Suggestions for a new PC

[Swampy]

So, I still haven't really picked a PC yet. But I guess my plan is:

Abit motherboard (IC7)
2 gigs of PC4000 memory (Corsair I think)
single Intel 3.2 Ghz HT 800mhz processor
2 Striped SATA 36gb 10k rpm drives (bought those already)

I've got everything else I need, except, I may upgrade my video card, which is a Gainward Golden Sample Ti4600 with 128mb ram. Dunno. Don't think that's going to play a major role in speeding up my Photoshop as it keeps up with the redraws no problem now.

Just an update.

[Scubagrapher]

Holy cow! No wonder you're selling your couch and kitchen appliances! :D (Naw I'm kidding) I don't think you would see any improvement by upgrading that video card. You will however, notice a marked improvement in the speed of Photoshop with the 800 mhz FSB processor, and the striped SATA drives. I don't know what you're upgrading from, but I just upgraded from a motherboard that was almost identical to the one I have now, the only difference was FSB, and SATA drives. I saw a very nice improvement, and I was even able to verify it by running them side by side.

[Swampy]

Right now, I have a P4 2.2ghz @2.6ghz (used to be 3ghz until my water pump ran out) with 1gb Rambus memory running something around 420mhz I think (don't quote me there, been a while since I looked). Anyway, we'll just say 400mhz for the sake of debate.

I'm also running two striped 40gb 7200rpm IDE drives, ATA-100.

I'm selling the couch cause I bought a new one today. Selling the kitchen cause I'm re-doing that. If anyone is interester, I've got a 1000(1016) sq ft deck I could sell you too, or just give it to you for firewood or something cause I'm re-doing that as well. I'd sell some other things from what I'm doing too, but it's Xmas time and the other stuff is electronics that the kids would enjoy, so... ;)

I'll probably order the motherboard, CPU and memory next week though, get it in in time for my 2 week vacation for Xmas and New Years.

[sandman]

could'nt sell me that electric fence could you. i've got the mother-in-law coming for christmas, and if i could only keep her out untill new year i might just get to enjoy some of it.

Brian

[Andre]

Bryan,

Have you tried striping over three disks? I did this once and I'm pretty sure it performed better.

Andre

[Swampy]

Brian - I'd be glad to sell you the fence. Make me an offer, but you gotta come and take it down for transport. :D

[Swampy]

Andre - I've striped anywhere from 2 drives to more than 60 drives before. I can tell you, it DOES perform better the more drives you add. :D

Here's a picture of a server I built not too long ago. 56 72gb drives for the data store, plus 2 striped drives for the server on top. Was a marvalous thing to hear running in an office. hahaa.

[Andre]

Originally posted by Swampy
Andre - I've striped anywhere from 2 drives to more than 60 drives before. I can tell you, it DOES perform better the more drives you add. :D

Here's a picture of a server I built not too long ago. 56 72gb drives for the data store, plus 2 striped drives for the server on top. Was a marvalous thing to hear running in an office. hahaa.

What - no cluster? :-)
(Looks like a DL380, right?)

[sandman]

As long as the dogs are'nt welded to it , see you next summer.
I'm thinking of upgrading my tower too . at the moment i'm running an Athlon T/bird 1.8 ghz. 100 gig H/D . AND 768 of memory with a 2nd 80 gig H/D Raided. trouble is it's 2-3 yrs old .

I can upgrade the motherboard, processer and 1st hard drive for £400, i'm happy with my 128 nvidia graphics chip , got a DVD rewriter , and a 5.1 sound card .
I can get a tower only , 3.08ghz,180gig H/D, and a 1024 memory.with a intel pentium4 chip and 6 USB2 ports for £800, and swap over my other components into it .
If and when i get Photoshop CS i'll need that extra speed, mine gets bogged down now if i use a few layers , and thats with ELEMENTS .
I'll let you know what i've done after the hols.

Brian

PS judging by you and Andres messages , i'm way ,i mean way out of my depth here , bye bye

[poolman]

Swampy, 2 Gigs of ram? I would'nt bother. My set-up is the same but with 1 gig PC3200 and an Ati 9800. Perhaps a third big drive for storage. My raid 0 Raptor set-up really :rockon:

[Swampy]

Andre - you're correct. DL380. :)

And why not 2gb? Everyone has 1gb these days. I usually work with 17-20 apps open at times.

[smunky]

I have one of those Snap! Servers
40gig
Very handy.

[RacerX]

XP by default doesn’t set up the "L2Cache" level in the registry file because it doesn’t know how much your chip may have. I recently found this tweak and AFTER backing up my registry, I made the following changes:

Go to the run command and type: regedit
goto "[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESYSTEMCurrentControlSetControlSe ssion ManagerMemory ManagementSecond Level DataCache"

Modify its value by "Decimalism" and change it to how ever much "L2Cache" your CPU has on board. Then RE-Boot.

Things will be allot snapper!

[Andre]

Originally posted by RacerX
XP by default doesn’t set up the "L2Cache" level in the registry file because it doesn’t know how much your chip may have. I recently found this tweak and AFTER backing up my registry, I made the following changes:

Go to the run command and type: regedit
goto "[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESYSTEMCurrentControlSetControlSe ssion ManagerMemory ManagementSecond Level DataCache"

Modify its value by "Decimalism" and change it to how ever much "L2Cache" your CPU has on board. Then RE-Boot.

Things will be allot snapper!

According to this page at Microsoft, this does nothing on Pentium II and newer processors.

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=http://support.microsoft.com:80/support/kb/articles/Q183/0/63.ASP&NoWebContent=1

[RacerX]

Well . . . I'm running a Dell P4 3.0Ghz CPU and work just perfect for me over here. Don't know what to tell you about the MS site. Sorry. I notice a big difference when processing pictures to print out. Thank God!

[Andre]

Originally posted by RacerX
Well . . . I'm running a Dell P4 3.0Ghz CPU and work just perfect for me over here. Don't know what to tell you about the MS site. Sorry. I notice a big difference when processing pictures to print out. Thank God!

I'll try it for a bit anyway and see if I notice any difference. It will be nice if it works. I love a good tweak.

Something tells me though that MS may know a thing or two about these settings...

[RacerX]

I just finished reading the link to MS site, it's speaks about:

REG_DWORD Range: Kilobytes 0, 1 -cache size Default: 0 (256K)

If you have a P4 with 512 L2Cache on board then your not using the entire amount of L2Cache available, is my understanding. That's why the points list I wrote speaks about making a modification on its value by "Decimalism" and change it to how ever much "L2Cache" your CPU has on board. I hope I was able to better explain what worked for me.

Good Luck!

[Swampy]

OK. My order shipped today. Can't believe they wouldn't let me will call it since they're only 5 miles from my house. So, it has to go 5 miles south of my house, picked up by fed-ex, dropped off at the fed-ex sorting station that's 7 miles north of my house, then delivered 7 miles back south to me. It went "ground", but I'll have it over night basically. haha.

Abit IC7-MAX3 motherboard
4 512mb PC4000 memory modules (2 gigs total)
Intel P4 3.2ghz HT Processor.
Have the drives (2 SATA 10k rpm 36gb drives) that I'll be striping in a raid.

Already have that I'm resurrrecting from the old PC:

Lian-Li alluminum case.
250mb internal Zip drive (for compatibility reasons, I really never use it)
floppy
16x Pioneer DVD drive
Yamaha 44x CDR
Enermax 450 watt power supply
IBM 40gb 7200RPM ATA100 drive (scratch drive for PS)
SB Audigy I sound card
Gainward Golden Sample TI4600 Video card w/128mb ram
Don't know if I'm going with air cooled or water cooled yet, but I want to squeeze the heck out of this processor to get the most I can out of it.

I'll probably upgrade the video card for my B-day as well to a Gainward FX Ultra 1800 XP Golden Sample w/256mb ram which is also AGP 8x and being a golden sample, is a hand picked, hand tested processor and memory preconfigured to be stable running overclocked at 500mhz for the processor and 1000mhz for the memory. :)

I have the water block and radiator, but I need to replace my water pump. Again, I want to see what my particular processor will do with standard bigblock air cooling first to see if I even need to go that far.

[ballroom_boy]

I hope this suggestion isn't too controversial... eve thought of getting a Mac?

After a 3 year love/hate relationship with my Win98 PC, I gave up on it. Talk about unstable.

A friend convinced me to get a Mac (iMac in my case) and I haven't looked back. Fast, NEVER crashes, it recognizes devices instantly, and built in Firewire is great. Not to forgot all of cools apps like iTunes, etc.

Check one out. I'm glad I did. :rockon:

[crabby]

I'm with Roël. Everyone I know with a Mac started out with a PeeCee, myself included. Not one of us has ever regretted making the switch. Why is that? Here's a good example: Try finding the letter "ë" on your machine.

[Swampy]

Hmm. Good question. Some of you saw my Xmas list of what I got. I was fortunate this year. I didn't list all of the other things that are happening or my wife's list for that matter. I got this far in life because of PC's, not MAC's. Dealing with thousands of people over the past 5 years, I've run across maybe 15 MAC users that I was able to say "sorry - don't know anything about them" without even blinking an eye. I support People in the PC world. Not using a PC every day for every thing I do would make me lose my edge of the knowledge I have/will aquire. Where does this put me in the market place? Down at the bottom. It's not only how the PC is used but the hardware that is available on the market at any given time that I must know.

You say that the Mac's never crash? Ha! How come the only people I know with Mac's came to me because they had problems with them then? That's ALL of them. 100% of my experience with Mac's - they've all had problems. From not being able to find a printer, to iMac monitors going out in 6 months to OSX upgrade from 9 crashing thier systems... With a larger sampling of PC's, I would say that only around 20% of the PC's had issues that were from OS or hardware instabilities. The rest of the issues were from, let's see, here's one that would affect PC or Mac: "I was driving with the window cracked and a spider crawled in and went onto my steering wheel. I slapped the spider and it made the steering wheel spin and I crashed - my laptop was in the trunk by itself. " - Those issues I don't count. My daughter's computer has been up for 3 years straight. No problems. Knock on wood. My wife's - about the same. She's been up fine for 3 years, less a motherboard and processor upgrade because she wanted to do more.

You hear about all the bad things in the PC world, but apparently you don't hear much about the good. Granted, I hear all the bad things about the Mac world, but don't hear much about the good.

Now, where's all my software? Mac's don't have the amount of software available that the PC does. Where is the bulk of the corporate paying market? PC. I'll have to stick with the PC for these and many other reasons, thanks. And BTW, as beat up as my PC gets, it runs fine right now. I just want more speed and the only real problem I'm having with it is color issues on the monitor with Photoshop which is a calibration issue. :)

Please don't take this as an attack on you or anyone in the Mac world. This is how I see the part of the computing world (less the mainframes, compute farms, infrastructure, etc.), and coming from an extensive background in the computing world, I will be one that will never be swayed to the "other side".

I started on an Apple][ when they first came out. I go back a ways as some of you do.

[stevebri]

Glad somebody said it....

Mac's have moved closer to pc's, I was in the trendy 'Station 1' mac shop in SoHo NY recently, fab, but the mac's are just like pc's now... only with dodgy software and compatability problems...

Swampy can you tell me how to clock my AMD xp 2400...?


Steve

[stevebri]

Copy Crabby's letter but instead I went this way...

programs>accessories>system tools>character map

The typed in (as a guess) ariel and scrolled down to this...

¸

I discovered this yonks ago when trying to use the copyright ©

symbol.


Steve

[Swampy]

Originally posted by stevebri
Swampy can you tell me how to clock my AMD xp 2400...?


Sure, what motherboard do you have?

What speed memory do you have?

Do you have a "stock" heatsink on the CPU or a beefed up one with a nice copper core, big fins, big fan?

There's many ways to do it, but the memory will probably be your limiting factor here since you probably have PC2100 memory (133/266mhz) If you have faster memory (PC2600+), you can start by bumping up the FSB to 166 in the bios (if you even have a motherboard that has adjustments to overclock. You'll need to play with the multiplier a bit too. Bring the multiplier down a bit when you increase the FSB to 166, try it out, make sure it's stable, then move it back up a little at a time.

Overclocking is an art. And art takes time. You'll need to make an adjustment, run it for a day or so under load, if it's stable, adjust it up some more and repeat. It's a pain in the rear sometimes, and by the time you're all done, you may not even notice the difference because you went up in small increments and got used to each increment each time. You may notice 1 or 2 seconds have dropped off of processing a raw file in the end, but for that, you'll have to benchmark it from the start then as the finished result, but there will be a difference. You'll need to watch your core temp as well. Make sure it doesn't get past the upper 50's Celcius under load.

[stevebri]

Asus A7v8x

1x 512 mb Samsung 400 ram
1x512mb other cheap (new) 333 ram

Standard cooler but will buy a biggie and new paste if you suggest.

N vidia fx 5600 vid card (256mb) 8x

Am going to NYC again next month and was just looking at a pair of Corsair exteme 512 ddr3200's

And maybe a 2500 amd with L2 of 512 and a starting fsb of 333

But before I buy I wanted to 'play' with this oveclocking to se the temps, because here the ambient temp is high (rio de Janeiro).

Please educate me a bit if you have time....

Steve

[Swampy]

With that memory, definitely go to 166mhz fsb then. Drop your multiplier down to do this, watch the temp. If it's good, then start bringing up the multiplier. Once you start experiencing crashes, you can back it back down and be happy or you can bring the core voltage up slightly to help stablize it. Bringing the voltage up however will definitely bring the temp up. Depending on how far you can and want to go, I would suggest going with a bigger heatsink, which you should be able to find a decent one for 20 bucks or less from Thermaltake or Alpha or someone else, especially if the ambient room temp gets into the 80's. Your samsung memory isn't going to do you much good. I doubt that you'll make it up to 200mhz fsb, which the 333 memory won't be able to do anyway, especially since it's a no name brand.

[stevebri]

Had a look in the asus set up and am not 100% familiar with it all but of the following which do I need to change.

I was a simple dual pentium man before my mobo went up so this amd ddr stuff is still a little fresh...

CPU speed 2000
CPU frequency multiple 15
CPU external freq. 133/33
mem freq. 333

Now, if I change the cpu speed to 'manual' I can the get at the next two boxes and tweak...

When I did this CPU ex. freq. went to 200/40... being unsure I have left it and come back to you...

Steve

[crabby]

Swampy-Absolutley no hard feelings. I actually forgot that it was you that started this thread. After all it is your livelyhood.
Steve-You're right too. To some degree macs and pc's have a lot of similarities. To find the ë key I went to the character pallet as well, just not as many steps.

[Swampy]

Originally posted by stevebri
CPU speed 2000
CPU frequency multiple 15
CPU external freq. 133/33
mem freq. 333

Now, if I change the cpu speed to 'manual' I can the get at the next two boxes and tweak...

When I did this CPU ex. freq. went to 200/40... being unsure I have left it and come back to you...


This is the reason for turning down the CPU Frequency multiple when you bump the CPU External freq up. Turn the multiple down to 13 or 14 and bump the external freqency up.

Also, before you do this and save, check your jumper listings and find the one that "Resets the CMOS" and you'll want to document what your current settings are over factory before you tweak as well. This way, if the system doesn't boot at all, you can reset the bios and be back to normal in no time. Some motherboards will reset themselves if they lock up before they POST knowing that the end user screwed up. :)

Sorry this took so long to get back to you. Got a lot of my stuff today and I've been swapping motherboards/memory/processor out of my case this afternoon and installing the OS/patches/Antivirus/etc. hehe. The new machine is screaming at stock speeds.

[Swampy]

Man. Now that I've had the new system up for a day and have done a few things with it... 1- I'm glad to be back on Windows 2000 instead of XP. What I see in Photoshop is what I see in my posted images again. Don't know why this is, but I never had to do anything in Win2k to profile my monitor or calibrate it or anything. Pictures looked the same in my prints, web and photoshop. XP, Photoshop would look different.

2 - I'm very glad to be on a faster system. 2gb ram, the 10k rpm drives (I also scratched putting back that 40gb 7200rpm drive, but picked up a 160gb 7200rpm SATA drive and use it for backing up my pictures and my windows swap file) all make this thing scream.

I apparently blew out my old 128mb ti4600 video card from static or some non-sense. So I picked up an Nvidia 5950 256mb video card as well.

When I load a picture, it takes about a second, where XP and my old machine would take anywhere from 8-15 seconds depending on how long PS was left open from before. Which was another grip about being on XP. The longer I left PS open, the slower it would go. Kid you not. I could open up PS, open a 5 meg jpg in 8 seconds, close that picture, go to work leaving PS open, come home from work and it would take 20 seconds to open a same size jpg. I've noticed this on every XP machine I've put PS on. Strange. Anyway. I'm back in business.

[stevebri]

Thanks for the advice about clocking... have done nowt (nothing) yet because my chip was running at 105 degree's !!!!! Quite happily for 3 months..so I'm fiting new fan today etc...

As for XP and win 2k, have you tried win 2003...?

I have a copy of it (web edition) and I'm thinking about spending a day and loading it instead of XP.

Apparently P/shop takes about 2 seconds to load, but it the opposite to XP whereby everything is turned OFF so I may have to tweak the other way.

Also swampy how many tasks did you have running in the background on XP...? I got mine down to a stable 19 plus norton AV and norton CC and it made things quicker.

I also put a ~ (like a wave) next to my digimarc folder in P/shop so it doesn't look for watermarks every time.

Maybe users should read this link I found it helpful.

http://www.adobe.com/support/techdocs/12dde.htm

Steve

[Adrian Batty]

I would first like to introduce myself as this is my first post on this forum. My name is Adrian and I'm currently living and working in Vienna, Austria.

A question for Swampy regarding your system are you going to add any cooling to your hardrives as I would imagine they get rather hot?

I've seen these at quitepc that might be useful to you http://www.quietpcusa.com/acb/showdetl.cfm?&DID=8&Product_ID=92&CATID=1

Best regards Adrian.

Great forum BTW.

[Swampy]

Welcome Adrian. I am not going to add any more hard drive cooling than I already have. I have sworn by Lian Li cases for years and this case is no exception. The hard drive rack is in an open area in the front bottom of the case (the coolest spot in the case - imagine that!). There's two 80mm fans blowing from the front of the case (with filters) directly on the drives and those keep the drives pretty cool, even at 10k rpm.

[bjnicholls]

I'm on my third Lian-Li build. Great boxes, but noisy, cheap fans. I changed mine for quieter fans so I could hear myself think.

[Swampy]

Of course. Panaflows all the way around! :)