The Official PC building thread - 4th Edition

Oman7,

You would think that the 4 core Propus would have an edge over a 3 core Phenom IIx2, but it doesn't. Metaphorically speaking it's like trying to find a parking space where parking is limited. You waste a lot time driving around the block! The Phenom II x2 555BE has 3 times the parking space so you don't have to wait as often! LOL!! AMD has stated that no Athlon II will ever have L3 cache! My 955BE ran away and hid from the 450MHz higher clocked 630 Propus at any kind of Video encoding. Average time saved between the 3.65GHz Propus and a stock 955BE was 11 minutes for DVD/RB! The lack of more L2 cache or the 6MB L3 cache of the Phenom IIs really hurts in the real world performance of the Propus.

BTW! The Propus is much harder to overclock than the the 555BE. I simply unlocked the cores and set the multiplier to x18, with no additional voltages required. I did 5 passes with IBT full load and it passed! The 1090T BE was even better. it wasn't until I reached 3.8GHz that I had to add any voltage to it. The Wafer yields have gotten that good!

As you know, I'm leaving my main computer to Russell and I've de-tuned it to 3.726GHz. I've set the CPU voltage to 1.344v, the NB up one click to 1.30v and the CPU NB VID to 1.30v and it's perfect! I no longer use P95 because it's a waste of time and beats up the CPU. I've passed after hours of running it only to have DVDRB/CCE reset the computer on me. I haven't had a single reset, crash or uncompleted WU since Now I use IBT for spot testing and DVDRB/CCE for a final test, and it runs perfect. Folding at home is a good test too, but takes much longer. It won't reset the computer, but it won't complete the WUs if the computer is not right. I'm confident that Russell will have no problems with it!

Russ

 

I'd like to see some testing of a 3 core 555BE against a 3.0Ghz propus, with X264 as the playing field. Having a fourth core has to make up for the lack of cache. I would certainly think...
In any case, this guys computer is pretty old. Looked like a Dell BTX computer. So I couldn't very well keep the case. I'm sure the propus will blow his mind He seems easily impressed.

 

I might be able to arrange that test. Games are a mixed bag. Games that don't utilize the L2 cache score right up there with the big boys. Games that do utilize it suffer! Pretty simple really. You can't put 10 Lbs of sh!t in a 5 Lb bag! ROFL!!

Russ

 

You do make some good points The propus is gonna be a cheap little cpu when Bulldozer comes out. At least his board is fairly future proof.

 

Oman7, I'd still go with the FOR SURE if we are talking $10! Just because Russ had good luck doesn't mean you will, even if yields are better than they use to be, and do you want a weaker CPU than you expect if things go south? Do you want to dink around with the CPU to get it to work? Do you really want to tweak the cores so they are not BALANCED using the +/- just to have now a weaker quad core? I think not!!!

Now if you were talking $100 bucks savings then maybe the extra hassle would be worth the effort. And I would say go for it. Sorry Russ but I disagree with your good point!

Stevo

 

I'd give it a try since the price is so low. Even if it doesn't do the trick it is so cheap that you can toss it and move on without feeling too bad about it.

I haven't had good luck with Bytecc 3.5" non-NAS enclosures but that was years ago and they may have improved with their products.

 

Steve,

That's OK steve, I only suggested it to Kevin because of the small budget, and it would have been a way to get better faster memory while keeping the price down. The Propus is a bit of a dog. At 3.5GHz, it barely outperforms the x2 555BE at a stock 3.2GHz, as a quad. Even then it only wins in benchmarks, not in the real world. It's a moot point, as Kevin already placed his order!

Best Regards,
Russ

 

BTW, do not open any emails, even if they are from friends if it says No Subject. Work that out with you friends. One of the tip-offs is that it's also sent to the sender, and always is sent to several other people as well I've been getting a lot of them in the last 3-4 months from Fred and Rick. They are all HTML files that will permanently destroy your hard drive and render it useless. It roaches the drive's bios chip, and it's toast! The computer will no longer even see it, not even in the setup! I can't believe that Rick decided to open one of the HTMLs and he's lost 3 drives so far! You also need to watch out for the AntiVirus Virus that's going around. Google it! some bad sh!t!

Russ[/quote]

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I think this is about the first time I ever had an issue with old Russie lol, I don't know why and how he gets no subject e-mails from me because I have never sent a no subject e-mail ever, even in my earlier days when I was totally stupid with pc's, my kids use to do it a lot and I always corrected them.

However I do have maybe an idea and of course I can be wrong, Russ using hotmail, from my experience it totally sucks, everybody I know on my end that uses it has problems, I hate hotmail with a passion, my good friend around the corner who calls me often when a problem arises uses it, the hotmail he uses does the goofiest things, when I was in the UK & Ukraine last year I would send tons of pic's to friends and family, the only one's that had trouble recieving them or me sending them were all hotmail users.

I use AOL, yeah I know go ahead and laugh I really don't care, I have tried all the others and didn't like none of them, and not because I was being stubborn to change, I'm always open to learn new and better things, none could compare to ease of use as far as I'm concerned, and hotmail is the worst of them all, my buddy would call me I would come over, he couldn't retrieve things at times, click on things, send things sometimes, I would go crazy trying to figure it out, I would tell him now watch this, I would sign on using my AOL account on his pc, and everything he had a problem with, whatever pages he tried to surf I would his surf the exact pages with no problems at all, he would just scratch his head but would never try using something else, that's what he is use to and that's what he want's, it's called stubborn lol. my niece in the UK also uses hotmail, whenever I came over her house she had the same problems.

I have another buddy uses hotmail lives near me, I get tons of mail from him, half of his mail have no subject, I tell him about it all the time, plus many of his mails he sends are not only no subject there also blank, he says that happens to him a lot and he can't figure it out why, and I can't help cause I gave up trying to figure out hotmail with all my other friends or family, they all say how hotmail pisses them off but they never change.

I'll eat all kinds of criticism on this thread, I've always said I'm no where near to any of use guys as far as pc knowledge and never will be, but won't take a bum rap, so no Russie Ronnie, I never sent you a no subject mail, I'm not a gambler but would bet it's that hotmail of your's. I hate to disagree with my buddy, he's my guardian and god when I have a question or problems with pc's, and I'm not discounting anybody else here, almost everybody here, from them I learn something new, the best and smartest people are right here, the only comment I can make is sometimes when I ask a question nobody answers, but Russ will always get ahold of me by mail or phone when nobody else will answer or comment, and he'll contact me on his own, I'm not complaining, I just figure oh well maybe my question was to stupid for anybody to answer and just leave it at that.

And speaking of pc's, my build is done, actually it was done several weeks ago, I'm not gonna comment on it now, way to much to write about, and my hands already hurt, when some of you younger wipper snappers get to become older farts like me you will find out what I mean, I will later this week try to post on how things went, it wasn't without some problems, but got things all straightened out thanks to a friend of mine that own's a little pc repair shop and mostly Russ, but I will say this for now, I have never experienced a pc like this, have never seen anything this fast, didn't even know pc's could be this fast, I still can't get use to it but boy am I loving it, this thing runs so smooth and so fast I keep getting paranoid ok when will something go wrong, things can't be this good, the paranoia comes from that HP I used for 5 years, something always was going wrong.

Some of you remember the build I did 2 years ago for my kids, I thought that was a blazer, this new one is a rocket.

 

If anyone is looking for added storage here is a inexpensive but nicely built 4 drive sidecar that comes with a eSata card and everything else you need to get going right off, with exception to hard drives. What I like is that it can do RAID 5+1 which is a very nice feature for an inexpensive 4 bay system. It also uses Silicon Images chipset which is very compatible with most systems. The backplane is simple and seems to be decent quality. The only negative is, although you can HotSwap the drives it doesn't allow for drive carriers, which for the price tag should be expected.

Rosewill RSV-S4-X 4 Bay SATA to eSATA (Port Multiplier) JBOD / RAID 0, 1, 1+0, 5 Enclosure $130 shipped

 

The only thing worse than hotmail is AOL, but who knows, maybe the fact that everyone stopped using it makes it slightly better for viruses...
I routinely send no subject emails if they're last minute quick messages, never had a problem with no subject messages. One of the useful things about google mail is if a message is no subject, or has a subject but one that is short, it will display the first few words of the message in the inbox preview, so you know what it is you're opening. If it looks suspicious, can always write an email back to them, and can the suspect message. Personally I find it very hard to believe that these emails are what's causing drives to go down. Sounds more like a virus to me. A virus that may also be sending them emails maybe, but I've never seen a case of an html file that can dump the BIOS of a hard drive. Stuff like this is usually the realm of fake virus warning emails, which I must get at least half a dozen of per year.

 

It's not that tough to put a subject in before sending email, and a message is never that urgent that one can't do that above and beyond pure laziness.

With that said most people will open no subject emails regardless so these kinds of warnings, which really mean nothing at the end of the day. And if you have auto preview enabled you are still opening up the email so you might as well just open it fully, same difference.

This type of problem always exists and is always a potential problem which means your usage should always accommodate such practices.

I got this email notification that is going around prior to Fred's post but I just deleted this nonsense and didn't forward it for the reasons above.

 

Sam,

Writing one back to them does not solve anything. These are truly hijacked emails. The email address is the person who supposedly was sending it to you. One tip off is that the email is also sent to the poster. Since not many people send an email they are sending to others to themselves, I always look for that. It does it with all 3 of my email addressses. Hotmail, Yahoo and Google Mail. It's never in any of my European correspondence either.

Russ

 

I had to laugh at sammy's post the only thing worse that hotmail is aol, sammy I in no way want to start an argument with that, but, don't forget I have used both, as well as others, as far as viruses, I haven't had any in years in all the time using aol, however did get some of those scareware crap using IE8 surfing with google, thanks to malwarebytes and superantispyware was always able to get rid of them.

All techies I know do laugh at the fact that I use aol, that's cool, I would never try to convince anybody to use it, does it have issues, sure it does, but nothing compared to many others I tried, all the family members that I helped start on using pc's I always gave them the options of many browsers, most stick with aol, why, it's less problomatic plain and simple, and of course to each his or her own, how can I argue these facts, easy, whatever is easier and less problomatic to use is how I make my assumption, if something better comes my way I will change.

 

I would disagree with AOL being less problematic in fact I've had more issues with people using AOL. The best route to go is using a client like Outlook or Opera or so many others. AOL has never been a good service it is just that most people have started with AOL and don't like change. That is the only good argument for AOL.

 

It's the only argument I know of for people that still use AOL. That or that AOL won't let them leave.

 

LOL! My mother refuses to switch from AOL. One day, they'll go out of business, then she'll have to adapt. I used it for dial up service(seems like ages ago). Good riddance.

 

Well no, that's not what I meant. If it was obviously a fake there'd of course be no point writing back, but if it was a no subject email that might have been legitimate but you weren't sure, you could write them an email separately (not as a reply) and find out that way, or since this is the modern age, send them an IM.

 

Sam,

See, that's the thing. All these emails were from people I know. When you scroll over the sender's name, it gives a legitimate email address, even though it didn't originate from the supposed sender! The first one I got was supposedly from Rick, and contained an html file. I do not open these files until I check with the person that supposedly sent it to me. Part of the caution was noticing that there were a bunch of others it was sent to, names of people who all of were people known to me but who I never had direct contact with before. Call me paranoid, but I always look at the names of others. When I see names that I know are not their contacts, but belong to people like Fred, or Rick or an email from my friend Alla in NY, and then see that she has also sent it to herself, I know something is wrong! It turned out to be the same way with Fred, Rick, another Rick, George, and a few others. When I saw this, I contacted all of the parties, and none of them sent these emails to me or anyone else I know. Rick Blackman opened one of them and so far he has lost 3 hard drives. The do not show in the bios, but occasionally will show in windows. If you try to access them it tells you that the disk needs to be formatted, and when you try, it says "drive not found"! You can't even access them with KillDisk II which is well before the drivers or files are loaded. Something has completely erased the bios in the drive. You have to replace the board on the drive to gain access to the data on the drive again. My other friend Rick opened one of the HTML files and when it did nothing, he immediately ran a virus scan in safe mode, and it took whatever it was out before it did any damage. The only time I send No Subject emails is when I'm on an IM with someone, and I know they are expecting it, because they know I'm sending it. So far I haven't gotten anything like that from Europe. I also get them on all 3 of my email accounts, but I get more through hotmail, I guess because it's my prime email. Since all my emails are virus scanned, I have to assume that it's set to a time, date or whatever it needs to make bad things happen. A quick virus scan will eliminate it if you do it right away. Once it hits a drive, there is nothing you can do about it. Whatever it is, it's pretty nasty!

Russ

 

Russ,

It could have came from someone like Rick and still conatained the nasty you just never know and that is why it is important to use the subject line when sending emails however that doesn't always make the email safe either of course.

If you have a good IAVP you can always scan the email, mine is setup to do that automatically. I typically delete no subject emails reguardless of who they are from and then you avoid those spawning nasties for the most part of course.

Stevo

 

Well like I said before, I tried most of them, it's not like I stay with aol because thats what I'm use to, I always try something new, the others, no thanks, I knew I was gonna get ganged up on, like I said before that's ok, almost every techie I know does not use it, they say it's to crappy, it's for kids, fine, for me I never have problems, things always run smooth, and no I never had problems leaving, I left several times with no issues. Now I challenge for all you techies here, try and solve Russ's problem with hotmail, or even yahoo for that matter, he uses that also with almost the same problem, good luck guys let me know how it goes lol, but my suckie aol I don't have those problems, nor any other for that matter.