"Rate my Rig" thread

[Zixinus]

What does a cache do and why is there up to three of them? I recall that caches temporarily store processable data.

[phongn]

What does a cache do and why is there up to three of them? I recall that caches temporarily store processable data.

See this article

[Zixinus]

Cool, thanks.

I would mostly be using the CPU for gaming and some basic file stuff. That and I could save 10k. Considering that both CPUs are 4-core, I presume that the plus 10k isn't that worthwhile if I want better gaming performance?

[GrandMasterTerwynn]

Cool, thanks.

I would mostly be using the CPU for gaming and some basic file stuff. That and I could save 10k. Considering that both CPUs are 4-core, I presume that the plus 10k isn't that worthwhile if I want better gaming performance?

The difference in gaming performance between an Athlon II X4 640 and a Phenom II X4 955 is about 12%, and mild overclocking will reduce that. Both are pretty high up in the rarefied heights of computing performance as it is.

[Executor32]

All right, after not upgrading last year because I needed my tax refund for other things, I'm finally ready to upgrade this year. It's been 3 years since the last major one, and performance in new games is starting to get bottlenecked by the CPU (I have a GeForce GTX 275 with 1792MB of VRAM, so I'm still set for a while there). So, without further ado, the new parts:

• Cooler Master ATCS 840 case: Ungodly amounts of room, lots of large, quiet cooling fans, and even a separate airflow path just for the PSU, with removable filters in front of all intake fans. I like the flip-up block on top with all the front panel ports, too, of which there are 2x USB 2.0, 1x Firewire, 1x eSATA, and audio jacks.
• Intel Core i7-2600k quad-core processor: Sandy Bridge, 'nuff said.
• ASUS P8P67 Deluxe motherboard: The best bang for my buck, as far as I'm concerned, when it comes to Socket 1155 boards. 2x eSATA, 8x USB 2.0, a Firewire port, dual gigabit LAN, and 2x USB 3.0 ports, and that's just on the back panel. Midboard, there are headers for 2 more USB 3.0, 4 more USB 2.0, and another Firewire port, as well as 4x SATA 3.0 and 4x SATA 6.0 Gbps ports, 3x PCIe x16 and 2x PCIe x1 slots, and 2x PCI slots. It has a built-in Bluetooth controller, and features what may be the first-ever BIOS with a GUI and mouse support.
• Corsair Vengeance 4GB DDR3 1600 DIMM: Four of these, for a total of 16GB of RAM. Not much else to say, other than that they're on sale, I trust Corsair, and they look neat.

These will be coupled with the aforementioned GTX 275, 2 1TB Seagate Barracudas, a Lite-On Blu-Ray/DVD±RW combo drive, a card reader/floppy drive, a Thermaltake XRay (a cup holder and 12v DC socket that fits in a 5¼ bay) and a 24" BenQ E2400HD and 19" Viewsonic VX922.

I'm also getting a few other things that I wouldn't consider part of the build, like a new USB WiFi dongle to use as a Soft AP to connect with my Wii, DS, and Droid2, since I get nearly no signal from the router 2 floors up. The one I've got has stopped working, from what I can tell, as all three devices will show a great signal from it, and I can try to connect, but it never actually does. It works fine in station mode, though. I'm also picking up the TRON mouse from Razer, because the laser seems to have gone out in my Mamba and I've been making do with a little Bluetooth notebook mouse. Also, I am a fatty nerd. I may replace that card reader/floppy drive with a straight-up card reader with a microSD slot, since I can't use the floppy drive anymore given the lack of a connector for it on the P8P67.

I'll finish this post with a quick question: Should I keep using my X-Fi Fatal1ty (PCI, not PCIe), or should I just use the onboard audio? They seem roughly comparable, and I know that integrated audio has improved greatly even since my last upgrade in 2008, but I'd like a second opinion.

[starslayer]

I'll finish this post with a quick question: Should I keep using my X-Fi Fatal1ty (PCI, not PCIe), or should I just use the onboard audio? They seem roughly comparable, and I know that integrated audio has improved greatly even since my last upgrade in 2008, but I'd like a second opinion.

If it were me, I'd stick with the dedicated card, despite Creative's shitty drivers. To my ears, dedicated cards still sound better, but YMMV. I'd try both out, since it's a simple switch in Windows (that does not require a restart) and then changing your speaker plug. Then use whichever one sounds better (obviously).

[white_rabbit]

Okay, I'm considering upgrading, and I asked a local computer bloke to suggest some specs to run a few games I'm interested in. The new Shogun, and Crysis/Crysis 2 on high settings.

Not much of a computer nerd myself anymore, so he's come up with two specs for me. Any suggestions on how to tweak them and/or which one to go for ?

I'm not after bleeding edge, but I would like to run fairly high spec on the two games above.

Store built.

Quad Core 2.8mhz amd
6 gig ddr3 ram 1333mhz
500 gb Hard Drive
Asus 1080p HDMI quiet Graphics card
Dvdr player
Genuine Windows® 7 Home Premium
Wireless N network card
Piano Black colour
1 year of coverage included with your PC
4 rear and 2 fron usb

£470



Or

Dell

•Intel® Core™ 2 Quad-Core Q8300 Processor (2.5GHz)
•6GB Dual Channel DDR3 [2x2048 + 2x1024] Memory
•1TB (7200rpm) SATA Hard Drive
•ATI Radeon™ HD 5450 1GB DDR3 graphics
•Genuine Windows® 7 Home Premium 64bit - English
•Piano Black colour
•1 year of coverage included with your PC

£560

Current pennies are within budget, so I'm wondering if a shinier graphics card might be a worthwhile addition ?

[Xon]

The dell deal looks a hell of a lot better. Especially since the gfx card from the store built is effectively mystery meat. You might want to try poking the dell website to find a better deal. They should be starting to sell PC's based on the new Sandy Bridge cpu.

[Mr Bean]

Hp is already advertising its sandy bridge systems. Dell should have them already as well.

[Gurachn]

Current pennies are within budget, so I'm wondering if a shinier graphics card might be a worthwhile addition ?

I'm guessing that the storebought graphics card is most likely this one.
If so, then I would probably suggest replacing it with something more capable within your budget.

[adam_grif]

The GTX 560 is coming out in short order (Jan 25th), and unless the early benches are particularly horrible / they charge ridiculous sums for it, I'll be using that for the rig I'm currently building. If either of those ends up being the case, I'll drop down to a nice cheap 460 and then hold the savings until the 600 / 7000 series cards are out and see how I go.

[Zixinus]

I'll finish this post with a quick question: Should I keep using my X-Fi Fatal1ty (PCI, not PCIe), or should I just use the onboard audio?

If it still works with Vista and win7, I would say to keep x-fi on if you'd like fancy audio effects and/or do heavy audio work (or can actually tell the difference). Dedicated audio takes a bit of a load off the processor and allows more fancy sound effects.
I'm not sure, but it shouldn't matter whether it's PCI or PCI-e.

Of course, it depends on what kind of sound system you have to begin with. No point in having a super sound card if you are using cheap speakers.

[Kojiro]

A quick question- do you guys think it'd be worth adding a second ATI 5870 in crossfire. I've been offered one almost new for $200.

[Mr Bean]

A quick question- do you guys think it'd be worth adding a second ATI 5870 in crossfire. I've been offered one almost new for $200.

Question 1:Is your power supply at least 740 watts or above?


At that price no since for 210$ you can GET a new 6870 which is better in pretty much every way.

[Kojiro]

My power supply is a 750w. So you don't think it's worth upgrading to crossfired 5870s for $200 over a single 6870?

[adam_grif]

It's not really worth upgrading at all, either way. Save your money and wait until next year's cards are out. Unless you've got cash to burn and you really need performance RIGHT NOW for some reason. The 5870 isn't exactly a horrible card. Going Crossfire/SLI is not an advisable method of future proofing, buying a better, single card is usually the preferred option since it is less power intensive and doesn't have the problems SLI has (compatability issues, microstuttering, lack of scaling on many cards / games that don't scale well).

[adam_grif]

Picked up a GTX 560 Ti from PC Case Gear, 311 including postage. Not bad. Should be arriving on the 28th; curse you Australia day public holiday!

[Executor32]

Jesus Christ. I knew the new case was going to be quite a bit larger than my current one, but goddamn:



Well, the desk is definitely coming further out from the wall.
Everything else will be here today, the case came a day early for some reason.

[Dillon]

So I'm hoping to build my own home file server/NAS with my tax return/bonus. I've installed hardware components before like video cards and PSUs even, but I've never built my own computer from the ground up, so I'm hoping that if there is some glaring incompatibility between the parts I've selected or have any other tips, someone will be kind enough to point it out. Mainly I want to store home media on it in HD and be able to stream to different computers around the apartment. Seeing as it's a home file server, and it will rarely, if ever be accessed by more than two people at the same time, as well as the fact that I'm doing this on a budget, I'm not going for super powerful components. As long as it'll do what I stated above, I'll be satisfied.

Ok, so now for the parts:

Tower: Fractal Design Define R3 Black ATX Mid Tower Silent Computer Case: It isn't too pricey, and it can hold up to eight hard drives.

Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-G31M-ES2L mATX LGA775 G31 DDR2 1PCI-E16 2PCI SATA2 Video Sound GBLAN Motherboard: It's cheap, takes DDR2 RAM which is also cheap and is compatible with the CPU I want to use.

CPU: Intel Celeron 430 1.8GHZ LGA775 512KB 800FSB: Again, it's nice and cheap and more than powerful enough for what it'll be used for.

PSU: XFX 650W XXX Edition Single Rail Modular ATX Power Supply ATX12V 52A 24PIN 80PLUS Bronze: Is XFX a good name for PSU? If not, I wouldn't mind switching to Antec. Anyway, it's 80 plus certified, and I'd think 650 watts would be more than enough to power a theoretical max of 8 HDD. This rig will have no video card, so the only other components sucking up power would be the CPU, Motherboard and RAID card.

RAM: Kingston ValueRAM KVR667D2N5/2G PC2-5300 2GB 1X2GB DDR2-667 240PIN DIMM Memory: It's cheap, and 2GB should be far more than I'll ever need.

HDD: Seagate Barracuda LP 2TB SATA2 32MB Cache 5900RPM 3.5IN Hard Drive OEM: I plan to start out with four in a RAID 5 array, however, I figure as my storage needs go up, I can simply add more. They seem to have a few bad reviews, but a lot of good reviews as well, so I figure that if one of them does fail, I can always send it in for a replacement.

RAID card: Supermicro AOC-SAT2-MV8 8 Port SATA Card Pcix 64BIT 133MHZ: Now this is where I start getting a bit confused. It says it supports software RAID, but isn't the whole point of a RAID card to provide hardware RAID? I want to use a RAID card because from what I understand, they make hard drives less likely to fail, but I need one with 8 ports obviously, and don't want to spend a shit load of money. Does anyone have any alternate suggestions in this regard?

As for the OS, I'm planning to run it on FreeNAS, largely, because it's well, free. I've looked up its capabilities, and it looks pretty versatile for a free piece of software. Is there anything about it I should be aware of about it in regards to this type of set up?

In order to help in regards to HDD stability, I am also going to get a UPS to use with this set up. I'm looking at the Cyberpower CP1000AVRLCD 1000VA 600W UPS 9 Outlet 1080 Joules AVR LCD RJ11/RJ45. Basically, as long as it has the battery power to safely shut down my server in the event of a power failure, that's good enough. I'd also like to possibly hook up my modem and router to it, so that if there is a power failure, I can still access the internet on my netbook. I don't imagine a DSL modem and router demand a lot of power, so if it were to immediately start shutting down the server because of power loss, I would hope it would keep my router and modem running for quite a while.

Total cost (including UPS): $979.23 CDN

I'm also hoping to purchase the XFX Radeon HD 6850 Black Edition 820MHZ 1GB 4.4GHZ GDDR5 2XDVI Display Port HDMI PCI-E Video Card for my gaming rig. My OEM nVidia GTS 240 is definitely the weak link right now in terms of performance. Does anyone have any experience with this card or with XFX manufactured cards in general? I also want to get a budget sound card that supports Dolby 5.1, and I found this. Is it going to be complete garbage at that price? I already have high end speakers that support Dolby 4.1, so I figure I might as well use them to their full capacity.

Anyway, any assistance would be very much appreciated guys. Thanks in advance.

[phongn]

PSU: XFX 650W XXX Edition Single Rail Modular ATX Power Supply ATX12V 52A 24PIN 80PLUS Bronze: Is XFX a good name for PSU? If not, I wouldn't mind switching to Antec. Anyway, it's 80 plus certified, and I'd think 650 watts would be more than enough to power a theoretical max of 8 HDD. This rig will have no video card, so the only other components sucking up power would be the CPU, Motherboard and RAID card.

I generally prefer Seasonic or Corsair over most brands; FSP is a reliable lower-end PSU. Seasonic is also known for their low noise.

HDD: Seagate Barracuda LP 2TB SATA2 32MB Cache 5900RPM 3.5IN Hard Drive OEM: I plan to start out with four in a RAID 5 array, however, I figure as my storage needs go up, I can simply add more. They seem to have a few bad reviews, but a lot of good reviews as well, so I figure that if one of them does fail, I can always send it in for a replacement.

I would prefer RAID-6 (with periodic data scrubbing) for larger drives. Bit error rates are becoming uncomfortably high. Be aware that using desktop hard drives in a RAID array can cause problems (the drives may take too long to correct errors and drop out of the array).

RAID card: Supermicro AOC-SAT2-MV8 8 Port SATA Card Pcix 64BIT 133MHZ: Now this is where I start getting a bit confused. It says it supports software RAID, but isn't the whole point of a RAID card to provide hardware RAID? I want to use a RAID card because from what I understand, they make hard drives less likely to fail, but I need one with 8 ports obviously, and don't want to spend a shit load of money. Does anyone have any alternate suggestions in this regard?

This is not a RAID card (ignore what NCIX says). You will also have to do some voodoo to boot off of it under FreeBSD (which is what FreeNAS is based off of). Newer Linux distributions have better support (Ubuntu 10.04, RHEL 6 and derivatives, etc). This is also a PCI-X (not PCI Express!) card - while it will work in legacy PCI slots, it will be pretty slow if you go that way.

RAID does not make your hard drive less likely to fail. What it does do is ensure your array can keep serving data even if some number of drives fail (1 for RAID 5, 2 for RAID 6, up to - but possibly less than - half for RAID 10).

As for the OS, I'm planning to run it on FreeNAS, largely, because it's well, free. I've looked up its capabilities, and it looks pretty versatile for a free piece of software. Is there anything about it I should be aware of about it in regards to this type of set up?

If you want to play with ZFS, you need to have ECC RAM (and CPU and motherboard that will support it).

I'm also hoping to purchase the XFX Radeon HD 6850 Black Edition 820MHZ 1GB 4.4GHZ GDDR5 2XDVI Display Port HDMI PCI-E Video Card for my gaming rig. My OEM nVidia GTS 240 is definitely the weak link right now in terms of performance. Does anyone have any experience with this card or with XFX manufactured cards in general? I also want to get a budget sound card that supports Dolby 5.1, and I found this. Is it going to be complete garbage at that price? I already have high end speakers that support Dolby 4.1, so I figure I might as well use them to their full capacity.

XFX is fine for GPUs and the Xonar is a good sound card.

[adam_grif]

Just chiming in to say that my new rig is working out wonderfully. i5 2500, Gigabyte GTX 560 Ti OC edition. The 560 is really chewing up anything I can throw at it, Metro 2033 and Crysis / Warhead maxed out are totally lag free (although I'm only running 1280 x 768 in fairness). Arkham Asylum was pulling >100 fps during the benches, but then I forced tripple buffering and set the AA to 4x and now it's practically locked at 60 (57 minimum, 62 max during the bench).

[General Zod]

The new toy I just ordered. http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications ... &CatId=114

Not exactly a top of the line machine but it has way more power than my current laptop with plenty of room to upgrade. I was a bit on the edge about ordering but since I was having trouble running certain CAD apps, so the extra power should help immensely.

[AniThyng]

I guess this is the thread to ask:

I'm going to get an core i5 w/ ati 6870 soon, but there's still one thing I can't decide on: should I go for Win7 64bit or 32bit? If 32bit i'll stick with 4gigs ram, otherwise 8gigs.

[Dave]

I guess this is the thread to ask:

I'm going to get an core i5 w/ ati 6870 soon, but there's still one thing I can't decide on: should I go for Win7 64bit or 32bit? If 32bit i'll stick with 4gigs ram, otherwise 8gigs.

I'm running Win 7 64-bit with no problems. Anyway, I think 4 gigs is really adequate these days, unless you're doing really memory intensive stuff like doing crazy Photoshop stuff or slicing and dicing videos. Four gigs is what I have in my main box, and I've never had a memory issue unless I do something intentionally stupid while programming.

[phongn]

Go 64-bit and 8GB of RAM.