JIMINATOR
02-02-2005, 09:54 PM
Ok, This is for anyone interested in building a system, kind of a look and learn. Some things may apply to you, other things may not. Lets take a trip back to the past for a context and the valuable (expensive?) lessons.
A couple of years ago I put together my prior system. It was a pentium 2400C cpu, asus P4C800-E Deluxe motherboard, geforce 5900 128K video card, corsair oc memory, a new WD drive.
The experiences were detailed in posts from long ago. This particular brand of CPU was multiplier locked but could be overclocked by increasing the FSB - from 200 MHz to a potential 250 MHz - or more - increasing the effective speed from 2400 MHz to 3000 MHz. I found that I was able to do more than 3000 MHz - but that was using slower memory with a 266 memory bus. Needless to say, that was disappointing. The corsair memory was not reliable overclocked past 210 mhz. I picked up some Kingston HyperX memory for testing. That ran @ 240 MHz reliably, but could not meet the 250 MHz that you would expect for PC4000 memory. Ok - 240 MHz is still good, I could deal with that. But a secondary problem occured. The motherboards at that time did not have an effective PCI/AGP lock. So running the system @ 240 MHz would run the PCI bus at some 39 MHz. My maxtor drive had no problem with it. However having the Western digital connected would cause some freezes for minutes at a time. I frown on western digital for that reason. So the Hyperx went back and I settled for a modest 210 Mhz bus speed / 2510 MHz system.
Memory Recommendations: Don't buy any type of OC memory if you plan to overclock. Instead get the highest speed memory you can, ie: skip the PC3200 OC and go for PC4000.
Testing for all of this? I use prime95. It essentially is a program that will max out the cpu and memory while it is running. It will detect and report memory or calculation errors. If the program is not able to run for at least a day straight, then the system is not going to be stable for the long term.
Ok. Then the graphic card. That has worked well, but overall I am pretty disappointed. The card was top of the line except for the 128 mb and it not being an ultra. Ok, not top of the line, but it was certainly expensive. Test results were disappointing. Compared to today they are ludicrous. That is why my standard recommendation for video cards is that if your card can handle what you are currently playing, don't upgrade until it cannot. Otherwise you are just wasting money. Future cards will be cheaper and more powerful, and there is no sense to upgrade just for the purpose of scoring a higher number on a fake benchmark.....
In the next installment we will cover the current system....
Part 2 : Power supply & case. For my last case, I picked one with a glass window and lots of fans. There were two on the front, two on the side, two on the back, the power supply had two, the cpu had 1, the motherboard chipset had one, and the video card had two. That was some pretty serious cooling, but very noisy. I think that many fans is really counterproductive and not more efficient at cooling and moving air. For serious cooling/overclocking it would be better to get some type of water cooling system instead of multitudes of fans. The main thing with cooling is that a case has to be able to breath. That means that it should not be in any type of desk enclosure. Additionally it should be off the ground, or on your desktop. A little bit nosier, but easier to work with. Dust will settle towards the ground and dust is bad news for computers. It is a good idea to periodically open the system and use compressed air to blow out all of the dust in the system, especially on all the fans.
The fans should be arranged so that air comes in through the bottom front and goes out the back through the top back. Test with paper to see if it gets pulled or pushed away.
Cases are largely personal preference. For my current case, I went with a screwless design. It allows for the panels to be removed with thumbscrews, the pci cards to be anchored with push tabs, the drives and cd roms to be locked in place with sliding rails. Overall it works pretty well. The drives are easy to remove and install. The motherboard still has to be screwed down. Anyway little touches like this are nice. My dream case is one that a friend of mine had purchased once. It was a screwless design and featured a spring loaded retaining mechanism for holding the motherboard pan in place. It could easily be separated from the case without screws and that made installing the motherboard a snap.
Power supplies should be a major part of any purchase, and really should be purchased separately from the case, unless it is a known case manufacturer, like Antec, and they have a combo with one of their featured power supplies. Todays cpu and board combinations need more power than ever, especially with the amd-64s and things like the dual sli systems. If a system is flakey, the power supply can often be the cause. You should plan on spending a minimum of $80 to $120 for a good power supply. The cheaper units are pretty much garbage, despite the fact that they may have high ratings. The newer units of today will often include dual 12V power rails. That essentially means that the cpu gets a 12V supply, and the video card/components gets its own 12V supply. This is important for SLI. Also nice to look for is ATX 12V 2.0 specification. You can tell when you see power supplies that support this, as they will have a new type of main connector to the motherboard, and also an adapter that connects to it to connect to existing boards. For this current build, I have been experiencing some instability when alt-tabbing in and out of some direct 3d games. To fix it, I picked up a Ultra X-connect 500 powersupply. They have been nuked in the reviews because despite the major advertising they do, they are not able to maintain the rated level of power. Still, it was $90 with a $20 rebate, compared to the christmas price of $130, and it $70 it compares favorably with other similarly priced units. The whole X-connect scheme is nice, but overall the unit did not help - so it is going back, although if I was more of a modder, I might have kept it. I have been looking to get something like the Antec Neopower 480 PSU ($130). It is decent, along with the Antec True Power series. The Neopower includes modular connectors - no big deal for me - but also is very efficient ("active switching") and includes a connector that can dynamically control the speed of case fans depending on temperature. (This I would love to see).
A note for rebates. I don't suggest purchasing something based on a rebate, unless you were wanting the same thing anyway and the price without rebate is attractive. Manufacturers like rebates because people forget to send them in, send them in late, or incorrectly, or lose the damn receipts (doh!!). A rebate will also block returns of items. On the other hand, you can get some killer deals. Look in the sunday papers for circulars of you want to shop this way, some killer deals are often available.
Drive Partitions: For your drives, I recommend having only one partition on a drive. In theory you can put the operating system on a small partition and your data files on a secondary partition. The reality is that windows will by default install the swap file and all new programs on the small partition, to where it may eventually run low on space. If you make the small partition larger, then you have a whole bunch of dead space between the partitions that has to be skipped when reading from the first partition and then to the second partition. Things become even more troublesome when you install a second drive and a second operating system in order to be able to boot off of either. Now the first partition on your main drive will still be "C:", your second drive will be "D:", your second partition on the main drive will be "E:". This will probably confuse programs that you have installed to work in both systems.
Temprorary files: One thing that I like to do is to point all temprorary files to "c:\temp". That way you can just empty the directory and they are not scattered in multiple directories all over the place. Right click on My Computer -> Properties -> Advanced Tab -> Environmental Variables Button. In System variables, point TEMP & TMP to both be "C:\temp", and save. Secondly for each user profile, open internet explorer properties -> Temp Internet files -> settings -> set it to use no more than 100 MB -> click Move Folder -> find "C:\temp" -> Ok. This is a per-user setting, and has to be repeated for everyone. If a bunch of people are using your computer, and you have no drive space left, this may be why.
Recycle Bin: Either empty it frequently or change the size to be about 1%. Note that this will still be some 1-3 GB on large drives.
C:\hiberfil.sys : this is going to be a large stupid empty file that is equal to the size of the amount of memory you have in your system. It is used to save the windows state on the drive and "wake up" to the exact same state when you restart your computer. Except that I have noticed it doesn't all work very well and systems will tend to be unstable when restarted this way. Most computers can do this in the hardware, so I recommend you disable this "feature". Go to control panel, power options, hybernate tab, uncheck & save. While you are there, on power schemes, set "Turn off Monitor" to about 10 minutes. Most computers will support hardware stand by modes, where start -> turn off computer gives a stand by option. There are two standby modes. On "S1" the monitor will go dark but the fans and everything else will still appear to be running. On "S3" the fans will shut off also and the computer will appear to be off - except maybe for a blinking power led. You can configure which mode your system uses in the BIOS.
A couple of years ago I put together my prior system. It was a pentium 2400C cpu, asus P4C800-E Deluxe motherboard, geforce 5900 128K video card, corsair oc memory, a new WD drive.
The experiences were detailed in posts from long ago. This particular brand of CPU was multiplier locked but could be overclocked by increasing the FSB - from 200 MHz to a potential 250 MHz - or more - increasing the effective speed from 2400 MHz to 3000 MHz. I found that I was able to do more than 3000 MHz - but that was using slower memory with a 266 memory bus. Needless to say, that was disappointing. The corsair memory was not reliable overclocked past 210 mhz. I picked up some Kingston HyperX memory for testing. That ran @ 240 MHz reliably, but could not meet the 250 MHz that you would expect for PC4000 memory. Ok - 240 MHz is still good, I could deal with that. But a secondary problem occured. The motherboards at that time did not have an effective PCI/AGP lock. So running the system @ 240 MHz would run the PCI bus at some 39 MHz. My maxtor drive had no problem with it. However having the Western digital connected would cause some freezes for minutes at a time. I frown on western digital for that reason. So the Hyperx went back and I settled for a modest 210 Mhz bus speed / 2510 MHz system.
Memory Recommendations: Don't buy any type of OC memory if you plan to overclock. Instead get the highest speed memory you can, ie: skip the PC3200 OC and go for PC4000.
Testing for all of this? I use prime95. It essentially is a program that will max out the cpu and memory while it is running. It will detect and report memory or calculation errors. If the program is not able to run for at least a day straight, then the system is not going to be stable for the long term.
Ok. Then the graphic card. That has worked well, but overall I am pretty disappointed. The card was top of the line except for the 128 mb and it not being an ultra. Ok, not top of the line, but it was certainly expensive. Test results were disappointing. Compared to today they are ludicrous. That is why my standard recommendation for video cards is that if your card can handle what you are currently playing, don't upgrade until it cannot. Otherwise you are just wasting money. Future cards will be cheaper and more powerful, and there is no sense to upgrade just for the purpose of scoring a higher number on a fake benchmark.....
In the next installment we will cover the current system....
Part 2 : Power supply & case. For my last case, I picked one with a glass window and lots of fans. There were two on the front, two on the side, two on the back, the power supply had two, the cpu had 1, the motherboard chipset had one, and the video card had two. That was some pretty serious cooling, but very noisy. I think that many fans is really counterproductive and not more efficient at cooling and moving air. For serious cooling/overclocking it would be better to get some type of water cooling system instead of multitudes of fans. The main thing with cooling is that a case has to be able to breath. That means that it should not be in any type of desk enclosure. Additionally it should be off the ground, or on your desktop. A little bit nosier, but easier to work with. Dust will settle towards the ground and dust is bad news for computers. It is a good idea to periodically open the system and use compressed air to blow out all of the dust in the system, especially on all the fans.
The fans should be arranged so that air comes in through the bottom front and goes out the back through the top back. Test with paper to see if it gets pulled or pushed away.
Cases are largely personal preference. For my current case, I went with a screwless design. It allows for the panels to be removed with thumbscrews, the pci cards to be anchored with push tabs, the drives and cd roms to be locked in place with sliding rails. Overall it works pretty well. The drives are easy to remove and install. The motherboard still has to be screwed down. Anyway little touches like this are nice. My dream case is one that a friend of mine had purchased once. It was a screwless design and featured a spring loaded retaining mechanism for holding the motherboard pan in place. It could easily be separated from the case without screws and that made installing the motherboard a snap.
Power supplies should be a major part of any purchase, and really should be purchased separately from the case, unless it is a known case manufacturer, like Antec, and they have a combo with one of their featured power supplies. Todays cpu and board combinations need more power than ever, especially with the amd-64s and things like the dual sli systems. If a system is flakey, the power supply can often be the cause. You should plan on spending a minimum of $80 to $120 for a good power supply. The cheaper units are pretty much garbage, despite the fact that they may have high ratings. The newer units of today will often include dual 12V power rails. That essentially means that the cpu gets a 12V supply, and the video card/components gets its own 12V supply. This is important for SLI. Also nice to look for is ATX 12V 2.0 specification. You can tell when you see power supplies that support this, as they will have a new type of main connector to the motherboard, and also an adapter that connects to it to connect to existing boards. For this current build, I have been experiencing some instability when alt-tabbing in and out of some direct 3d games. To fix it, I picked up a Ultra X-connect 500 powersupply. They have been nuked in the reviews because despite the major advertising they do, they are not able to maintain the rated level of power. Still, it was $90 with a $20 rebate, compared to the christmas price of $130, and it $70 it compares favorably with other similarly priced units. The whole X-connect scheme is nice, but overall the unit did not help - so it is going back, although if I was more of a modder, I might have kept it. I have been looking to get something like the Antec Neopower 480 PSU ($130). It is decent, along with the Antec True Power series. The Neopower includes modular connectors - no big deal for me - but also is very efficient ("active switching") and includes a connector that can dynamically control the speed of case fans depending on temperature. (This I would love to see).
A note for rebates. I don't suggest purchasing something based on a rebate, unless you were wanting the same thing anyway and the price without rebate is attractive. Manufacturers like rebates because people forget to send them in, send them in late, or incorrectly, or lose the damn receipts (doh!!). A rebate will also block returns of items. On the other hand, you can get some killer deals. Look in the sunday papers for circulars of you want to shop this way, some killer deals are often available.
Drive Partitions: For your drives, I recommend having only one partition on a drive. In theory you can put the operating system on a small partition and your data files on a secondary partition. The reality is that windows will by default install the swap file and all new programs on the small partition, to where it may eventually run low on space. If you make the small partition larger, then you have a whole bunch of dead space between the partitions that has to be skipped when reading from the first partition and then to the second partition. Things become even more troublesome when you install a second drive and a second operating system in order to be able to boot off of either. Now the first partition on your main drive will still be "C:", your second drive will be "D:", your second partition on the main drive will be "E:". This will probably confuse programs that you have installed to work in both systems.
Temprorary files: One thing that I like to do is to point all temprorary files to "c:\temp". That way you can just empty the directory and they are not scattered in multiple directories all over the place. Right click on My Computer -> Properties -> Advanced Tab -> Environmental Variables Button. In System variables, point TEMP & TMP to both be "C:\temp", and save. Secondly for each user profile, open internet explorer properties -> Temp Internet files -> settings -> set it to use no more than 100 MB -> click Move Folder -> find "C:\temp" -> Ok. This is a per-user setting, and has to be repeated for everyone. If a bunch of people are using your computer, and you have no drive space left, this may be why.
Recycle Bin: Either empty it frequently or change the size to be about 1%. Note that this will still be some 1-3 GB on large drives.
C:\hiberfil.sys : this is going to be a large stupid empty file that is equal to the size of the amount of memory you have in your system. It is used to save the windows state on the drive and "wake up" to the exact same state when you restart your computer. Except that I have noticed it doesn't all work very well and systems will tend to be unstable when restarted this way. Most computers can do this in the hardware, so I recommend you disable this "feature". Go to control panel, power options, hybernate tab, uncheck & save. While you are there, on power schemes, set "Turn off Monitor" to about 10 minutes. Most computers will support hardware stand by modes, where start -> turn off computer gives a stand by option. There are two standby modes. On "S1" the monitor will go dark but the fans and everything else will still appear to be running. On "S3" the fans will shut off also and the computer will appear to be off - except maybe for a blinking power led. You can configure which mode your system uses in the BIOS.