State of the union, help me choose/design new PC

[e_dawg]

Hi everyone,

Haven't been around in a while as I've put computers in general on the back burner (for what seems like an eternity now, because I feel completely lost when I see what's on the market these days). Consequently, I have a lot of questions, and little perspective. Wondering if you could help.

First of all, can anyone deliver a state of the union of sorts? Where are we at now?

For video cards, at one point in time, I recall ATI having taken the leadership position in video cards, with nVidia struggling to keep up with massive, power-hungry cards and wanting to resurrect SLI.

For hard drives, SATA seemed to take over and command queuing became a discussion topic. Capacity doesn't seem to be increasing as much, nor does performance.

Motherboards... no clue on this one. Is Socket 939 fulfilling its promise to be the AMD platform of longevity? What is Intel using? Has PCI Express made AGP and PCI obsolete?

CPUs... Intel vs AMD? Is AMD still the enthusiats' choice?... Is everything 64-bit and dual core now? (what happened? that was fast!)

Would some kind individual(s) please clue this former PC enthusiast in? I feel like a bit of a newbie these days.

 

[Pradeep]

ATI and Nvidia cointinue to plow ahead with expensive, power sucking behemoth video cards. If buying, you may want to wait till November for the latest generation of nvidia stuff to come out, I believe ATI is further out in January 07.

SATA is definitely the way to go for hard drives, capacity has increased to 750GB.

Socket 939 has been replaced with Socket AM2 (supports DDR2 basically). If buying new, AM2 would probably be best as it will support quad-core CPUs next year. PCI express is well in vogue for video cards, often with two x16 slots so you can run two vid cards in SLI.

The current Intel CPUs (Core 2 Duo) totally rape what AMD has available. Plus they overclock very nicely. Only downside is the mobos are a little on the pricy side.

 

[Will Rickards]

Hi everyone,

Good to see you

First of all, can anyone deliver a state of the union of sorts? Where are we at now?

Probably some are more qualified then me to make the state of the union but the state is as follows. CPU makers are going towards multi-core chips not just dual and the focus on clock speed isn't there. The focus now is on power consumption and a metric of performance per watt. The newest support 64 bit but not many are actually running a 64 bit OS or apps on them.

As for video cards, nvidia is top dog again but any of the high end cards are requiring huge fan heat sink combos to the point of requiring the room of two slots on your motherboard. If you play games maybe your concerned. If not just buy one of the low end ones that meets vista's minimum requirements. But honestly in the mid to low end there are ATI and nvidia cards that will meet your needs. SLI is here and in force with both ATI and nvidia having a version of it. Again if you play games, great. If not, whatever. And yes PCI express has made AGP and PCI obsolete.

For hard drives, SATA is here even though we still grumble about the flaky connectors. All makers (seagate) are less focused on performance than they used to be. They are more concerned with size, heat and noise. They are too busy increasing size. 1TB = 1000GB are rumored for release next year. The big news is of course perpendicular recording. Where the bits are not flat but standing tall. This allows greater areal density. Seagate bought maxtor. Hitachi bought IBM's hard drive business. And there is some talk about a deal involving Samsung. WD is still kicking. Most here prefer Samsung drives and stay away from WD. Although WD does have the Raptor, the only 10K RPM SATA drive. Yes people talked about command queueing but really it is a multi-user thing anyway. If you are running a file server, great. If not, just check the benchmarks. There was the warranty fiasco as well. Many manufacturer's dropped their warranties to 1 year. Now I think they've all upped them back to 3 years.

SCSI on the desktop seems even more niche than it already was. But a nice fujitsu 15K RPM drive as a boot drive and a large sata drive for data is still the way I run things.

Motherboards... for as was said, AMD X2 = AM2 right now. Intel you want the core 2 duo chip. They are both dual core. They are similar in performance with the winner being intel usually since the core 2 duo release.
Generally you either get a board with SLI or without. Difference being the number of PCI slots. With SLI you probably get one. Without maybe two - three. They are trying to transition to PCI express. Only problem is the add-in cards aren't all pci express yet. So PCI isn't dead for add-in cards yet. AMD still is the king for budget / lower cost PC.

Other trends, smaller boxes, smaller motherboards, larger power supplies can you say 500W. Something has to power those video cards.

 

[Will Rickards]

Oh and AMD just finished the acquisition of ATI.

 

[GIANT]

...SCSI on the desktop seems even more niche than it already was. But a nice fujitsu 15K RPM drive as a boot drive and a large sata drive for data is still the way I run things.

The transition from parallel SCSI (Ultra 320) to Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) is definitely taking place. SAS is quickly replacing parallel SCSI in the server racks and in higher-end workstations. Mixed SAS and SATA environments are being embraced by the cutting edge technical and enterprise crowds.

10kRPM 2.5-inch SAS drives are being deployed in server environments now. High performance 2.5-inch drive technology will surely start to trickle down to the desktop in the coming 2 or 3 years.

Long-overdue SATA optical drives are already trickling out.

Motherboards... for as was said, AMD X2 = AM2 right now. Intel you want the core 2 duo chip. They are both dual core.

Socket 939 is *quickly* becoming passé. AM2 (Socket "F") is here to stay for a while, until AM3 comes along in 2008. Core2 Duo is also here to stay for at least a year, when they will be replaced by 45 nm Core2 Duo processors that will require about 35 watts but still be able to out-process anything that's currently available for personal computer use. Do not confuse Core2 Duo with Core Duo or dual-core Pentium 4. Dual-core Pentium 4 = crapola.

They are trying to transition to PCI express. Only problem is the add-in cards aren't all pci express yet. So PCI isn't dead for add-in cards yet.

The slowest form of PCI Express (1x) is at least as fast as 66 MHz 64-bit parallel PCI. PCI Express communicates in full duplex mode and is hot-pluggable. Mobos with mixed PCI Express and parallel PCI slots are using PCIe-to-PCI-parallel bridge chips to provide parallel PCI slots for legacy support. PCI Express provides 100% full-duplex bandwidth to each PCI slot, whereas parallel PCI is a shared bus architecture.

 

[e_dawg]

Hmm... lots to consider. I'm thinking of getting 2 systems, actually. (1) a basic PC that won't be used for anything demanding, and (2) a more powerful PC that can be used for video capture, vid editing, encoding, etc.

What do you think of these pre-built systems from a local vendor? I assume the Celeron based system could suffice for a basic PC. Could the AMD x2 system suffice for basic video production? They seem to be a pretty good value (in fact, they just discontinued their Core 2 Duo system for $369 CDN possibly because it was too good for the price):

http://www.canadacomputers.com/index.php?do=ShowSystem

 

[e_dawg]

... when considering the prices in the website, remember that (1) they are CDN $ (divide by 1.15 to get USD) and (2) we don't have access to dirt cheap parts or killer Dell promotional deals that you have in the US.

 

[e_dawg]

BTW, thanks for the detailed reply, Will. I know it can be tiresome to condense a couple years of PC history into a single comprehensive post.

 

[Mercutio]

The sweet spot CPUs are the Athlon64/3800 ($99), the Athlon64x2/3800 ($140) and the Core 2 E6300 ($200).

My recent experiences as a system builder tell me that most people feel that the single-core AMD 3800 is faster than a dual-core 3800 by a large enough margin that it's worthy of repeated comment. I bought some cheap dual cores and ended up going back to the 64/3800 for almost everything.

1GB RAM is utterly standard on everyday builds now. DDR2-667 when dealing with DDR2. The faster forms don't make computers any faster. It's still hard to justify 2GB of RAM for most people, but it's not uncommon.

In the land of cases, I'm building with Antec NSK-series at the moment, when possible, and inexpensive Foxconn cases when not. My customers seem to like and prefer micro-ATX systems and mini-ATX cases.

My motherboard of choice is generally a Gigabyte nVidia 6100-based board. When I do install a video card it's almost always an ATI x1600 or a gaming card of some sort. One of the big things that keeps me away from Intel systems even now is the awful expense of current Intel motherboards and the poor (zero?) availability of integrated-graphics boards.

I'm basically installing 160GB drives at this point. I'm not picky about SATA vs. IDE. Whatever is cheap and made by Samsung or Hitachi. I note that a typical business desktop at the moment seems to have around 10GB of data on its hard disk.

NEC makes the good DVD burners.

Software-wise, I try very hard to convince individuals to purchase Acronis TrueImage Home ($25) and Webroot Spysweeper ($25). I install Paint.NET, AVG Antivirus, Nero 6 OEM, PowerDVD 6 OEM (those come with the burners I buy), OpenOffice or Office 2003 (for college kids who get it free from their campus bookstore), K-Lite Mega Codec Pack, nVu, SmartFTP, Firefox (+adblock plus, IE Tab, dictionarysearch, linky and forecastfox enhanced), Thunderbird, Hamachi, GAIM, SpaceMonger, Acrobat Reader 7, Spywareblaster, Adaware, Hijack This, Spybot S&D, the Picture-Resize Power Toy, Java, uTorrent and WinAmp. I also set up a large hosts file and populate people's bookmarks and IE Favorites with useful things.
For people who don't buy TrueImage, I usually put an OEM copy of Ghost 2003 on their PC.

And when I say I "install" software, I really mean that those things are all part of pre-prepped images.

 

[Buck]

A lot of excellent information has already been given, so I can only mention some of the common items I currently include as a system builder. Here are some of my base configurations, which of course change to the customer’s need:

Office

CPU: AMD SDA3400CNBOX
Motherboards: Gigabyte GA-M51GM-S2G
Memory: Kingston KVR533D2N4/1G
Case: Antec SLK1650B
FDD: Mitsumi D359M3BLACK
SATA HDD: WD WD800JD
DVD: Pioneer DVR-111DBK
VGA: Gigabyte GV-RX13128D-RH
Monitors: AG Neovo F-419R12
Keyboard/Mouse: Microsoft N90-00076
Speaker: Logitech X-120e
OS: Windows XP Professional
Office Suite: Microsoft Office Small Business Edition

Home

CPU: AMD SDA3400CNBOX
Motherboards: Gigabyte GA-M55PLUS-S3G
Memory: Kingston KVR533D2N4/1G
Case: Antec NSK4400
FDD: Mitsumi FA404A-BLACK
SATA HDD: Samsung SP2504C
DVD: Pioneer DVR-111DBK
VGA: Gigabyte GV-NX76G256D-RH
Monitors: AG Neovo F-419R12
Keyboard/Mouse: Microsoft N90-00076
Speaker: Logitech X-530
OS: Windows XP Media Center Edition
Office Suite: Microsoft Office Business Edition

Gaming

CPU: AMD ADA4000IAA6CS
Motherboards: Gigabyte GA-M59SLI-S5
Memory: Kingston KVR667D2N5/1G
Case: Antec Solo
PSU: Antec NeoHE-550
FDD: Mitsumi FA404A-BLACK
SATA HDD: Samsung SP2504C
DVD: Pioneer DVR-111DBK
VGA: Gigabyte GV-NX79T256DP-RH-ED
Monitors: Samsung 204B
Keyboard/Mouse: Microsoft N90-00076
Speaker: Logitech X-530
OS: Windows XP Media Center Edition
Office Suite: Microsoft Office Business Edition

Professional

CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo BX80557E6600
Motherboards: Intel BOXDG965WHMKR
Memory: Kingston KVR667D2N5/1G x 2
Case: Antec Solo
PSU: Antec TP3-550
FDD: Mitsumi FA404A-BLACK
SATA HDD: WD WD1500ADFD
DVD: Pioneer DVR-111DBK
VGA: PNY VCQFX560-PCIE-PB-V
Monitors: Samsung 204B
Keyboard/Mouse: Microsoft N90-00076
Speaker: Logitech Z-4
OS: Windows XP Professional
Office Suite: Microsoft Office Small Business Edition

Professional II

CPU: Intel Xeon BX805565130P x 2
Motherboards: Supermicro X7DAE-O
Memory: Kingston KVR667D2D8F5/1G x 4
Case: Supermicro CSE-743T-645B
FDD: Mitsumi FA404A-BLACK
SATA HDD: WD WD1500ADFD
DVD: Pioneer DVR-111DBK
VGA: PNY VCQFX1500-PCIE-PB
Monitors: Samsung 204B
Keyboard/Mouse: Microsoft N90-00076
Speaker: Logitech Z-2300
OS: Windows XP Professional
Office Suite: Microsoft Office Small Business Edition

 

[Santilli]

EDAWG;
After looking at those computers, the motherboards are my only concern. The prices appear very good, but they are sans the MSFT tax.

I'm currently working on a lowend machine, using windows 2000, Quantum LM, good BX440 motherboard, 512 mb ram, P3 450 mhz, and, it's fine for webstuff, email, etc. However, certain websites, with streaming video, and flash, etc. like www.surfline.com, will take 100% Processor, with about 150 mb of ram usage.

Plays mpegs at about 50% processor.

My guess is that Celeron should be just fine.
As for the video editing stuff, I notice a BIG improvement using duals, vs. single athlon 3000+. The Video program I was using, importing VHS tape, through a hardware converter, still used nearly 80% of two processors.

There was another thread around here, talking about lowend computers, but, I can't seem to find it.

I'd have a look. David, Buck, and Merc had some very nice systems for a basic computer, a bit nicer then the one you are looking at.

Greg

 

[Santilli]

You might look at this thread, and Davids new mini:

http://www.storageforum.net/forum/showthread.php?t=3472&page=3

Greg

 

[e_dawg]

Hmm... very helpful replies, guys. That gives me enough to get my bearings and mull over countless component and pre-built system options on the Internet.

Merc, in the thread Santilli linked to above, Dave was saying that he had audio problems and asked if you were using 64-bit, to which you responded "Nope. And stupid things like that are entirely the reason why."

Is there a sentiment these days that going 64-bit is buggy... and if so, specifically the CPUs and/or the software/OS?

 

[e_dawg]

My recent experiences as a system builder tell me that most people feel that the single-core AMD 3800 is faster than a dual-core 3800 by a large enough margin that it's worthy of repeated comment. I bought some cheap dual cores and ended up going back to the 64/3800 for almost everything.

Would you say that this is due to the current lack of consideration given to optimizing for dual-core CPUs when coding applications? Could the tables be turned, making the dual-core systems faster with the next version of various software -- perhaps as easily as by using a dual-core optimized compiler?

 

[Bozo]

64 Bit operating systems are lacking in drivers. XP doesn't have drivers for basic things like NICs.
Some of the drivers that are available are quite buggy.
There is a service pack in the works for XP 64Bit that makes a huge improvement in the operating system, but drivers are still an issue.

Maybe it's better in the server and /or the Linux side of things???

Bozo :joker:

 

[Adcadet]

Does anybody have experience with some of the new Intel P645 boards like the Abit AB9Pro, MSI Neo-F, or Asus P5B-E? I'm looking for a solid motherboard for a Core 2 Duo chip. I'm considering the Intel board that Buck uses but I would like the ability to overclock slightly.

 

[Bozo]

Some of the newer Intel boards allow some overclocking. It's labeled "Burn In Mode" or something equally silly.
I wouldn't give you a wooden nickel for an Asus board. :twistd:

Bozo :joker:

 

[Mercutio]

Given a choice between an Asus, Abit or MSI board, I think I'd vote "None of the Above."
I've had better luck with MSI than the others. Sorta. I say that as I look at the two dead MSI nv6100-based boards that're here on my desk.
Asus = Crap
Abit = The dirt that's under the Asus.

 

[Adcadet]

Buck, have you had any difficulties with the Intel 965 board? I might happily trade the ability to overclock if I just knew that everything would work. Boy I miss my old Tyan Tiger and dual P3's.

 

[Santilli]

Edawg:

I also had a similar Windows XP 64 bit sound problem, that went away when we went to XP. Drivers sound about right.
MSFT looks like they are learning from Apple, putting out buggy software, and, having the consumer suffer, or, debug it for them. Still, it's pretty amazing how long it's taking for 64 bit drivers to come out...

Don't you think that very soon, everything is going to be 64 bit, and drivers, and software compiled for at least dual cores is going to be industry standard, changing the perception, and speed of all this new stuff?

I'm guessing here, but my general observation is that there is more to designing motherboards then you get with the lower end boards. While I'm very happy with the Athlon 3000's we have, both Gigabyte motherboards, and I think they are a very sensible build, I'm not convinced that their dual motherboards, or dual core boards maybe the cutting edge, or equal to proven designs, of such companies as Supermicro, and Intel. I think once such companies are building from the ground up for dual cores, and, most software is designed as such, the speed benefits, in multi-tasking, will become apparent. I often wonder when booting, and doing certain tasks if the bottlenecks on the Gigabyte boards are data feed channels.
I'm getting around 73 mb/sec on both machines with Cheetah X15's, IIRC. Access time is very good.

One of these days it would be fun to hook up a dual cheetah raid, and see if that gives the Athlons the same snap the dual Xeons have, at a measly 2.8ghz.

Thoughts that come to mind in building a 'new' system for me would be looking at some of the better motherboard makers, and here I mean Supermicro, Tyan, and Intel, and, see if it would be feasible, money wise, to buy a dual processor designed, or dual core, dual processor designed motherboard from them?

I currently see no reason to replace this dual machine, for a long time to come. I'd also check and see if your video and movie software supports dual processors, and what they recommend for hardware for their software?

That does bring up another question:
What is the best video editing/movie making software on the market currently???

Adacadet's comment about the dual P3's got me thinking.
Except for games, and, it's rare this thing won't run them fast enough, I don't see much reason to move. I guess one day I'll have to consider getting a better video card, then the ATI XL 800, but, that would mean going to a new motherboard...

Finally, I'm looking forward to one of the boot X15's dying, and loading this machine with 2003 server, with a few tweaks, and, that should add another level of speed, above XP Pro...

Greg


Greg

 

[Adcadet]

IIRC, I went from dual P3 700's to a single Newcastle XP3000 (2.0 GHz), which I'm currently running. It is faster overall, especially when I have a single CPU-hogging application (rare outside of the occasional video game), but I miss the snappiness that comes from a dualie. I hoping that my Christmas Conroe system will bring some of that back.

 

[Mercutio]

Greg, there's a LOT of stuff going on under the hood with making threaded applications that can properly take advantage of multiple cores. The simple fact is that many applications that ARE threaded already, but their child processes are so simple that there's almost no real-world benefit. A perfect example is printing in MS Word. Printing is its own thread. How often is your single-processor PC tied up with that?

The "we wish it were" problem is that truly CPU-intensive stuff has either been coded for multiple CPUs all along (Image and Video manipulation, programming compilers etc), or else the overhead of using a threaded process model isn't conducive to the standard application model (most 3D games that weren't written by John Carmack).

AMD is working on a binary optimizer that will re-create non-threaded, monolithic applications as programs that are streamlined to be faster on SMP systems. That MIGHT not be a productive thing, but it'll probably happen. DEC used to have a similar system for creating native binaries for Windows programs on Alpha hardware. The end result was that no one wrote native software for Alpha machines, and it died as a Windows platform.

Also, we're going to have more cores soon. I do not think this is highly productive for most office or home PCs, but it's coming soon enough.

An interesting aside to this is that PCs are effectively becoming more mainframe-like, with lots of "lesser" CPUs for parallel operations and fairly staggering I/O. I guess that makes handhelds the new desktop PCs.

To answer your other question:
For true video editing, I like S*ny Vegas better than Premier. I almost never need to do anything like that, and neither does anyone else who isn't doing filmmaking.
For simple work (e.g. format shifting) with minimal hassles I usually use Nero Vision.
For classroom work and ease of instruction I use Ulead MovieFactory 5.

 

[Mercutio]

Greg, there's a LOT of stuff going on under the hood with making threaded applications that can properly take advantage of multiple cores. The simple fact is that many applications that ARE threaded already, but their child processes are so simple that there's almost no real-world benefit. A perfect example is printing in MS Word. Printing is its own thread. How often is your single-processor PC tied up with that?

The "we wish it were" problem is that truly CPU-intensive stuff has either been coded for multiple CPUs all along (Image and Video manipulation, programming compilers etc), or else the overhead of using a threaded process model isn't conducive to the standard application model (most 3D games that weren't written by John Carmack).

AMD is working on a binary optimizer that will re-create non-threaded, monolithic applications as programs that are streamlined to be faster on SMP systems. That MIGHT not be a productive thing, but it'll probably happen. DEC used to have a similar system for creating native binaries for Windows programs on Alpha hardware. The end result was that no one wrote native software for Alpha machines, and it died as a Windows platform.

Also, we're going to have more cores soon. I do not think this is highly productive for most office or home PCs, but it's coming soon enough.

An interesting aside to this is that PCs are effectively becoming more mainframe-like, with lots of "lesser" CPUs for parallel operations and fairly staggering I/O. I guess that makes handhelds the new desktop PCs.

To answer your other question:
For true video editing, I like S*ny Vegas better than Premier. I almost never need to do anything like that, and neither does anyone else who isn't doing filmmaking.
For simple work (e.g. format shifting) with minimal hassles I usually use Nero Vision.
For classroom work and ease of instruction I use Ulead MovieFactory 5.

 

[Santilli]

Mercutio:
Thanks.

How would you rate MSFT's different OS as far as using multiple processors? I've been playing with 2000 Pro, getting ready to sell the P3 450 mhz, and, I'm just amazed by the zip, compared to the XP Athlon 3000+. XP runs well on my dual Xeons, but, I'm really wondering what it would be like with 2003 Server, which is MUCH faster on the Athlon 3000+, even with the fixes to get it to run games.

I think I'm getting rid of the single processor version I've got of 2000 Pro, and, I'll hold on to the multiple processor version, perhaps for one of these new dual core processors.

Greg

 

[Mercutio]

They're all the same, Greg. No differences at all. They all use the same process model and scheduler. There's a slight but observable difference in system speed that comes from having newer or older versions of the Windows kernel, but NT4 just as capable of running multithreaded apps as Server 2003 is.

 

[iGary]

...I think I'm getting rid of the single processor version I've got of 2000 Pro, and, I'll hold on to the multiple processor version, perhaps for one of these new dual core processors.

Windows 2000 Professional (Workstation) supports either 1 or 2 processor cores -- total per system. With a system using a pair of dual-core microprocessors, Windows 2000 Pro will detect those 4 cores as 4 microprocessors. If you wish to continue using Windows 2000 with a workstation using a pair of dual-core microprocessors, you will have to go with Windows 2000 Server, since it supports up to 4 microprocessors.

Windows XP Pro SP2 and Windows 2003 SP1/R2 will detect a pair of dual-core microprocessors correctly as 2 distinct microprocessors, not as 4 microprocessors, since these "multi-core aware" operating systems count sockets -- not cores -- in their licensing algorithms.

 

[Mercutio]

Merc, in the thread Santilli linked to above, Dave was saying that he had audio problems and asked if you were using 64-bit, to which you responded "Nope. And stupid things like that are entirely the reason why."

Is there a sentiment these days that going 64-bit is buggy... and if so, specifically the CPUs and/or the software/OS?

There's nothing wrong with the 64 bit OS. 64 bit drivers for the 64 bit OS are not as ubiquitous and I've found them to sometimes lack the features of their 32-bit brethren. You also run in to goofy stuff like apps not working because they have 16-bit install programs.

XP64 *is* faster than standard XP. Because it has a newer kernel, not because it's 64-bit. But 64-bit apps have basically zero availability in Windows-land right now, driver support is spotty at best and plus, you have to buy another copy of Windows. Why bother? There's more of a benefit in Server 2003 - which has the same fast kernel, a smaller memory footprint and tons of nifty server-y stuff to play with, plus better driver and application compatibility. It costs more, sure, but there's also way more of an up-side to having it.

 

[Mercutio]

Windows 2000 Professional (Workstation) supports either 1 or 2 processor cores -- total per system. With a system using a pair of dual-core microprocessors, Windows 2000 Pro will detect those 4 cores as 4 microprocessors

... IIRC that's only an issue for some Xeon and X-tr33m edition Pentium chips...

 

[Mercutio]

http://www.technologyreview.com/read_article.aspx?id=17682&ch=infotech

 

[ddrueding]

64-bit windows is still more hasstle than it's worth. For the record, there is no way to get even the latest (released a few weeks ago) version of Act to run on anything 64-bit. I ended up running it in a VM. My sound drivers wouldn't run, neither would the Azalia drivers for my onboard sound.

Went back to Server 2003 Standard R2 and it's doing great.

 

[Will Rickards]

Printing is its own thread. How often is your single-processor PC tied up with that?

It isn't about CPU time with printing in a separate thread. It is about responsiveness of the main application. Printing involves communication with another device and the delays and interrupt handling that comes with that. Kind of like handling I/O to the hard drive in a separate thread.

 

[Bozo]

SP2 for XP 64bit should be out soon. In my testing adding SP2 was like turning on the after-burners. Plenty stable too.

But....still a problem with drivers from companies outside of MS. And lack of programs that take advantage of 64bit.

Maybe in another 5 years :crap:

Bozo :joker:

 

[Adcadet]

What do people like for power supplies? I guess with the Conroe chips high wattage is less of an issue.

Is this Coolermaster a good deal? http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16817171007&ATT=17-171-007&CMP=OTC-B1zrat3

 

[Bozo]

I have been buying the Antec NEO series of high efficient power supplies.

http://www.antec.com/us/pro_p_NeoHE.html

Bozo :joker:

 

[Handruin]

If I were in need of a new PS, I'd probably buy one of the Seasonic S12 Energy Plus.

 

[Santilli]

Second the Seasonics. Expensive, but, very consistent juice, with near 0 fluctuation. Combine with a good UPS, and no worries, or blown computers like I had this year in school.

Kind of curious about Windows 2000 Server. Turns out with my floppy installs of Windows 2000 Pro, they include a disk that says Windows 2000 Professional Server, and Advanced Server?

How does one go about using the floppy install, and, for a workstation, is anything to be gained by installing 2000 Server?

thanks

Greg

 

[Buck]

Buck, have you had any difficulties with the Intel 965 board? I might happily trade the ability to overclock if I just knew that everything would work. Boy I miss my old Tyan Tiger and dual P3's.

Nope, no problems. I've never had problems with Intel boards. Even when trying out the i820 and i840 chipsets with RDRAM years back, the boards were rock solid. The memory was an anti-climax, but stability and reliability have always been good for me. More recent chipsets like the i845, i915 and now the i965 have all worked out well. My main test system for data recovery, cloning, testing, CD/DVD burning, etc. is an i845 based Intel board - it runs 24 hours a day without any hiccups.

 

[Bozo]

I have over 130 Intel systems running in an industrial setting. Never had a problem with any of them. Most run 24/7 with some being on line for 5 years.
They might not have all the bells and whistles, but for reliability and stability you can't beat them.

Bozo :joker:

 

[Mercutio]

Intel for Intel, Gigabyte for AMD. Very simple.
Wish Intel had some non-sucky onboard graphics options, though. I'd rather have S3 Unichrome than i940.

 

[Santilli]

SUPERMICRO AND Intel for Intel, Gigabyte for AMD. Very simple.
Wish Intel had some non-sucky onboard graphics options, though. I'd rather have S3 Unichrome than i940.

There, Mercutio.
Fixed that for you.;-)

Greg