[techtalk] Re: Time for a new computer
- From: Thomas Hurst <tom.hurst@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: techtalk@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sun, 24 May 2009 17:49:45 +0100
* Thomas Hurst (tom.hurst@xxxxxxxxx) wrote:
> My desktop is currently a K8 Opteron 185 in a Tyan K8E-SLI; it's
> developed an awkward fault, dropping all the on-board SATA devices
> randomly and requiring a power cycle to get them back. It's getting
> worse; I spent 50 minutes today poking at it before getting it back up.
It's now pretty much dead; it detects on first POST, but bootup hangs,
and after a reboot (even if it's just sat in BIOS for 5 minutes), the
second SATA controller simply hangs.
> So, it's time to push ahead with my new system; target machine is a
> Xeon W3520 (ECC supporting equivilent of the i7 920), on a Supermicro
> X8SAX motherboard (PCI-X \o/) with 12GB of ECC DDR3-1333 memory.
Thankfully, I'm now running my i7, albeit a 920 instead of a W3520.
Sadly it's not been entirely smooth, having random poweroffs and dodgy
poweron.
I appear to have resolved this, however; I bought a molex -> 8 pin
EPS12v connector, using the one on the PSU to drive the 4 pin ATX
connector this mobo also "needs". It was suggested that molex probably
isn't sufficient to drive EPS12v properly, and indeed now I've dropped
that and left the 4 pin ATX connector unconnected, things seem to be
much happier.
> So, has anyone used a bog standard i7 with ECC memory?
It's perfectly happy with it.
> Secondly, I'm tempted to take this opportunity to get a new case; I
> have a Lian-Li V1000 Plus, and while it's well built, it's not the
> most practical of designs. I'm open to suggestions for nice, fairly
> quiet cases with room for a decent number of disks and which won't
> turn into cable-routing hell; this one has places for 6 disks, but you
> can only really fit two in after cable routing, which is frankly
> ridiculous.
I bought an Antec P193. It's fairly quiet and has plenty of space, but
it's also very heavy, and the feet like to come off if you don't lift it
when you move it. I now appreciate Lian-Li's aluminium design and case
wheels rather more, but at least I'm not struggling to fit stuff inside
it.
> Graphics wise, I'm happy with my HD4870. OS is almost certainly going
> to be the Windows 7 x64 RC, which I've heard nothing but good about.
I'm fairly impressed by Windows 7 so far; no major difficulties. I
can't exactly make any claims about how fast it is, though; comparing a
4 year old XP install running on a 7200RPM HD and old Opteron vs an i7
with 6x the memory and an X25-M is a bit ridiculous.
Anyway, it's doubled my framerate in Dwarf Fortress, and that's the
important thing :D
> I guess my other option is a Mac Pro, but I'm not sure I can bring
> myself to buy such an overpriced machine from a company I have no love
> for; I certainly have no intention of running OS X on it.
Were I to do this again, I'd be very tempted to buy a workstation from a
big-name. e.g:
http://www.sun.com/desktop/workstation/ultra27/index.xml
In fact, I'm quite tempted to say I wouldn't want to build another
machine from scratch again; I have better things to do.
--
Thomas 'Freaky' Hurst
http://hur.st/
Other related posts:
