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General => General discussion => Topic started by: bobbarley on 08 October 2011, 10:14
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Well being a tech section and all, would be a shame not to get some computer chat on the go!
Just finished doing a mini upgrade on my computer. Was really looking forward to Battlefield 3 and a few other titles due out the back end of this year. However started to realise that the old machine wasn't quite cutting the mustard any more. Don't get me wrong it was still a fast computer, Core 2 Duo E8400 overclocked to 3.6Ghz with 4GB Ram and a GTX 260 graphics card. It just wasn't fast enough for what I wanted to do with it, and I refuse to play computer games with crappy low graphics.
£270 I've ended up with:
AMD Phenom X4 955 B/E 3.2Ghz
Asus M4A88T-M motherboard
8GB Corsair Vengeance RAM
GTX 460 768MB
Already had:
64MB OCZ Vertex 2 SSD drive
Corsair H50 watercooler
Some random gigage of hard drive space, lots and lots
X-Fi sound card
Speed difference in Windows is negligible, however in games it's a whole new ball park. Can now play Bad Company 2 with every setting maxed out, and Battlefield 3 I can play with everything on high. My 22" Samsung monitor only goes up to 1680*1050 which helps, I think at higher resolutions the GTX 460 might start to get tired, especially with it only having 768MB.
I wanted to start overclocking it, however had a bit of a cock up with the cooling. My H50 watercooler has different brackets depending on whether it's going onto an AMD or Intel motherboard. When I moved I misplaced the bracket for AMD boards as I'd never used it. This meant I had to use the stock cooler whilst looking for a solution. The stock cooler by the way is AWFUL! Very loud and the temperatures were way too high. Thermal compound on there was shocking as well.
I mentioned it on the Overclockers UK forum and a very nice person said he had an AMD bracket he didn't need as his block is on an Intel board, so he was kind enough to post the bracket to me! There are still decent people in this world after all. Got it this morning so just took everything out and re-assembled with the watercooler block on. Temperatures have gone down mid 40's to low 30's.
Very happy :afro:
What rigs are we running boys?
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I'm running...
E6600 core 2 duo 2.4 gGz
Asus Motherboard
Zalman copper heatsink
4 Gb Corsair ram
250 Gb System drive
1 Tb Files drive
XFS GTX260 896Mb
Two NEC 24" widescreen 1080p monitors
....currently building/desinging/getting parts for a new system which will be
i7 2600k 3.4 Ghz - Got
Asus P67 Motherboard with Intel sandybridge - Got
16 Gb of Patriot 1866 Mhz memory - Got
Watercooing - considering sealed Corsair system or modular system so that I can mount the radiator external and have scope to cool the graphics later if I wanted.
Two 2 Tb 138 Mbps hard drives in RAID 0 as system drives - Ordered
1 Tb hard drive for files - RAID 1 being considered
GTX570 graphics - GTX580 being considered
Will run the NEC monitors on this new system.
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hp pavilion dv6-2113sa
it works :grin:
Got good reviews!!
http://www.trustedreviews.com/hp-pavilion-dv6-2113sa-15-6in-laptop_Laptop_review
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Heres mine a 3 years old now,
Intel Core 2 Quad Q9650
8GB CORSAIR DOMINATOR 1066MHz
Asus GTX460
Asus P5K SE board
750w PSU
Asus Silent Night Copper II cooling
500GB drive
2TB drive
Looking to upgrade the processor, MB, RAM and a SSD drive in the new year
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I could really do with a bigger HD now that they're so cheap. Think I'm running about 570GB or something. Toying with going up to 16GB of RAM as well...
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64MB OCZ Vertex 2 SSD drive
Do you run the OS off this? If so, what's it like, speed-wise?
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Yeah I do, it's very good. Loads in a fraction of the time it did when I was using a HD to load Windows 7. Everything I load from the SSD is pretty much instant.
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main rig is;
i7 930 @ 3.6Ghz
12GB RAM
Asus P6X58D Premium
2 * EVGA 1GB 460GTX
120 Corsair Force 3 SSD (os and a couple of games(DCS-A-10, RO2))
1TB WD Caviar black (for files)
2 * 1TB Hitachi ultrastar drives RAID 0 (games and scratch)
250GB Hitachi Deskstar (downloads, general dump)
X-Fi Titanium Fatal1ty Professional
waiting for the ivybridge chips to come out in the new year then I'll be upgrading.
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Very nice. I'm going to see if the Bulldozer CPU's are worth a look at or not once they're released.
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i5 2500k running at 4ghz
asrock z68 extreme 4 mobo
8gb ocz intel xmp memory at 1800mhz
2 x 60gb ocz agility 3 ssd's in raid
2 ati hd 6870's in crossfire
asus xonar d2x sound card hooked up to logitech z5500 500w rms speaker system
antec p183 case
antec 750w modular psu
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Very nice. I'm going to see if the Bulldozer CPU's are worth a look at or not once they're released.
I doubt it, I've got nothing against AMD but they are so far behind at the moment, this article compares the architecture of the current and past chips on a clock for clock basis;
http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/processor-architecture-benchmark,review-32238-15.html
this shows that interms of clock for clock the old old core2 is faster than the current gen AMD chip, so unless they have something very very special up their selves then sandybridge is still the way forward (till ivy bridge comes out) the only thing AMD can do is throw more cores at the problem, the same way intel were ramping the clock speeds up on the P4 chips to compensate.
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Im running atm
AMD Phenom II x6 1090t
8GB DDR3 XMS3
Gefore GTX560Ti
It works for most thing at max, ie Crysis 2, BF3 beta, Shift 2 :)
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didn't AMD and intel used to be neck and neck constantly?
Sort of. Mhz for Mhz the old AMD's were quicker and cheaper, intel just ramped up the clock speeds to catch up. Now the tables have turned and Intel are by far the better chips, Mhz for Mhz, though AMD's are still cheaper.
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Main laptop:
Dell Latitude D620
Intel Core2 (Centrino Duo) @ 2Ghz
4GB RAM
Windows 7 Enterprise Ed (64bit)
Western Digital 500GB HDD
NVidia Quadro NVS110M 330MB
Also have
Dell Precision M laptop Intel 1.6Ghz CPU, 1GB RAM
Acer Aspire One netbook (9inch screen), Intel Atom 1.6Ghz 1.5GB, 160GB HDD
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didn't AMD and intel used to be neck and neck constantly?
Sort of. Mhz for Mhz the old AMD's were quicker and cheaper, intel just ramped up the clock speeds to catch up. Now the tables have turned and Intel are by far the better chips, Mhz for Mhz, though AMD's are still cheaper.
that's not quite true at the moment, the i5 chip / mobo combos are pretty much the same price and in some cases cheaper.
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i regret clicking on this thread now, i dont understand at all what you guys are talking about
i wish i did :embarassed:
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i regret clicking on this thread now, i dont understand at all what you guys are talking about
i wish i did :embarassed:
That's how I feel about some of the more techie car talk :grin:
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After reading up i think ill go for intel i5 at around £170 thats 3.3ghz out the box looks like it can handle up to 4ghz fairly easily with a decent fan sat on top of it.
By the way my zalman z9 case and coolermaster 650w have turned up :nerd:
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After reading up i think ill go for intel i5 at around £170 thats 3.3ghz out the box looks like it can handle up to 4ghz fairly easily with a decent fan sat on top of it.
By the way my zalman z9 case and coolermaster 650w have turned up :nerd:
good choice :afro:
one of my mates has that chip. he's using a hydro H60 (http://www.corsair.com/cpu-cooling-kits/hydro-series-water-cooling-cpu-cooler/hydro-series-h60-cpu-cooler.html) (these don't cost much more than a high end air cooler), he's running 5Ghz with a peak temp of 65 and idle 27 :shocked:
As you've said you could easily go 4Ghz on air though.
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After reading up i think ill go for intel i5 at around £170 thats 3.3ghz out the box looks like it can handle up to 4ghz fairly easily with a decent fan sat on top of it.
By the way my zalman z9 case and coolermaster 650w have turned up :nerd:
good choice :afro:
one of my mates has that chip. he's using a hydro H60 (http://www.corsair.com/cpu-cooling-kits/hydro-series-water-cooling-cpu-cooler/hydro-series-h60-cpu-cooler.html) (these don't cost much more than a high end air cooler), he's running 5Ghz with a peak temp of 65 and idle 27 :shocked:
As you've said you could easily go 4Ghz on air though.
Get it. I use the Hydro H50 and it's awesome!
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I don't get why you need to overclock?? (ok my old system was a celeron2 E series 2.2ghz clocked to a stable 4.0ghz)
anyhow my latest machine is
Intel i5 650 @3.2ghz
4gb RAM
NVidia GT460 2gb
1.5tb H/D (non ssd as these are still too new for me :smiley:)
Runs everything I need it too (and more!)
and my older machine
Intel Celeron2 E5500 2.2ghz (clocked to 4.0ghz)
OCR Ram 3gb (1x2gb & 1x1gb)
Asus Geoforce 9800GT 512mb
all running on 32 bit Vista (hence the lowish ram)
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i may not need to overclock, ill be more than happy if it performs out the box. its just nice to have the option going forward, a free upgrade if you like.
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Overclocking is great. It's extra power for free :afro:
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Overclocking is great. It's extra power for free :afro:
+1
no different from tuning your car, except you're getting free power for nothing*
* except slight more heat and electricity
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This Phenom won't overclock for sh!t. Tried everything and it won't go above 3.5Ghz.
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HP Pavillion DV6
i5 m460 2.5 GHz
8Gb RAM
Does the job.
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HP Pavillion DV6
i5 m460 2.5 GHz
8Gb RAM
Does the job.
I like HP laptops think there very good , and I was to move away from Apple then it would be an HP Envy.
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HP Pavillion DV6
i5 m460 2.5 GHz
8Gb RAM
Does the job.
I like HP laptops think there very good , and I was to move away from Apple then it would be an HP Envy.
Consider an envy from the US or Hong Kong etc, as the specs availabel when I looked a few months back were far better for simmilar money.
Envy's are good but I got this DV6 at a nice price.
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HP Pavillion DV6
i5 m460 2.5 GHz
8Gb RAM
Does the job.
I like HP laptops think there very good , and I was to move away from Apple then it would be an HP Envy.
Consider an envy from the US or Hong Kong etc, as the specs availabel when I looked a few months back were far better for simmilar money.
Envy's are good but I got this DV6 at a nice price.
There Track pads are awful though mate !
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Are they? never use them as I don't get on with them, always use a small USB mouse.
:smiley:
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Mac Pro 3,1 (early 2008 model)
14Gb RAM
5Tb HDD
Nvidia 8800GT graphics card
(http://i288.photobucket.com/albums/ll190/bobotheclown_gti/Screenshot2011-10-12at094127.png)
(http://i288.photobucket.com/albums/ll190/bobotheclown_gti/Screenshot2011-10-12at094303.png)
Still churns through graphic design work like a hot knife through butter even though it's over 3 years old. Most powerful computer I have ever owned and the quietest too.
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No wonder why! Quad core Xeon! :shocked: :grin: It's better than some of the severs we look after that are newer than 3 years old :laugh:
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AMD Athlon II X4 635 AM3
Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit
Asus M4N68T
4GB DDR3 1600mhz Corsair XMS3 (2x2gb)
500GB S-ATAII 3.0Gb/s & 160gb IDE HD (storage)
22x DVD±RW DL S-ATA
ATI Radeon HD 5770 1GB
Creative SB X-Fi Xtreme Audio
700W EZCool Tornado
CPU overclocked from 2.9Ghz to 3.6Ghz and is stable, however voltage is higher than I'd like. Currently 1.48v idle and will peak at 1.53v under load, but I've got an Akasa Venom cooler and temps don't go past 54C in prime95.
Graphics card is overclocked from 850mhz core and 1200mhz memory to 900mhz core and 1400mhz memory. It ran BF3 Beta on high without lag which is surprising bearing in mind the HD 5770 is not by any means a powerful card. I've got priorities in life but when I get round to it the next thing I'll buy for it is a better graphics card. There's some good deals out there and on overclockers you can buy a very very good card for £200 with 2 free games which you could sell for £35 - £40 each on ebay and get almost half of your money back!
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mines coming together, and considering ive never done this before im well happy it turns on lol.
Asus P8 Z68 - V
Intel i5 2500k 3.3ghz
8gb Corsair vengence DDR3 1600mhz (2x4gb)
OCZ agility 3, 120gb SSD
Cooler master 650w 80+
Main things to do are windows 7 and a graphics card for BF3
Currently running on Linux11 mint 64bit, and its rapid, cannot believe the boot time.
(http://i199.photobucket.com/albums/aa226/Dollycupra/Screenshot-1.png)