Your systems and impressions

[Oilslick]

So i just finished building a machine for audio engineering purposes, and before it was all said and done I decided to take it for a test drive in WoW.  I got a bunch of tells and geeked out in vent for a while so I thought I'd post the new gear in case someone else in the guild was thinking about building their own machine soon.  It then dawned on me that maybe anyone who's built their own system lately could add their system to the thread and their impressions of it, giving others inclined to build their own stuff a little relief from all the research that goes into building a new setup.

Motherboard:
http://usa.asus.com/product.aspx?P_ID=WqMFKNkS6ZjDLx4S&templete=2

Graphics card:
http://www.hisdigital.com/un/product2-478.shtml
(I'm only running one card...no sli or crossfire)

CPU:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819115225

Ram:
http://www.gskill.com/products.php?index=200
6 gigs worth

OS:
Dual boot WinXP Enterprise + Win7 64 bit Enterprise

Impressions:
My initial impressions are all good...I'm running everything at default settings right now except I've enabled my graphics card to throttle up to 790 on the GPU and 950x2 on the ram when it experiences any load.  It isn't really necessary...only seems to boost fps by single digits on this system.  With graphics all maxxed out, but shadows turned all the way down - I was getting 114 fps in dal at full resolution.  That really surprised me since this video card is by no means a top of the line card.  So far so good, a bonus to the motherboard is the number of simultaneous PCIe slots, which is great for the studio.  One thing that stinks is there are no PCI slots, so putting old cards in won't work.  One thing to note if you get these parts, get a big case with big fans for cooling it - air cooling works fine, and the bigger the fans generally the quieter they run.  My particular setup is absolutely silent...and I'm not using anything fancy like water cooling, i've just got a giant case with 140mm fans.  I'm not really noticing much performance difference yet between xp 32 bit and win7 64...but I've only experimented for a couple of hours now.

So, what have you put together recently - or a pre built/store bought machine even - and what are your impressions so far of how it's handling wow and day to day activities?

[Kothnok]

Very cool, Oil. =)

> I'm not really noticing much performance difference yet between xp 32 bit and win7 64...
Nor will you.  WoW is a 32 bit program, so bumping up the OS to 64 won't really speed anything up for WoW until it too becomes a 64 bit program.

[Avelandra]

Oil, your comp is pimpin, no other words for it.

I built my own about 3 years ago, and am still using it. Its a budget model built for gaming.

MB: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813138264

It has a BIOSTAR TForce6100 with a 939 Socket on it. Micro ATX form factor. Its have a 1000MHz FSB, which was pretty decent when I got it. It only has 1 PCI Express 16 and 1 slot, and 2 PCI slots, but i didn't need much more when I bought it and still dont.

CPU: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819103562

AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ 2GHz 2x 512KB L2 Cache and Daul Core. It was very decent when new, and it runs over clocked to 2.2 GHz all the time. I got a ThermalTake cooling tower, which moves 54.1 CFM, and has a 120mm fan, so it is quiet. Also keeps my CPU at around 35 to 40 C during normal ops.

Graphics: http://www.nvidia.com/object/product_geforce_9400gt_us.html

NVidia GeForce 9400 GT with a 550 MHz GPU and 512 onboard. It runs great. Its a workhorse, and I make it work. I built this for gaming, and with that the card's speed fits in perfectly, and makes the machine not in the 10 out of 10, but the 8-9 out of 10, which is all I need, and fit my budget perfectly. Its the only part I've upgraded.

RAM: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820211014

2 x 1 GB Sticks of Ram, PC 3200 DDR 400. They work great, and came with  heat sinks on the RAM. I didn't over clock it, but it still works well.

Peripherals: I have a standard Wired Keyboard and an Infrared Mouse. Infrared's advantage: It works on glass, and anything else, minus a heating pad.

I like my system. It works great, runs multiple apps like a champ, and works extremely well for what I need. Its running all original, except for a DVD Drive and the graphics card. I have a modular power supply which works great and helps with air flow, and powers it all.

Peace

[Oilslick]

Very cool, Oil. =)

> I'm not really noticing much performance difference yet between xp 32 bit and win7 64...
Nor will you.  WoW is a 32 bit program, so bumping up the OS to 64 won't really speed anything up for WoW until it too becomes a 64 bit program.

except that i'm using a 64 bit video driver and the system sees and properly uses the 6 gigs of triple channel ram in one of them...and the other well...but you're right, i'm not really noticing much difference at all yet.  We'll see in a raid with all the graphics that tend to choke framerates flying around.

[Oilslick]

Woot!  Thanks Ave!  I wanted to put newegg links to all my parts but when they run out of stock, they vanish from the web.  So i couldn't get links for all my parts this week

[Urmyboyblue]

thats a Sick System Oil....other then the Intel parts.  but ill let it slide

i just build one myself a couple weeks ago....bummed AMD released the 6 core like two days before i built it and i couldn't afford the extra money. (AMD Fan)

CPU:
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=5692033&Sku=A79-1965

Mobo:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128435&cm_re=gigabyte_890-_-13-128-435-_-Product

Ram:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227478

HD:
took me a while to make up my mind on this.  went with SSD boot up time from the time i hit the button is clocking at around 34 seconds without messing with any settings yet.  its been fun game load times are cut in half or better.
loaded into Dal with good graphics setting (would have done better but I'm using on-board graphics till i can afford a nice card.)  but it took about 1 and a half to 2 seconds to fully load.  so far I'm happy with it!
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820139133

so far it has been great! soooooo much faster then my laptop that had a duel core 2.0 processor in it (shrieks in terror) it runs wow in ultra even without a good vid card but its a bit sluggish and to be honest i really don't need it it be on ultra....i have been playing with every detail turned off till now it was like playing in paper cut out world...anything is better!  still haven't really tested it. never played with system settings much to tweak performance but i have been reading up on it....just don't really wanna try it to much with a system i cant replace lol.

[Shadowwolf]

My dual FX-74's still kick a lot of ass on the processor front. Was the best investment I made, tho it was rough on cost when I got em, haha. Ive been an AMD fan since Intel started using coded serial numbers on its processors with the P3 line and up. I dont like applications having the ability to track hardware serial numbers like that and report it to websites and whatnot. Just irks my privacy protection nature.

[Oilslick]

I've been an AMD fan for a long time as well...unfortunately I'm constrained by software/hardware compatibility requirements due to Digidesign/Avid systems.   

However, most bios' include the ability to block cpu serial numbers.

[un4]

Worship.

Actually, I've gotten pretty damn good at shading...

[Oilslick]

I know this is an old thread but...

Many of you know that I often play from a laptop due to my working environment.  On my last hitch out, the fan on the gpu decided to bite the big one.  The old laptop was still great as I'd upgraded it as much as is possible (best mobile processor for the socket, great ram, solid state drives, etc.) but it wasn't possible to replace that video card or the fan on it without spending an arm and a leg for a replacement part from the manufacturer.  So I started my quest for a new laptop.

Knowing that Dell had bought out alienware - I decided to start my search not at the big name brands, but instead at the manufacturers of those brands that might have been developing new laptop systems but didn't win Dell's bidding process.  I struck gold.

Many of you may know MSI (microstar international) as a brand that makes motherboards, video cards, and other miscellaneous hardware.  Their bread and butter is actually manufacturing computers and putting whatever company's logo that hired them to do the manufacturing on the plastics.  After the AlienDell buyout, they decided they could bring a dose of reality to the market - and released some seriously powerful laptops on the market at prices that should really tick off the competition that value their brand recognition more than their performance at this point and time.

It's still not a "cheap" laptop at ~$1500 US,  but if you take a look at what's under the hood and tried to get the same or better from any other main brand, you'd have to spend anywhere from $3600 to $4500 US.  As a matter of fact, at the time of this post, there is only one alienware that you can consider definitely better than this one in its stock configuration, but it easily tops the price range due to it's dual video cards in SLI setup in a laptop.  Another way to look at it for those that aren't familiar with the high end brands:  this thing completely smokes the best and most expensive gaming laptop you can find at BestBuy online or in store today, at a fraction of the cost.

Here it is, the MSI GX660R-060US.
Link: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834152211

Yes, it's a 15.6" display - however, 17" models are available with either top end nvidia or ati graphics cards.  Some reviews gripe about the screen's off angle viewing.  I think MSI changed the screen since those reviews were made as my off angle viewing is as good as I've seen.  Having been using a 17" laptop for years now, I was actually hunting for something slightly smaller as 17" in a laptop really is a bit much to lug around.  It is the only laptop currently on the market with built in usb3.0, and the only one I've been able to find with triple channel ram.

I should have WoW up and running on it later today sometime, and I'll post a bit on my personal impressions of its performance once I give it a test drive.

Some of the things I've already done to it before even getting started may change it's performance and my report somewhat:
I disabled the Raid0, switched the bios to AHCI, and replaced the drives with 180 gig corsair force series ssd's.
I removed the thermal paste from the video card (this one is replaceable by the way) and cpu (also socketed and replaceable) heat sinks and used Arctic Silver 5.

My impressions thus far are simple: this thing is smokin'!  That being said, I wouldn't run out to buy one right away unless you're in the market to get one right away like I was.  The reason for this is that the largest change to computer processors we've seen in ages is about to hit in January/February of 2011 with the release of cpu's with built in gpu's.  This sounds on the surface like it might be a bad thing for us gamers - but the advantages of having a gpu tied directly to the cpu are potentially immense, and with Intel and AMD both owning ATI and Nvidia now - there's a chance that they'll do it right.  This change in processor design will mean a huge architecture change from a hardware standpoint, and as good as this machine is now, and as upgradeable as it is - there is a great chance that it'll be total  in just a couple months.  That could be said at just about any time when buying computer equipment, but this change in design has the potential to be as big a change as going from punch cards to magnetic media was in the late 70's/early 80's.

[Kothnok]

... the release of cpu's with built in gpu's

Sounds to me like they are just taking dual core processors and re-purposing the second core into specifically a GPU.  It has potential to be a large paradigm shift, but the only way to make a GPU really shine is to back that up with a large cache that is separate from the CPU cache or else you merely starve one of the two processors and create a new botttleneck that cannot be fixed by upgrading a part of your computer.

I see this change as a great boon for the console market where upgrading parts of your machine causes the business suits to foam at the mouth in rage over it. Laptop market may see a big benefit as well.  Desktop market I'm not so sure about. Losing the ability to upgrade your GPU without having to also upgrade your CPU seems more restrictive and costly. Unless the speed of such integration is a vast upgrade from the current model, I'm fairly skeptical it will be a benefit to go that route. 

[Oilslick]

You're right koth.  Everything I'm reading about sandy bridge says they aren't simply repurposing one of the cores though, but instead the gpu will be accessed directly and have its own instruction sets and completely independent clocking seperate of the cpu (unlike current pseudo separate clocking among cores depending on number of threads in use).  Regardless...where it ends up going and whether or not it'll be any kind of a boon to desktop performance will be entirely market driven...or rather, intel and amd's interpretation of the drive in the market.  Seeing as there aren't seperate entities to push for the continued existence of crazy good pushing the boundary video cards - it'll be up to the video game and moviefx companies to apply the market pressure.  Only time will tell if that pressure is substantial enough, or just a drop in the bucket compared to console and mobile device market push.

[Docsamson]

The biggest thing with integrating the CPU and GPU in a desktop is that there's still a largr market from video gamers, graphic designers, and a myriad of other end-users that want them distinct, simply because of work necessity.  It will probably be a huge boon for the laptop market, especially ultra-light units and long-life units, or" ruggedized" units for field use, as well as PoS and the ultra low end workstation range-  places where hard drive space, memory, and multitasking all beat out the need for a fully independant and separately upgradeable GPU.

The biggest gripe is going to be the inability to replace one of the components separately in a failure situation, but all of those markets are ones where a part replacement is usually more expensive, or just plain more troublesome, than a full system replacement due to parts availability.

[Lord Entropy]

I play exclusively on a laptop as well.  I got by for years on an Inspiron, but about a year ago I bought a studio 16 XPS from the Dell outlet.  I'm generally happy with the laptop, though it did have some heat issues initially that I was able to solve eventually.  It uses one heat sink for both the CPU and GPU and it's not adequate unfortunately.

For anyone looking at Alienware or Dell though, I really recommend the Dell Outlet.  It took me a couple weeks of watching and I had to be ready to buy as soon as I saw what I wanted, but I got an $1800 laptop for $1200.  For the patient, it's totally worth it.  I was also able to score a quad-core business laptop for my wife that she can run code on for her PhD.

[Raif]

OK

Ive bought and paid for all the parts on my new Beast, im just about finished putting her together, wish me luck


CPU
http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819103913

Motherboard
http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131667

Video Card (It's physically HUGE)
http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=14-150-517

I put in 8 gigs of ram with a 1000W 80+Gold Psu and a 120 Gig SSD drive for the OS and a 1 TB drive for everything else