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Post by karabin on Aug 11, 2008 22:58:58 GMT -5
Alright guys, enough of all the politics already. Here is a thread where I am sure all of us can find some common ground no matter what nationality or ethnic group.
This is a thread for all of you that are like me and enjoy computer hardware and software. Feel free to post your system specifications and any sort of tweaks, overclocks, cooling, main purpose of your rig..etc.
I will start
I have the following setup:
AMD Phenom X3 8450 overclocked to 3.2Ghz @ 1.325V 2 x 1Gb of Kingston HyperX CL5 DDR2 800Mhz overclocked to 900Mhz 2 x ATI Radeon HD3870 in crossfire overclocked to core/memory 815Mhz/1250Mhz (2500Mhz effective as it is GDDR4) 550W Power supply (2 x 12V rail at 20Amps each) 160Gb Seagate Barracuda SATA2 HDD
I am cooling my components with water cooling and my rig is running at 35C under load and 21C on idle.
As you can tell I am and have always been an AMD fanboy. They have always offered best bang for buck and if it was not for them we would still be paying 1 grand for Intel CPUs.
Anyways I use this computer for all sorts of things including gaming and digital circuit simulation (i am an electrical engineer).
I am currently playing Company of Heroes and Call of Duty 4. Both are top games but I am especially impressed with Call of Duty 4 and its engine.
In terns of operating system, I am still using Windows XP Professional. Gave Vista a try and did not like it one bit. Sure it has direct X 10 support but at the moment there is very little difference between direct X 9 and 10.
hope to get some of you to join me on this topic as this forums needs some relief from all this hate and dirty politics.
cheers
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Post by meltdown711 on Aug 11, 2008 23:14:35 GMT -5
The last time I built a comp for myself was over 4 years ago. Back then everything was new... now... Athlon 3200+ 2.2 overclocked to basically a 3400 GeForce 6800GT(was brand new when I bought it) 2x 512mb Kingstons DDR2 (kingston is among my favorite). I forgot what Mhz... 480w power supply which came with my massive tower case 160GB SATA Seagate. Everything did get a little hot at times, going as high as 44C on a very hot summer day... but generally stayed at around 39C, 27 on idle. I obviously used Windows XP. With it I could play Half-Life 2 maxed out and Rome Total War maxed out. That was the last time though and havent built myself a comp since then. Its because since then I've had to rely on laptops since things turned mobile with college. My current lap top: 8600GT Nvidia 2.2 Dual Core processor 120GB SATA2 2GB ram It was a Dell...
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Post by karabin on Aug 11, 2008 23:19:06 GMT -5
I too used to have the Athlon64 3200+, on socket 939. It is running at 2Ghz though.
I also used to have a GeForce 6800LE. That was the best bang for buck card I ever owned. reason for that is that I was able to unlock 4 extra pixel pipelines and 3 vertex pipelines. I also volt moded the card and overclocked it from stock 300Mhz to 430Mhz. That resulted in me having a $600 card like your GeForce 6800GT for only $190.
Yeah your RAM is DDR1 not 2. reason for that is that only the new socket AM2/+ supports DDR2 memory. But the difference is negligible.
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Post by meltdown711 on Aug 11, 2008 23:19:53 GMT -5
I dont remember well, so your prolly right.
I was actually intending to overclock it but I decided not to since I felt like it was really going to push much. If anything, the processor was my main worry while setting up games. RTW was perfect graphic wise, but it was when numbers on the screen swelled that I felt the pinch.
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Fender
Commanding Moderator
Hardarse
Posts: 2,653
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Post by Fender on Aug 12, 2008 3:05:51 GMT -5
My last proper upgrade consists of the following:
Intel Duo Core 6550 (2.33)FSB 1333 running stock 2GB matched ram Corsair 6400 Gigabyte P35-DS3L Motherboard 250GB hardrive SATAII 8600GT Video Card X-Fi Sound Card Dual DVD Burners SATAII
Used to run XP but have migrated to Vista Ultimate 64bit. Its a definite improvement on the XP and Vista 32 bit software. I am running a second harddrive purely with XP only because my USB TV Dongle doesn't have 64 bit compatibility. I will buy one when I get around to it but for now its just as easy to boot into the other drive.
I use my system for a host of things like bookeeping, taxes, internet, music (playback and recording), video editing, games, photos, I could go on but it would bore people.
I had made up previous computers with AMD processors for both my daughters but found them to be wanting over time, so now all three run dual core Intels.
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Post by Arxileas on Aug 12, 2008 6:59:54 GMT -5
I got an Intel 486 system with a Pentium DX 33 overdrive CPU with 8 MB of RAM, 512 KB of memory for video card, HD is a 480 MB, 4 X CD-ROM 1.44 MB floppy running on Windows 95 currently surfing the net on a 56K modem.
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Post by Arxileas on Aug 12, 2008 7:50:29 GMT -5
^ That was my first system Man have things improved since then ! Current system is home made and it consists of; Gigabyte “Motherboard version unknown right now” motherboard with everything onboard. A Pentium 4 2.66 Mhz. 2 X 512 MB of Ram = 1 GB 120 GB hard drive. 250 MB Zip drive 1.44 MB floppy < Great for re-booting for repairs or flashing the ROM... 1 X 52 DVD ROM and 1 X DvD writer NVIDIA RIVA TNT2 32 MB video card with TV out. Onboard sound 500 Watt power supply Windows XP Pro December 2007 edition and Win XP Pro small office Pretty basic for now. Planning to build a new one soon which consists duel Pentium 4 CPU’s with Hyper threading. I need to upgrade soon for photo editing work. My current system is working just great at the moment, feel the video card a definite in need of upgrade. I have been building my own systems for the past 8 years. .
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Japodian
Senior Moderator
Aber dojde donke
Posts: 117
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Post by Japodian on Aug 12, 2008 8:20:35 GMT -5
Desktop computer: Midi tower Gigabyte 7N400S-L motherboard AMD Sempron 2800+ 2 x 1 GB of DDR RAM 160 GB of hard drive 2 x CD/DVD player/writer 1.44MB Floppy drive ATI Radeon 9600Pro, 256 MB OS: Windows XP Pro SP2 & Ubuntu 8.04 400 W power supply Although by some international trend it is not something, I am content with it... It is quite enough for Mathematica, Maple, Matlab, programming in Fortran, C, C++, C#..., multimedia and Warhammer 40k :-) [Anyone playing it? :-D]...
Notebook: Acer 7720ZG Intel DualCore T2310 1,46 GHz 2 MB cache 2 GB DDR2 160 GB HD SATA nVidia GeForce 8400GS 256 MB 56K/LAN/WLAN 5-in-1 card reader IEEE1394 TV Out OS: Microsoft Vista Home Premium [Will change it soon since this one is getting annoying!]
Plan in the following time to buy an new Intel processor based desktop PC sine AMD has some issues with themselves for a while!
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Post by karabin on Aug 12, 2008 10:22:27 GMT -5
NVIDIA RIVA TNT2 32 MB video card with TV out. Planning to build a new one soon which consists duel Pentium 4 CPU’s with Hyper threading. I need to upgrade soon for photo editing work. My current system is working just great at the moment, feel the video card a definite in need of upgrade. I have been building my own systems for the past 8 years. . Could not believe when I read that you are still using a TNT2 gfx card. Those things are like 10 years old. How do you get anything done with those given the highly graphic demanding nature of of photo editing software. By the way, do not get a dual Pentium 4 (those are named Pentium D). Get either a Intel core 2 duo or AMD Phenom X3 or X4. Both will be better than a dual core Pentium 4 since P4 is old technology. As far as graphics card goes. You might as well get a nVidia quadro or Geforce 8 and softmod that into a quadro. Japodian, I see you do a lot of software programing on your PC. Are you by any chance studying software engineering or maybe are an engineer or programmer? I have done a bit of C++ during my uni years. Since then I have moved to Basic and Assembly language due to the heavy use of Microcontrollers in my field. I am getting into Visual Basic now since it allows me to create a graphical user interface for some of my electronic designs. Hehe I remember the good old days when we used Maple at uni. Towards the end though we were purely just using Matlab. And regarding Warhammer 40k, its a kick ass game. I bought 2 years ago including Winter Assault. A new one is coming out now with a new engine. should be nice.
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Post by vinjak on Aug 12, 2008 19:01:27 GMT -5
I need to ask some advice from you guys,
I am looking to buy a new pc and this is what I am looking at.
24 " wide screen Intel Core 2 quad processor 3gb ddr2 sdram memory 500gb sata hard drive with NCQ 256mb ATI Radeon HD 3650 XT
all this would cost me $1399
Will be using for Web surfing, Business, and Games such as Medieval II Total War.
What you guys think ?
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Post by meltdown711 on Aug 12, 2008 19:07:09 GMT -5
MDIITW is a very very processor heavy game. I dont really know about the graphics card since Im not good with Radeon brands (Personally though, I generally like Nvidia over Radion... but I think this will work fine), however make sure you load on processor if you truly want to enjoy the game on the best settings. Mine is far too weak and I've been meaning to ask Dell if it would be possible to up it a bit.
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Post by vinjak on Aug 12, 2008 19:19:30 GMT -5
MDIITW is a very very processor heavy game.
Uff dont I know it, In later stages of the game when the Guys with Elephants turn up and start beseiging my castles not only does it scare my men in the game but it also scares my PC and it throws me out of the game LOL damn annoying.
however make sure you load on processor Sorry man I aint very tech minded what does that mean ?
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Post by meltdown711 on Aug 12, 2008 19:34:59 GMT -5
make sure you get something with a lot of GHz. Maybe like a 2.6 Duo Core. That should set you straight.
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Post by vinjak on Aug 12, 2008 19:36:37 GMT -5
Ahh ok thanks
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Post by karabin on Aug 13, 2008 0:09:52 GMT -5
I need to ask some advice from you guys, I am looking to buy a new pc and this is what I am looking at. 24 " wide screen Intel Core 2 quad processor 3gb ddr2 sdram memory 500gb sata hard drive with NCQ 256mb ATI Radeon HD 3650 XT all this would cost me $1399 Will be using for Web surfing, Business, and Games such as Medieval II Total War. What you guys think ? Ok vinjak, a few things I would like to make yo aware of. First let us start with the Monitor. When you get a big monitor like that 24 inch, you have to remember that LCDs are not all that great at running lower resolutions or even higher for that matter other than their native resolution. So the thing to remember here is that when you try to run a game at a 24inch monitor native resolution that will require a very powerful graphics card if you intend to run the game with some eye candy enabled. NOTE: The higher the resolution the more pixels on screen need to be rendered the more the graphics card needs to work. If the pixel amount is more than the graphics card can handle you will get choppy gameplay as a result of low frames per second. That brings us now to your graphics card. A Radeon 3650 is a medium range card and it will not cut the 24inch monitor resolution at playable framerate. May i suggest to you a Radeon HD4850. These cards are only about 200bucks and perform almost on par with their $700 Geforce GTX280 counterpart. The radeon hd4850 is best bang for buck at the moment. Trust me you would not regret it. Regarding your CPU. Keep in mind that for software to utilize multiple cores it needs to be multi threaded. In other words it needs to be programed in such a way that it utilizes the extra cores. Since most of todays game have just started utilizing 2 cores and that not even to its fullest potential, I would advise to you that you go with a core 2 duo and a higher Frequency (Mhz), because with a quad core you would have 2 cores sitting there doing nothing unless of course you are using 3D Studio Max or Autocad. Your memory. I suggest you buy kits as 2Gb (2x1Gb) or 4Gb (2x2Gb) instead of 3Gb (3x1gb) reason for that is that you do want to take advantage of dual channel memory. All motherboards of today support it but it is only enabled when you put two sticks of equal memory amount into two RAM banks. So if your motherboard has 4 RAM banks you can but 4x1Gib and have dual channel enabled or 2x2Gb and leave the other 2 RAM banks for future where you could put another 2x2Gb for a total of 8Gb in dual channel...etc I hope you get the drift. Other than that, all good.
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Post by vinjak on Aug 13, 2008 1:13:10 GMT -5
Hey Karabin thank you man totaly appreciate you taking the time to advise........Great advise
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Post by karabin on Aug 13, 2008 1:30:34 GMT -5
No worries buddy. anytime. I am a computer hardware enthusiast and have been so for the past 10 years. So i do know a fair bit so feel free to ask if in doubt :-)
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Japodian
Senior Moderator
Aber dojde donke
Posts: 117
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Post by Japodian on Aug 13, 2008 8:49:00 GMT -5
Japodian, I see you do a lot of software programing on your PC. Are you by any chance studying software engineering or maybe are an engineer or programmer? I am currently a graduate student of theoretical physics in Zagreb. We also need quite a lot of programing and computer algebra systems for simulations, calculations and data analysis.
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Post by Arxileas on Aug 14, 2008 8:36:25 GMT -5
Could not believe when I read that you are still using a TNT2 gfx card. Those things are like 10 years old. How do you get anything done with those given the highly graphic demanding nature of of photo editing software. Amaze myself how lazy I have been ! It's been working great never gave me any problems, that video card was a left over from some computer when I was a Pc parts seller once. Haven't done any photo editing work with it, don't think it'll handle it, so right now am looking at many different makes to buy for an upgrade ASAP. Thanks for the leads, will look into those soon, also thanks specially correcting me on the CPU specs was a bad typo by me. Cheers .
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Kralj Vatra
Amicus
Warning: Sometimes uses foul language & insults!!!
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Post by Kralj Vatra on Aug 14, 2008 9:52:45 GMT -5
CPU/Memory over clocking is the wrong way to performance. You spend too much money on h/w that will give you 5-10% increase in speed, whereas by upgrading your RDBMS you can have up to x 20 times better speed!
I am in the business since 1986, and the only ppl i have seen who follow the h/w mod way to performance are domestic guys. How can somebody be sure that his memory runs fine overclocked? You cant do that on production systems. True performance gains are by software. Run on some Unix (linux,*BSD) and you will forget about water cooling and h/w modifications. Thats my stance on the matter.
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