new build...whatcha think?

[jayd4wg]

I ended up getting:

Gigabyte M55SLIS4 rev2.0 mobo
AMD X2 5600+
2 Gb Corsair XMS2
140Gb WesDig Raptor 10,000 rpm SATA1
Lite-on DVDRW SATA
MSI GeForce 8800GTS (soon to be joined by another MUAHAHAH!!!)
new copy of WindersXP Pro
el-cheapo tool-free case (MassCool i think?...too lazy to look it up again)
Mushkin 550 watt modular power supply
and for the hell of it 1 extra 120mm fan

BF2 never looked so good. Using the benchmark from CNET.com called Performance Test, i score 795 without overclocking at all.

I can run the CPU steady at 3.1Ghz, and the vid card came with an overclock util. With the CPU at 3.0 and the vid card on "game mode" (what seems to be the most aggressive and definitely hottest setting) i can score 825.

I'm a proud papa.
http://picasaweb.google.com/jayd4wg/MyNewBox

 

[Lasthitlarry]

Usually ppl post before they buy...but it looks good, though I'll never understand why people support SLI, and I've never heard any bad or good things about Mushkin PSU's.

 

[Blain]

It's about time someone bought something other than a C2D.

 

[Roguestar]

Blain you forgot to give your patented x/10 rating. And a link to a picture of PC Builders .

Next recommendation in a "lol ive got $5000 to spend on a PC" thread I'm going to say go for a HP-UX server.

Originally posted by: jayd4wg
MUAHAHAH!!!

hmmmmmmm

 

[Bradtechonline]

Originally posted by: jayd4wg
I ended up getting:

Gigabyte M55SLIS4 rev2.0 mobo
AMD X2 5600+
2 Gb Corsair XMS2
140Gb WesDig Raptor 10,000 rpm SATA1
Lite-on DVDRW SATA
MSI GeForce 8800GTS (soon to be joined by another MUAHAHAH!!!)
new copy of WindersXP Pro
el-cheapo tool-free case (MassCool i think?...too lazy to look it up again)
Mushkin 550 watt modular power supply
and for the hell of it 1 extra 120mm fan

BF2 never looked so good. Using the benchmark from CNET.com called Performance Test, i score 795 without overclocking at all.

I can run the CPU steady at 3.1Ghz, and the vid card came with an overclock util. With the CPU at 3.0 and the vid card on "game mode" (what seems to be the most aggressive and definitely hottest setting) i can score 825.

I'm a proud papa.
http://picasaweb.google.com/jayd4wg/MyNewBox

Looks good man, I'm still waiting for someone to bust your balls on not getting Core 2 Duo lol!

 

[PurdueRy]

150 Gigs total hard drive space? What is this 2003?

 

[jayd4wg]

Originally posted by: PurdueRy
150 Gigs total hard drive space? What is this 2003?

so quick to judge...

I refuse to wait for a terabyte drive to defrag...I like to keep things tidy. upcoming improvements are another vid card, and 2 36GB Raptors striped for my system drive. This should boost performance a little, dunno if i'll notice it, but we'll see.

Besides...my 500GB network storage box keeps all my media files nice and tidy and serves as a nice little print server too.

I've never been a "OOOH! ME TOO!" kind of guy and i can't stand all the hype around the C2D's. I wanted AMD from day one and bought AMD. I could not justify the price increase to go any higher than the 5600. If i had money to burn i'd build Morokiane's machine...stay tuned for this writeup. He put together a dual quad core box w/8 gigs ram, and 2 nVidia Quadra vid cards. He's in school for 3d animation and was sick of using a ton of POS machines as a rendering farm...so he combined them all in one SICK freekin box. Y'all can keep your C2D's...i'm PERFECTLY happy with my build and actually came in UNDER budget...cus the budget did not originally include a copy of windows

 

[PurdueRy]

Originally posted by: jayd4wg

Originally posted by: PurdueRy
150 Gigs total hard drive space? What is this 2003?

so quick to judge...

I refuse to wait for a terabyte drive to defrag...I like to keep things tidy. upcoming improvements are another vid card, and 2 36GB Raptors striped for my system drive. This should boost performance a little, dunno if i'll notice it, but we'll see.

Besides...my 500GB network storage box keeps all my media files nice and tidy and serves as a nice little print server too.

I've never been a "OOOH! ME TOO!" kind of guy and i can't stand all the hype around the C2D's. I wanted AMD from day one and bought AMD. I could not justify the price increase to go any higher than the 5600. If i had money to burn i'd build Morokiane's machine...stay tuned for this writeup. He put together a dual quad core box w/8 gigs ram, and 2 nVidia Quadra vid cards. He's in school for 3d animation and was sick of using a ton of POS machines as a rendering farm...so he combined them all in one SICK freekin box. Y'all can keep your C2D's...i'm PERFECTLY happy with my build and actually came in UNDER budget...cus the budget did not originally include a copy of windows

Things could have been tidy with one 500GB drive too(and cheaper). I don't suppose you have looked into the benchmarks on anandtech to see the performance difference between the raptor and a large capacity drive?

Same with going SLI. It's a waste of money upgrade path as the combined money could be used for one more powerful card, or used to upgrade in a year or two when its actually required.

You asked "Whatcha think?" but you sure do get defensive when I tell you what I think

 

[AmberClad]

Originally posted by: PurdueRy
150 Gigs total hard drive space? What is this 2003?

Not everyone needs 500+ GB . I myself have had a 160 GB SATA and a backup 200GB IDE drive for the past two years, and I've only used up 80GB between the two of them. And those drives may last me for years to come, depending on Seagate's workmanship.

 

[WT]

I just made a list of my total price on my build and its over what I had planned but I didn't skimp on anything, most times buying above what I had planned just for a 'no compromises' build for a change. Total is $1,158 and thats with everything factored in other than an LCD. I haven't gotten the case yet to build it, but my hope is that it will run ET:QW (and that the game is great, as well !!).

 

[Noema]

Very nice.

 

[jayd4wg]

au contraire...i enjoy the banter. Big drive...cheaper yes. better? Doubt it. Check the benchmarks. The raptors CONSISTENTLY place top ranks along with other drives like the Hitachi Deskstars. I just cruised thru the THG charts again so i'm not speaking out of school...i welcome you to do the same and if you have something that shows some kind of crazy price to performance gain with going to 500GB (or larger) without the lag of seek and data transfer times, i'm all ears.

As for SLI, the way I see it is this. To maintain "bleeding edge" performance, you have to spend nearly 500 bucks a shot to continue being top dog. I dropped half that on the 8800GTS, and in a year when i buy another, the price will have dropped well below the 200 dollar mark. I'm still below the cost of "bleeding edge", have DX10 capability, and enough performance to rock out 100+fps with default "High" detail levels on BF2. Next year if a game comes out that requires me to upgrade (i doubt it...) i can, and on the cheap. Don't take a defensive stance to a defensive reply when you insult. It's not 2003...it's 2007 and I know alot of guys who would rather have a SCREAMING machine with less storage and more performance (thus the striped 36GB raptors for my next upgrade).
BTW...SATA RULES.

 

[PurdueRy]

Originally posted by: jayd4wg
au contraire...i enjoy the banter. Big drive...cheaper yes. better? Doubt it. Check the benchmarks. The raptors CONSISTENTLY place top ranks along with other drives like the Hitachi Deskstars. I just cruised thru the THG charts again so i'm not speaking out of school...i welcome you to do the same and if you have something that shows some kind of crazy price to performance gain with going to 500GB (or larger) without the lag of seek and data transfer times, i'm all ears.

As for SLI, the way I see it is this. To maintain "bleeding edge" performance, you have to spend nearly 500 bucks a shot to continue being top dog. I dropped half that on the 8800GTS, and in a year when i buy another, the price will have dropped well below the 200 dollar mark. I'm still below the cost of "bleeding edge", have DX10 capability, and enough performance to rock out 100+fps with default "High" detail levels on BF2. Next year if a game comes out that requires me to upgrade (i doubt it...) i can, and on the cheap. Don't take a defensive stance to a defensive reply when you insult. It's not 2003...it's 2007 and I know alot of guys who would rather have a SCREAMING machine with less storage and more performance (thus the striped 36GB raptors for my next upgrade).
BTW...SATA RULES.

I realize people are sick of hearing it...but if "Bleeding edge performance" was your true goal then why did you go AMD? It is well known that C2D is a better performer and a great overclocker...your build isn't consistent.

As for your claims about RAID and raptors:

http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.aspx?i=2101&p=10

Migrating to two Raptors in RAID-0 resulted in a 3.6% performance improvement; definitely not worth the added cost of a second drive as well as the decrease in reliability.

2.6% is the only benefit that RAID-0 will give you here.

There's a small 2.8% performance boost from RAID-0 here, but once again, nothing to write home about and nothing worth the added cost.

I could keep quoting this review...but as you can see by now...RAID 0 does very little for your system performance. So your ambition to stripe two 36gig raptors together is money rather well wasted.

As for the raptors in general...yes they are the fastest. I would be an idiot to argue that they aren't(short of SCSI of course)

However, the question is what is the REAL benefit. In synthetic tests they tend to dominate and look rather attractive, however in the real world benches they fail to impress.

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2922&p=9

so with the 150GB you gain .7 seconds in loading time over the seagate 320Gig. You gain 3 seconds of load time in BF2..which takes a minute to load as is.

Again, I will let you look through these on your own and draw your own conclusions. I am not attacking your configuration as its already built and on the whole I think its pretty decent. I just think some money could have been better spent. Enjoy your new computer.

 

[trOver]

Originally posted by: PurdueRy

Originally posted by: jayd4wg
au contraire...i enjoy the banter. Big drive...cheaper yes. better? Doubt it. Check the benchmarks. The raptors CONSISTENTLY place top ranks along with other drives like the Hitachi Deskstars. I just cruised thru the THG charts again so i'm not speaking out of school...i welcome you to do the same and if you have something that shows some kind of crazy price to performance gain with going to 500GB (or larger) without the lag of seek and data transfer times, i'm all ears.

As for SLI, the way I see it is this. To maintain "bleeding edge" performance, you have to spend nearly 500 bucks a shot to continue being top dog. I dropped half that on the 8800GTS, and in a year when i buy another, the price will have dropped well below the 200 dollar mark. I'm still below the cost of "bleeding edge", have DX10 capability, and enough performance to rock out 100+fps with default "High" detail levels on BF2. Next year if a game comes out that requires me to upgrade (i doubt it...) i can, and on the cheap. Don't take a defensive stance to a defensive reply when you insult. It's not 2003...it's 2007 and I know alot of guys who would rather have a SCREAMING machine with less storage and more performance (thus the striped 36GB raptors for my next upgrade).
BTW...SATA RULES.

I realize people are sick of hearing it...but if "Bleeding edge performance" was your true goal then why did you go AMD? It is well known that C2D is a better performer and a great overclocker...your build isn't consistent.

As for your claims about RAID and raptors:

http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.aspx?i=2101&p=10

Migrating to two Raptors in RAID-0 resulted in a 3.6% performance improvement; definitely not worth the added cost of a second drive as well as the decrease in reliability.

2.6% is the only benefit that RAID-0 will give you here.

There's a small 2.8% performance boost from RAID-0 here, but once again, nothing to write home about and nothing worth the added cost.

I could keep quoting this review...but as you can see by now...RAID 0 does very little for your system performance. So your ambition to stripe two 36gig raptors together is money rather well wasted.

As for the raptors in general...yes they are the fastest. I would be an idiot to argue that they aren't(short of SCSI of course)

However, the question is what is the REAL benefit. In synthetic tests they tend to dominate and look rather attractive, however in the real world benches they fail to impress.

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2922&p=9

so with the 150GB you gain .7 seconds in loading time over the seagate 320Gig. You gain 3 seconds of load time in BF2..which takes a minute to load as is.

Again, I will let you look through these on your own and draw your own conclusions. I am not attacking your configuration as its already built and on the whole I think its pretty decent. I just think some money could have been better spent. Enjoy your new computer.

pwned

 

[Boyo]

Nah, you bought the system you wanted so good for you. Nice system, but I would avoid going with the 36GB Raptors and go for a WD 300GB drive for all of your media and other things to keep your Raptor fresh.....

 

[jayd4wg]

not PWNED...lets call it ENLIGHTENED Perhaps even educated This is the kind of info i was seeking last month and could not find. I'll take the money i save by not getting the raptors for my system partition and buy some search skillz

additionally...bleeding edge was NEVER my goal. If it was, i'd build the box Morokiane built (more on that later, but imagine dual socket quad core C2D's w/8GB matched RAM, dual quad core GPU's and a plethora of HD's in various raid configs...it was a nightmare to assemble, and put a SERIOUS dent in his wallet...but for a 3d Animation student's home machine, it trumps some commercial rendering farms without breaking a sweat). I wanted a good performing system for under 1100 bucks and got just that. TO HELL WITH C2D AMD 4EVA! j/k

Thanks. and for what it matters...i LOVE my new box. I guess I just spent a little more than i needed to and could have dropped another 2GB of memory. I smell smoke... LOL

 

[Nnyan]

You can head over to jonnyguru.com and learn all about the Mushkin PSU's. I had the 580w but it was a bit too rippley for me. I currently have three PC's. one for gaming one for video encoding and the third one for lookups during gaming (pretty low end). My encoding PC has two Raptors 150's in RAID and my gaming PC (rebuild) now has a new 500GB drive.

Are the raptors faster? Sure. Would I notice this in real life unless I ran some benches? Nope. I fell for the raptor craze and paid the premium for it, no biggie. I would rather buy the 500GB drive. So what if you don't need all that space now? The just means you'll have great performance and room to grow.

 

[PurdueRy]

Originally posted by: jayd4wg
not PWNED...lets call it ENLIGHTENED Perhaps even educated This is the kind of info i was seeking last month and could not find. I'll take the money i save by not getting the raptors for my system partition and buy some search skillz

additionally...bleeding edge was NEVER my goal. If it was, i'd build the box Morokiane built (more on that later, but imagine dual socket quad core C2D's w/8GB matched RAM, dual quad core GPU's and a plethora of HD's in various raid configs...it was a nightmare to assemble, and put a SERIOUS dent in his wallet...but for a 3d Animation student's home machine, it trumps some commercial rendering farms without breaking a sweat). I wanted a good performing system for under 1100 bucks and got just that. TO HELL WITH C2D AMD 4EVA! j/k

Thanks. and for what it matters...i LOVE my new box. I guess I just spent a little more than i needed to and could have dropped another 2GB of memory. I smell smoke... LOL

Glad I could help then. Thanks for taking it as help and not criticism. Too many people would be too defensive to realize what I am trying to help them with...saving money.

That said, I do think you have a great computer. Much better than my own thats for sure . Enjoy it