Classicamiga Forum Retro Edition
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
Thread: Ready for a new PC
J T 11:07 14th May 2010
Is it a big case or a small motherboard?

I may be a 'little' behind the curve with PC things.

(The only PC I ever really open up is my one that I built 3-4 years ago. I think it was 4).
[Reply]
Demon Cleaner 12:10 14th May 2010
It's a big tower with a normal sized ATX mobo. My older PC was 6-7 years old already, and annoyed me lately whilst multitasking, and also streaming HD material to the PS3.

I also only had 760GB of HDD space (IDE disks), and had to backup everything on slow external USB drives. Now with 6TB (SATA/300 --- reading at 135MB/s) I can do that internal, and a lot faster.
[Reply]
Harrison 17:52 14th May 2010
Originally Posted by Demon Cleaner:
One problem I only noticed is that the CPU cooler is quite big and reaches over the last RAM expansion, so that you cannot upgrade memory without removing again the cooler.
You got the Freezer 7 Pro CPU cooler in the end, didn't you?

If so, the fan can easily be unclipped from the front of the heatsink via the rubber frame that holds it all in place and reduces vibration. Makes it fairly easy to then reach the ram. I also have this problem with mine.
[Reply]
Sharingan 16:41 17th May 2010
PC pr0n! Nice!

Have you considered getting a Solid State Drive as the system drive? You can get 250+ MB/s transfers out of that, and if you put it in a RAID, things will really fly.

There was an experiment a while ago by a couple of guys who put 20 SSDs in a RAID. That was some sick shit ... they got several GIGABYTES/s transfer rates.
[Reply]
Demon Cleaner 14:31 19th May 2010
Originally Posted by Harrison:
Originally Posted by Demon Cleaner:
One problem I only noticed is that the CPU cooler is quite big and reaches over the last RAM expansion, so that you cannot upgrade memory without removing again the cooler.
You got the Freezer 7 Pro CPU cooler in the end, didn't you?

If so, the fan can easily be unclipped from the front of the heatsink via the rubber frame that holds it all in place and reduces vibration. Makes it fairly easy to then reach the ram. I also have this problem with mine.
Yes, I got that one. The problem is that the RAM I have, the Patriot GSeries, is quite large (look here), because it has a heatsink, and the fan reaches over the last RAM expansion. So only RAM without a heatsink would fit under the fan.
[Reply]
Harrison 17:50 19th May 2010
That is annoying, but would happen with all tower style heatsinks, which are the most efficient type these days.
[Reply]
Submeg 09:43 26th May 2010
Wow, I really know nothing about building PCs these days...
[Reply]
Harrison 12:21 26th May 2010
It isn't that different building a PC from the past 10 years really. You still have a case, motherboard, ram, CPU, cooler, PSU and graphics card as the main parts.

The big differences are the need for a powerful PSU, graphics cards are now much bigger and longer so need larger cases for them to fit, and good after market CPU coolers are much bigger, with tower style ones being the current popular and most efficient design.
[Reply]
Submeg 12:40 26th May 2010
I guess, but I just have no idea what is out there anymore!

PS Tis good to be back and posting
[Reply]
Demon Cleaner 07:41 27th May 2010
I ran the Windows 7 experience test (WEI) yesterday, and I get an average of 7.5, only the hard disk test (disk data transfer) gives me 5.9 points, thus giving me a rating of 5.9, as the lowest subscore counts.

As I read so far it seems very difficult to get a higher score for the hard disk test, unless you have an SSD.

Originally Posted by Techradar:
Hard drive performance was always a difficult one: even with the last WEI, you had to opt for a Western Digital 10,000RPM Raptor, a RAID solution or be very picky with your main drive selection to hit the magical 5.9.

Even with two RAID0 SSD drives, we didn't achieve anything higher than 6.5. And frankly that's not the sort of solution we expect anyone to be regularly running even by the start of 2010.
Anyway, the system runs so slow, I can barely hear it running, although there's 6 fans on the case plus CPU,GPU and PSU fans! The HDDs are really silent too, that's why I got the Samsung F3 EcoGreen models, they also run only at 5.400.

I also updated the BIOS and all other motherboard drivers, which were all a bit older already. No I still need to install most of my software, currently I'm copying my files back from my old HDDs.

But at the moment I'm very pleased with my new system
[Reply]
Tags:Array
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
Up