"Rate my Rig" thread

[phongn]

I'm thinking of putting together a custom gaming rig for the first time. Probably going to be building from components to keep costs down. I've got most of the system figured out, but and stuck on the processor. I'm debating between a 3.33 GHz Core 2 Duo and a 2.66 GHz Core 2 Quad, both 45nm chips, both the same price on Newegg at the moment. Assuming a reasonably high end GPU (probably an upper end Geforce 9800), which would give me more bang for the buck? I'm more used to spec'ing number crunchers for renderfarms and molecular dynamic simulations than gaming unfortunately.

Dual-core remains better for gaming. ATI's R4850 & R4870 are the best value in GPUs right now and extremely fast.

So....since my compy died, I'm thinking of just dude....getting a Dell. Nothing fancy, I just want a middle-of-the-roady rig that will last me a few years. what say you all to this setup:

It's fast. It's probably more computer than you'll use, though the GPU is a bit slow for the latest games.

[darkjedi521]

I'm thinking of putting together a custom gaming rig for the first time. Probably going to be building from components to keep costs down. I've got most of the system figured out, but and stuck on the processor. I'm debating between a 3.33 GHz Core 2 Duo and a 2.66 GHz Core 2 Quad, both 45nm chips, both the same price on Newegg at the moment. Assuming a reasonably high end GPU (probably an upper end Geforce 9800), which would give me more bang for the buck? I'm more used to spec'ing number crunchers for renderfarms and molecular dynamic simulations than gaming unfortunately.

Dual-core remains better for gaming. ATI's R4850 & R4870 are the best value in GPUs right now and extremely fast.

Thanks for the tip on ATI. I have to use NVIDIA for a variety of reasons at work, so I'm not as current on ATI.

[Chardok]

Thanks phongn! I'll see about scaling back the CPU and upgrading the GPU.

[Brother-Captain Gaius]

I'm in the market for a portable desktop.

Looking over the options, it looks like something in the $1000-1200 price range is what I'm looking at. I need lots of RAM, a good graphics card, a good processor, etc. because it's going to need to run modern games now and then. I know pretty much what to look for in this department, so really I'm wondering about brands. Sony seemed like they had the best system from a cursory glance, but what would you all recommend? Durability, reliability, and optimal battery/performance balance is ideal. It doesn't need to run Crysis at maximum settings or anything, but it should be able to run it in a playable state as a theoretical benchmark.

[Lonestar]

Goddamn work laptop.

It seems like every 20 letters or so it fucking bounces to some random spot in the post/document OR manages to "back" on IE...which is particularly annoying if I just got finished writting a long(for me) post.

Guess I'm going to have to get a personal one for travel...preferably one that let's me play some sweet, sweet Total War series. Thoughts?

[Fingolfin_Noldor]

Goddamn work laptop.

It seems like every 20 letters or so it fucking bounces to some random spot in the post/document OR manages to "back" on IE...which is particularly annoying if I just got finished writting a long(for me) post.

Guess I'm going to have to get a personal one for travel...preferably one that let's me play some sweet, sweet Total War series. Thoughts?

Anything with Core 2 Duo, with a decent discrete graphic card of the same class or better than the 8600M GT should be fine.

[atg]

Goddamn work laptop.

It seems like every 20 letters or so it fucking bounces to some random spot in the post/document OR manages to "back" on IE...which is particularly annoying if I just got finished writting a long(for me) post.

Guess I'm going to have to get a personal one for travel...preferably one that let's me play some sweet, sweet Total War series. Thoughts?

I recently purchased the Asus M51V and can highly recommend it. It has a Core2Duo 2.5Ghz CPU and an ATI 3650 512MB graphics chip in it which has so far handled any game I've cared to throw at it with relative ease - including Medieval 2, CoD4, Silent Hunter 4, etc.
Price was approx AUD$1800.

[Xon]

Ugh, 32bit Windows 2003 volume shadow copy service really does not function well with a 6.5TiB when dealing with a few hundred gigabytes of changeset information. Keeps running out of kernel memory when generating a previous version checkpoint, and the only way to recover is to delete all the old pervious versions and start again.

In addition Virtual Server 2005 R2 has developed an annoying habit of having my VMs mac 'stick' to the network adaptor despite the virtual server not associating the mac with the VM after a shutdown of the host OS. Resulting in me having to shut the service down, unlink the virtual machine network adaptor driver, link it back, and then start the Virtual Server software.

To solve this, I was planning on upgrading to Windows Server 2008 Standard (ya Dreamspark for free software) but the question I have is do I have the required hardware to run hyper-v?

If so, I'm planning to use my Win2k8 Standard licence for the host OS and have it host the current RAID array, and use VMs to host the services I currently run on the box natively (DNS,DHCP,AD, DFS/file services, user profiles, other apps, etc)

Gigabyte GA-G33M-S2
Pentium Dual CPU E2140 1.6ghz
4x 1gb 800mhz ddr2
Areca ARC-1260 PCI-E 16 ports RAID controller w/ 1gb ddr1 onboard ram.

My question is does the CPU have the required bits for hardware virtualization?

[Ace Pace]

No. According to this.

No Virtualisation tech.

[Xon]

That sucks amazingly hard. The E2200 apparently has it, and that was released a quarter after I bought my E2140.

I can get the E2200 locally for $115 AUD, the Q6600 is ~$318. Maxing the mobo's memory would be 8gb, at 4x 2Gb DDR2 800 Kingstons sticks @ $38 each (total of $152). More importantly that is within a single bus trip @ $1.7 without having to pay shipping. Which gets stupidly expensive since I live in Perth, Western Australia. And the rest of the country is on the otherside of the continent.

[Xon]

Ok, so the E2200 doesn't have it according to some parts of intel's website but the ark.intel.com pages do?

[phongn]

Ok, so the E2200 doesn't have it according to some parts of intel's website but the ark.intel.com pages do?

I think it's a typo. Their budget line does not have hardware virtualization enabled.

[Beowulf]

Ugh, 32bit Windows 2003 volume shadow copy service really does not function well with a 6.5TiB when dealing with a few hundred gigabytes of changeset information. Keeps running out of kernel memory when generating a previous version checkpoint, and the only way to recover is to delete all the old pervious versions and start again.

No shit, really? A higher version of Win2k3 would probably work better (Enterprise as opposed to Standard). Of course, this raises the question: why the hell to do you have 6.5 TB of space on a server? Anyways, an upgrade to 64-bit Windows Server would solve the problem. Which, given that you're getting it off Dreamspark, means you'll need Win2k8.

Anyway, yes your chip does have the required bits for virtualization, but they aren't enabled. Go get a better (read: higher end) chip. You just need a E8200, if you can manage to find one of those (USD160, YMMV).

[Xon]

No shit, really? A higher version of Win2k3 would probably work better (Enterprise as opposed to Standard).

That was with 32bit Win2k3 Enterprise.

Of course, this raises the question: why the hell to do you have 6.5 TB of space on a server?

It is my home fileserver which stores a lot of media.

Anyway, yes your chip does have the required bits for virtualization, but they aren't enabled. Go get a better (read: higher end) chip. You just need a E8200, if you can manage to find one of those (USD160, YMMV).

Yes, finding the bloody thing will be 'fun'.

[Uraniun235]

Hey Xon, what kind of drives do you use with that monster array of yours? Do you shell out for the enterprise-class drives or do you use consumer drives?

[Xon]

Hey Xon, what kind of drives do you use with that monster array of yours? Do you shell out for the enterprise-class drives or do you use consumer drives?

9x 1tb WD green drives in RAID6 (WDC WD10EACS). Got a cold spare sitting on a shelf due to a store RTM 2 drives and giving me 2 drives back when I returned 1 with bad sectors. I went for RAID6 due to reading shit like this thread, which suggests the per sector failure rate has remain relatively constant but bigger drives have a hell of a lot more sectors.

Sure, the performance is crappy compared to what it could be . "Only" 300-400 mb/s sequentual reads from a single thread, and multiple simultaneous accesses tdrop per-thread preformance (total remains ~300-350 mb/s or so) but it is a fileserver serving files over a home gigabit network. And file hashing is horrifically limited by the CPU anyway.

[phongn]

I hope you're regularly data scrubbing! As for me, I'm pondering a building RAID-Z2 server sometime in the future.

[Uraniun235]

What all does data scrubbing entail? Is that a specific program or is it a built-in function on RAID controllers or...?

[Xon]

I hope you're regularly data scrubbing! As for me, I'm pondering a building RAID-Z2 server sometime in the future.

About once a month, and hence the use of RAID6 with dual parity.

If I could use zfs on windows, I'ld just use the controller as a dump 16 port SATA controller. Migrating data would be a pain but.

What all does data scrubbing entail? Is that a specific program or is it a built-in function on RAID controllers or...?

It is a built-in function of a raid controller where all the data and parity is read and checked for consistancy. With RAID5, you have issues on determining if the parity data or original data has gone bad. With RAID6 you have the original data, parity data #1 & parity data #2, so if one is incorrect you can always determine correctly which is the bad data and repair it.

RAIDZ/zfs gets around this by including 256bit checksums on blocks and being integrated into the actual filesystem instead of just being a complete block device like traditional RAID. zfs implements many things which are normally considered the responcibility of higher level layers, but simply can not be efficiently done at those layers without the lower level layers basicly doing all the major work anyway.

[phongn]

I may go the Linux-btrfs route if that filesystem becomes stable enough. I like Solaris, but Sun is not in the best of shape, OpenSolaris doesn't seem to have taken off and FreeBSD's ZFS support is not stable.

The only thing I don't like about RAID-Z is that it's relatively slow in order to avoid the write hole.

[Uraniun235]

This is my planned new build, when I get around to it:

Case: Antec P182

Power: Corsair 450W

M/B: Gigabyte EP45

CPU: Intel C2D E8500

HSF: Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro (I momentarily considered a Tuniq Tower, but after seeing a couple of pictures of that monster actually installed in a case, I regained my sanity.)

RAM: Corsair 2x2GB DDR2 800

Video: Visiontek Radeon 4870

HDD: Western Digital 640GB

Optical: Samsung DVD burner

Sound: Asus Xonar DX - This one's a maybe.

I went ahead and ordered it tonight, although I made a few revisions:

I bumped up to a Corsair 550W because the 450 didn't have two PCI-E connectors, and because this system tilts towards the indulgent, I didn't want anything so ugly and kludgey as a 2x4-pin->6-pin adapter powering the next revision...

I switched from the 4870 to a 260; this one should be a bit faster, and with the combo deal on the P182 case, it's actually as cheap or cheaper than most of the comparable 4870 products.

Changed motherboard to a UD3R.

I switched from the SH/SC favorite WD 640GB drive to a Samsung F1 1TB drive after seeing that it had both a superior gigabytes/dollar ratio and after seeing a favorable review of its performance.

I doubled up on the memory and the optical drive. It's nice to have twin optical drives, it'll be even nicer to have twin burners, and memory is so hilariously fucking cheap that I'm grinning at the prospect of probably never running out of RAM for as long as this build stays with me. Seriously, 8GB of RAM? Hell yeah. Let's rock this shit up. (Sure, I could have brought my old DVD burner over, but then I'd have a big nasty IDE ribbon in my case. Barf to that. SATA all the way.)

Finally, I decided to hold off on the Xonar for now. I'll give the onboard audio another shot, and if it's unsatisfactory I'll just order it later.

[Xon]

8gb of memory is very nice. I hope they get around to making 4gb ddr2 sticks, as I have a motherboard which supports upto 16gb of memory in 4 slots. Not entirely sure what I would do with all that memory, but usage expands to fit supply

[Uraniun235]

They actually do make those now. (link, link)

[phongn]

Overclock that E8500 and be merry. However, I would be wary of the F1. It's certainly fast but I'm hearing all sorts of reliability issues about it.

[Uraniun235]

Oh, hell. That figures. Where have you been hearing it?