[Pyro1588]

well, your fsb is 1333mhz and your memory standard is ddr2 1066, so i'd go with that.
the only 2x2gb sticks available in ddr2 1066 are made by geil, and they have a fair number of very negative reviews, so i'd stay away. it looks like you'll have to go with 4x1gb if you want 4gb of ram.
CORSAIR Dominator 2GB (2 x 1GB) has a lot of pretty positive reviews. it's $154 for 2gb, so that's just over $300 for 4gb. the only other ram with reviews this good is the Crucial Ballistix Tracer 2GB for $130, but it's out of stock right now.

keep in mind that you've only spent around $550 of your original $1000-$1500 budget. with the gpu you just ordered, that's around $840. you've got a little bit to play with for ram and whatever else you're thinking about getting.

[Trev-MUN]

Actually ... The @#$%ing card went out of stock RIGHT AFTER you left IRC.

[Frobozz]

LogiCow, on Nov 2 2007, 11:08 PM, said:

Can I re-recommend a 10000 rpm raptor drive

I totally disagree. Don't touch 10K RPM drives. If you want fast harddrive speeds, go with a RAID 0+1 of four harddrives. 0+1 is a striped, mirrored raid. It essentially takes two drives and stripes the data on them (think odd chunks on one - even chunks on another) increasing the speed. Of course if one goes bad you stand to lose all of your data. Thus the other two drives act as a mirror of the striped drives giving redundancy.

Now for some prices. I'm using prices from NewEgg's SATA Western Digital page as reference. Four 160GB drives cost $200 and give 320GB space. Four 250GB drives cost $280 and give 500GB, Four 320GB drives cost $320 and give 640GB. $400 would give you 1TB from four 500GB drives. Past this point though and the prices start getting too high.

Edit: Its especially nice that $400 gives you three times the space for only double the cost of the smallest drives. I'd go with a set up like this myself but I don't need a lot of speed or redundancy past simple backups.

This post has been edited by Frobozz: 29 November 2007 - 04:19 AM

[Maverick]

When comparing hard drives, don't forget to check how much cache they have. More is better, because it can take bigger bites of your files at a time.

As far as RAID goes.. its really not worth it, given that 2 disks are twice as likely to fail, and the performance gain from load balancing is less than 5%.

Here's an old Anandtech article, even has some benchmarks, including 7800s vs 10ks:

http://www.anandtech...doc.aspx?i=2101


(are you kidding? 4 drives, thats just silly, if you want RAID1 for data redundancy, then maybe, but Raid0 on a desktop system is crap-on-a-stick, especially for gaming and content creation. As long as ou have enough RAM that you don't have a page file, you're fine.)


On the 10k vs 7200RPM thing, I agree, the 10k isnt' goin to be that great.

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3061&p=9

Check that out, the WD1500 Raptor (150GB) and the WD7500AAKS (750GB!) are almost identical in performance. The 7500 is 7200RPM has 16MB cache and low seek times. Its a nice disk, for sure

[Frobozz]

Yeah I'm not much on RAID myself mostly due to expense. I might be tempted to try a redundant RAID at some point, but I doubt it. However I wouldn't say performance isn't going to be boosted for him. These tests mostly covered game loading and silly stuff. If he's doing CGI work then he'll be working with BIG files. Not little tiny ones that a game typically has scattered through several directories.

And even if I'm wrong - at least he'll have a lot of backup drives.

[LogiCow]

Raid offers virtually no performance increase and requires lots of identical drives.
Raid 0 doubles the chance you lose all your data, with virtually no benefit.
Raid 1 prevents you from losing data, at _double_ the cost. It's useful for professional applications but it's not necessary for home computing.

On the other hard, a 10k rpm drive is just plain faster. However, it's only slightly faster, so it's hard to justify paying more for a much smaller drive.

[Trev-MUN]

OK--later yesterday, pyro and I found a 8800gt that was in stock. It wasn't the same EVGA model I was originally looking at, but I went ahead and bought it considering how things are going with these damned cards.

BFG Tech BFGE88512GTOC2E GeForce 8800GT 512MB 256-bit GDDR3 PCI Express 2.0 HDCP Ready SLI Supported Video Card
http://www.newegg.co...N82E16814143117

pyro said it's about the same, but a little faster. I hope that justifies the higher price, heh. At least all I need to do now is grab RAM and I'm technically set.

What bothers me though is the reviews for the card consistently mention that the card can and does run hot. Combined with my grabbing the C2Q Kentsfield Q6600, I'm starting to wonder if fans aren't going to be enough to keep my computer cool enough to operate. Aside from the motherboard and power supply's fans, the case itself has three fans of its own; the current setup runs between 88~100 degrees with all that.

Do you guys think the new setup will do alright with just fans, or is this is where I need to start looking into water cooling? That's something I'm REALLY unsure about, seeing as that typically requires a person to know what they're doing--even with the ready-made systems from companies like Koolance.

On the issue of the drives ...

I'll put it this way. The CGI project I described earlier in the thread, the entirety of its working + sequential backup files takes up 10 GB. The bitmaps are the major culprit, with their files accounting for 7.63 GB of that.

That WD7500AAKS sounds ... yow. That thing is massive! At current I own just two 120 GB drives; the WD My Book Essential I bought last weekend has more space than both combined and it's a 320 GB model.

I wonder if drives exist that have high caches but aren't as massive? Smaller drives ought to be less expensive, right? I don't think I quite YET need 720 GB ... I'll have to look into that and compare the prices with WD Raptors of various sizes--unless you guys know of a model off hand?

[Terryn]

I'd imagine RAID isn't worth it at all until you're able to use at least three drives and go for RAID 5 minimum.

Before you jump into water cooling, it's probably a good idea to see if your setup even presents a problem after you DL Riva Tuner and adjust fan settings on your video card.

[Maverick]

Here's the 750GB, on sale right now:

http://www.newegg.co...N82E16822136131 $159

Here is the Raptor WD1500 150GB:

http://www.newegg.co...N82E16822136011 $179

Here is the 320GB version of the 7200RPM w/16MB cache. Its also on sale. (This "line" of top end performance Western Digital 7200RPM drives are all labeled "SE16")

http://www.newegg.co...N82E16822136074 $79.99

---------------------------

The rest of the WD drives can be found here: http://www.newegg.co...Western+Digital

Some notes:

"SE" was/is the mainstream drive "brand" for WD, while "RE" were the high performance (The last SEs had 8MB cache, the REs have 16) The drives above are SE16, obviously meaning SE drives with 16MB cache - and most of the goodies that cam with the RE line. The 2 RE disks and the SE16 750GB had pretty comparable benchmarks, so if you find an RE with more space than a close-priced Se16, they'd be acceptable.

If you read page 1 of the 2nd anand link, he mentions that the 750GB has 2 features that the smaller SE16s don't, both related to it being a large disk . Still, 99 5 star ratings at Newegg, and only a handfull of negatives, so it must be working alright.

[ajs]

If you've never done GPU water cooling before, be careful. It's fine assembling such a system, but it's after-install leaks and card swaps that become hazardous thereafter.

I'm water cooled on my desktop and I recently upgraded it, but the system required surgery (removing the northbridge block and replacing the CPU), and I have to admit I dripped water on the new mainboard. (I just left it for 24 hours under a lamp and it booted up fine afterwards.)

I doubt the 8800GT's heat will be a problem, and if it is you can just reduce the core clockspeed. I think the stock core is 600MHz, and yours is clocked at 675MHz, so there's a potential for underclocking if necessary.

--ajs.

[Why-Fi]

Trev-MUN, on Nov 1 2007, 03:42 AM, said:

So today was the fourth time in recent months where a chunk of the day went by with the computer on the sidelines, because of an increasingly bitchy Radeon 9800 PRO.

The external power cable for the damned thing is getting as bad as my speakers are, which means the computer will slow to thick molasses, requiring a restart, only to find the computer won't boot because the card whines the cable is not connected.

Except it's actually attached so tightly, I can't even pull the damn thing loose from the rest of the rigging.

I can't afford to have the computer go kaput in the coming weeks as I have important assignments to do. At the same time, I've been aching to upgrade this thing so that I can continue with my 3D projects that I've left idle for the past few years.

I'm guessing my budget is within the $1,000 to $1,500 range. All I'm looking to upgrade is the RAM, CPU, motherboard and video card. I'm not planning on upgrading to Windows Vista any time soon (and if I'm forced to get a 64-bit box I'll likely make the jump to Linux), so I plan to get enough RAM to max out the 32-bit setup at 3 GB.

These were some of the notes I put together for myself back in June-July:

Quote

1. Wait for a motherboard that supports PCI Express 2.

2. Don't worry about buying a top of the line video card. PCIe2 supports PCIe1, so a stronger video card can come later when you're established.

3. Look for a motherboard that supports any of the following chipsets:
* Intel's Bearlake series
* AMD's RD700 series
* NVIDIA's MCP72 series

4. A 64-bit chip is recommended and is fully compatible with a 32-bit OS, no problems.

5. 32-bit OSes can only use up to 3GB, don't get anything more until you're ready to upgrade to a 64-bit OS or else it'll be a waste of money. (RAM is easy to replace anyway, and I can pay the difference for new RAM at comp shops around here)

Note from Firehawke:
RAM is pretty well standardized at this point-- it might change between CPU/chipset lines (I talk about the two as a whole) but never in mid-line.

Therefore, you can just buy whatever board, find out what RAM it wants, and go buy it. Nothing to worry about.

Anyway, what I'm asking you guys is, can you recommend any good/reliable CPUs, video cards, and motherboards? Keep in mind I (plan) to do a lot of heavy high quality CGI. Right now my 1 GB RAM, Athlon XP 2.16 GHz, RADEON 9800 PRO system simply CAN NOT render or efficiently display my most recent projects, and of course cannot play recent games like C&C 3, Supreme Commander, or any of the ones I'd like to try out.

But yeah, can you guys give me some tips/pointers/whatever?

No good, your computer is OWNED!

[mzxgiant]

I'm not going to bother quoting Why-Fi because it hurts my brain... but...

Wow. Just... wow. You really need to go learn how to participate in forums effectively. I'm sure there's someone who could teach you how to speak like a human. Say, Stephen Hawking, for instance.

[Why-Fi]

mzxgiant, on Nov 29 2007, 08:57 PM, said:

I'm not going to bother quoting Why-Fi because it hurts my brain... but...

Wow. Just... wow. You really need to go learn how to participate in forums effectively. I'm sure there's someone who could teach you how to speak like a human. Say, Stephen Hawking, for instance.

What about me?

[Trev-MUN]

Terryn/ajs: Gotcha. I'll try running the setup with just air cooling first; hopefully it won't need water cooling. I was browsing Koolance's products and ... yeah, they're pretty pricey, not to mention that many of the drop-in systems still require case modding.

Maverick, on Nov 29 2007, 12:53 PM, said:

Here's the 750GB, on sale right now:
Here is the 320GB version of the 7200RPM w/16MB cache. Its also on sale. (This "line" of top end performance Western Digital 7200RPM drives are all labeled "SE16")

http://www.newegg.co...N82E16822136074 $79.99

Oh wow, I'm liking that one. Almost half the price of the WD Raptor you pointed out, with the sale Newegg's got going on.

I was checking out some of the other Western Digital models after reading your post ... as far as price/performance goes, I think this one seems like a solid deal. Just gotta hope it doesn't come defective, eheh.

Last year around this time when I bought the Seagate 120 GB to replace the fux0red old Maxtor drive I had, I was nervous about it failing for several months after the fact ... Doesn't it take about two months of use before one can determine whether or not the drive is defective?

Why-Fi, on Nov 29 2007, 02:21 PM, said:

No good, your computer is OWNED!

Uh ... Why-Fi, did you ever ... by chance, once work for the Channel 4 Action News Team in San Diego as their weatherman?

[Why-Fi]

Trev-MUN, on Nov 29 2007, 10:43 PM, said:

Why-Fi, on Nov 29 2007, 02:21 PM, said:

No good, your computer is OWNED!

Uh ... Why-Fi, did you ever ... by chance, once work for the Channel 4 Action News Team in San Diego as their weatherman?

Nope, but now that I'm Parole'd and I can't do anything good with this forums, I'll rather work hard on my Breakout game, that's the best thing a Parole'd guy can do: work.

[Lachesis]

Why-Fi, on Nov 29 2007, 03:48 PM, said:

Nope, but now that I'm Parole'd and I can't do anything good with this forums, I'll rather work hard on my Breakout game, that's the best thing a Parole'd guy can do: work.

Waaa, waaa, I got myself paroled for multiple instances of flaming on a forum, feel sorry for me.

[Maxim]

Kuroneko, on Nov 30 2007, 01:22 AM, said:

Why-Fi, on Nov 29 2007, 03:48 PM, said:

Nope, but now that I'm Parole'd and I can't do anything good with this forums, I'll rather work hard on my Breakout game, that's the best thing a Parole'd guy can do: work.

Waaa, waaa, I got myself paroled for multiple instances of flaming on a forum, feel sorry for me.

Now, there's no reason to go nuts on a guy for saying he's going to do something smart.

Oh, and Why-Fi, here's a stumbling block you might run into with MZX's trig: you'll have to divide the value you're going to use in normal trig by the value of the multiplier, which is the thing that determines how many times the sine value is multiplied by 10 (I prefer to set the multiplier to anywhere between 100,000 and 1,000,000, but that's just me).

You should structure your trigonometry expressions like the following as a base:
dec "x" by "( 'sin('angle')' / 'multiplier' )"

From there, it's a matter of adapting that to equations. Remember that trigonometry is a good way to trace lines and circles when looking for equations to use (easily found through a web search usually). The applications are pretty damned versatile, it's really worth learning.

e: okay, I'll be honest. I know very little about trigonometry, next to nothing in fact. But I've found and adapted a lot of good equations and they've worked, so I figure I'm on the right track at least.

This post has been edited by Maxim: 30 November 2007 - 03:11 AM

[Trev-MUN]

By the way guys, I was looking at the stats of my currently-installed hard drives.

Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 120GB Hard Drive, Ultra ATA/100, 7200 RPM, RoHS Compliant, Model: ST3120814A. OEM

(That's the one I bought last year)

Wstern Digital Caviar WD1200JB 120GB Hard Drive
IDE ATA-100, 7200 RPM, 8MB

(My current master drive)

I never thought about looking at a hard drive's cache size before. Looks like if I get that $80 Caviar I might be seeing speeds twice as fast(?).

I went back and looked at the specs on the motherboard I bought, too:

Quote

Storage Devices

PATA 1 x ATA100 2 Dev. Max
SATA 3Gb/s 8

So ... Two ATA100 devices maximum are installable with this motherboard? it sounds like I could stuff both drives into the PATA configuration, and the new 16MB cache drive into the SATA ...

[Frobozz]

I'm a bit unsure as to what type of a benefit increased cache is going to give you. If the prices aren't that much of a difference then I suppose it wouldn't hurt. However I did a quick search and found a somewhat recent (this year) article on Tom's Hardware and one of their tests involved 8MB and 16MB caches. I'm not going to bother explaining a lot. You can read the article if you're interested, but I will quote a sentence or two from their conclusion page(s).

Quote

We looked at several Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 drives to get down to the performance nitty-gritty. In doing so, we found that there is hardly any difference between two drives that only differ in their cache sizes: 16 MB cache has no significant advantage over 8 MB across our benchmark suite, and this applies both to Serial ATA and to UltraATA drives. We would have expected that at least the SATA drives would show some degree of benefit, but in the case of the 7200.10 family, 16 MB cache is a waste of money if you have a cheaper 8 MB alternative. At the same time, 16 MB cache doesn't hurt either if the price is about the same...

[Terryn]

When I move up to a Core 2 Duo system, I'll probably have to get a SATA burner. The burner'd be far cheaper to replace than the two 200GB ATA drives. uch.

[Frobozz]

Yes SATA drives are nice. No more having a huge cable in the middle of your case - even if its one of those round IDE cables (my new motherboard came with one so I'm using it right now). And the prices aren't too high anymore. No reason as far as I can see to even bother with IDE. I'll probably get one later and while I'm at it, swap out this ZIP drive I have.

This post has been edited by Frobozz: 30 November 2007 - 04:21 PM

[Trev-MUN]

EDIT: This was crossposted from my blog. I removed some irrelevant stuff out.

Having to use another computer to make this post ... my video card thought it'd be awesome to throw ANOTHER fit.

I could sense it was going to happen and I managed to update the backups on my USB hard drive.

It seems the video card might not come back around this time, which will leave me without a computer for at least a week into the new year.

Despite fiddling with the power cable (unplugging, replugging, jiggling, etc.) and leaving the computer to cool off for a few hours (which worked the last few times), I still get that infuriating red BIOS error message about the video card unplugged (like hell it is).

I tried checking the molex power cables after Googling to see what others have tried. I didn't see any burnt or crusty connectors. although one of the connectors coming in from the PSU seems to be misaligned (though it has no problems sliding into the cable coming in from the video card).

Furthermore, the hard drives continually try to turn on, then turn off with that distinctive click associated with their powering down.

I am not happy. I am rather furious right now.

The missing pieces to my upgrade puzzle are RAM and--as I have found out--a power supply. I need a decent dual-rail one, according to a local computer shop. Apparently the 8800GT and Kentsfield quadcore are too much for a single-rail power supply like what I have now.

pyro1588 suggested these parts in the past:

-- PSU --

GIGABYTE ODIN GE-S550A-D1
http://www.newegg.co...N82E16817233002

-- RAM --

Crucial Ballistix 2GB (2 x 1GB)
http://www.newegg.co...N82E16820148069

Crucial Ballistix Tracer 2GB (2 x 1GB)
http://www.newegg.co...N82E16820148070

OCZ Vista Upgrade 4GB(2 x 2GB)
http://www.newegg.co...N82E16820227187

pqi 4GB(2 x 2GB)
http://www.newegg.co...N82E16820141141

What do you guys think? Which of these would you go for? Is there an ideal dual-rail PSU you guys can suggest?

[Trev-MUN]

Alright, well ...

Thanks to Terryn for contacting me on the issue of power supplies--I went ahead with your recommendation and bought the Seasonic S12 Energy Plus.

I also went with two Crucial Ballistix Tracer RAM sticks.

Also, guys, after talking to another local comp shop, I decided to go ahead and buy a boxed version of Windows XP myself rather than have them install it as they build the computer (you wind up buying it from THEM that way, and it's less expensive to grab XP off Newegg).

However, considering I'm getting a new hard drive entirey, and since Newegg sells it for the same price, I'm going to give the 64-Bit Edition of Windows XP a spin.

The old main hard drive still has XP32 installed, so there's at least a contingency if this doesn't go well. However, over the past few months I heard of a lot of good things about the 64-bit version--and that most driver issues can now be addressed by shoehorning Vista drivers in.

Anyway, all the parts'll be here by the coming week, and I hope to have my computer back on its feet by either the Monday after next, or Friday.

Thanks again for responding Terryn, and to everyone else who helped with my earlier questions/request for advice.