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PostPosted: Sat Sep 30, 2006 4:48 am 
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Koa
Koa

Joined: Wed Dec 29, 2004 3:25 am
Posts: 886
Location: United States
Ok so I downloaded a demo of the new Microsoft X flight, and it ran like a DOG!!, this computer is over two years old and was built on the first generation AMD Athlon 64's, using an MSI Neo mainboard...

So it's time to build a new one, this will be Monster #3 for me...

Here is what I'm thinking so far:

Intel D975XBX or Asus P5W DH Motherboard:

both are really good, but the Asus has Wifi built in and does DDR 800 so it's the contender right now. Both will do an FSB of 1066Mhz, have the ATI Crossfire support, Sata, USB 2, 1394, PCI Slots etc... all the standard stuff.

The Intel board however comes in a BTX form factor which could be cool because I'd like to have some smaller and QUIETER...

For a CPU I've settled (well so far) on the Intel Core 2 Duo E6700 which runs at 2.67Ghz and is half the price of the extreme models.

4 Gigs of DDR 800 or 667 Memory (have not decided on a brand just yet).

I'm going to go with a water cooling solution this time to keep the PC quiet, I'm just going to buy an off the shelf solution so I need to research which ones have gotten good long term tests.

Graphics cards are the problem area, I use a dual monitor setup for working in Rhino and find that I can't live without it. I'm running a FIRE GL right now and it was $800 flippin dollars and for that amount of money it's no slouch but I can't for instance run WOW on both monitors so it's not been the greatest. I'm thinking about seeing if ATI has dual monitor cards that are not for industrial modeling and get two with Crossfire support.

I have SATA drives, a DVD Burner, an Audigy 2 ZS so I won't have buy those things. The only other thing I need to find is a case, I want multiple USB's up front and a 1394 for the camera.

My goal this time to increase my processing power and max out the video, since I do 3d work in rhino, video editing and game playing all on this machine it needs to be a killer.

This should be fun, I'm doing research now so any suggestions would be welcome (that means you Hesh!!), My wife has already resigned herself to this one. I've been digging through performance charts and it makes my head spin and I've not even gotten to the video cards yet

I thought about new SATA2 Drives and may do that yet, since I want to pull compenents from this one though I'm not sure, but if I do that then I will have two operation computers and can give this one to my wife..

choices choices choices...

-Paul-

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PostPosted: Sat Sep 30, 2006 5:54 am 
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Hey Paul, do you know any other foreign languages?


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PostPosted: Sat Sep 30, 2006 6:27 am 
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So you are leaning toward Intel dual core rather than AMD? At the moment the price of 64 X2's is very attractive.

Have you tried Vista...its memory management is a big step forward from XP... you did not mention if you were running 32bit XP or 64Bit...a big difference in performance and memory management there as well.

The price of PCI-E (x16) Video cards has really come down alot in the last month...Crossfire is pretty cool... I hear you about the video card being the gating issue...while I am not doing any hard core modeling I am getting good results with 2 512Mb PCI-E x16 Nividia cards running in SLI mode on an AMD system. I run this across 3 21" widescreen flat panel monitors (two are one stretched screen and one is separate.

As far as small form factors have you looking at the ITX or other small form factors such as the shuttle boxes? I am running a compute cluster that is 4 dual core AMD 64 X2 4800+ shuttle boxes tied through a 10GigE switch that is running a new version of Windows named Windows Server 2003 Compute Cluster Server. The OS cost is about the same as XP but is tuned for number crunching, has its own task scheduler and is a very stable 64bit system.

I am using it for number crunching (Monte Carlo Risk Analysis of market data) and as a render farm and benchmarked it at about 18 Gigaflops which is pretty awesome when you consider that it is twice the performance of an 8 year old Cray that cost > $1 million and my setup was plug and play, less than 2 hours to setup for under $4000. That is without any 3rd party drivers, just what ships in that version of Windows.

Regarding water cooling, I assume you are doing that for overclocking...I would look into some of the alternative liquids instead of water cooling as these are better performing.


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PostPosted: Sat Sep 30, 2006 7:06 am 
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Koa
Koa

Joined: Wed Dec 29, 2004 3:25 am
Posts: 886
Location: United States
I was leaning towards the Dual Core for a couple of reasons:

1. Right now they are whupping AMD, the Duo is a huge performance jump, I like AMD but I want performance flat out this time.

2. They are introducing a Quad early next year and both these boards should be compatible with that.

3. Both of these have the intel chipset which from my reading has done very well in testing.

For the OS I'll be running 32bit for now and then Vista later, I don't think Rhino runs on the 64bit OS.

I was looking at the BTX form factor because it was intels design and has good airflow, ITX would work as well. However the Asus is ATX which is fine actually, just have to find a smaller case. With built in WiFi however that's just another card I don't have to add.

The water cooling is for two reasons:

1. I might overclock if I feel the need.

2. I want something that is QUIET!, I'm tired of the noise my current one makes.

There are new kits out and you can use all different types of liquids, I havent' finished researching that area just yet.

For monitors I have two 20.1 VP201s Viewsonics, they are great, I bought the first one new and the second off E-Bay. I want to be able to run windows on both (split) and play games across both.. Still looking into that, are you running one VCard for each monitor?

Don... this is my native language :)

-Paul-

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PostPosted: Sat Sep 30, 2006 10:09 am 
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Koa
Koa

Joined: Wed Dec 29, 2004 3:25 am
Posts: 886
Location: United States
Hahahaha your response made my day, after giving birth to the largest human made birthstone it's good to see you back online.

I've settled on the Asus, they have a good rep, both boards use the Intel Chipset so you really can't go wrong, but built in G wifi and 800mhz memory did the trick for me.

Your right about the harddrive, however if I'm going to do that then I might as well just get a DVD burner and call it all new. No floppy's this time around, and I'll go shopping for Sata's, the board support SATA2 so i'll look in that area. HD prices are so cheap who cares anymore.

Lian LI makes a cool desktop case that I found, that's what I'm going with.

Raid is WAY oversold, I would never do a home PC with it, unless you have DEDICATED hardware for it your not going to get very good results. There's just too much work going on behind the scenes. We always ran our servers in a Raid0+1 configuration at work which worked well but for home it's just too much. Sanyo just released a new 32Gig memory drive, been hearing about them for years, this is the first prodction one, no seek times!!!

Dual Crossfire is my goal, just have to decide which ones and which will support two monitors.

I'll go look at those power supplies, this is starting to expensive now... never fails..

So I may go the non water cooling path, the Asus has heat pipes on it for the onboard chipsets, just a quiet fan to move the air should be enough, until I add the VCards

Thanks... Now go get better!!

-Paul-

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 Post subject:
PostPosted: Sat Sep 30, 2006 10:55 am 
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I have several of the latest Intel chips and boards I am playing with as well...

I am an engineer for Microsoft's Government sales group so I go anywhere in the world there is Government, which is everywhere (280k miles so far this year ). All of the hardware companies want us to push them so I get alot of toys to play with

While not performance oriented, the fanless quiet systems are very interesting...no noise is such a big change to standing in a server room with cold air at your ankles and a constant drone of fans...

Another cool thing that is coming out that will be supported in Vista is hard drives with flash memory on them...they are really fast access as it pre-fetches into flash instead of of at disk seek speeds...I have some that are 7200rpms and some 10,000s that are the new hydrid drives and they scream for things like streaming...

By the way, the PC Power and Cooling quiet stuff is very cool...while their stuff isnt cheap, it is rock solid...super smart people that give excellent support.


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PostPosted: Mon Oct 02, 2006 3:00 am 
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Koa
Koa

Joined: Wed Dec 29, 2004 3:25 am
Posts: 886
Location: United States
I had to update my post on this, I finally found a technical article that explained crossfire in more details, ATI says you have to have a crossfire compatible card and a main crossfire card, it's a bit misleading and I'm kind of surprised this got past their marketing. The inference is that you need both, when actually you just need one of the new generation compatible cards and then some crossfire compatable from the older generations or the same generation. However that being said if you choose a new card and an old card you will be limited to the old cards rates because of synch issues. I think the SLI is a better approach..

NVidia already has had SLI out for a while, you can buy SLI video cards now and they are even selling SLI ones where if you do it right you can do a quad SLI setup (WOW!!)... They had stated originally that SLI would only be installed by professionals but have started to come off that idea because of pressure from the market.

So I decided to go with NVidia this time, I've used both in the past and I have no preference anymore. The NVidia card I want is a dual SLI in a single card and supports dual monitors so it should do everything I want. I had to change MB's to get the SLI one but it's the same price so no problem there.

Sean if I could get my hands on one of those drives I would, but I've not heard of a release date for Vista yet and I've not run the beta because I need this machine to be stable so I decided to hold off and wait. I did see it on MSDN and it was tempting :)

Hesh I took your advice and am getting the Raptor-X 150 GB as the main drive, I'm going to keep my second drive which is a caviar 250 GB and leave the original 120 in the machine for my son. Since he can't afford a new computer this ones going to him when the new one is ready.

Now I just have to start ordering parts, I'm spending more than I wanted too but I'm getting a killer machine in the end. Even if my wife is just rolling her eyes

-Paul-Sprockett38992.6688888889

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 Post subject:
PostPosted: Mon Oct 02, 2006 6:33 am 
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Brazilian Rosewood
Brazilian Rosewood

Joined: Sun Dec 25, 2005 6:32 am
Posts: 7774
Location: Canada
Just wanted to say Hi since i ain't no GEEK!

oK, SORRY GUYS!


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 Post subject:
PostPosted: Mon Oct 02, 2006 11:40 am 
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Vista is scheduled to be released to manufacturing in early November for enterprise customers (who download volume license software that is not serialized) and will be in the stores by the beginning of January.

Vista Release Candidate 1 (RC1) is free to download on Microsoft's website and is upgradable to the final shipping version without having to rebuild the machine.

At the moment there are 5+ million people running Vista beta versions including some in production use in large corporations and government agencies.


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PostPosted: Mon Oct 02, 2006 12:49 pm 
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Koa
Koa

Joined: Wed Dec 29, 2004 3:25 am
Posts: 886
Location: United States
Hmmmm....

I'll be ordering this machine on the 15th, I'm not sure if my MSDN is still active or not, if so I'll have to grab that and install that on the machine. I'm wondering if Rhino will run on it...

-Paul-

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 Post subject:
PostPosted: Thu Oct 05, 2006 10:09 am 
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Koa
Koa

Joined: Wed Dec 29, 2004 3:25 am
Posts: 886
Location: United States
Well I'm writing this running Vista RC1, looks pretty good so far, had to pull some tricks to get my sound to work (this is on my new toshiba laptop), I found that even though they say 'Vista Compatible' the sound drivers are not, you have to tell Vista you REALLY want to install the drivers and it worked.

Need to spend some time with this, I'm going to install all my normal apps and see how they fair...

I've got all the new computer parts figured out, I'll be placing the order for it next week. I can't wait to play with it, if this version of Vista looks stable I'll use it on the new machine...

Cheers

-Paul-

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 Post subject:
PostPosted: Thu Oct 05, 2006 10:58 am 
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Koa
Koa

Joined: Wed Dec 29, 2004 3:25 am
Posts: 886
Location: United States
Yeah I was looking at that as I was digging through the features...

4.5 On The CPU (Intel Duo 1.6 GHZ)
4.5 On The Ram (1 Gig)
3.2 On The Video (Intel Laptop Video)
3.0 Game Graphics
2.8 Primary HD (It's 5400 RPM 100 Gig SATA)

Overall was 2.8... The machine seems to run fine with it, I'm sure it could use more memory. So far so good with this so I'll most likely use this for my new machine and see what kind of results it turns up. I just hope they can detect the onboard sound and wireless configs out of the gate.

-Paul-

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 Post subject:
PostPosted: Wed Oct 11, 2006 11:31 am 
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Brazilian Rosewood
Brazilian Rosewood

Joined: Tue Nov 29, 2005 11:44 am
Posts: 2186
Location: Newark, DE
First name: Jim
Last Name: Kirby
Focus: Build
Status: Amateur
Curiosity here - What are the appropriate benchmarks for a gaming machine? (I only worry about floating point number crunching - my 84 dual core AMD Opterons only have a fortran compiler to keep them company, and have never been in the same room as a Windows machine.)

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PostPosted: Thu Oct 12, 2006 2:51 am 
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Koa
Koa

Joined: Wed Dec 29, 2004 3:25 am
Posts: 886
Location: United States
That's a good question Jim...

Not an easy answer though...

For gaming you want a fast video card more than anything else, the new crop of SLI and Crossfire cards are very very good at this time.

If I was building just a gaming rig I would look for the following:

Intel Duo Core (any of the lower end models will be fine, don't use the Extreme's they are a ripoff).
1 Gig of at least PC 5400 memory (2 would be better)
7200 RPM Sata Hard Drive (a 10K drive would be better)
DVD Reader/Writer
A Motherboard with PCIe Slots and Sata...
An ATI Radeon 1900 Class or NVidea 7900 class graphics card.

If you do it right you can do that pretty cheaply, and with a good motherboard you can do a little overclocking on the CPU and get better numbers out of it.

One thing about Vista is that it's running DX10 and Microsoft has changed the way graphics work on it, so any app that runs DX9 (all the current ones available today) will run slower because they have an emulator for DX9 apps. I've heard numbers from %10 - %15 slower and there are a good number of people who are going to sit out the release because of that.

I've been using it on my laptop and while it's pretty and seems to run well I've not fallen in love with it like Hesh has, and I think for now until everything gets ironed out I'm going to stick with XP.

Cheers

-Paul-

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