New Hardware

[jimnyc]

I don't have any and won't anytime soon as I am an unemployed bum!

Well, maybe after monday...

 

[Jackass]

I dont either...and I am working, and living with the in-laws and STILL cant afford any. How sad is that?

 

[janeeng]

That's a damn shame, maybe I will have Adbul run over to the PC center and rob some! hahah

 

[Jackass]

Works for me!!

 

[janeeng]

hahahaha, make a list and I will tell him I will give him a kiss and send him along to get what we need! hahahhaahah!

 

[Jack]

Poor boys,

just wondering what my next toy will be. Have to look in Sundays paper and see what's on sale.

 

[janeeng]

I hear that if you buy two you get a discount, so could you pick me up something too!?

 

[Jackass]

Thanks for rubbing it in there Jack!! LOL

 

[jimnyc]

Originally posted by Jack
Poor boys,

just wondering what my next toy will be. Have to look in Sundays paper and see what's on sale.

Whatever you replace, I call dibs on the old one!

 

[Jack]

Sorry Jim,

you know how the game goes, I stare at what I want and Laurie says get it and she gets the old one. What a great deal this is. ha ha

 

[jimnyc]

Originally posted by Jack
Sorry Jim,

you know how the game goes, I stare at what I want and Laurie says get it and she gets the old one. What a great deal this is. ha ha

Well, can you go stare at another 512meg of memory and ship it my way please? Thanks!

 

[janeeng]

Damn, I always thought it was "share and share alike" I am the poorest here, any handouts? hehe

 

[malos]

It isn't hard at all really and is a bit cheaper than getting a decked out machine from one of the big companies.

All you gota do is plug the stuff together and put an OS CD
in the drive... it will do the rest.

For $800 bucks i made the following - parts from pcparts.com

2.4ghz pentium IV(191 bucks for the 800 FSB version may or may not be worth it I am still workin on that... might be better to just get a 2.8 ghz processor that is 533 FSB.
512 megs of pc 3200 ram ($100 bucks for the cheaper brand)
big black easy use case (the colored ones are worth the extra)
power supply (unfortunately the color cases don't come with it
but its worth the extra $30 bucks not to be sucha pain to build)
mother board Asus (90 bucks... 20 bucks more gets u onboard
raid goto dell's site if you don't know what RAID it isn't needed really but it increases performance significantly and you can make
huge drives with it.
two 120 gig harddrives setup in raid format (makes it look like one big 240 gig harddrive that runs about 40% faster) (100 bucks each)
52speed rewriter cdrom (go 30 more bucks and u got a dvd writer)
128 meg video card (60 bucks)

So.. you could dump a harddrive and the raid card and go with a 2.8 ghz processor and drop the price to right around 600 bucks for a really smokin fast machine. Go to a local school if you know someone who works at one in the IT department and ask if they have any extra licenses of their xp OS software for sale I got mine for $20 bucks. (better than 100+ from the store or a distributor)

feel free to email me if you have questions on puttin a pc together
or troubleshootin it. Used to have my own business which I did part time while workin but I let it go and I'm tryin to catch up on the technology again ... amazing how things change in just a year.


On a side note - any of you PC gurus out there know the value of Hyperthreading technology for a 2.4 ghz processor on a ASUS p4s800 board? I have two 256 meg DDR (3200)internationals installed and it doesn't seem to be performing up to par. My brothers machine is almost identicle (built them both) and it seems to do much better with one 512 kingston ram in it that is only 2700. We paid about the same for both rams but i'm surprised at the difference in speed.

Does Windows XP or 2003 have to be installed to take advantage of the hyperthreading technology or can windows 2000 pro do it? (my brothers got xp on his i got 2000 on mine)

take it ez

 

[jimnyc]

malos, good post, and welcome to the board.

I feel the same way you do, I build my own pc's. I did the same as you, but with an AMD chip instead (Athlon 1800) and did it for about $350 (i had a little stockpile of parts already). I've been in the pc fix'em business since 1989, glad to see another techie around. We have another member here, Eric, who knows LOTS about technology, and he's a little higher up the food chain than I.

Your setup sounds good, the only thing I wouldn't recommend to the every day user is the RAID technology. The only RAID worth a damn is scsi and even then should be left for servers. The differences for most users will be negligible. Unless your a true speed freak and every nanosecond counts!

I can't add much to your questions. I would say out of all the memory I've used in my time, Kingston is at the top of the list. How long has it been since you purchased the memory? (maybe you can trade it in) Can you swap it with your brothers memory to see if it helps your machine?

 

[malos]

Hmm got the ram for my new pc about a month and a half ago... they are two 256 meg 3200 DDR chips from a company called international (probably shouldnta let pcparts decide what kind of ram should go in my board but nonetheless whats done is done... i'll get some more later)

My brothers ram we just bought last week from fry's electronics.

I have the feeling that my speed issues lay in the fact that hyperthreading may not be supported by windows2000... i am researching that at the moment. Fairly hard to find a good source on information on it however.

I have a copy of the beta of windows 2003 that is comin out that I ordered sometime ago when i was starting to get into ASP programming (I've since dropped that project and hopped up and down onto about 200 different projects heh... if I'd just stick to one thing I'd do great! At least i'm learning a little bit of everything)

I snagged up a spare 80gig hd that i may pop several different operating systems on to see what i can get for a response out of the board.... just picked up a bunch of benchmarks that run on multiple os so i can test the reactions.

I'm currently gonna try windows.net server RC2, sun solaris x86 windows (not sure what version i got), and hopefully windows XP if I can scrounge it up somewhere think we have a couple spare licenses here at work I can bum for 20 bucks or so. They didn't have any spare out at the college.

I really wish I had more time and a duplicate of my machine so i could leave it here at work to mess with when I don't have things to do.

I'm gonna do a bunch of messing with it this weekend and will let you know what i end up with.

I agree on the RAID it does not seem extremely beneficial to gaming or any processing really but for massive amounts of files it sure does help. I have like 180 gigs worth of stuff and not having to copy back and forth from partitions/drives really saves me a ton of time. Even when i'm copying 800 meg files from my 80g hd to the raid it still only takes it about 3-4 seconds... pretty impressive. Copied about 80 gigs of stuff over a lan in about 5 minutes it was crazy.

I have a feeling putting 256-512 megs more of ram in there will really make the difference. I think windows 2000 has a bit too much system overhead (its somewhere around 126 megs of memory used when it finally finishes booting up with norton).

I will have to check my brothers machine out next time i go to his place and see what kind of overhead xp has on his machine.

 

[eric]

Don't have a lot of time right now but some quick answers :

Does Windows XP or 2003 have to be installed to take advantage of the hyperthreading technology or can windows 2000 pro do it? (my brothers got xp on his i got 2000 on mine)

Hyperthreading is supported on Windows 2000 SERVER. It in not just the OS that needs to be considered though, as the Applications that are running must make efficient use of asynchronous threading. Hyperthreading is greatly misunderstood and the theoretical model does not behave as it should in real time; we have performed extensive lab testing, and have uncovered many things, some good and some bad, about this new technology. I will explain much more of this latter.

The only RAID worth a damn is scsi and even then should be left for servers.

SATA raid is changing this thinking, but I agree the average user does not need the power and extra headaches.

I have a feeling putting 256-512 megs more of ram in there will really make the difference. I think windows 2000 has a bit too much system overhead (its somewhere around 126 megs of memory used when it finally finishes booting up with norton).

The extra ram will help, though not as much as one might expect, unless you are running memory intensive apps. One thing you might want to do is tweak the Paging File Location (putting it in its own partition can help greatly) and size , adjust disk Cache sizes, or ramdisk essential system files and Dll's. Again much more a little latter.

P.S. Watch Norton, although a good utility, it has some downfalls with Win2K.