[elky] Gotta brag a little

  • From: Ray Buck <rbuck@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: elky@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Mon, 22 Feb 2010 07:07:57 -0700

I've been running my new Dreadnought computer for the last few days as my primary workstation.  I'd hoped to have a bit longer to tweak it, but when I came back from Oregon/Washington I had a buncha photos and the old machine I was using was a little slow at certain tasks...like editing photos.  So I called the Dreadnought to active duty. 

For those who haven't been playing along at home, here's a link to the build diary and a brief system description.
http://www.raytherat.com/dreadnought/Welcome.html

 Cooler Master HAF 932 full tower case
TYAN Thunder N3600B Dual processor motherboard
2 x AMD Opteron 2378/2.4 GHz quad-core processor chips
16 Gigabytes OCZ Reaper HPC RAM (8 Gig per processor)
 16 GB WINTEC 240-Pin SDRAM ECC Registered DDR2 667 Server Memory (8 Gig per processor)
APEVIA Warlock ATX-WA900W Power Supply
OCZ 60GB SATA 2 Vertex Series Solid State Drive
XFX Radeon HD 4890 Video Card
M-Audio Audiophile 2496 Sound Card
LITE-ON Black 24X DVD Writer

I've been doing a little tweaking as I try to figger out this Windoze 7 64-bit OS.  There are some nice things about it, but I'm not totally fluent with it and there are some things I don't like about it...like the taskbar preview (I've looked into it online and followed the instructions for disabling it, but that hasn't worked) and the irritating habit of moving the taskbar icons when I drag a file to one of the programs shown on the taskbar.  Unless I hit it dead center, the icons move away, so that I can "pin" the file to the taskbar.  It's almost like the icons are trying to avoid being selected.  I understand why is does it but I don't like it and nothing I've tried (like locking the taskbar) has been effective.

I guess those are minor issues.  I originally decided to use a trackball instead of a mouse, but gave up on it after a few days. My hands aren't steady enough to use it accurately.  My hands have been shaky most of my life for some obscure reason and I found it easier to go back to a Logitech mouse with scroll wheel.

Ok.  Some comparisons using HWInfo32 as a benchmark program:

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The above image shows my machine's rating vs other CPUs.  Funny that it was compared against an Opteron 2378, since that's exactly what it is...times 2.  I thought there might have been more entries below the Opteron 2378, but it's the last entry in the listings.  I'm very surprised that it blows the Intel i7 CPU away. 

This chart in this chart, the higher number is better.

[]

This shows the burst read ratings of the OCZ solid state disk vs other disk systems.  It's good but not as good as I would have thought.

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