Computer hardware

[arkiel]

Was wiped out in a 5-alarm fire. Stood on sidewalk and watched my router wink out. Thinking the damage is limited to water, but not sure when I'll be able to get into the apartment.

2 questions for what could become a general-purpose thread:

1) anyone got an up-to-date system buying guide for 2012?

2) any chance my harddrives could survive (unpowered) a deluge?

Thanks. Don't really have the will to do any of this myself. Finding housing and whatnot.

[soul.assassin]

1.) This one's a few months ago:
http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/buyers-guide/2012/05/18/pc-hardware-buyer-s-guide-may-2012/1

Performance-wise, go for Intel's i* (i3, i5, i7) series, but if you're on a tight budget or not gaming too much, more recent AMDs (except Bulldozers) will fill the bill.

2.) Assuming they're not powered and/or immersed completely, there's a lot of information about problems with wet hard drives and how to deal with them, including anywhere from swapping the circuit boards to serious data recovery.

[arkiel]

Thanks, soul.

[PolarisX]

If you can find a Q6600 Core2Quad chip in back stock somewhere, cheap, they overclock like an ANIMAL. Just saying. I'm floating happy at 3.5GHz.

[arkiel]

Considering a Maximus V Gene mb. Micro ATX, so maybe I can just shove it into my backpack if the house burns down again.
Only, it just has 2x16x pcie 3.0 slots, and 1x1 pcie expansion slot. Never used more than two slots at once, but gotta ask:

Aside from soundcards and enterprise SSD, what are 1x1 pcie good for?

[PolarisX]

Considering a Maximus V Gene mb. Micro ATX, so maybe I can just shove it into my backpack if the house burns down again.
Only, it just has 2x16x pcie 3.0 slots, and 1x1 pcie expansion slot. Never used more than two slots at once, but gotta ask:

Aside from soundcards and enterprise SSD, what are 1x1 pcie good for?

Saying you have. I've never used a 1x slot for anything. I do think there are some propitiatory things that do use it too though.

[Kasowaree]

If you go ATI stay far away from Bulldozer. And if you go Intel stay away from Ivybridge. Right about now the best would an Sandybridge. Ivy has heating issues due to a switch to thermal paste rather then Fluxless Solder and Bulldozer has performance issues.


As to the use of 1x1pcie slots other then SC and SSDs I use them for things like Firewire USB expansions Capture cards sometimes and some of the more obscure doodads.

And for the Maximus, looks good. I don't see any placement issue or restrictions. With 1155 it'll give good choice of CPUs and it even support 32 gigs of RAM off four slots, which is useless to most people but nice to have.



I do have to ask one question. What are you going to be using it for?

[arkiel]

1155 requires Ivy Bridge, yeah? I was planning for 3770k. Don't immediately care about OC, just like the option.

The Ivy Bridge problem you describe, that something that can be corrected by correct choice of pastes? Or were you referring to chipset, and not CPU?

Also, monitors. I was thinking one s-ips and a standard HD that can pivot. Any suggestions? I was considering http://accessories.us.dell.com/sna/productdetail.aspx?c=us&cs=04&l=en&sku=320-2676
for the pivot, and
http://www.anandtech.com/show/5636/hp-zr2740w-high-resolution-ips-that-doesnt-break-the-bank
for the S-IPS.

[Kasowaree]

The Ivy Bridge problem you describe, that something that can be corrected by correct choice of pastes? Or were you referring to chipset, and not CPU?

It's inside the CPU. With the "Issues" AMD have had lately Intel got alittle cocky,so rather then using Fluxless solder they used generic thermal paste in chip. Most of the time it shouldn't cause you're average user much issue, but if you do any overclocking, live in a disturbingly hot climate or do really CPU heavy things like video encoding it might cause overheating.


I could give much better suggestion if I knew what you use you're computer for most. Just browsing highend gaming video editing streaming HTPC or what?

[arkiel]

Pretty much everything from 3D modeling to word processing to image editing to gaming to the classic good 'ol fashion porn scour.

[Kasowaree]

Pretty much everything from 3D modeling to word processing to image editing to gaming to the classic good 'ol fashion porn scour.

Well then Let the Fun Begin.


64 Four Bit Window 7. At least 16 gigs of 1866 DDR3. An SSD drive for booting and programs for Modeling and Editing. Two 2TB internal HDDs for finished work nonintense games and porn. The 3770k should handle damn near anything you throw at it. For a GPU honestly anything is the current gen is fine, unless you're rich/crazy enough to get a Workstation card. You're also gonna need a massive PSU I'd suggest atleast 600-700 watts,Corsair makes some really nice ones. Try and get a modular one to save space. The MOBO you linked should be fine.

Also good on you for actually building your own.

[arkiel]

I was pretty close to buying an Alienware and being done with it.

Hard to apply critical thought and assessment right now. Angry most of the time.

[dhokarena56]

Speaking of computers, I'm in the market, or will be in about a year, for a computer that has a fantastic processor that is not necessarily multiple-core. In essence, I need a processor that will run a non-multithreaded program at ridiculous speeds.

[PolarisX]

Speaking of computers, I'm in the market, or will be in about a year, for a computer that has a fantastic processor that is not necessarily multiple-core. In essence, I need a processor that will run a non-multithreaded program at ridiculous speeds.

You do want multiple cores, so one core can be doing something, and the other is the core doing your program in question.

[arkiel]

Multiple-core is your only option. All the fast stuff is just built that way. Intel throttles the speed on the lower core count chips, too.

Anyone got any Windows product keys they could PM me, for the full product? Anything NOT Win7? In the alternative, I seem to recall a counter-intuitive way for getting an upgrade key to work w/o a full key (I got an Upgrade key).

I had four full keys, going back to XP, before the fire :/

[Ornette]

They throttle the speed on every processor, not just Intel. Every i7 coming off the assembly line gets put in a tester, most don't even work, some work at 3Ghz and they sell that as a 2.2 (making these numbers up), some work at 4Ghz and they sell that as a 2.4, etc.

There really isn't many things that run exclusively on a single thread these days, at least not many that actually requires a lot of horsepower. Even encoding h264 video with mencoder or ffmpeg actually uses dozens of threads. If you compile Firefox, libtool and gcc both use as many threads as the system will allow (which is usually one more than the number of processors x cores). Even if you've written a nice little c program that runs on nothing but the spawned thread and calculates the digits of Pi, you're running this on an OS, and this OS is doing lots of other things while your program is chugging along. That means your single thread program won't have to give up its time slice to the scheduler to allow other threads to run, and it won't need to give up space on that processor's cache for other activities that the OS may need to perform.

The added bonus of having multiple cores on a single bed of silicon is that they can share a cache and in some cases even registers. It is VERY expensive to have to fetch something off-chip. Ignoring things like pipelining and whatever, let's consider a simplified memory model. You have a processor that runs at 2Ghz, that means it can execute an instruction once ever half of a nanosecond. Now, your RAM, say some PC100 with 10ns latency, on a bus that's 100Mhz (10ns). But when something is fetched from memory, it's not just a single word (some number of bytes), it's an entire block, so we're looking at a total latency of maybe 100ns+. So in the time it takes the processor to address and read from memory, the processor could have done 200 other things while it waited for memory.

In practice, it does go off and try to do other things, and there's a lot of optimization between the RAM, the bus, and the processor, but it's still extremely expensive than accessing stuff that's on-chip, like registers or the cache. If you have an application that has 2 threads, and one's on one chip while the other is on another, and they're both working on the same thing (like compiling code or encoding a movie), both chips have to pull the same stuff from memory into their respective caches. But when multiple processors are on the same chip, they can share all of that data.

Bottom line, there's really no reason you'd want a slightly higher clocked single core processor vs a slighly lower clocked multicore.

[Dartz]

To put the performance benefit of a new i7 in perspective. My laptop has an i7 3610QM.

I encoded Star Wars last night in about 40 minutes.
The same video encoding will take hours on an old Intel T9300 on my older machine.

It's so much faster it's not funny. 4 cores and 8 threads squat down and shit all over anything. IT also gets up to 80C running that encode, with the fan screaming at full power.

I'm going to fit an mSATA SSD drive and 16GB of RAM sometime next year for a whole load more speed on top of that. Only downside is Nvidia Optimus is a bit of a dog. I smashed the drivers trying to hack them and repairing that was a pain.

I tend to buy high end laptops, rather have a mid-range desktop and a low-range portable. Grabbing a laptop in a fire is generally much easier than a desktop. I think it usually works out a little cheaper. I paid 1250 for this GE70 less than a week ago and it is a grunty beast.

And it's fully portable. For a definition of portable. It's a 17 incher (15 inch was sold out).

[arkiel]

One more time before I head to Best Buy. Anyone got a root (full) product key for Windows? Preferably Windows Home Premium, but I'd take Windows XP. Anything you've upgraded out of.

[dhokarena56]

I ask because I specifically want a processor that will run Dwarf Fortress quickly- and Dwarf Fortress isn't multithreaded.

[soul.assassin]

I ask because I specifically want a processor that will run Dwarf Fortress quickly- and Dwarf Fortress isn't multithreaded.

Nice troll, nice.