Hey Kids Look What I Got! Pc Related

[tank_rider]

"You say it's faster than an FX-57, but to be perfectly honest it won't perform better due to its outdated pentium 3 architecture. Have you got any plans for any better cooling? I believe someone has managed to get an XP-120 to fit theirs."

In games, it probably will be. When we compared it to the 915 Based Pentium M board (with PCI-E and DDR2 etc), it gave comparitively faster frame rates.

It may be based on the P3 architecture, but it's extra Level 2 cache helps a lot, and it has better branch prediction. It is lacking SSE3 though.

I'm guessing that that test was using a non overclocked FX-57, as is usually done. They usually hit 3GHz on stock cooling which would more than likely give it a nice big boost over anything a dothan could achieve. Never the less, they are extremely good value cpu's for the money, and can get some pretty damn good results if you can get them to overclock well (I've read many a story about finding fsb limits of mobo's etc)

[spode@thinkbikes]

I'm guessing that that test was using a non overclocked FX-57, as is usually done.

Well, yes that's true. But then an FX-57 is a fixed variable, so it's easy to bring up in a comparison (Y)

[N.Wood]

I'll use the system for hacking, video, photo, gaming, downloading, software devlopment.

(Y)

[MrMonkey]

1TB ay, wow, you must be about as storage thrifty as an old woman who has stuff from when she was 8 (Y)

[Wright Pads]

It's clock for clock faster than a AMD FX-57. On the benchemarks i have found there on par or just behind but like 5/10% out behind.

I'll get screenies when i can, little bit busy right now with it. Cooling i've a P4 DD water block i could fit, i also have a head for P4 479 that i could fit on my Extream Prometha (phase chnage unit) off my amd to cool it. I do have an XP-120 right here and now with an alaska abur 120 ultra quite series fan that could be but you have to bend the clips as it sits so dam high up.

Temps are only 31 load!

1TB is cheap and easy and when you have masses of data it's needed. I've very good music collection i want to keep.

Pete

[george_seamons]

Have you got any pictures of your setup? You must have some kind of dedicated computer room or something to keep all these beasty machines in? Would be interesting to see.

And before you say anything, I'm not having a bitch or trying to catch you out, you've got a new name, so I'm willing to give you a second chance (Y)

[MrMonkey]

1TB is cheap and easy and when you have masses of data it's needed. I've very good music collection i want to keep.

Well I've never seen a 1TB HDD, so I take it you mean 2 500GBs in SATA, so that's a measly £250 each. £500. Cheap of course :shifty: And if you have somehow found a 1TB HDD I'm sure it would of been more than £500.

[spode@thinkbikes]

Surely it would be cheaper to buy a load of 200 or 300 drives instead?

[MrMonkey]

Surely it would be cheaper to buy a load of 200 or 300 drives instead?

Harder to get them all to work together. I don't even know if you can get alot of them all linked up, meh, and you'd be looking around for stuff and waiting ages for stuff to load.

[Dai the Socket]

Well I've never seen a 1TB HDD, so I take it you mean 2 500GBs in SATA, so that's a measly £250 each. £500. Cheap of course :shifty: And if you have somehow found a 1TB HDD I'm sure it would of been more than £500.

I agree with the Monkey.

Powermac G5? What Spec? What Monitor? Panther? Tiger?

Tell me the spec of it....

Ram? Hdd? Processor? Duel i'm guessing, or the new quad since you're Mr. Cool.

Nick.

Ps I'm sure you could fit your 'large' music collection into 250gb. With space left over. By far.

Edited November 12, 2005 by mod661

[MrMonkey]

240 songs per GB, on average. 240,000 songs. 3 mins each, 720,000 minutes of songs. 12,000 hours.

[spode@thinkbikes]

Harder to get them all to work together. I don't even know if you can get alot of them all linked up, meh, and you'd be looking around for stuff and waiting ages for stuff to load.

Explain?

I'm not a big fan of RAID anyway. I just keep my hard drives seperate in my file server, and then symbolically link them all in to one big share. I think Linux can do something similar to striping in software anyway.

[MrMonkey]

Explain?

I'm not a big fan of RAID anyway. I just keep my hard drives seperate in my file server, and then symbolically link them all in to one big share. I think Linux can do something similar to striping in software anyway.

Well, say if you've got 1 HDD it's gonna run than 2 working together, it's like a race, one guy is gonna beat 2 guys with their legs tied together. I think it's right anyway :shifty:

[Alexx]

Good for a home user, average as an editing suite... Spec seems to fall a little down the middle, kinda a bit on the high end scale for home use, but no where near powerfull enough for high end editing.

Other than the 1Tb hard disk, which is none existant... so must be 2 500gb SATA'd together.

[spode@thinkbikes]

Well, say if you've got 1 HDD it's gonna run than 2 working together, it's like a race, one guy is gonna beat 2 guys with their legs tied together. I think it's right anyway :-

No, I said explain. Not throw useless analogies at me. :P Give me some TECHNICAL backing.

[Tomm]

Pete did actually say he was using two drives in RAID 0.

I've not really heard anything good about RAID for home use. Raid 0 is potentially faster, that is until one of your drives dies and you lose what is on both drives. But seek times are not improved, and that's what makes the big difference in terms of general windows usage.

I think Pete would be much better off with a 72Gb Raptor (Or even SCSI seeing as he seems willing to throw money about), and then a few 7200rpm 250Gb drives for all the storage he "needs". And no RAID anyway. I thought Monkey's analogy was quite good. But anyway, prove me wrong my CustomPC :P

[Gandalf the Yellow]

all you need is a X800XTPE :P , its available in AGP, its 2nd fastest AGP gpu...shame they're not going to make anymore of them.

luckily i got mine for just £200 the ASUS AX800XT, whereas now you need to pay up to £300 for the exact same card....

steve

[spode@thinkbikes]

Pete did actually say he was using two drives in RAID 0.

I've not really heard anything good about RAID for home use. Raid 0 is potentially faster, that is until one of your drives dies and you lose what is on both drives. But seek times are not improved, and that's what makes the big difference in terms of general windows usage.

I think Pete would be much better off with a 72Gb Raptor (Or even SCSI seeing as he seems willing to throw money about), and then a few 7200rpm 250Gb drives for all the storage he "needs". And no RAID anyway. I thought Monkey's analogy was quite good. But anyway, prove me wrong my CustomPC ;)

Well that's more like a response!

Personally, I'm not a big fan of RAID. I had one of my drives die on me and I lost a lot of data. And I didn't notice huge improvements in performance (unless you count theoretical benchmarks).

The only up side to it, is it essentially joins the drives, so you have a single drive. But this CAN be done in software without comprimising your data's integrity.

I've always felt those Raptors were a bit of a fad. IIRC, the tests they did in CPC showed little improvement with them.

However, your suggestion of a few 250GB drives instead of 500's basically agrees with me. You'd get better value for money. Big price ramp when you get to 500GB.

Now if he's REALLY throwing money around, how about a solid-state disk drive :- Get an 8GB model just to keep Windows on and then some storage drives :lol: That would be my ideal setup. People don't realise how much hard drive performance affects the rest of your PC.

How was his analogy good? Running two drives striped doesn't SLOW things down, which is what he suggested.

And I'm not just a CPC man. I write for lots of different mags :P And I've only mentioned that once, and that was only because someone was commenting on a review I'd written - which I found a little amusing (Y)

Edited November 13, 2005 by Spode

[Tomm]

Now if he's REALLY throwing money around, how about a solid-state disk drive :P Get an 8GB model just to keep Windows on and then some storage drives :- That would be my ideal setup. People don't realise how much hard drive performance affects the rest of your PC.

Yeah, definitely. Laptops are slow for that very reason - I've got a 4200rpm drive in my laptop and it's noticeably slower than a "proper" computer of a similar spec.

Don't solid state drives die when you lose power to them?

[spode@thinkbikes]

They should do. Most most marketable versions come with a battery pack that can keep it alive for up to 12 hours or something (in case of a power failure). But it can use the 5V stand by voltage to keep it alive even when the pc is turned off (as long as it's still plugged in to the mains).

I think we are going to start to see more of these...

[Wright Pads]

Pete did actually say he was using two drives in RAID 0.

I've not really heard anything good about RAID for home use. Raid 0 is potentially faster, that is until one of your drives dies and you lose what is on both drives. But seek times are not improved, and that's what makes the big difference in terms of general windows usage.

I think Pete would be much better off with a 72Gb Raptor (Or even SCSI seeing as he seems willing to throw money about), and then a few 7200rpm 250Gb drives for all the storage he "needs". And no RAID anyway. I thought Monkey's analogy was quite good. But anyway, prove me wrong my CustomPC :lol:

Sorry i'm only passing a si have lots of work to do and i'm just testing the new system out with multi tasks now and day to day usage.

Sadly your very worng on the drive front.

RAID 0 is the performance side of the house. RAID 0 or "striping" uses two drives in conjunction with one other for speed. Data is divided when it is written to both drives so that the workload is balanced and thus more efficient. The data is broken up into chunks or stripes when it is alternatingly stored. There is no redundancy of data with RAID 0. You should be using two identical drives if you are setting up a RAID 0 but this is not required. Two different drives can be used but at a small cost. Keeping in mind that the workload is being balanced, the computer sets the drives up to be equal. If you have an 80 and a 120 gb drive, RAID 0 will have your machine treat them as two 80 gb drives, ignoring the extra 40 gb of space on drive two.

RAID 1 is basically a fail safe set up for your hard drive. Two drives are set up in RAID 1 form which provides all data be written twice. Once to hard drive A and once to hard drive B. This set up is for redundancy to keep your data effectively backed up at all times. You may hear the term "mirroring" when referring to RAID 1. This is a perfect term because you are making two drives that mirror one another. Imagine for a second that your primary computer's hard drive just up and dies on you. While this is rare, it is far from uncommon. All your data is effectively gone. Your financial information if you do your bills with something like MS Money or Quicken - gone, the e-mail address of all your friends and even that hot chick from two weeks ago - gone, your term paper - gone, activation codes for downloaded software - gone, etc. With your drives being mirrored, if one drive dies you still have all your data and remain up and running. The only downside is that you are halving your disk drive dollar to pay for this redundancy. Two 80 gb hard drives in RAID 1 give you 80 gb of storage, not 160 if you just had them plugged in as drive C and drive E. But let me pose a question for you to consider, if your lone hard drive crashed, would it be worth say $75 to have everything back running fine? I think that says it all right there.

RAID 0 is from the gamer side of things. I'll be abck latters if not sonner and desphier al lthese posts and do one big reply and i'll try and get screen shots on if i can...

Pete

[Simon]

Well done, you can copy and paste from Overclockers.

[Wright Pads]

She not be from overclockers at all dude. Google and some gaming tech site as i'm sick of you lots thinking you all right right when you are very far from it and in fact wrong! So the poeple that said there pc experts are clearly not.

I'm getitng bord of this topic, bitch fest already.

Mark or other MOD/ADMIN. Close at will please!

Pete

[Mark W]

No really, it IS from Overclockers.

Just accept if someone's right about something. It doesn't mean a topic has to be closed, and it's not turned into a bitchfest at all? Someone just pointed out your post was just pasted from another website, which isn't grounds for topic closure really. Seeing as people are still putting up decent posts, there's no point.

[spode@thinkbikes]

Whether or not it's from Overclockers or not, it's still right (although a UK person saying "term paper" and $75 did confuse me somewhat..).

Basically, the earlier three legged race analogy is incorrect, RAID 0 (striping) won't slow you down, it's supposed to speed you up. *

I don't think this thread needs closing at all! And how is this a bitch fest?? Personally speaking (can't speak for anyone else), I'm trying to get behind the logic of having more a few 250GB drives is worse than having 2 500GBs! (there are reasons, but I've not heard any sufficient ones yet..)

And just a side note on mirroring - most people lose data due to viruses, stupidity and general software failure. Something that mirroring won't protect against at all. So it's not the be and end all.

Edited November 14, 2005 by Spode