"Rate my Rig" thread

[phongn]

Samsung and Intel should be the only SSDs you consider.

[Zixinus]

Samsung and Intel should be the only SSDs you consider.

Why?

[phongn]

Samsung and Intel should be the only SSDs you consider.

Why?

Those two are their own foundries (well, sort-of in the case of Intel; they have a joint venture with Micron called IMFT) and typically reserve the best flash for their own products. Firmware tends to be of better quality, too.

[Zixinus]

Well, thank you and everyone else that helped me. I'm migrating to the new SSD drive (for some reason, I keep saying SDD, even though I should know that it's Solid-State-Drive) now. Right now, I'm looking over the BIOS to see what options should I enable for it to run the WinOS off the SSD (the shop guy mentioned something like "AHC" that I need to enable in the BIOS, but I don't see such an option, the closest I got is "access mode" that I can set to either "large" or "auto").

[phongn]

It might be in the Integrated Peripherals section of your BIOS. Unfortunately, Gigabyte's manual is not that great but root around. You might need a BIOS update, too.

[Zixinus]

It isn't. I checked thoroughly as possible, but there just doesn't seem to be such an option. I did update the BIOS, from F1 to F5.

There is a SATA/RAID driver that is in the category called SATA RAID/AHCI. It's a bunch of DLL files though (with two .sys files and a .cat file), called "preinstall version". I have no idea what to do with it.

[Zaune]

I've been looking at replacing my increasingly geriatric Pentium 4, and a casual eBay search has turned up this:

HP XW6200 Workstation/Tower PC:

TWIN (2x) Intel Xeon 3.2Ghz - 64-Bit - Hyper-Threaded
- 3.0 - 3.8Ghz Dual Xeon systems available in our eBay shop

4 GB RAM - DDR2 ECC RAM
- Alternative 8GB systems available in our eBay shop
- 8GB Upgrade available for £50 GBP.

160GB SATA Hard Drive
- 1TB systems available in our eBay shop
- 1TB Upgrade available for £80 GBP

On-Board SATA RAID Controller - Raid 0 & 1

Brand New XFX ATI HD5450 1GB GDDR3 Gaming Graphics Card
- (2GB with Hyper-Memory!!)

DVD-ROM Optical Drive

Genuine Windows XP Professional Installed

Good use of £150 plus whatever I have to lay out on Windows 7, d'you reckon?

[Zaune]

Missed the edit window: Another possibility at £200. Bigger hard drive and comes with Windows 7, but a slightly inferior CPU and graphics card.

[phongn]

Those are both P4-based space heaters.

[Zaune]

If you know somewhere I can get a better machine for no more than £250 including shipping, please feel free to point me to it.

[Ace Pace]

It isn't. I checked thoroughly as possible, but there just doesn't seem to be such an option. I did update the BIOS, from F1 to F5.

There is a SATA/RAID driver that is in the category called SATA RAID/AHCI. It's a bunch of DLL files though (with two .sys files and a .cat file), called "preinstall version". I have no idea what to do with it.

Whats your motherboard? I'll see if I can find an online guide.

You need to find an option say "IDE Mode" or something of the sort, and make sure it's set to AHCI.

Do NOT install your OS without making sure of this setting because IDE mode is shitty and you can't replace the drive setting without Windows being aware of it (this is as far as I remember).

[phongn]

Do NOT install your OS without making sure of this setting because IDE mode is shitty and you can't replace the drive setting without Windows being aware of it (this is as far as I remember).

It isn't that shitty (lady's laptop is IDE-mode only and has an Intel 320). You can also enable Windows to boot via AHCI mode, too: see KB922976.

[Zaune]

Another possibility, albeit one on the absolute top end of my budget. The graphics card doesn't appear to be very good but the rest of the spec is pretty solid.

[Zixinus]

It isn't. I checked thoroughly as possible, but there just doesn't seem to be such an option. I did update the BIOS, from F1 to F5.

There is a SATA/RAID driver that is in the category called SATA RAID/AHCI. It's a bunch of DLL files though (with two .sys files and a .cat file), called "preinstall version". I have no idea what to do with it.

Whats your motherboard? I'll see if I can find an online guide.

You need to find an option say "IDE Mode" or something of the sort, and make sure it's set to AHCI.

Do NOT install your OS without making sure of this setting because IDE mode is shitty and you can't replace the drive setting without Windows being aware of it (this is as far as I remember).

As I said earlier (I do apologize, it is buried among my posts):Gigabyte GA-M68M-S2P
I believe it is a rev 1.0, although I'm not sure. Drivers and whatnot are mostly identical anyway, as the two have the same chipsets.

I am genuinely confused whether it has AHCI support or not. It's FQA bluntly states " NVIDIA chipset does not support AHCI. " yet I have fond drivers marked "SATA AHCI drivers". So I am confused.

I also have the opportunity (I think) to upgrade it from a Vista 32bit Home edition to Win7 64bit edition. Since I managed to get the damn thing infested by some nasty malware, I am considering that I may as well upgrade the OS, though I am also confused whether my AMD Athlon II X4 640 HAS x64 support (cpu-z says that it has "x86-64, AMD-V" instructions among a bunch of other things, so I guess that it can do both?).
Would that be worth it, considering that the upgrade likely would have little to no cost for me*?

*The explanation to this is oddly enough, not piracy: instead, one of my half-brothers brought a netbook that had Win7 on it (key and recovery disk and everything) and he insisted that it had WinXP on it instead (yes, I know, he was just that neophobic to Win7). Thus, the upgrade would have no cost to me.

[Executor32]

x64 and x86-64 are the same thing. x86-64 is the actual designation for the 64-bit extension to the x86 instruction set, but most people (including Microsoft) just shorten it to x64. If you already have or intend to upgrade in the future to 4GB or more of RAM, install 64-bit Windows. Otherwise 32-bit is fine, especially if you have 2GB or less RAM.

The nForce 630a chipset supports AHCI, but only if the manufacturer has added support for it in the BIOS. Gigabyte doesn't appear to have done so for that board.

[Edi]

Figured I should ask here instead of making a separate thread, but is there anything substantially more powerful or extravagant coming down the pipeline in the next three to four months that would cause the price of components to drop appreciably?

Asking because the integrated sound on my computer's mobo dying means the thing probably doesn't have too long to live before it starts developing even more problems. Given that the system is from September 2006 with only a couple of component upgrades and one power supply replacement and some 45k power-on hours, that's a rather decent run. I'll probably buy a €20 or €30 sound card to tide me over but if there are no appreciable price cuts on the horizon, might as well buy the new comp right away.

[phongn]

Figured I should ask here instead of making a separate thread, but is there anything substantially more powerful or extravagant coming down the pipeline in the next three to four months that would cause the price of components to drop appreciably?

Haswell will be coming and may well be worth the wait.

[Zixinus]

x64 and x86-64 are the same thing. x86-64 is the actual designation for the 64-bit extension to the x86 instruction set, but most people (including Microsoft) just shorten it to x64. If you already have or intend to upgrade in the future to 4GB or more of RAM, install 64-bit Windows. Otherwise 32-bit is fine, especially if you have 2GB or less RAM.

The nForce 630a chipset supports AHCI, but only if the manufacturer has added support for it in the BIOS. Gigabyte doesn't appear to have done so for that board.

I already have 4 gigs of RAM. DDR2 RAM but still 4 gigs none the less. I thought that Vista 32-bit still could handle that much?

[phongn]

I already have 4 gigs of RAM. DDR2 RAM but still 4 gigs none the less. I thought that Vista 32-bit still could handle that much?

For a variety of reasons, desktop 32-bit versions of Windows since XP will only let you access ~3.25GB at most.

[Zixinus]

Okay, I upgraded to Win7.

It says that out of 4gigabytes, only 4,00 GB only 2,00 GB is "usable". Wtf? I know that I can't use full 4 gigs or more, but there seems to be an entire gigabyte missing here. And yes, that one gigabyte matters.

[Starglider]

It says that out of 4gigabytes, only 4,00 GB only 2,00 GB is "usable". Wtf? I know that I can't use full 4 gigs or more, but there seems to be an entire gigabyte missing here. And yes, that one gigabyte matters.

The default 32-bit virtual address space mapping is low 2 gigabytes for user-space (program) memory, high 2 gigabytes for kernel-space (system) memory. So no single program can use more than 2 GB but a combination of programs and the OS can use up to nearly 4 GB (somewhat less due to driver requirements). You can mess around with Windows configuration settings to remap the address space and allow more user memory, as phongn indicated, but this can cause some (badly written) software to crash.

It's been 10 years now since AMD released the first x86-64 processors, there is no reason to still be using a 32-bit operating system.

[phongn]

Okay, I upgraded to Win7.

It says that out of 4gigabytes, only 4,00 GB only 2,00 GB is "usable". Wtf? I know that I can't use full 4 gigs or more, but there seems to be an entire gigabyte missing here. And yes, that one gigabyte matters.

How much RAM does your GPU have? Windows memory-maps that into upper memory space, so if you have a 1.5-2GB GPU, well, you're screwed. Time to go 64-bit.

You can mess around with Windows configuration settings to remap the address space and allow more user memory, as phongn indicated, but this can cause some (badly written) software to crash.

Desktop Windows ignores memory remapping, I think, for that very reason.

[Zixinus]

It turned out that Dad didn't use his Vista key either. And that I could assign to a 64-bit Vista. Sorry for previous moaning.

How much RAM does your GPU have?

2 gigabytes, I take it that this is no longer a problem now that I switched/reverted to a 64bit Vista?

[phongn]

It turned out that Dad didn't use his Vista key either. And that I could assign to a 64-bit Vista. Sorry for previous moaning.

You can use the same key for both 32- and 64-bit versions.

2 gigabytes, I take it that this is no longer a problem now that I switched/reverted to a 64bit Vista?

It's no longer a problem.

[Executor32]

Wait, why did you go back to 64-bit Vista instead of just installing 64-bit 7?