** Official ** Upgrade, 3D card, Hardware Tech Questions **

Revision!

CPU - Intel Core i7 950 - $900
GPU - Geforce GTX 285 - $470
MOBO - Intel X58 Chipset - $850
RAM - Corsair 6GB 1333Mhz DDR3 CL7 - $155
PSU - Thermaltake Tough Power $850 Q-fan - $299
HDD - Seagate Barracuda 1.5 TB - $185
Case - Cooler master Cosmos - $340

Total cost - $2698

The Screen would be about $430. And I'm not happy with SDD drives prices and storage as yet. Will go for a second 1.5TB hard drive though. And replace the opticial with my Blue ray drive.

 

How much storage do you want?
How much storage do you require?

Modern motherboards often come with onboard RAID controllers so that you can have some level of fault tolerance.

RAID 1 is the most common form I guess, you buy 2 x 1TB HDD's and you'll have 1TB of storage but it will be mirrored, so in the event of one of the drives failing you have a carbon copy which can carry on until you get a replacement disk.

If you haven't got a NAS device I would recommend looking at RAID as a possibility. Otherwise Netgear produce some good NAS devices that have a low footprint. If you did go down the NAS route it would mean you could consolidate all your media in the one central location, if you've got wireless you can access the same stuff all over the house. Netgear's NAS devices come with RAID built-in in one form or another (depending on what device you go for) so that's more fault tolerance for you. With enough storage you could even schedule back-ups for your home machines to the NAS device.

When it comes to solid-state tech, the price isn't about the storage capacity, it's about the speed. A friend of mine has an SSD that will boot fully, from the moment he presses the power button to being able to use Windows, in 8 seconds.

If you have just one hard drive with windows and maybe antivirus installed on it and nothing else then you're minimising risk of data loss. It makes sense to separate your Windows installation from your own 'Data' in the event of malware or hardware failure. At the moment if you can't recover your windows installation you'd probably have to format and rebuild from scratch, losing your saved games/music/movies etc, if you had a separate windows drive then you would just have to wait for the replacement device to arrive before reinstalling windows and you'd be back to normal.

Windows 7 requires 20 gigs of space IIRC, so a 40 gig SSD would have more than plenty.

 

New computer
CPU Intel 17 950 $900
GPU Geforce GTX 285 $470
Mobo Intel x58 Chipset $399
RAM Corsair 6GB 1333Mhz DDR CI7 $155
PSU Thermaltake Tough Power 850W Q-Fan $299
HDD Seagate Barracuda 1.5 TB $185
HDD 2 Seagate Barracuda 1.5 TB $185
CASE Cooler Master Cosmos $340
Screen AOC 416V 24" 5ms Widescreen LCD $430
Speakers Logitech x-530 5.1 $150
Optical Drive Pioneer Dual Layer 20x SATA 217BK $45
Keyboard Logitech G15 $115
Mouse OCZ Equalizer Laser Gaming Mouse
Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit $470

Total $4143

Thermaltake !SGC-V320 GPU Cooler $89
Water cooling ???


The final list.
I'll certainly agree that SSDs are fast, but I can't justify the price or storage. That's too much of a concern to me.

 

I take it you intend to use BitLocker and switch between other languages then to justify the extra cost of Windows 7 Ultimate?

Watercooling is only necessary if you intend on seriously overclocking your system, motherboards with passive heatpipes (with liquid coolant inside) are more commonly available and make watercooling only necessary when pushing for 25% extra performance.

I'm just trying to help you achieve the best bang for your buck. If you don't have a backup solution in mind I'd seriously get one sorted. If you're going to use that 3 TB of space then you don't want to lose all that data.

 

The reason for Ultimate is for the XP mode, though I guess I could just use Professional.

It's now summer here is Aust, and the last 3 summers my system has overheated (one time I melted a motherboard). For that first summer it was because my single core CPU was running at 100% 24/7. The last two summers had my quad core use two cores at 100% and still overheat. That my sole reasoning for watercooling.

As for backups, about once a week to my two pocket drives and once a month to my main backup 1TB drive. I really could use smaller drives, but I seem to use more and more space as time goes along and I'm tired of always having to delete games then reinstall later.

And believe me, the bang for the buck idea is definately on my mind given the price.

 

Cool (no pun intended). What do you do that has your CPU going 100% all day? I used to live in Darwin but we had air con to keep the temperature down in the low 20's.

I can't suggest what watercooling system to look at, there are many overclocking forums which I would visit to get an idea on what to go for. Don't go for the cheapest, that old adage "Buy cheap, buy twice" is too true with technology these days when a 3-5 year product life is the norm.

Have a look on this website http://www.overclockers.co.uk/ , it's a shop but it has a forum which might be useful to work out what to go for.

 

http://boinc.berkeley.edu/

I'm guessing the graphics card is going to be pretty warm from now on as well.

Thanks for the link by the way. I'll be checking that tomorrow.

 

No problem, I hope you find it useful

 

I have a question that I hope someone can help me out with.

I recently purchased Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic from Steam and installed it to my hard drive. After booting it up and starting a new game, the opening cutscene ran fine (the opening scroll and an outer space view of the Endar Spire under attack), but then when I got to the in-game scene with you waking up and Trask Ulgo telling you what's going on, the game became unbelievably choppy. The gameplay is the same way, very very choppy and makes the entire game virtually unplayable.

The weird thing is that I used to play KotOR all the time on an older computer and it ran just fine, but with this newer computer the game basically cannot be played due to the choppiness of it. Is it a graphics card issue maybe?

I greatly appreciate any help.

Edit: I'll go ahead and post my graphics card information here:

Name: ATI RADEON XPRESS 200 Series
Manufacturer: ATI Technologies Inc.
Chip Type: ATI RADEON XPRESS 200 Series (0x5954)
DAC Type: Internal DAC(400MHz)
Approx. Total Memory: 256.0 MB
Current Display Mode: 1280 x 1024 (32 bit) (60Hz)
Monitor: HP vs17 flat panel monitor

 

Radeon Xpress? That's the mobile one right?

KOTOR fails hard with mobile chipsets.

 

I have no idea. This is a desktop though, not a laptop. I don't know if that has anything to do with the mobile thing.

 

The Xpress is a pretty low key graphics chipset. As you have a desktop I would look at upgrading your graphics card if you want to play 3D games.

This is a separate graphics card right? And not an onboard chipset?

 

Nah, it's integrated, which is why it shows up on laptops a lot.

Basically it blows. Buy a new graphics card.

 

I was afraid that was the issue. All right, thanks for the help guys.

Any recommendations for a good, affordable graphics card?

 

Define affordable

Also, we might need to know what expansion slots your motherboard has (PCI Express x 16? AGP?) to best recommend a good card.

Also, what games are you hoping to play, is KOTOR and it's sequel (and games of that sort of age) what you're aiming for?

 

I have a question concerning graphics cards. I have a GeForce 7600GS and I need something better. I'm not looking to spend a lot of money but I do need something that's better. There are games out now that specifically list my card as not being good enough. It doesn't have to be that much better than what I've got but it needs to be enough to make it worth buying.

 

I have twin 7600 GS's and yeah, they need replacing.

I would look at the nVidia 9 series, possibly the 9600 GT. The only problem is power consumption, as the nVidia 9 series requires quite a bit more grunt (from what I've been able to find out, almost twice as much!).

ATI's equivalent, the HD 4670 actually uses a bit less power so could be the one to go for. Either the ATI or nVidia card are available for around £70-80, so possibly within Christmas present reach

Do you know what your computers power supply puts out? the 9600 GT recommends a 400 watt power supply, easiest way to find out is pop the side off the case of your PC and read the label.

 

Got any further with this?

Done anything further here? What games do you want to be able to play?

Jedi Knight Pozzi: Bought your rig yet? I've been thinking more about this and with your computer continuously running, don't expect the compononets to last much more than a year, especially if they're in a hot environment.

Our servers are only fine because of the constant temperature of 19 degrees centigrade and that the quality of the components is high.

Your run of the mill SATA hard drives aren't really designed to run 24/7, even with servers they are hot swappable should one ever fail, and we have the RAID configuration so that even if a disk fails we can carry on until it?s replaced.

So make sure you get the extended warranty option or have a back up solution in place.
HP and Maxtor (to name a couple of manufacturers) produce ?One Touch? hard drive back up solutions, I believe the maximum storage available at the moment is 1tb, but basically after the initial configuration of the external hard drive, you plug it in and it just starts backing up.

 

The shops got all the parts except for the case. That comes after Feb 10.

It's the middle of summer for us now, and the current rig I have with a 7600GS, E6600 quad core, and now with two HDD removed only two HDD remain (Yep, had four) has been running for over 2.5 years without hassel, thankfully.
Would you say the newer companents are more `brittle,' for lack of a better term? I'd have thought a water Cooling system would be much better for my needs.

I back up about weekly on one 250GB Hard Drive, and Monthly on a 1TB HDD. And my Itunes files on a third Drive, thought just todays I see my mobile apps are gone.

 

I decided not to spend money on a graphics card just to play one game when I can just as easily get it cheap for the Xbox.

 

Cool news about the back-up, I'd be totally pissed if I had the 1.5TB drives bum out on me and lose all that data!

As for reliability, you've just got to think that components are being made for different reasons and uses, but if you have gone down the watercooling route you'll be fine, especially if you've gone 2 and a half years with this one.

Are they going to give you the prices as of Feb 10th rather than when you ordered it?

Fair enough! I'm in the same boat myself. I don't have enough spare cash to spend on a new machine so I have to make do with consoles

 

How freakin sweet is apple's iPad?

I'm gonna have to get me one of those.

 

Very tempting.

Personally I may wait for the second generation version.

And what will games manufacturers do with it?

 

Looks nice but I'm sure the price will be inflated for the UK and Europe. I can't see my getting one unless I hit the Lottery or get a job that pays a lot more than my current one.

 

QFT. $499 US normally translates to £499 UK

Not always that bad but it'll probably be £400. Software is the same, Adobe takes the pee. But enough of that.


As for games, I don't know. Not enough is known about the spec of the machine yet.

The iPhone has a PowerVR chip which, IIRC, is derived from that which powered the Dreamcast so it has potential. The iPhone 3GS also supports OpenGL 2.0, which the previous versions didn't, so Apple aren't letting it stagnate.

Seeing as you can play Quake 3 on the iPhone, I think the gaming potential is pretty good. Illusion labs have achieved something pretty cool with iPhone games on a table sized multi-touch screen too. See here

How sweet would something like Ragdoll Kung-Fu be on it, or even (purely driven by mentioning the dreamcast above) and episodic Shen Mue