[Toptube]

Oh, well fuck that shit then.

Man, just lookin real quick, there doesn't seem to be anything really great in the medium price range right now for Intel MATX. AMD has a much more interesting selection, So if I was building right now and didn't care about clock for clock gaming performance, I'd go with good ol' AMD.

Biostar has never let me down, though so this might be a decent buy for Intel:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813138132


But if I was buying, I guess I'd just blow on the DFI that has a full blown P45 chipset on an MATX board.

This Gigabyte ATX I just bought will be a good board, but man it is picky. Maybe that's how Intel boards go though? This is my first time on their side so who knows.

[Toptube]

My RMA drive that was 2-day shipped last wednesday is just now in my hands today.

Hopefully there is no spark of glory this time.


Also, AMD just came out with their Phenom II chips. 45nm process and a slew of small improvements. They still can't match the core 2 architecture clock for clock, but its a nice improvement over the original Phenom and atleast gets AMD in the ballpark with Core 2. You can forget i7, of course.

The Phenom II 940 black is a 3.ghz stock chip (impressive for AMD) and is said to hit 3.7 pretty regularly in overclocking. If you are building a complete brand new system, you'd still do well (unfortunately) to go Intel. But if you've already got an AM2 or AM2+ board, this is a no brainer drop-in upgrade that will get you similar performance to Core 2 Quads.

For comparison, this 3,0ghz Phenom II chip beats a similarly priced 2.66ghz core 2 quad in a majority of benchmarks. That's really good, considering how badly the Phenom 1 was spanked. Unfortunately though for AMD, if you are an overclocker, just about every Intel Chip priced similarly or under the Phenom II 940 is a better value. Its still a great value though for non-overclockers, upgraders, or HTPC builders who now don't have to sacrifice much in CPU performance for AMD/ATI's arguably better feature set.

[EmX]

Anyone going to take the plunge on the public beta of Win7 when it comes out tomorrow? Anyone torrent the leak? Thoughts?

[Panoptic]

I've got a spare HDD I was planning to load it on. Impressions later, I suppose.

[Toptube]

If they pull some magic performance boost for games then I'll give it a go. Otherwise I don't really have much use in trying out a beta OS. If I had faster internet I'd be more inclined, but I'm not living somewhere where it aint no thang to download gigs of data in a short time. So I have to prioritize my downloading.

[Toptube]

Oh my gawd this drive has been formatting for 1.5 hours and its only at 75%

[Panoptic]

I'm told the 7000 build is "faster than XP."

Also, I only do quick formats unless I suspect there might be something wrong with the drive.

[Toptube]

[EmX]

So I got my grubby mitts on the Win7 Beta and installed it. In fact, it was up on MS's site for a while until they took it down. It's alright. The new start bar takes some getting used to but is an improvement over the old one overall. All the programs I've tried to run are fine and the ram usage is 5-10% less than what I have on Vista. I'm considering making it my primary OS, barring any serious problems.

One neato feature is that you can have your wallpapers run in rotation automatically, like a slideshow. 3rd party programs did this too but they sucked, frankly.

[CubaLibre]

[EmX]

[Toptube]

Got around to doing some overclocking tonight. I have a Q9300 Core 2 Quad that is 2.5ghz stock. My goal was a 1ghz overclock and I easily reached that. I barely gave it extra voltage. Turns out My ram has quite a bit of headroom too.

470FSB x 7.5 multiplier = 3.5GHZ @1.225V (1.2 is stock)

I raised the northbridge voltage from 1.1 to 1.80. I may not have needed to do that, I will tweak it later.

My ram is Some OCZ DDR2 at the now standard 800MHZ with SLI branding on them that means absolutely nothing. Its stock timings are 5-4-4-15, those are good timings, but not awesome. It was a good balance though between price and performance. Besides, Core 2 Quads respond more to higher MHZ (more bandwidth) than lower timings because the memory controller is on the board, not part of the CPU like AMD. So Core 2's are constantly begging for bandwidth. It takes some special magic to get CAS/CL 4 ram to do high speeds, whereas CAS/CL 5 ram usually has a lot of overclocking potential. Even Value ram from certain brands can do pretty well.

My ram would only go about 50mhz above stock with the default timings. I relaxed them to 5-5-5-15 and am now at 900 something. I think its 940mhz right now. That's with no extra voltage. With extra voltage, I could surely break 1000. I'm gonna play with that more later as well.

[GcDiaz]

My PC runs Bioshock at full settings and 1600x1050 rez and doesn't drop below 50-60fps. That's...really all I can tell you in terms of how all the parts work together. Overclocking is still an obscure science, at this point. I'll post some CPU-Z screenshots when I get home.
_________________
Steam/PSN/Xbawks: GcDiaz

Let's bring sexy back!

[km]

I've got a E6600 that I've had for more than a year now, and even though I know I can OC the hell out of it or whatever, it's so fast that I don't even care.
_________________

vi) RPGs (Role-Playing Games)
For adolescents; half-formed personalities roaming (in packs) in search of identity.

[Toptube]

[Toptube]

When I installed Vista 64, I had 1 Sata HDD and 1 IDE HDD. I bought another of the same Sata HDD to get rid of the IDE. Even thought the 1st SATA drive is my OS drive, Vista decided to make the IDE my system disck (it had BOOTMGR on it and was the ACTIVE disc) so when I took it out, I couldn't boot to my SATA OS drive.

To fix it, I had to put the IDE drive back in, boot to Vista, and then mark the SATA drive as an Active drive. Then with the IDE drive once again removed, I had to boot into the recovery console on the Vista 64 retail disc and use the tools in there to fix my boot tables (effectively putting BOOTMGR onto my Sata OS drive).

blargh.

[Corinth]

my tuner and capture card is broken but it now receives 120 ghosts in the machine

my motherboard only catches once out of thirty tries but once it turns on it mostly stays on

thats a symptom of the time when my heatsink fell off and took the zif socket and cpu die with it but i upgraded my 1600+ to a 2800+ that time so

one of my sticks of ram was sent to me by AFK but it has horrible errors on one of the chunks of flash

i need to do a reformat but i dont have the patience anymore so when the registry whines about being too big i just slap it in the face and fuck it in the ass angrily

there is a dead fan on my videocard which is a handmedown upgrade i hate from my gf4 ti4200 which was so lovely and i wish i hadnt switched

my case cost five dollars six years ago and has awful awful airflow problems

i dont have the money to fix anything or build a new one but i keep my newegg cart filled with the computer i would have

the computers i would build are never beasts, i have a thing for finding sweet spots and maximum efficiency

i have no backup solution

[Toptube]

If anyone is in the market for a power suppply, this is a DEAL
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817103941

I personally own the 650 watt version. These are powerfull, Modular, very efficient, mega quiet, and manufactured by Seasonic (see: the best).


I also have a cheapass case. The military's moving company damaged my SFF X-pack case when I first got up here. Shipping a case to Alaska costs about 100% of the cost of the case, so I said fuck that and had my computer spread out on a spare desk and used it that way for a long time. But Bestbuy.com had deal on this no name case, it was $6 with $8 dollar shipping. It turns out its not a terrible case. Air flow is good and everything lines up to the PCI mounts. It doesn't dampen noise at all, but that's not really a big deal because all of my stuff is pretty much the quietest that you can get.


*fixed my typos, geeeezz.

[Corinth]

I've had nothing but great experiences with Antec TruePower PSUs!

[Toptube]

Here's another power supply deal on an Antec Earthwatts 650
http://shop4.frys.com/product/5503410