My new God

[masteen]

• Intel Core i5-2500K Sandy Bridge 3.3GHz (3.7GHz Turbo Boost) LGA 1155 95W Quad-Core Desktop Processor
  
  MSI P67A-C43 (B3) LGA 1155 Intel P67 SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX Intel Motherboard
  
  Crucial RealSSD C300 CTFDDAC128MAG-1G1 2.5" 128GB SATA III MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD)
  
  Microsoft Windows 7 Professional 64-bit 1-Pack for System Builders - OEM
  
  SAMSUNG Black Blu-ray Drive SATA Model SH-B123L LightScribe Support - OEM
  
  Antec EarthWatts EA-500D Green 500W ATX12V v2.3 / EPS12V 80 PLUS BRONZE Certified Active PFC Power Supply
  
  Kingston HyperX Grey Series 8GB (2 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 Desktop Memory Model KHX1600C9D3X2K2/8GX
  
  Western Digital Caviar Green WD10EARS 1TB 5400 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive -Bare Drive
  
  MSI N460GTX Hawk GeForce GTX 460 (Fermi) 1GB 256-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 2.0 x16 HDCP Ready SLI Support Video Card
  
  Antec DF-35 Black Computer Case
  
  Order Total $1,465.22

I did scrimp a little on the video card, because the egg had an awesome instant savings (not mail-in) deal on the 460. Fucker boots up in under 15 seconds, is almost silent under low loads, and even with the settings in Shogun 2 or Rift cranked beyond ultra and the vid fans spinning at full blast is not distracting at all. Got a new CyberPower true sine wave UPS to make sure it doesn't get spiked. Only thing I'm pondering now (aside of how to best conquer 16th century Japan) now is if I want to upgrade the stock CPU cooler and overclock.

[Bubba Grizz]

Only 8 gb of ram? No SSD drives?

just kidding. sounds like a good system. I'm almost in need of buying a new rig as my other machines are getting old.

[Winnow]

Only 8 gb of ram? No SSD drives?

just kidding. sounds like a good system. I'm almost in need of buying a new rig as my other machines are getting old.

He's got an SSD drive.

Anyone buying a new PC that doesn't get an SSD drive with a new system needs to do more research.

[Aabidano]

Your game of HKIA will be blazingly fast!

[Stonie]

if I want to upgrade the stock CPU cooler and overclock.

If you don't increase the voltage, you won't need better cooling. I upped the voltage on my I7-920 a tad bit on a copper air cooler. I have thought about trying the Corsair H70 closed-loop liquid cooler to OC a bit more, but I never come close to reaching it's CPU potential as it is.

[Fairweather Pure]

Here's my latest!

[Aslanna]

Anyone buying a new PC that doesn't get an SSD drive with a new system needs to do more research.

Not really depends on what they are doing with it. SSD drives still not in my sweet spot for purchasing. Getting close though!

[Bubba Grizz]

Well my primary computer that I use for gaming and such had the powersupply die on it this morning. It had a good run of being on almost continuously for 3 years. So a quick look at Newegg and I should have my new powersupply if not tomorrow then on Monday. Until then I have my production machine. I am downloading Rift now. I'll keep tabs on it while I'm at work with remote desktop.

I'm not upset that this happened actually. I am more upset that it isn't a good enough excuse to buy a whole new system. The wife would never believe that. I've trained her too well so now she can see through my bullshit. *sigh*

[masteen]

Only 8 gb of ram? No SSD drives?

just kidding. sounds like a good system. I'm almost in need of buying a new rig as my other machines are getting old.

Not just SSD, but one of the new SATA III SSD. Also, that should read 2x8GB RAM; I bought 2 packs of 2 4GB sticks for 16GB RAM.

[Bubba Grizz]

You have this all together and up and running now? I may just copy your config then. I'm in need of a new machine. I just have to convince the wife.

[Aabidano]

Not just SSD, but one of the new SATA III SSD. Also, that should read 2x8GB RAM; I bought 2 packs of 2 4GB sticks for 16GB RAM.

You really need to bring that up to my house for testing, I'll give it back in a few weeks, promise.

[masteen]

Oofta: yeah, it's up and running, no issues after 2 weeks. Only note: that stock Intel heat sink mounting bracket is kinda a pain to attach to the mobo. Mount the CPU and it before you mount your mobo to the case unless the case has a rear cutout. It's really hard to tell if the plastic pins are inserted and locked properly unless you can actually see the underside of the board.

I missed this on the initial assembly, kept seeing my CPU temp spike to 97 C whenever I did ANYTHING more taxing than browsing. Luckily, that case DOES have a mobo cutout, so I opened up that side of the case, and sure enough, 2 of the clips weren't in right. ~32 C at idle, max 55 C under heavy load now.

Aab: buy one yourself, skinflint! It's time to put that Pentium 100 MHz to rest.

[Aslanna]

Only note: that stock Intel heat sink mounting bracket is kinda a pain to attach to the mobo. Mount the CPU and it before you mount your mobo to the case unless the case has a rear cutout. It's really hard to tell if the plastic pins are inserted and locked properly unless you can actually see the underside of the board.

I missed this on the initial assembly, kept seeing my CPU temp spike to 97 C whenever I did ANYTHING more taxing than browsing. Luckily, that case DOES have a mobo cutout, so I opened up that side of the case, and sure enough, 2 of the clips weren't in right. ~32 C at idle, max 55 C under heavy load now.

I always have a problem with that too! Last time I mounted one I just did that first before putting the motherboard in the case. It seemed to work much better as I could tell if it was proper or not.

[Kilmoll the Sexy]

Fuck SSD right in its ear. We have seen more issues with SS drives failing than I have ever seen of hard drives in the last decade. I know we have had to re-image at least 50% of the PC's that have had SSD in them within the first 3 months of them being deployed. Give me good old RAID with some stable drives and I will live with a 30 second longer bootup process.

[Winnow]

Damn, what kind of cheap ass SSD's are you using? Are people trying to defrag them or something?

CORRECTION: SSD's for those that know how to research and buy quality hardware. Rest: Stick to the spinners!

[Kilmoll the Sexy]

Mostly Toshitba and Samsung. It is not that uncommon of an issue with many laptop SSD's from what I have seen on the issues with OS corruptions on them though.

[Canelek]

I like my SSD. It's a Corsair, I think. Been running top-notch for about 5 months now.

[Winnow]

I like my SSD. It's a Corsair, I think. Been running top-notch for about 5 months now.

Mine's also a Corsair and it's been running perfect since I got it from whenever my last PC upgrade is posted here (couple years?).

I've backed up and restored Windows several times, moved from Vista to Windows 7, etc. No issues.

I also have a CFL bulb that's been on 24/7 for more than eight months as a test!

[Aabidano]

I also have a CFL bulb that's been on 24/7 for more than eight months as a test!

You needed a second one on a time switch that cycled it ~10 times a day.

[Chidoro]

Grats on the pc. I'm unfamiliar with the nvidia cards but I'm assuming the 460 GTX but I'm assuming it's pretty damn good compared to my radeon 5770 which I think runs great. What were you running before?

And quiet is nice. My fans were beginning to get a little lippy under heavier load, hadn't cleaned out the interior since I got the system in Jan '10. I won't let that happen again. only thing I don't like about my system is that the power supply Dell packed was only 475W. Well that and the 8 gigs of ram were only ddr2's even though I can throw in speedier ddr3's.

[Fairweather Pure]

On the subject of noise, my Alienware is water cooled and whisper quiet. Almost annoyingly quiet actually. Under full load, I hit around 35 C, which is only a few degrees above idle. When I say "full load", I'm talking 5760x1200, max effects, running for hours at a tome. Those are the pros. The cons include the fact that I am reluctant to ever crack open the case because I know absolutely jack shit about water cooling. It makes me nervous to monkey with it. I will if I have to though. The other bad thing is that whenever I do a restart, the software that controls the existing fans shuts down, so everything in the machine jumps straight to the highest fan speeds possible, which sounds like a cross between a harrier jump jet and a cat getting run over. It only lasts less than 10 seconds, but when you're used to silence, it makes it seem that much more loud. Furthermore, most of my PC time is late at night so you can see how this can be quite annoying.

Prior to owning this PC, I had zero experience with water cooling for computers. I wasn't sure what to expect when I got it, but I can safely say I am extremely happy with it and will make sure all my future computers also have the feature if it's feasible.

Masteen, time for the serious question... What was the first game you put in to try out your new rig?!?

[masteen]

Shogun 2 downloaded from Steam.

[masteen]

I think Winnow had some doubts about the Antec Earthwatts powersup, I just wanted to post a little update that it's still humming along just fine, with zero issues. I do have it hooked up to a quality battery backup (CyberPower pure sine wave), and did budget a lot of overhead on both the PSU and UPS, so I am not pushing it very hard.

[Aslanna]

I finally got around to picking up an SSD (Samsung 256GB) as NewEgg had them on sale for a decent price recently. I know I should just do a clean install but I don't have time for that now so just wanted to mess around with it however I've run into some issues. My existing setup I had a 640GB HDD divided into a C and D drive with C: being boot of course. I have cloned the C: drive and wrote it out to the SSD. Windows is seeing the SSD as drive J: and I set it as the primary boot drive in the computer BIOS.

However when I reboot it's getting a mix of files from the C: drive (still the HDD) and the J: drive (SSD). I'm not able to reassign the letters in Windows because C: is in use. I removed the letter but that just basically screwed me as when I rebooted the Windows login came up but the mouse and keyboard weren't functional. I tried using the Windows setup and using diskpart where I was able to reassign the letters but when I exited and rebooted they went back to the old lettering so after three times of that I just pulled out the SSD and went back to my previous setup.

So basically what I want is the SSD to be C: and the existing D: to stay D: since I have some programs installed there. Is there an easy way to accomplish that? Is it even possible? If not I guess I'll just do a clean Windows install over the weekend but I'm not really looking forward to that as it will be a lot of work to get everything reinstalled and configured again. I actually don't have a whole lot on my current D: so I could also just partition the SSD into two drives as well and just pull out the 640GB HDD which might be easier.

[Winnow]

Are you able to reformat the C partition on your old drive since you've cloned it to the new drive? That should take care of any confusion by the OS. (as long as you're sure your new SSD has everything on it) If your C partition isn't too big, it should also be a 12 or so minute task to back up the partition using Acronis True Image in case things go awry.

edit: as for the drive partitions, I'd have to look when I'm home.

Go to Computer management (if you have Windows 7) and you'll see disk management there. Right click on a drive and you should see "Change drive letter and paths"

[Stonie]

Doing a clean install is the only way to go for a new SSD.

This guide is outstanding for optimizing a new Windows 7 install for SSDs.

http://www.overclock.net/t/1156654/sean ... -ssds-hdds

It helps with things like trimming down the total disk space used by OS related files and also makes sure your drive is getting TRIM support, not being defragged, turning off indexing and superfetch, etc.

Follow it to the letter and you won't be disappointed you took the extra time.

[Aslanna]

Go to Computer management (if you have Windows 7) and you'll see disk management there. Right click on a drive and you should see "Change drive letter and paths"

I tried that. That only works to assign a letter that is not in use. Which is why I tried the remove option figuring I could just make the SSD my C: drive. But that didn't work out so well. I have no idea where that's stored. I miss autoexec.bat and config.sys files. At least with them you knew where to change stuff!

[Winnow]

I tried that. That only works to assign a letter that is not in use. Which is why I tried the remove option figuring I could just make the SSD my C: drive.

Can't you assign the current D drive to another letter first and then assign the partition you want to D after it's available?

[Aslanna]

C not D.. But I decided I'm not going to bother at the moment. Ivy Bridge will be out in a couple months and I plan to upgrade at that time so I'll just use the SSD with that. My current computer was a real pain to set up some of the stuff (like the Creative drivers under 64bit) and I don't really want to mess with all the things like that again. If I planned on using this current setup for 2 more years sure but at the moment I don't think it's worth it.

It began the sale of the processors to middlemen in the last quarter of 2011, with retail availability from April 2012 with one source specifying April 8 as the availability date.

Although it is fairly annoying that the path after Ivy-Bridge (Haswell) involves another socket switch. LGA1155 is now a dead end too!

Haswell is the codename for a processor microarchitecture to be developed by Intel's Oregon team as the successor to the Sandy Bridge architecture. Using the 22 nm process, Intel is expected to release CPUs based on this microarchitecture in Q2 2013 according to leaked roadmaps.

New sockets - LGA 1150 for desktops and rPGA947 & BGA1364 for the mobile market

Oh well. Gotta jump in somewhere can't keep waiting for the 'next' thing. I'll just move on to Broadwell in 2014. If the world hasn't ended.

[Canelek]

I wish I got a Intel discount by merit of living in Oregon. However, I am sure glad I don't work there.

Thanks for posting that link, Stonie. I need to rebuild soon due to some registry issues, and it is nice to see some good SSD (OS Drive) tips. I think all I did was move the page file to a spinning disk.

And speaking of SSD, my company is purchasing SSD cache for our SANs as well as these new IBM servers that use an internal SSD array for OS and applications/binaries/etc. I am going to plop tempDB on the internal array (will carve a ~300GB 1+0 volume for that) and just keep my database files on SAN LUNs.

Sorry for slight derail, it is just that SSD is beginning to take off in enterprise environments....

[Winnow]

FWIW, I haven't had a clean install of windows since Vista I think. I've upgraded to Windows 7, switched motherboards and just about every other peripheral once or twice, and then copied the OS partition over to my SSD. I'll probably clean install Windows 8 on my Ivy Bridge upgrade later this year. It's a major hassle to set everything up. You don't realize all the little shit you need to configure or applications you need to track down product codes, etc for.. Some things you haven't touched in years and forgot what you did, you have to research it all over again. Acronis True Image is the savior. I'll take a 15 minute backup/install over hours of hassle any day.

I'm going to use a best price/performance model for the Ivy Bridge upgrade. My last upgrade (2009) went so well a few years ago, I'm having a hard time justifying actually upgrading again as nothing feels too sluggish to me. I could probably get away with a video card upgrade but where's the fun in that? Ivy bridge is a significant boost in performance with its tri-gate transitsors, plus I want PCi 3, USB 3, etc etc. The next build should get me through 2015. The two year cycle has been extended to 3 years. I've used the same Antec P180 case since 2007 I think. Main PC will be supported by the 27" iMac for media and probably three iPads by that time. I'll most likely add a 30" display although it will be secondary to the Samsung LCD TV I use as a monitor. Recently, I've been a lot more patient with tech stuff. I can wait on most things (except iPads and iPhones!). PC power isn't an issue anymore. Now it's time to focus on best display/audio, ease of use, reliability, etc...and comfort too! I bought the Nightingale desk chair from Canada awhile back and am happy with it. Memory foam for your ass FTW!

[Fairweather Pure]

My current rig is 1.5 years old so I think I have another 2-3 years I think before an upgrade is needed. The only thing I may upgrade in the future is to a larger SSD as a secondary drive. I may be able to get 3x30" screens by then as an upgrade to my 3x24"s. Going triple screen was the best decision I ever could have made last time I upgraded. Between the 3 screens and Logitech Z5500 sound system, my PC gaming experience has never been better.

I'm happy to see even more people jumping in the SSD band wagon. It made a very noticeable improvement in my everyday computing and gaming.

[masteen]

I can't believe my baby is almost a year old! Still cranking those polys, and yes Winnow, the Antec power sup is still performing great.

I figure I'll upgrade the gfx card in another 6-9 months, and definitely planning on adding another SSD or maybe one of those fancy Seagate hybrid drives

[Stonie]

I think all I did was move the page file to a spinning disk.

It's safe to leave the page file on the SSD now, thanks to TRIM support. The key is having FIXED page file size. I've been setting my page files to 1gb. You can probably get away with no page file or smaller than 1gb, if you have enough physical RAM. I've had 6gb triple channel for almost 3 years now, and playing WOW and SWTOR, my RAm usage hardly ever gets above 50%.


Winnow,

Moving your OS around from motherboard to motherboard by using an image works way better on XP, Vista, and 7 than it did in the 95/98 days for sure. As long as you aren't concerned with or have taken care of issues like going from an IDE to AHCI SATA controller, not having TRIM support, etc. I know exactly what you mean by program registration and the other million setup issues though. Sysprepping an image helps by keeping your programs and preferences intact while removing machine specific stuff like sysid and drivers. The bad thing about sysprepping is it can only be done once to an install or image.

[Aslanna]

You don't realize all the little shit you need to configure or applications you need to track down product codes, etc for.. Some things you haven't touched in years and forgot what you did, you have to research it all over again. Acronis True Image is the savior. I'll take a 15 minute backup/install over hours of hassle any day.

I realize it. That's why I don't want to do it! Especially for a system I'll only be using for a couple more months. I especially remember the Creative drivers being painful and have no clue what I did to get it to work eventually. Which is one reason (there are others!) I'm never buying another Creative Labs product again.

Regardless, the SSD will still find a use just in a brand new install. Plus my current MB uses Marvel for the SATA III controller and from everything I read that is bad news.

[Stonie]

Plus my current MB uses Marvel for the SATA III controller and from everything I read that is bad news.

It's only bad news if you don't like AHCI and TRIM support for your SSD, or do like sporadic data corruption and poor driver support. Marvell is great for NICs, shitty for storage controllers. I don't see how they're still in the storage business.