeg, raise some hell with those 4 burners son, leave no prisoners.

 

Quietness is subjective, and compared to a lot of PCs out there, the CM unit will certainly be quiet. The Sapphire 4670s are usually pretty quiet I think, as they use similar fan mounts to the freezer coolers (one thing they did get right). The Hyper 212 cooler will probably be the noisiest thing in the system at full speed, but if it's hooked up to the motherboard it should run pretty quiet most of the time.

 

THanks sam. I'll see just how hot things get when I get a 1090t or bulldozer. Whichever happens Probably upgrade my GPU eventually too.

LOL fred I like to have multiple, because I don't like busting one burners butt. I alternate which one I use. The one on the bottom has seen an obscene amount of disks. As well as the white one. The bottom one will probably be the first to quit. It makes a curious noise after spinning down now

 

Fred, it isn't that more than 3GB is needed it is that XP only supports up to 4GB of ram unless you run 64 bit edition then you can go as high as 128GB of ram but fat chance of finding a desktop board that will handle that or sticks that are 32GB in size.

It used to be thought that you couldn't use a quad-core with XP but it turns out your limit is on physical processors and there is no limitation on amount of cores so you'll be fine with a 6 core processor. Most software will be limited to one core so you won't see a big boost with everything but if you transcode video you'll be able to use those extra cores there or if you use VMWare the extra cores will be useful too.

With that board, the ram you have, the 6 core CPU, and excellent SATA3 HDD's you'll be smoken happy.

 

Steve,

Did I miss something here. I just looked it up in the motherboard manual and the pairs are color coded. for two sticks it should go in 1 and 2, or 3 and 4 as shown below! Fred should be putting them in sockets 3 and 4. Here's the page from the manual.



That's the reason they started making the sockets different colors!

Russ

 

Surely you mean 1&3 and 2&4, otherwise you'd end up with single channel?

 

Anyone here have any experience with AMD's new Turbo Core? As far as I know it's only available on the 1090T BE and the 1100T BE. I turned off the overclock today as I'm getting it ready for my Friend Russell, and he has no real use for overclocking at all, and he wouldn't know how to do anything with it if something went wrong to begin with. Since my motherboard is an AM2+ with DDR2 1066 memory, I don't get all the bells and whistles for all the adjustments available for Socket AM3 motherboards with DDR3. Still, It's impressive at all the things it monitors and adjusts on the fly with Turbo Core enabled!

Russ

 

No Russ the memory should be in slots 2 & 4. Also I ran into an issue with the VGA drivers from Gigabytes driver site, Photoshop puked on the Open GL 2.0 driver so I had to download the driver straight from AMD's ATI site searching for Motherboard/Chipset - Readeon HD drivers - 4200 series - and then your OS XP for Fred.

GA-880GA-UD3H Manual Page for Memeory

 

Most of the time this is how it is laid out. There are some oddball boards out there, however, that put the channels next to each other, rather than interleaved like that. Infuriating when you don't realise.

 

Ya, I've had them both ways too and some boards prefer the first channel filled first but most like the second channel now, almost all in fact.

 

That's certainly how Gigabyte P55s work. They won't actually accept memory in 1/3 if there isn't already memory in 2/4.

 

Umm my board has the channels next to eachother and it's a bone stock 790X-UD4P like Russ's. My DFI board did have interleaved slots though. As far as I was always aware, you just match the colors.

Also my board is not picky about which channels are used. It runs both sticks perfectly in 1+2 or 3+4. Currently using 3+4 to give the CoolIt pump a little clearance.

 

The Gigabyte that Russ is using isn't picky as you can put the memory in the first bank if you wish but if you want to OC the memory it has to be in the second bank and thus operates overall better in the second bank.

Also you can't go by color coding always, I've had boards with color coding interleaved but the board wanted it consecutively place. So it's not that simple!

 

I've seen that too, needless to say on boards from Asus.

 

Steve,

I just called Gigabyte and asked. The diagram in the manual you have is incorrect! For Dual Channel, they go in either the blue or white slots! I also questioned if the motherboard revision made a difference, and was told to ignore the manual and just go by the colors for dual channel!

Best regards,
Russ

 

Russ,

Mine is as it is laid out in the manual the correct memory locations are 2 & 4 and the slots are colored that way too.

My board is Rev 2.2

Stevo