Ooo, new computer posts eh

Antec 900 ATX Ultimate Gamer Case, Corsair 750W PSU, Gigabyte P45 MoBo, Intel E8500 Dual Core 3.16 GHz CPU, Zalman CPU cooler, 8 Gigs of OCZ Fatal1ty DDR2 800MHz RAM, Diamond Radeon 4870 w/512MB RAM, Diamond Radeon 9250 w/256MB RAM, 2.25TB of disk (3 750GB Seagate Drives), Creative Labs Sound Blaster X-Fi XtremeGamer, Sony DVD burner, Logitech X-540 5.1 Speakers, and Microsoft XP Pro SP3.

I reinstalled Starcraft/BroodWar, Half-Life 2, Diablo II, Doom 3 and C&C 3. I also bought Dead Space. So far it's not bad. Not as scary as folks are saying though in my opinion.

I've heard both good and bad about Fallout 3 so I might have to check it out.

Computer build site:

http://www.schelin.org/20081004

Carl

you realize, of course, that windows XP won't work with the whole 8 gigs of RAM you got there?
Vista Ultimate 64 can barely handle that . .
and you realize, of course, that i will have to tell you now, that my future rig is gonna top that? ^^

Yep, I'm aware of that. TigerDirect has a deal where 8 Gigs is only $100 (with rebate) and I couldn't pass it up

And yea, it's already out of date I'm also planning on a Fan controller but I'm still 50/50 on whether I want to do that or not.

Burning a DVD on my Mac takes about 40 minutes. I burned the same data (2.2 gigs of PDF's mainly) to a DVD on this box and it took 5 minutes including finding the right software to use. Screaming machine.

Carl

i actually have my next system planned out allready ..
Skull-Trail board with 2 quad-core Xeon Processors each at 2,6GHz with 12MB Level2 cache each
GeForce 8800GTX the big version with 768 MB GDDR-3 RAM,
8 Gigs of Corsair RAM,
2,3TB HDD(2x1TB and 2x150Gig) the 2x300Gig are gonna be 10k rpm models in an raid 0 array to house System and Games)
Audigi 2 Platinum Soundcard is enough for me
Thermaltake VA8003BWS Case
2x22" WideScreen with 2ms reaction time . . if i can find any game that does not run really good on that system, i am going to cry . .

after that, i am going to build another system, with a single Quad Processor and 4 Gig of RAM and an 8800GTS Graphics Card with 640MB GDDR-3 RAM and just about 1TB of HDD Space

this system i am using right now will be downgraded to GeForce 6600GT with 256MB GDDR-3 RAM and upgraded to 10TB HDD Space and solely be used as a storage System . .

Are you using Vista 64 on that (the 8 Gigs comment)? I understand games aren't working well with XP 64 or Vista 64. Address space issues.

Other than that, nice looking system. I have the Audigy on my older gaming box (now media server next to the TV). It's a nice card but I wanted a whole fresh system. Geek toys With the Crossfire option, I went with the next step down Radeon. I figure if I find that it's not enough power, I can snag a second one and connect them

I tried to keep the price down below $1,000. Adding the third drive and the Logitech sound system kicked it over the top but not by much.

As to monitors, I still have 2 20" CRTs and a 21" CRT along with two 17" LCDs. Check the pictures for views. I'm not willing to spend the money on widescreen LCDs until folks can convince me they work as good as CRTs or until my CRTs finally bite the dust.

Carl

well, over here, in germany, thanks to the good €/$-Rate such things are much more common and cheaper . .
it's close to impossible to get a good CRT anymore over here though . . 17" CRT with 85Hz is the most many stores carry . .
no 21" anymore, not 100Hz anymore, certainly not 21" ^00Hz CRT's . .
look into your system stats, windows will be telling you anything from 3 to 3,5 to 4 to 8 Gig RAM in your computer . .
then go to http://www.canyourunit.com/ and see what that one is telling you about your RAM, as that is what Windows is actually going to be using . .
For example, in my one LapTop, there are 4 Gig DDR2 RAM in there. Windows Vista Home Premium 32Bit and Vista says: 4Gig installed
can you run it says 3Gig, as that is the most this windows will actively use . .
now if i were to upgrade to ultimate 64 both would show me the full 4Gig, and if the board supports it i could upgrade up to 8 Gig . .

on the New Systems, i will use Vista Ultimate 64 to get the max out of the cores and RAM, on the older Systems WinXP will suffice, as there's no more than 2 Gig in either my current Desktop(the one going to go Storage) and my other slightly older LapTop . .

Then prepare to cry.

Skulltrail ain't a gaming platform. It is, at best, uselessly expensive for the gamer. More likely, however, it will actually hinder performance. The big issue is the use of fully buffered RAM. FB RAM is reliable, and is great for server systems that need to reliably handle many transactions, but that reliability comes at the cost of much higher latency and for this reason it sucks in a gaming computer. The extra processor won't do anything for you, either, unless your alt-tabing between four to eight processor-hogging games at the same time, simply because most modern games are double-threaded at best. Games capable of utilizing 8 simultaneous threads don't exist, so you won't be getting any benefit from that. If you do an absurd amount of multi-tasking, the extra cores may be helpful, but thread management isn't perfect and inter-processor communication is slow due to being limited by the northbridge.

And an 8800GTX , are you kidding me? I'm sorry, but that's just laughable after you've spend so much on the less-than-useful second processor.

If you're going to be doing 3D animation or other highly-parallel processes, then go for it. But if you're just gaming get something more reasonable and better suited to the task.


If you just want a gaming computer that will last a few years, drop the Skulltrail and get a plain single-processor LGA 775 motherboard with a quad-core Yorkfield processor. Use the absurd amount of money you save doing this to get a GeForce GTX 280 or a Radeon 4870 X2. If you choose the latter, get Vista. If you choose the former, stick with XP. The Geforce GTX 280 actually loses performance under Vista while the Radeon 4870 X2 gains a significant amount of performance under Vista.

The limiting factor in games is the video card, not the processor. A mid-grade Dual Core will work fine if you have a blazing fast video card.

as far as i know, the board supports usual DDR2 RAM, so that should not be a big problem.
as for the parallel processing? as far as i know there are tools out there to make the system use whatever you're telling it to use.
if windows uses 2 cores of one processor with 12MB level 2 cache, then that's one thing . . if i can get it to use one core of each processor and thus gain access to all 24 MB of Level 2 Cache, then that's a whole other measurement one would need to apply.
and the Grafics card, i have that one lying around, and as of right now, it's still a pretty good card. 60MHz Core, 128Scalar processors at 1.4GHz, 768MB GDDR3 RAM at 1GHz with 384Bit Connection.
i have done the math, and the complete System will have cost about 1500euro, that's about 1500 to 2000$ or somewhere in between . . most expansive part is the power supply unit, believe it or not . . thing costs about 350 bucks . .
and i did compare prices with an quad system that i would have built otherwise . . there's no BIG difference, as the board i would use for the quadcore would require DDR3 RAM, which is again, pretty much horribly expansive when compared to DDR2 Prices right now . .
the overall price difference between Skulltrail and Quad-Core System is at about 400 bucks . . which is more or less the difference of one quad core xeon processor and processor cooler . .
i could start out with this system with only one Quad Xeon fpr the same price as i would pay for the other quad core system . . and later on upgrade with another quad xeon. . . this board is a beatuy to upgrade, with 4x PCIe x16 Slots . .

don't think i did not think those things through . . i have been working on this for about 3 Months or so.
Biggest Set-Back i had in this stage was the need for a new System to tide me over untill i can build THAT one . .
it is not only a gamer system. i will use it for work like ripping DVD's and other such things. And with this setup, i can do that and still play without having too many problems performance wise.
Oh and for the most part it is just a see if i can do it . . if i can do it and i ain't satisfied, the hardware gets sold and i will build the other System . .

I could have built this last month allready instead of purchasing a new laptop for the time in between, but then the prices got upped by 100 to 200 bucks per component, because christmas is close. so i will wait another one or two months after christmas for the prices to drop, then recalculate and decide again.

if i don't build this one, i am going to use other components
(1)Intel Core2 Quad Q9650 4x3.0GHz which cost about 400 bucks 2 months ago and is right now at 550 bucks a piece
(1)ASUS Striker II Extreme nForce790i Ultra SLI that right now costs 450 bucks and was at 300 bucks 2 months ago
(1)4096MB Corsair PC3-1600 CL7 KIT DHX right now weighing in at 350 Bucks and has been at 200 bucks 2 months ago
Graphics Card and Case will stay the same, as i allready have those components.
I ain't that big of an ATI Fan in Graphics Cards . . and right now, nVidia seems to be leading Edge again. maybe i will look into a newer graphics Card, but i will cross that Component when i get to it . .
PSU will only cost about 100 Bucks instead of the 350 bucks i would have to pay for the special needs of the Skulltrail-Board.
can't frigging believe how much more a second 8-pin power-connector costs <.< . .

I went with the dual core mainly because there weren't many games that used both and most of the other stuff I do doesn't require that much power. I put the money into the ATI and as I said, figured that if I needed that much video horsepower (and so far I haven't), I could just crossfire a second one. My older gaming system had a GeForce4 ti2600 which I really liked as it worked with most things. Until I decided to get a couple of ATI Radeon 9250's to drive the two other monitors. Then they wouldn't talk together. Since the new system is using one of the older ATI's from the old gaming system, I went with ATI. Even so, it's not perfect. The drivers for the two card conflict. So I use the XP drivers for the 9250 and the ATI drivers for the 4870. Not a problem since the two 17" LCD's are mainly for doing several things at once. The CRT is the gaming monitor.

But if you go to my site, I do have the prices listed (US) for what I picked up so you can get an idea of what I paid.

Carl

No, it doesn't. The Intel 5400 Northbridge only supports FB-DDR2. If you try to use unbuffered DDR2 it won't work at all.

Not that I know of, but I'm not entirely up to date on Vista utilities. Generally, the OS schedules threads in a process that is totally transparent to the user. A programmer can write his program to only use specific cores, but this is generally a bad idea because it interferes with the OS's scheduling ability and is, again, totally transparent to the user.


Actually no. The Core 2 Quads are made of two separate dies dual-core attached to the same package. Each die has 6MB of L2 and cores from one die cannot use L2 from another. That sort of setup will net you 12 MB of L2, at best, which you could also get from a single-processor setup. More importantly, doing so defeats the entire point of having a huge shared L2, the ability of multiple cores to operate on the same data at the same time. If you do what you suggest, you just have the same data duplicated twice on two different caches, more likely than not . Furthermore, the fact that the two processors have to communicate with each other over the Northbridge introduces some extra latency into the process.

If you just have it lying around, that's different.


Then get a motherboard that doesn't require DDR3.
Or, better yet, get a Core i7 920. The performance difference between the Core i7 and the Core 2 is absurdly huge, due to the i7s onboard memory controller, improved cache, and single die construction, among other things. It won't help much with gaming, but it will with everything else.


That's sort of true, but you're still going to be stuck with fully buffered RAM and an extra processor won't provide any significant performance boost.


Well, you did miss the FB-DDR2 issue. That's a biggie.
Well, that's a good reason for a multi-processor system, I guess. It really depends on what sort of video encoding program you're using. Assuming that it can take advantage of four or more cores, such a system will be slightly better than an i7 920 based system


That's a good a reason as any, and better than most.



That's a nice system, but I am going to point out that dual-channel DDR3 is pointless in Core 2 system. It's nice to have and all, but the FSB simply can't handle the bandwidth. With the FSB as a bottleneck, you might was well just use DDR2 at 800Mhz in a dual-channel configuration. You can't pump data through the Northbridge much faster than that. Or use a Core i7 with the DDR3, since it isn't limited by the Northbridge.

ATI's newest offering, the 4800X2, is actually slightly better than nVidia's SOTA card, sort of. The 4800 X2 provides better framerates at high resolution with heavy anti-aliasing that the GTX280 does while the GTX 280 is superior at lower resolutions and lighter anti-aliasing. The GTX 280 also performs better on XP, in general, while the 4800X2 performs better on Vista. And the 4800 X2 eats substantially more power than the GTX280 does, even on idle, due to less than ideal power management combined and its dual-processor design.

ok,seriously? i have no frigging idea how i missed the FB bit time and time again x.x . . ok, that pretty much nixes the whole idea of this system . .


i know some codermonkeys and guys with the whole cisco and microshit certified batch in their resume, and consens was more or less, that it would not be all that hard to tell the system which cores to use for what . . but now this point is moot anyway . .


i may be misunderstanding something here, but as far as i remember, the Xeon are not 2 separate dies . . will have to check up on that . . or not, now that this system will probably not be built <.< . .


technically speaking i have a complete computer in the shelf behind me . . just not compatible parts *snickers*


ASUS Striker II Extreme nForce790i Ultra SLI MB supports Core2Quad and Penryn CPU's with an FSB of 1600MHz and DDR3 with 1333MHz and up to PC3-16000RAM with 2 unbuffered Channels. . if that's the whole bottleneck, the bottle is big enough anyway or am i misinterpreting soething there? on this board there will only be 4 Gigs of RAM, not more i think . .
and 3-Way-SLI with the 3xPCIe x16 Slots sounds nice enough for future upgrading options i think O.o
or just usual SLI and an Phys-X Expansion Card maybe . .


ok, the Oktav will not be built anymore anyway now <.<


yes yes,i don't know how i missed that again and again ._.
and i don't really understand what all the ruckus is about with the Core i7 . . especially since those will exclusively use DDR3 RAM and not DDR2 RAM . . and in price/performance they don't come close to the Core2Quad with 3GHz right now O.o
even right now, the Core2Quad with 4x3GHz costs about 500 to 550 bucks and the i7 with 4x2,93Ghz costs 700 bucks . . the 4x3,2GHz costs 1200 bucks, which is about 4 fitfths of the price of a whole new system after my specifications . . and only 8Megs of Level3 cacheand not even one MB of Level2 Cache? and the Hyper-Threading coming back does not give that mcuh more power too . . only thing that seems like about 50% better is instead of 2 there are 3 RAM Channels . .
i'll have to look deeper into this. i somewhere heard something about 8 virtual cores and am questioning the purpose and performance of this . . 8 virtual cores that have to share 8 Megs of Level3 Cache between them? can that compare with 4 REAL Cores and 12 Megs of Level 2 cache between the 4?


well, in the beginning it was 50% performance and 50% AssHole Computer . . Asshole Computer because it was basically just to show one of my a bit more obnixious and braggy buddies that his oh so cool machine with Core 2 Duo wasn't all that hot to begin with . . and that i would be able to build an about 2 to 4 times as strong system with about the same ammount of money . .
Later on came the realisation that i could do some serious work with this . . compiling bigger software projects for other buddies, to hardcore video encoding and image editing and the such . .
and when i saw that an Core2Quad System was more or less exactly as expansive as this 8-Core System but did not have as good a price/performance and upgradeability score i basically said fuck this noise, it's perfect, i am going to do this . .


i repeat, with an FSB of 1600MHz and RAM of 1333MHz, is that such a tight bottleneck?


i just checked, and i can order ATI4870x2 with 2 Gigs of GDDR5 RAM . . the specifications sound nice enough, and the power consumption ain't that big of a point for me anyway . . i am planmning on using 1000Watts PSU in the new Machine anyway . . but as i said,i have the 8800GTX just hovering around here right now . . maybe i'll build the new system with the 8800 in it . . or if the prices fall after christmas i will look at this issue again . .

My thoughts exactly. Of course, if he already has it, it makes sense to use it... it's still powerful enough.

That system only sounds amazing on paper, but will be no better than a computer for half the money in practice for most tasks, unless the applications are written for multithreading and are full 64bit apps. Or you do A LOT of things at the same time.

Bye
Thanee

I am using Vista 64 Home Premium, any problems I have had were with older games and you can run them in virtual server with XP/2000/98 just fine. Older printers however can be a problem...

Using a dual-channel setup at those speeds, you're losing 66% of your memory bandwidth to the FSB. This is why DDR3 doesn't do much for Core 2 systems. You've got the equivalent of 2666Mhz DDR3 going to the Northbridge (2x1333), but he Northbridge can only send it to the processor at 1600Mhz.



I've made this mistake before. When comparing two different micro-architectures, clockrate is meaningless. Because some micro-arcetectures are more efficient than others, there will be major differences in performance between two different chips at the same clockrate. You have to compare the operation completion rate to get a good picture.
In benchmarks, the Core i7 is able to complete, on average, 20% more operations per second than an equivalent clocked Core 2. So when comparing clockrates it could be helpful add 20% to the i7 clockrate.
Of course, this isn't true in all cases. The i7 handles some operations much better than others, so in some applications you won't notice such a big difference.

About the price, the 965, which costs between $1100 and $1250 in the States, is an Extreme Edition and is priced at slightly less than the equivalent Q9770 Extreme Edition Core 2 Quad, which goes from $1200-$1350. It is marketed to hardcore overclockers. It isn't just a 3.2 GHz chip. It is a 3.2 Ghz chip with an unlocked multiplier and the quality to support the wildest dreams of the overclocking community without simply frying due to excessive voltage. It is the sort of chip you buy when you want to stick a heavy-duty vapor cooler in your machine and crank it up it 6.0Ghz. And it can probably support that. I know that a Q9775 can get that high with the proper cooling.
The cheap i7 920 at 2.66 Mhz, on average, performs better than a 3.0 Ghz Core 2 Quad and you can pump it up to 3.8Ghz on air with a high-quality fan (though I wouldn't recommend doing so unless you have experience overclocking) Getting it up to 3.0 Ghz shouldn't be a problem.

The only real problem with the 920 is that it only uses 800Mhz and 1066Mhz DDR3, so you really have to use all three channels to see a huge memory bandwidth improvement over Core 2 (though 532Mhz ain't shabby). On the other hand, the 965 with 1600Mhz DDR3 doesn't benefit from the extra memory bandwidth of a third channel, simply because it can't process fast enough to require it, nothing on the market right now can.

Smaller shared cache isn't a problem due to more efficient cache management. Remember, each core has its own L2 and the entire point of the Shared L3 is to share data between cores. It actually works better than the two-level cache system that Core 2 had. The only problem arises when using hyperthreading for not-highly parallel applications, since L1 and L2 get divided in half (which is necessary to prevent cache-thrashing, a huge problem in Pentium 4s with hyperthreading), and even then the performance degredation is minor. On highly parallel applications and when heavily multi-tasking the hyperthreading kicks butt, you get about 10-30% better performance.

another question that arose during this discussion and that i haven't been able to find an satisfiying answer to:
can i use Crossfire on an SLI-Board?
can i crossfire two of those x2 Cards?
can i crossfire two of those x2 Cards on an SLI Board?

as for the decision between Core2Quad and Core i7, i think i will wait untill after christmas with that . . again . .
lower prices, more available information, time to ask around a bit . . i don't really care much about theDDR2 or 3 right now, i just want a specific board and build the rest of the system around the board more or less . .
and after a bit of research, i don't think that will utilize multiple GPU's in the near future . . it seems these systems aren't quite out of developement right now . . people reporting of lower performance in games than with a single GPU, but more points in various benchmarks somehow and CPU's limiting those arrays in some kind of way . .

Crossfire and SLI each require proprietary chipsets. Currently, Nvidia doesn't sell their SLI chips to anyone and don't install crossfire, so no, they generally aren't compatible. The only exception was Skulltrail, which was the result of a once-in-a-lifetime deal with Intel.

X2 cards are technically already crossfired (you've essentially got two cards attached together) but it is possible to Crossfire then creating a Quad-GPU setup. Currently, however, quadruple crossfire sucks. The drivers just don't support it very well and for this reason it actually tends to be slower than than using a single two-GPU card.

why the hell nobody manages to do what voodoo did back when is beyond me . . they made it easy to combine graphics adapters AND with 2 Cards you actually had a 100% performance increase . . i miss those times, i had my voodoo cards and i was king <.< . .
i read up a bit more on the 4870x2 and it seems there's still those micro stand stills . . even though it sounds as if the 2 GPU's BOTH actually accessed the same 2 GByte of GDDR5 RAM . . *sigh*
i will have to look for further clarification it seems <.< . .
and god how my expectations for the new rig get lowered . . i had planned to make the skulltrail a REAL Oktav . . 8 CPU Cores, 8Gig of RAM, 4x2=8 GPU's with 8Gig VRAM . . no 8TB HDD space though . . 8 different Case fans with 8 differently coloured LED's to achieve octarine glow . . now i'm down to a bastard system of 2 to 4 real CPU cores and 1 to 4 GPU cores and somewhere between 4 to 8 Gig of RAM <.< . .

You could still go with the Skulltrail, if you are willing to use fully buffered memory (and a strongly recommend four DIMMs in such a configuration). It won't be the best gaming platform in the world, but it will excel at multitasking. Just overclock it up to 3Ghz and it'll be great.

Honestly, at this point it doesn't really matter what you buy. The best configurations will save you hours in the long run, simply because they are faster, but it would be terribly noticeable in the short term. Anything out today can play games fairly reasonably well if you have a good graphics card. And for extreme multi-tasking, it is difficult to beat an eight-core dual-processor system.

If you go that direction just make sure to get fully buffered RAM, since unbuffered won't work. With four channels the extra latency isn't intolerable.

I still have my Voodoo dual card setup with the external cable running between the two. It's in my OpenBSD box right now

Carl

Edit: Check the picture of the rack in my build pages. It's either in the rack or on the floor next to it. (It's in the rack now but I was working on the media server so it may still be sitting on the floor.)

i'm not a big fan of overclocking . . shot more than one system for myself and several of my buddies shot theirs too . .
and to overclock quad core 2,6 xeon socket 771 to 3GHz would not be sparta, but madness . . because i have not found actually cooling FANS for socket 771 only passive coolers . .
and don't even mention watrer cooling . . i don't trust liquid with my hardware <.<

Actually, skulltrail accepts LGA 775 compatible fans. It is designed to be a hardcore overclocking platform and is probably the best overclocking board ever made, RAM requirements notwithstanding (a little bit of research has shown some low-latency highly overclock able enthusiast FB-DDR2 is available from Kingston, though it isn't cheap). And if you don't like water you could go with thermoelectric cooling.

Wow, Hyzmarca wins this thread.

Hyzmarca, should I install the Windows XP service pack 3?

SP3 has some nice features, if you're a network administrator. If not, then there is little point to it. As long as you've kept SP2 up to date and have installed all of the security updates, you should be fine without it.

thermoelectric cooling?
isn't that the bit with no moving parts and electricity moving the air?
is that allready in production? O.o
i had heard about this some months ago, but i did not think, that it was this close to available product at that time o.O
as for the board eccepting LGA775 coolers . . i had read about that, but the source did not seem all that trustworthy to me . . bonus! ^^
4 Gigs of Kingston FBDDR2 PC2-6400F ECC CL5 Kit(2x2GB) for about 200€ RIGHT NOW [meaning it will be cheaper after christmas again] ain't all that bad O.o
4 Gig DDR3 16000 would be more than 300 right now, so it's still cheaper ^^
looks like you found me a solution to the RAM problem, thanks Hyzmarca!
i think i will start the system small . . only one Xeon Quadcore, only 4 Gig of RAM and only one Graphics Adapter . .
heck, building/upgrading is half the fun with do it yourself computers anyway ^^

say, what do you do for a living that you know your way around this stuff like that? O.o
i'm doing techsupport and thought i knew a bit, but now i feel kinda noobish <.< . .

Not exactly. Thermoelectric CPU coolers use electricity to move heat from the CPU to the heat sink through copper heat-pipes. Because this is active heat transfer rather than passive, the heat sink can become hotter than the CPU, which is impossible in a standard heat-transfer system. This means much more efficient cooling at high loads and the potential for the CPU to drop below ambient room temperature when idle (which can cause condensation so good thermoelectric coolers have smart controllers that prevent the heat pump from cooling below a certain temperature, which adds to the cost).
It still needs a giant fan to move air through the heatsink, but because the heatsink is hotter it dissipates heat faster.

And there are several products available that use the technology, though they're fairly expensive. The best are about as good as water cooling, and substantially easier.

as you probably gathered by now, cost is not of the essence right now *g*
i just bought a laptop für 800€ to tide me over for 2 to 3 months . . i figure about 1.5 to 2k € will be what i spend on the system as a whole . . RAM, CPU(s), GPU(s), PSU, Case(allready here), HDD, Optical Drive(yeah, it's probably not worth it, but i calculate 200€ for a Blue Ray Writer) and Software . .
8 Gigs of FB DDR2 will cost 400€ right about now, which is allmost as much as one Xeon Processor with 4 Cores cost some weeks ago . .
another idea . . let's say i am ready to spend about 2k nuyen . . erm €uro i mean . .
what kinda hardware would you suggest for that kinda money?
Complete Setup, without having to really look at the price, as long as it's below 2k . . no screens, only tower interior . .
and if you feel like it, would be nice to see, what you would suggest to get a really good price/performance rating too O.o
if you don't wanna have to look up €uro prices,just use $ prices and let's say 2k $ . . with todays €/$ Exchange Course, i will actually probably save money that way ^^

I happened on a Slashdot article on best gaming laptops and someone linked back to an earlier Slashdot article on best gaming rigs. I snagged the link and used it as a base for the $1,000 rig I put together. It's not exact because some bits seem to not be available here in the US but it still provided some good information, especially since no one's beat me up for my rig

http://www.gameplayer.com.au/gp_documents/...ey-Can-Buy.aspx

Carl

Acer Aspire 5930G-584G32Mn
that's the laptop i bought to tide me over untill i can build my new gaming rig
aside from HDD Capacity, it is better than my current desktop
my current desktop has an older AMD CPU 64 the 3200+ with 2GHz Singlecore,
2 GB DDR1 RAM at i don't know what speed
1 Gainward GeForce 8800GTS with 640MB GDDR3 RAM,
1 TB HDD space on 3 IDE HDD's
1 older Plextor DVD Writer,
1 Asus A8N SLI Deluxe in the very first incarnation
1 BeQuiet 800 Wats PSU

that link looks usefull, thank you ^^
as for things not available in the US of A . . i'm in Germany, should not be too problematic ^^

Since you want a Blue Ray burner...

The case is really a matter of taste; so long as it has enough space for all of your parts, there is no problem. The only time it really matters is when you're generating a great deal of heat and need optimal airflow, in which case I'd recomend just taking a dremel to it to make space for large fans. But, realistically, thats $50-$100, paying anything more is insane.
You say you already have one, but I'm throwing the cost into my estimates anyway.

For the Power Supply, since we plan on doing some hardcore gaming, I'll recommend the Rosewill RX950-S-B 950; 4 rails, 950 Watts, and enough connectors to do anything you want at $150. It isn't a cheap power supply, but it also won't break your budget and is pretty nice.

A BD-RW/DVD-RW(DL)/DVD+RW(DL)/CD-RW will go for about 250 here.

I'd suggest a cheap 1TB Drive for about $120, you should be able to find plenty of those.

That $620, estimating high, and we're just getting started.

_And here is where we start making choices_

Branch 1) Yorkfield

For a processor, I'd go with the Q9550 at $320 and use the stock cooler
That puts us at $940

Next, we have to chose out video card and our primary hard drive.
Video cards are so close that they're more a matter of preference than anything else. Both ATI and nVidia have their up sides and their downsides. nVidia drivers currently suck with Vista, while ATI drivers currently suck with Quad Crossfire
The choice between a Crossfire compatible motherboard or an SLI compatible motherboard is essentially a bet on future driver releases. If Nvidia gets their Vista drivers together, then they'll rock. If ATI gets their Quad Crssfire drivers working then they'll rock.

The hard drive is another thing altogether. You can make due with the 1TB, but seek times will be a biach and gamers love fast hard drives. There are six (several more actually) ways to go, in addition to just using the 1TB drive. You can a) Get a cheap small 7200 RPM hard drive and use that as your primary, at 80 GB that's cost you $40. You can get two cheap small hard drives and RAID 0 them together. You can get a velociraptor at 10,00RPM, 160 GB and $160 or you can get two at twice the price, or you can got for $200 high-performance Solid State drives, which are superior to even the velociraptor but which only hold 64GB each.

Personally, I don't like RAID 0. It defeats the purpose of RAID, which is data integrity, in favor of speed. But that's a philosophical issue rather than a practical one. If you want absurdly fast hard drives, RAID 0 the SSD drives. If you want to go cheap, a couple of 80-gigers in Raid 0 will do and you won't see much difference. The only issue arises when playing MMORPGs, in which you really don't want to see loading screens for very long.



Branch) 1a The Good Drives
Since I have some overhead left, I'm going to RAID 0 together a couple of Patriot PE64GS25SSDR 64GB SSDs and choose the less power hungry and slightly less expensive GeForce GTX280 on the assumption that nvidia isn't run by total morons. My main motivation is the ability to obtain an open box version (possibly used or possibly just a display model) for $350, a great deal. You might not be so lucky.

That'll be $420 for the drives and $350 for the open box GTX280
That gives us a total so far of $1710, just enough space to sneak a motherboard and some RAM in under the wire.

The ASRock Penryn1600SLI-110dB goes for $90. It is a budget motherboard, but not a cheap motherboard.
And any one of a number of 5-5-15 2x2GB DDR2-800 RAM kits for $45

Total cost = $1845


If I were devious, of course, I might spend an extra $60 on a ZALMAN CNPS 9700 NT 110mm 2 Ball Ultra Quiet CPU Cooler, underclock the RAM to 667MHz and then overclock the FSB to 1600MHz, bringing the RAM back up to 800 and the processor up to 3.4.

That'll be $1905, $2005 if you can't find a discounted open-box GTX280.


Of course, you could save 80 bucks going with Velociraptors instead of SSDs, which wouldn't be a bad idea at all. If you don't care about an extra 3-5 seconds of loading, you can shave off another $240 by just using cheap drives and you can shave another 80 off by short-stroking the 1TB drive at the cost of another 3-5 seconds of load time (On second through, forget what I said earlier and just short-stroke the 1TB - unless you're a hardcore MMORPG player it the extra drives ain't worth the cost) You also might want to get some tighter timing on your RAM, with'll cost about $40 extra

I might set out some other possible builds later, but I'm tired at the moment.

I'd suggest a larger primary drive if you're going that route. I had an 80 in my last box and I had to move my Home Directory off to another drive. Perhaps with better planning and less games on my C: drive it'd work out better but I hate that sort of mucking about.

One thing I haven't done is check out the system's power consumption on boot. During game play though, it just tips over 200W. That's Half-Life 2, Dead Space, or Fallout 3 so far.

Just saying.

Carl

I'm not a network admin, and I have been scrupulous about keeping SP2 up to date. So I won't bother to "upgrade". Thanks very much for your advice. It is much appreciated.

It is an upgrade, it just isn't a retail-consumer-oriented upgrade. The entire point of SP3 is to increase the life of XP in enterprise settings by adding networking features that are present in Vista, because big corporations are substantially more reluctant to upgrade to Vista than Microsoft had anticipated (When upgrading consists of spending hundreds of thousands on software and changing or replacing thousands of machines, and what you've got still works perfectly, and you're in the middle of a recession, upgrading doesn't seem like a good idea at all) .

And you're very welcome.


________

Back to the system idea

Branch 2) i7

Core i7 920 - $350, Intel DX58SO Motherboard $300, two sticks of 2GB DDR3 at 1600MHz $180 Total = 830

830+650 = 1470

Redeon 4870X2 $520

= $1990

Ultra Products ULT-33186 ChillTec Thermo Electric CPU Cooler $120

= 2110

A bit overpriced and no fancy RAID 0 Dirives, but this is a great overclocker. All you have to do is match the RAM's native speed by increasing the base clock to 200 and you've got a 4Ghz system. all you have to worry about is CPU voltages.

thanks, those are really nice . . and only 200 above 2000 ain't that bad, as that is more or less the difference between € and $ i think . .
the overclocking options are nice enough to have, but i don't know my way around there as i don't like the idea of risking my good base hardware in trying to squeeze more performance out than they are supposed to deliver . . and one has t have such ideas like underclocking ram so one can bring it up again by overclocking somewhere else in the first place ^^#
i will probably go with an in between of those two systems you so nicely statted out for me, if the prices don't drop as much as i expect them to after christmas.

The reason I chose RAM that is faster than necessary with the intent to under clock it is that you don't have to alter the RAM voltage that way, nor do you have to worry about it running too hot.

In the Core 2, you want the RAM to be synchronous to the FSB, anyway, since that produces less latency and better performance. In a Core i7 920, if you don't overclock you might as well go with cheaper DDR-3 1066, because that's the limit of the on-chip memory controller. You could also go with cheaper DDR-3 1333 for less overclocking potential (probably not a bad idea) as you save about $30. That'll let you overclock the i7 920 up to 3.3, which isn't bad at all and is substantially safer than a 4Ghz OC. (Though you can also do so with the more expensive RAM, you don't have to use its maximum rated speed). The main reason to underclock the RAM and bring it back up to its rated speed is that you don't have to increase its voltage above stock or worry about it overheating. You can even do this with cheap RAM.

The key to good overclocking is to be careful with your CPU voltage, you don't want to push it too high but at the same time you don't want it too low, keep it the lowest you can without introducing instability. Also, on the i7, make sure the memory controller voltage is equal to the RAM voltage (or within half a volt of it at the most, because the memory controller will burn out quick if there is a voltage differential there larger than .5 volts). Other than that, the only issue is keeping it cool. Just go very slow when raising the FSB speed. Raise it a little, boot up and see what happens. When you start having problems back it down. If you can't boot reset the BIOS.

Also, another, perhaps more efficient way to get good hard drive speeds to is go with a second 1TB drive of the same make, RAID 0 them together, and short-stroke them. Partition off the first 100-200GB or so of the RAID 0 array for system and games. (Generally, Temp and page files first, then system and games works best, though you could also make a seperate games partition having the temp and page files on a separate partition reduces fragmentation on your other partitions). Because the outside of the platters are the fastest parts, you'll get the best read speeds that way, probably better than two cheap 80-gigers , and possibly better than two velociraptors on average. Of course, you'll end up with a 2TB RAID 0 array, which is a lot of lost data if one of the drives fails. It's probably the most efficient way to go about it, as it saves you money over velocipaptors or SSDs. I would have actually included that idea earlier if I had thought of it.

heck no, i'm not going to make a 2TB Raid0 O.O
that's maximum NTFS can support and IF something goes horribly wrong, then losing 2TB of Data does NOT sound nice x.x . .
probably one or two 1TB HDD's for Storage and 2 VelociRaptors with up to 300Gig each as a Raid0 . . 10kRPM . . to store Games . .
and maybe use one or two small SSD's for operating System . . can one Raid0 two SSD's? would that bring performance?
and i repeat, i don't know my way around overclocking and thus avoid it because i am afraif of fucking things up beyond repair <.<

Yes, one can Raid0 two SSDs, which is why I included it in the first build I posted. Now you could make it RAID 0+1. You'll require twice as many drives but the drive mirroring protects you from catastrophic HD failure. One could also try RAID 5, which would sacrifice some speed for more reliability with only three disks.

As for being the limit that NTFS can support, that's what partitioning is for. It is a smart thing to do on an large disk. Each partition is treated as a separate disk, so disk size limits aren't a problem.

no no, NTFS supports maximum filesize of 2TB, because that is the maximum partition size too . . NTFS doesn't work with more than 2TB at once, as far as i remember my education. And Raid0 is basically the exact opposite of partitionioning . . but wait, did you mean raid0 STRIPING and then PARTITIONING the 2TB Raid0 Disc into smaller partitions? @.@
ok, that's another idea i would never have thought off ^^
so, 2 small SSDs in an Raid0 Array Striping for the Operating system, then another Raid0 with 2x10k rpm HDD's of up to 300Gig each for software like games and the such . . and two usual 1TB HDD'S for storage, that sounds about as usefull as it will get. enough storage for about enything i will most likely ever need(as long as i don't start mirroring linux distro or something like that) and performance through the 2 raid0 arrays . . and maybe regular backups by hand to the big discs . .
let's say this alone will cost about 600 bucks i think . .

Using all three RAID 0 solutions is a bit overkill. In addition to costing over $1000 in drives alone, there wouldn't be much performance gain.

The reason I suggested RAID0ing the 1TB drives is to take advantage the physics of circular motion.

The Velociraptor spins at 10,000 RPM, but that's just the angular velocity. Data is arranged in linearly across the surface of the disk, and how fast it can be read is determined by the linear velocity of the disk under the read/write head.
To determine the linear velocity, you need to use basic geometry to convert radius into circumference.

2πr*RPM = linear velocity. 2 and π are constant but radius is not. For this reason, hard drives read and write fastest on the outside of the disk, which generally comes first. As you put more and more data on, you get closer to the center of the disk, your radius drops, and thus your linear velocity drops as does your read/write speed.

By creating a small system or game partition at the beginning of a very large hard drive, you ensure that all of the data in that partition will be read at the fastest rate that the drive is capable of. The maximum read speed may be lower than a velociraptor's, but the average could easily be the same or higher. I really should have though of that earlier, as it is a great way to save money on a high-performance system. Now, due to teh way RAID 0 works, if you were to partition it, the first partition on the combined virtual disk would be striped across the outsides of both disks.


SSDs, the big advantages are no seek time and the fact that they don't spin, meaning that you've got similar read times throughout the medium.
I have also been doing a little bit more research into SSDs and I wouldn't recommend them for storing temporary files the page file, are any log riles, since there are issues with wear after several million writes. It isn't enough to be noticed with games, but with files that get re-written extremely frequently, such as the page file, it could pose a problem.

Actually, if you're going to use SSDs, I'm going to recommend using them just for games and putting the system on another drive. That'll mitigate any potential issues of the drive wearing out from constant writing.

I need to so more research into SSD drive wear patterns, as it could last a very long time or it could last a very short time, depending on your write-erase needs. Using the SSD for games instead of for system would maximize its lifetime. It would, at least, be prudent to move page and temp files off of the SSD and onto another disk.

what do you mean, all 3 raid solutions at once?
i meant one raid0 for the 2 SSD's for the OS,
and then one raid0 for the 2 velociraptors for games
and then one JBOD for the 2x1TB HDD's for Storage
hmm, so installing os onto striped SSD's and then doing one partition on the striped velociraptors to put pagefile and temp files into and install games into . .
and maybe use another partition on those striped velocities as a backup windows install and to shovel save-games in maybe . .

That is, in fact what I meant. It seems a little excessive, to me, given the cost. If you're going with the velociraptors for games then you might as well just drop the SSDs and put your system files on the velociraptors, too. You aren't going to notice much of a difference, certainly not $420 worth of difference. Plus, you'd need a board with at least 7 SATA ports (remember your Blu-Ray drive, it won't work if there is no place to plug it in).

hrm . . ok, you're right . . ok, i will drop the SSD's . . never really did like that idea . . i did not even think to use them in the new rig, untill you mentioned them *g*

yippie for new comps!