Ratdude's main rig V3, maybe

[shovenose]

Re: Ratdude's main rig V3, maybe

something about people with aspergers when we get this idea in our head, and visualize it, we have to see it through. Its why I made a music video of 30 seconds to mars 'this is war' with scenes from the revolutionary war. I heard the song in my head while watching the show, and, just could not get it out of my head until I made some progress with it.

Larry saw the insides of TC's computer and looked at his and his head said...'I have to do this'. It sticks inside, filling the recesses of his brain until its done. I'm the same way to an extent, but not as bad as larry :P

That's fine, but if somebody is always complaining and going on about how they have no money and how they're a broke college student and how they want to move out and how they hate living with their parents blah blah blah... they can't make constant threads about the next overpriced used stuff they picked up off eBay/Topcat/Shovenose (yes, I'm being a hypocrite here, but hear me out)...

I would be interested to know how much has been spent on rigs V1/V2/V3... (not counting the price of Windows 7 OS, and not counting that Supermicro case because due to personal preference ratdude747 wants his computer to look like a f*cking server and that case could be used for the new build)...
Compare that to the price of the Newegg build I threw together in five minutes a couple posts up.
I have a feeling my build would end up cheaper, in addition to being more reliable, faster, quieter, more environmentally friendly (if you give a shit), use less power so be cheaper to run, and just overall better.

[Uranium-235]

Re: Ratdude's main rig V3, maybe

Larry, none of your arguments make ANY LOGICAL SENSE.

something about people with aspergers when we get this idea in our head, and visualize it, we have to see it through. Its why I made a music video of 30 seconds to mars 'this is war' with scenes from the revolutionary war. I heard the song in my head while watching the show, and, just could not get it out of my head until I made some progress with it.

Larry saw the insides of TC's computer and looked at his and his head said...'I have to do this'. It sticks inside, filling the recesses of his brain until its done. I'm the same way to an extent, but not as bad as larry :P

[shovenose]

Re: Ratdude's main rig V3, maybe

It's consumer grade. uATX as well. No PCI-X (so bye bye HW hdd controller, I know everybody hates those too).

Those WD Raptor drives are nice, however you're not going to get any noticeably slower performance from a nice WD Caviar Blue 7200RPM 500GB drive. And it's quieter, has warranty, and uses way less power.

I want a computer that I can look at and feel proud of, not some rig that screams "bottom of the barrel". I want a rig that looks like an expert built/modified it, not a rig built for a broke ass wannabe.

That means nothing. Just because my computers don't use Supermicro cases, doesn't mean they are trash. I take pride in my computers... they are not trash. If I went and bought an HP at Best Buy, THAT is bottom of the barrel trash. Besides, if it's the exterior look that matters to you, those components of the system I built you on Newegg would go inside it just fine so you can have your damn "expert looking rig"...

I used to push a newer rig built using the cheapest parts possible to make it run. That was Main Rig V1, based off an Intel DP35DP. At the time, it was one CPU model away from a celeron (a PDC 1.8ghz) and only had 1gb (later 2gb) of RAM. Every time I looked at the rig I felt depressed, seeing empty RAM slots... it ran like crap too.

That system was a pile of shit. Empty RAM slots do not slow down your computer, they simply give you the opportunity to expand in the future without replacing your motherboard. I don't understand how you don't understand this - I know you're not stupid or anywhere close to stupid, in fact I'd say you're one of the more intelligent and/or clever people...
You're using an outdated Pentium Dual Core, 1GB of RAM which is nowhere near enough, a trash Intel motherboard... of course it's going to run like crap... is that not obvious? You can't reasonably assume that a modern computer would perform like crap just because something you had before that was junk would??
I dare you to fly over here, sit down in my room, and use my Celeron G540-based computer, and tell me after that if it's trash or not. You're paying for the plane ticket :P

Larry, none of your arguments make ANY LOGICAL SENSE.

[shovenose]

Re: Ratdude's main rig V3, maybe

is that 4C /w HT or an 8-Core AMD?

I'm fairly certain mariushm was the little brother to my FX-8350, the FX-8320. So 8-core AMD.

[Uranium-235]

Re: Ratdude's main rig V3, maybe

is that 4C /w HT or an 8-Core AMD?

[mariushm]

Re: Ratdude's main rig V3, maybe

Let me guess, you're next going to attack my web browsing habits.

Nope, here's how i work : http://savedonthe.net/image/1796/asdf.png

Each person works most efficiently in his own way. H

I simply suggested 4 GB of memory as lowest amount, in case you are on a budget. I have two 8 GB sticks in my system.

Sorry to see you view my comments as attacks. They weren't meant to come off as that.

[ratdude747]

Re: Ratdude's main rig V3, maybe

Oh man...

9800 GT is a renamed 8800 GT ... just like GTS240 was almost a renamed 9800 GT. That's a 2007-2008 video card.
It's kinda pointless to even do SLI with those, you get maybe 20-30% extra performance for a ton of noise and power usage.

The 8800GT/9800GT is basically beaten by an ancient 4850 at anything above 1280x1024, and is weaker by about 10-20% compared to a new $50 Radeon 6670 that uses 20-30% the power a 9800gt uses and is almost inaudible.

A $90 radeon 7750 runs circles around two 9800gt, have a look at the benchmarks : http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/521?vs=535



Can you honestly tell me that if your current motherboard supported only 8 GB of memory in total, you would have used 512 MB sticks just to have all slots used?

I honestly don't understand why it bothers you that much to have unused slots. You're often provided with lots of things for flexibility, not too feel bad about not maxing out things.

For example, there are boards that only accept 16 GB of ram but offer 4 slots, simply because they realized 8 GB sticks were more expensive than 4 GB sticks.

Or, in the case of the latest processors, AMD recommends users to only use 2 modules even though there are 4 slots on the motherboard if they want to use memories with frequency at or above 1866 Mhz, simply because above this speed the signal from four modules can be degraded or be affected by the distance of traces coming from the other modules (theres lots of differential traces going to cpu from all those modules) and other factors.

It's the same story with pci express connectors - every manufacturer know most video cards take two slots, some take 3 slots, so they put pci express x1 slots between two pci express x16 slots, which have lanes coming from the slower southbridge.
Are you going to have seizures because you can't fill that x1 slots? It's just silly... the manufacturer puts x1 slots there just because otherwise space would be wasted and it's cheap to add them and if you don't have a x16 card you can use them, but you shouldn't think you have to.



I guess each has its own tastes about how a system feels ghetto.

I bought an Aerocool Xpredator case (without the red fans on the side) : http://content.hwigroup.net/images/p...ck_edition.jpg - yeah it's expensive at about 150$ but I can afford it, there are cheaper cases out there.

Anyway, it's full black inside, lots of space, cable management heaven.
The Seasonic X-650 psu is full black with the cables in black mesh.
The motherboard is black, a 140$ gigabyte ga-990fxa-ud3 : http://www.gigabyte.com/products/pro...px?pid=4001#ov
The ram sticks are two corsair low profile sticks, black again : http://www.pcforce.co.nz/images/veng...onboard_x4.png
The dvd writer is black ... sata cables are black, leds and power switch cables are black,
video card is a dark blue/black pcb with black heatsink, a radeon 7770 ghz edition

basically the contrast between the black everywhere and the white capacitors on the board and the back headers and the large heatsink on cpu is just awesome and the system looks anything but ghetto.. and best of all it's probably under 800$ overall.

The point is the most expensive parts are the processor and the case ... i simply need a fast processor because i do a lot of video encoding... you could use a 50$ cpu and it wouldn't make a difference visually, won't feel more ghetto.

If there is a specfic reason or if the rig truely ran well, then I'd be fine with empty slots. However, Unless I run an x32 OS, I'd need more than 4gb. heck, under xp x64 I'm using 3gb and I'm not really pushing it. Ok, maybe I have 25 tabs open in chrome, but aside from thunderbird, I have nothing else running. Not even close to peak usage.

I will say that it has been running pretty well. No performance complaints. Had it not been for the tuner card issue I'd call it good.

(too bad topcat hasn't chimed in, The trend of me building personal workstations was inspired by him. After all, he gave me the X5DAL used in V2).

Let me guess, you're next going to attack my web browsing habits.

[mariushm]

Re: Ratdude's main rig V3, maybe

Oh man...

9800 GT is a renamed 8800 GT ... just like GTS240 was almost a renamed 9800 GT. That's a 2007-2008 video card.
It's kinda pointless to even do SLI with those, you get maybe 20-30% extra performance for a ton of noise and power usage.

The 8800GT/9800GT is basically beaten by an ancient 4850 at anything above 1280x1024, and is weaker by about 10-20% compared to a new $50 Radeon 6670 that uses 20-30% the power a 9800gt uses and is almost inaudible.

A $90 radeon 7750 runs circles around two 9800gt, have a look at the benchmarks : http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/521?vs=535

Every time I looked at the rig I felt depressed, seeing empty RAM slots... it ran like crap too.

V2, once built up, fixed all of those issues... It ran reasonably well (and then some) and being maxed out, I didn't feel ghetto using it.

Can you honestly tell me that if your current motherboard supported only 8 GB of memory in total, you would have used 512 MB sticks just to have all slots used?

I honestly don't understand why it bothers you that much to have unused slots. You're often provided with lots of things for flexibility, not too feel bad about not maxing out things.

For example, there are boards that only accept 16 GB of ram but offer 4 slots, simply because they realized 8 GB sticks were more expensive than 4 GB sticks.

Or, in the case of the latest processors, AMD recommends users to only use 2 modules even though there are 4 slots on the motherboard if they want to use memories with frequency at or above 1866 Mhz, simply because above this speed the signal from four modules can be degraded or be affected by the distance of traces coming from the other modules (theres lots of differential traces going to cpu from all those modules) and other factors.

It's the same story with pci express connectors - every manufacturer know most video cards take two slots, some take 3 slots, so they put pci express x1 slots between two pci express x16 slots, which have lanes coming from the slower southbridge.
Are you going to have seizures because you can't fill that x1 slots? It's just silly... the manufacturer puts x1 slots there just because otherwise space would be wasted and it's cheap to add them and if you don't have a x16 card you can use them, but you shouldn't think you have to.

It ran reasonably well (and then some) and being maxed out, I didn't feel ghetto using it.

I guess each has its own tastes about how a system feels ghetto.

I bought an Aerocool Xpredator case (without the red fans on the side) : http://content.hwigroup.net/images/p...ck_edition.jpg - yeah it's expensive at about 150$ but I can afford it, there are cheaper cases out there.

Anyway, it's full black inside, lots of space, cable management heaven.
The Seasonic X-650 psu is full black with the cables in black mesh.
The motherboard is black, a 140$ gigabyte ga-990fxa-ud3 : http://www.gigabyte.com/products/pro...px?pid=4001#ov
The ram sticks are two corsair low profile sticks, black again : http://www.pcforce.co.nz/images/veng...onboard_x4.png
The dvd writer is black ... sata cables are black, leds and power switch cables are black,
video card is a dark blue/black pcb with black heatsink, a radeon 7770 ghz edition

basically the contrast between the black everywhere and the white capacitors on the board and the back headers and the large heatsink on cpu is just awesome and the system looks anything but ghetto.. and best of all it's probably under 800$ overall.

The point is the most expensive parts are the processor and the case ... i simply need a fast processor because i do a lot of video encoding... you could use a 50$ cpu and it wouldn't make a difference visually, won't feel more ghetto.

[ratdude747]

Re: Ratdude's main rig V3, maybe

Don't bother those crappy old cards. I didn't count a case or OS since you have both already...
Give me one way that your dual CPU server/workstation system is more reliable or better than this... And it's not your Celeron even though you have yet to provide a solid reason that they are bad, except for "it's a Celeron" which is no longer a valid reason...
I've built myself a secondary PC with a Celeron G540, now the G1610 is available for the same price and I've built two computers for friends. (one was an upgrade from a P4 and one was an upgrade from an Athlon 64X2)... No complaints, and you know I'm picky. Both other people that got the Celeron G1610 were skeptical but they came around once I delivered

It's consumer grade. uATX as well. No PCI-X (so bye bye HW hdd controller, I know everybody hates those too).

I know I coudl have built a faster rig using newer parts... but I'll say it one more freakign time... I DON'T WANT A NEWER RIG. I just don't.

I want a computer that I can look at and feel proud of, not some rig that screams "bottom of the barrel". I want a rig that looks like an expert built/modified it, not a rig built for a broke ass wannabe.

I used to push a newer rig built using the cheapest parts possible to make it run. That was Main Rig V1, based off an Intel DP35DP. At the time, it was one CPU model away from a celeron (a PDC 1.8ghz) and only had 1gb (later 2gb) of RAM. Every time I looked at the rig I felt depressed, seeing empty RAM slots... it ran like crap too.

V2, once built up, fixed all of those issues... It ran reasonably well (and then some) and being maxed out, I didn't feel ghetto using it. In fact, had I not been gifted the Board from JP, I'd still be using it full time.

Heck, once 3.5 is there (K8WE), then I'll rebuild V2 and use it as a second desktop.

---

GPU wise, If I get a K8WE, I'll probably grab 2 of these:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/EVGA-NVIDIA-...item589e9a515b

(of course making an offer).

[shovenose]

Re: Ratdude's main rig V3, maybe

That explains a lot.

I wasn't going to put that new of a card in anyway... Maybe Geforce 9 or so.

Don't bother those crappy old cards. I didn't count a case or OS since you have both already...
Give me one way that your dual CPU server/workstation system is more reliable or better than this... And it's not your Celeron even though you have yet to provide a solid reason that they are bad, except for "it's a Celeron" which is no longer a valid reason...
I've built myself a secondary PC with a Celeron G540, now the G1610 is available for the same price and I've built two computers for friends. (one was an upgrade from a P4 and one was an upgrade from an Athlon 64X2)... No complaints, and you know I'm picky. Both other people that got the Celeron G1610 were skeptical but they came around once I delivered

[ratdude747]

Re: Ratdude's main rig V3, maybe

7600gt are not exactly top of the video cards, you know. They're 7-8 years old cards. I'm talking more recent video cards, made in the last 2-3 years or so.

That explains a lot.

I wasn't going to put that new of a card in anyway... Maybe Geforce 9 or so.

[mariushm]

Re: Ratdude's main rig V3, maybe

7600gt are not exactly top of the video cards, you know. They're 7-8 years old cards. I'm talking more recent video cards, made in the last 2-3 years or so.
Nobody said you should get a Celeron, even though they're cheap and powerful (very good value).

Since the performance of two opterons satisfies you (and seems you're not intel fanboy), you could start even with a cheap $55 processor

AMD Athlon II X2 270 Regor 3.4GHz Socket AM3 65W Dual-Core Desktop Processor ADX270OCGMBOX
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16819103953

This one is still about 2-2.5 times more powerful than your two opterons combined.

On motherboards, you can get solid motherboards for this processor for as low $50 (and it's not Asus) but you'd be somewhat limited in upgrading (it doesn't support all the FX series processors) and you may not like that it has Apaq and possibly ucc kzg capacitors on it:

GIGABYTE GA-78LMT-S2 AM3+ AMD 760G Micro ATX AMD Motherboard
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813128564

If you want more quality and features (full Nichicon polymer capacitors, sata 6gbps, ide connector, 2pci slots, 4 memory slots) and support for all fx series processors for potential upgrade, you have this at $70:

ASRock 980DE3/U3S3 AM3+ AMD RX881/760G SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX AMD Motherboard
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813157366

You can just fill it with 4 x 1-2 GB ddr3 sticks if you can't stand not having the board full of ram but imho that's just silly.

Or you can just buy a 4gb ddr3 stick for now, even a 30$ stick will be way better than those 16 gb ddr1 you have now - the system will just feel faster even with only 4gb: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820148538

DDR1 with ECC is still bought on eBay for 3-5$ a module, maybe more if you find a stupid buyer or advertise as matched pairs etc etc so you could recover a part of your investment in this new hardware.

Both mbs have onboard video that's enough for windows and 2d stuff but you can always stick a pci express card in them without any fuss and conflicts and so on.

[ratdude747]

Re: Ratdude's main rig V3, maybe

Seems you don't get it. It worked fine BACK THEN.
It was the only way technically possible back then. Nowadays all processors have pci express lanes built in and drivers are made with that assumption and optimized for that.

nForce 4 had only a 1 Ghz Hypertransport link to the cpu on AMD systems, up to 2000MT/s.
The intel version still uses hypertransport (1.6 GB/s) between northbridge and southbridge but uses the (up to) 1066 Mhz fsb to communicate to the processor.
Also, on this platform the memory is connected to the northbridge just like the pci express connectors, there's a super fast link between memory and pci express.
On AMD server platform the memory controller was integrated in CPU, so data had to go to northbridge, go through ht bus to cpu, then go back through the memory controller in the cpu.



There's another big difference: in a regular desktop system like that nforce 4 chipsets there's a direct path : pci express - northbridge - cpu . (In today's modern desktops it's direct pci express - cpu)
In a workstation/server like this one you try to buy, you have a choke point: the bandwidth between processors, in your case only 1600 MT/s.

If you have a video card on the first pci express but a game runs on the second physical processor, the data goes back and forth through the northbridge connected to first processor, then goes through the ht link to the second processor (a ht link that's already busy maintaining consistency between processors), accesses the memory banks and goes back...
It wasn't an issue back then when video cards were using pci express 1.0 and had 128-256 DDR1 memory on them, there just wasn't much data transferred back and forth.
Nowadays, even onboard video cards are more powerful than those pci express video cards that were available back then, a modern video card's driver is simply unlikely to work right with all the latencies, slow bandwidth, quirks of memory access between processes and processors etc etc.

I kinda doubt that... IIRC topcat ran a SLI'd K8WE with 7600GT's... and he reported no issues.

I'm sorry (or not) that I don't want a celeron based new system. Celeron = piss poor flimsy junk.

[ratdude747]

Re: Ratdude's main rig V3, maybe

rd, how much $$$ have you spent on this? Just curious

Maybe $250. Over half of which is the case.

[shovenose]

Re: Ratdude's main rig V3, maybe

rd, how much $$$ have you spent on this? Just curious

[mariushm]

Re: Ratdude's main rig V3, maybe

Seems you don't get it. It worked fine BACK THEN.
It was the only way technically possible back then. Nowadays all processors have pci express lanes built in and drivers are made with that assumption and optimized for that.

nForce 4 had only a 1 Ghz Hypertransport link to the cpu on AMD systems, up to 2000MT/s.
The intel version still uses hypertransport (1.6 GB/s) between northbridge and southbridge but uses the (up to) 1066 Mhz fsb to communicate to the processor.
Also, on this platform the memory is connected to the northbridge just like the pci express connectors, there's a super fast link between memory and pci express.
On AMD server platform the memory controller was integrated in CPU, so data had to go to northbridge, go through ht bus to cpu, then go back through the memory controller in the cpu.



There's another big difference: in a regular desktop system like that nforce 4 chipsets there's a direct path : pci express - northbridge - cpu . (In today's modern desktops it's direct pci express - cpu)
In a workstation/server like this one you try to buy, you have a choke point: the bandwidth between processors, in your case only 1600 MT/s.

If you have a video card on the first pci express but a game runs on the second physical processor, the data goes back and forth through the northbridge connected to first processor, then goes through the ht link to the second processor (a ht link that's already busy maintaining consistency between processors), accesses the memory banks and goes back...
It wasn't an issue back then when video cards were using pci express 1.0 and had 128-256 DDR1 memory on them, there just wasn't much data transferred back and forth.
Nowadays, even onboard video cards are more powerful than those pci express video cards that were available back then, a modern video card's driver is simply unlikely to work right with all the latencies, slow bandwidth, quirks of memory access between processes and processors etc etc.

[ratdude747]

Re: Ratdude's main rig V3, maybe

The issue is how these pci express ports are implemented.
On consumer hardware, the lanes to the video card pci express come from the cpu and the less important lanes are from the chipset...
on these workstation boards each pci express goes to a chip which then talks to the cpu: https://cdn.badcaps-static.com/pdfs/...2b07aca8a6.pdf

Modern video card drivers don't take this in consideration and they're "tuned" to assume direct connection to processors, so you can get into instability issues.

What about non-hypertransport stuff? Like the nForce 4 SLI intel edition (for 775 P4) or the intel variants of the nforce 590 sli and 570 sli? All of those (and any pre core i_ series nforce) AFAIK had the the PCIe run through the northbridge, a separate chip and NOT a direct connection to the CPU.

[ratdude747]

Re: Ratdude's main rig V3, maybe

He probably bought that from best buy or some other shitty store.

140$ : http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16819113286
88$ : http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813157280
58$ : http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820233335

286$.

Nope, custom built from newegg parts picked by my ASUS lovign classmates. Cheapass case and PSU, the rest wasn't even close to maxing it out (Sorry, but not maxing things out kinda peeves me more than I should).

[mariushm]

Re: Ratdude's main rig V3, maybe

Yeah, and I'd have to spend $800+ to do that the right way (it cost a classmate that much to do it the cheapass way, IMHO the rig was shit). And guess what? Give it 3 years and it's probably dead (modern stuff isn't made to last).

He probably bought that from best buy or some other shitty store.

140$ : http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16819113286
88$ : http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813157280
58$ : http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820233335

286$.

[ratdude747]

Re: Ratdude's main rig V3, maybe

what are you going to do with a workstation desktop? 3d modeling or just facebooking?

edit: if that is a K8SR you're screwed, not even an AGP slot

Heavy web browisng with many tabs open... maybe some report writign and GIMP/Inkscape photo editing at the same time... with twin screens. Perhaps stuff with the tuner card. Maybe even some light gaming. You know, power using. The kind of stuff that has made my Latitiude D630 go to a crawl... and it has a 2.4GHZ C2D! Yeah, not Ivy bridge... but still, new enough.

edit- yeah, I know the K8SR is a useless (to me) server board. I told the seller in the case of the board itself being a K8SR to consider it a pre-ship return under the 30 Day warranty/return period.