And cutting down on the memory shouldn't hurt too bad, I can't really imagine much real world use for 16GB. Were you just wanting some bragging rights or do you have bad habit or running Photoshop, 200 Firefox tabs, Skyrim, AutoCAD, and several other heavy programs all at once?
Worse; one tab of Google Chrome while trying to browse Facebook....
Also, GOT MY FEDERAL BACK, WHOOOO, LET'S DO THIS!!!
*Browse, browse, browse....blink....blink.....*
MOTHER Fucker!!!!! You have GOT to be kidding me....
I can't find a single Phenom II 1100T anywhere, and now Microsucker is out of stock and the egg no longer lists it....
*Head desk* (...is it just me, or does this all sound familiar?)
At this point I'm pondering if I wanna just go with a cheaper Phenom and then upgrade to a Zambezi next year because they're interchangeable with the Fatality MB I'm grabbing or do something else. Every time I f'n turn around, it's:
CTRL+ALT+FU = TROLL FACE!!!
(No, seriously, I feel like we've been here before, have we been here before?)
Memory: I wound up going with half that memory because I can always upgrade later, or, at the very least double it later. And thanks to the current $10 rebate, I'm actually getting them cheaper by the pair than in a set of four. Worst case scenario here, they are regular price when I buy the second set, bringing the total price to $130; the same price as the matched quad.
Heat sink; FINALLY!!!: This was the original fucking problem that BROUGHT ME HERE to start with, and has been mad doggin' me every since I bought this beast. No biggie though, I got the system pretty cheap, and spent most of last tax season building a kickass tower! But a cold heatsink while the CPU is under load is a waste, nothing more than dead space, and I'd much rather open it up for my NEXT project:
And after much measuring, I finally found the perfect fit all around, and I say perfect in this case, well, because of the case, no pun intended (this time...). The turbine engine 'jet stream' theme of the case gives you two massive 25 CM inlet fans, a fuckton of positive case pressure, and plenty of vents all around making it one of the most effective air cooled cases in it's class. It's one of the main reasons the Hyper 212 is so effective, meaning I could easily go down to a smaller aerodynamic heat sink, even with a 'larger' CPU, and still not lose a single BTU in thermal transfer capacity, ya'know?
A side note is the north bridge cooler that comes with the board will make the most kickass case badge, and I can mount it up in 'no-man's' land on the rail that runs across the Acrylic window, sweeeeeeet!
Anyway, I ams likes totally locksk ins ons the MB, Heatsink and Memories, buts am onest agains ats odd ons thaz CPU, so I ams comings back yets agains...
and still not lose a single BTU in thermal transfer capacity, ya'know?
Yes Shou, we know. (Ignore this is it's not what you were going for.)
Honestly the heat sink looks silly in your situation. You could just put that little radiator up there and you're case flow would do the rest. Having another fan in the middle of that seems silly and maybe disruptive (to the air flow)? I'm not sure how all that works but if you have........... Meh, on second thought I won't bother with this.
I'm not making serious suggestions here, In case anyone feels like misunderstanding.
I'd say go the FX route but there's no real reasoning behind it, I just like their value and like to stand behind them. Just to spite the die hard Intel boys and people who waste time complaining that a $140 chip isn't as good as a $279 Intel chip.
And copy paper? No sir! I've had the same pack of copy paper for well over a year! Whereas I'm always needing to increase my amount of storage. And on top of that my Case has a higher mortality rate than your nearest nursing home!
Sorry about my language skills, my brain is not in top form right now. And Trainrek's purposefully illiterate posts were not the best things to refresh my communication skills.
I suppose it doesn't matter if it's just a storage or back up drive though. And the price is right. Personally I'm not buying any hard drives until prices go back down, I already have to deal with unreasonable price hikes on my gasoline, I'm not tolerating over priced storage on top of that.
I agree - I have some slow HDDs as backup drives or drives to store videos/music on. I have some what were adequatelly fast 2TB drives in RIAD 1 in my server that I bought before the prices of HDDs exploded.
I already have to deal with unreasonable price hikes on my gasoline, I'm not tolerating over priced storage on top of that.
Like several others I am always in need of more storage space, but like you I'll have to wait until HDDs prices return to normal before I buy more.
Like you I am already spending a lot of money on petrol (£1.34 a litre) and can't afford another 4TBs worth of HDDs on top of that.
Do you see the prices of HDDs going down in the near future?
OUCH! I had to do some conversion... which just made the prices seem ever worse. My prices aren't quite that bad but the trade off is my car only gets about 11 miles per gallon (I think that's about 3.8 KM per litre) So it's probably about the same.
I really can't say; From what I remember HDD prices went up because whatever foreign country they were made in (it's interesting that they all are in the same country) had some kind of mother nature, water disaster. Flooding, Typhoons, Tidal waves, Afternoon showers? Something like that I think?
That was some time ago I think. Which begs the question, How long does it take things to dry in Asia? Whatever happened I'm sure they're back to pumping out new HDDS with a %50 chance of being DOA, you know, Business as usual.
So prices should have dropped already. But maybe they're going the way of gas...petrol... and thinking, "Eh, people are already used to these prices, might as well keep them up there and make some extra money. Who cares if everyone hates us and has to start deleting their family photo collections every time they want to download their new favorite hard S&M Gay porn."
The answer to that is simple economics, and with a market as brutal as the PC component market, and with the sheer NUMBER of factories over in Malaysia, if one company won't lower their prices, another one will in order to get the jump on the competition, sell more hard drives than them because they offer the same thing at a lower price and maybe put them out of business.
As far as the 5900 RPM driver goes, compared to an external enclosure it's very fast. Not to mention that coupled with the SATA 6.0 Gbs interface and the large on board cache, it helps to optimize usage.
Not to mention, I've dealt with 10,000 RPM raptors before, and I have to say, I'm not impressed with the life span as high speed drives tend to fly themselves apart (Seriously, Don't you watch Mythbusters???).
Who cares if everyone hates us and has to start deleting their family photo collections every time they want to download their new favorite hard S&M Gay porn.
It's almost as if he's speaking from experience...
Well the thought was this: All those companies are in the same area, they all produce the same products, they all have the same prices, they all have the same failure rates and bad RMA processes. And I know several companies are one in the same. So my thought was that most of them are secretly the same company one way or the other, or at the very least they're cooperating.
And as for your economic model unfortunately it doesn't work that way. If one company drops their prices they know every other company will follow suit in a day or two. That being the case dropping your price won't really be that profitable. But keep your prices higher and your making more profit off of the same number of drives. And as long as no one breaks that trend then all the companies are making more money that usual and can continue doing so as long as they see fit. And people need hard drives so they'll pay whatever prices they have to...eventually.
I think it's because the market is so competitive that things like this happen. If one company lowered their prices then they all would very quickly and they'd end up making less money than if they kept their prices up.
I'd say the Gas prices discussion is a perfect example. They were given and opportunity to go crazy with their prices and they, in 11 years, never bothered to bring them back down. Now they're richer than ever and will probably never bring gas prices down to reasonable levels.
But this is a bit off topic.
I'm sure that a 5900 RPM speed kind of wastes some of the potential of SATA 6 GBS, but It's probably not that bad. And I'd be willing to bet that 5900 RPM drives have a higher life expectancy than 7200 drives.
I don't watch Mythbusters, they really bum fuddle some of their experiments and overlook important things or just do them wrong all together. That irritates me to no end so I stopped watching.
I beleive that the 10,000 RPM drives will shake them selves to pieces though. And higher speeds means shorter lives so I think I'll stick with my 7200s. It's kind of neat to see how far some things have come in the years, processors, video cards, memory, etc. But then other things like HDDs and sound cards have been more or less the same for over a decade.
Now I know there's SSDs but they're prices are so extravagant that they're not really a viable option. Aside from that what's changed? A new connector? Making them spin faster? Nothing significant.
So I'm working on building an upgraded desktop computer and turning my old desktop machine into a home server. I have the server stuff under control, but I've realized I no longer have any idea how to buy graphics cards or processors.
Considerations: - I'd like to keep a budget of around $700 - $800 - I play some games (mainly Valve stuff + Flight Simulators, which don't run that well on my current machine) and would like it to be fairly capable in that respect - I don't have any particular media wishes, but an HDMI port might be nice to play with - I have no allegiances to Nvidia/AMD/Intel/Whoever - I'd rather go for a nondescript case, so no reason for LEDs or whatever there. - I need a case/stuff inside, but I'll be re-using monitor/keyboard/all the other accessories - The machine will run Windows 7 64-bit
I have a Public Newegg Wishlist where I've gotten started. Does PrincessNybo still maintain her lists of parts?
One, not all hard drives are built in Malaysia; some come from China!
Also, it's kind of hard for Mythbusters to bum fumble anything, or overlook important things with thousands of fans screaming at them on the fan forums. They have revisited experiments MORE than once simply because fans JUST LIKE YOU actually felt it would help expressing their opinions online in a civil manner instead of simply giving up to go pout in the corner like a child. It's very gratifying when they revisit old myths because the fanbase says they were wrong about something and they wind up proving the fans right! I FEEL your frustration, but you wound up missing the very thing you were looking for BECAUSE you stopped watching.
When was the last time anyone on a TV show like that ever admitted to being wrong and apologized to the fans who were right after an online response to previously aired material?
Anyway, back to the subject:
SSD's ARE a viable option, not for mass storage, but simply as an on-board boot drive or for smaller mobile applications. They are faster, more reliable (the ones that make it out the factory door that is....), and are more impact resistant, thus making them ideal as either a PCIE boot card option, or a HDD for a laptop. If you didn't need much storage space, you could get a large enough HDD on the motherboard, leaving the entire hard drive bay completely open for increased airflow, airflow that will remain much cooler on it's trip through the case if it doesn't have to pass over any active drives on it's way to the heat sinks. The overclocking applications of something like that alone are practically limitless.
Time was, when a hard drive with moving parts is accidentally dropped, chances of it getting damaged while reading or writing were pretty heavy. SSD's were designed to be bounced around.
But then other things like HDDs and sound cards have been more or less the same for over a decade.
Actually, they have; the changes are just a lot less visible now, that's all. When you have an exponentially greater amount of data compressed onto a hard drive platter that is the same size physically as they were a decade ago, you wind up with read/write heads on high capacity drives that have targeting capabilities accurate down to the sub-atomic level (if not LOWER!!!), yeah, I'd say it's come a long way in a short time. Granted, they look much like they did ten years ago, but the technology advancements on the inside have been phenomenal. Ten years ago, they were dealing with I believe they referred to as the '4Gigabyte boundary'. Any hard drive with a storage capacity of greater than 4 gigs would need multiple partitions to prevent bad sectors/data loss. It was back in the days where they were still integrated NTFS OS's into consumer grade computers due to it's increased advantages over just FAT32. Simply put, a 5900 RPM drive can do what a 7200 from a few years ago does as far as latancy and seek time goes because of the higher compression rate. The smaller the data is on an equally sized platter, the more of it will pass through a specific point compared to an older, lower capacity drive running at a higher speed.
Then there's the evolution of the Sata capable drives and it's various stages, far exceeding anything IDE or scuzzy could come close to, and with a max transfer rate of 6.0 Gbs, it will more than meet my performance requirements....or would if I was going to be grabbing it. Unfortunately a HDD is out of the equation for the moment, especially since I wanna wait for the market price to come back down, or the current stock goes back on sale with added MFG rebates because they aren't moving fast enough. Granted, higher prices yield higher profit, but it will always impact your volume, and if the volume impact is greater than what the increased profit margin yields, then there is no point in keeping the prices high because in examples like that, you wind up losing money due to much lower volume in sales.
Supply and demand: price goes up across the board, demand goes down. Price stays high as it does, demand will drop significantly for the very same reason everyone in this thread is waiting to upgrade mass storage. If everyone in the market for a hard drive holds off until the next month or two to buy, then no one is buying hard drives THIS month. And irregardless of the higher profit margin NOW, if no one is CURRENTLY buying hard drives, than you aren't making a profit and wind up losing money every day due to continued operating expenses. If this develops into a trend, irregardless of how few parent companies there truly are, if they lose enough of their 'small' subsidiaries, it will wind up impacting their bottom line. IOW: They'll keep this up only until the equation they use to determine the profitability of 'higher prices/lower volume vs. lower prices at higher volume' determines there is greater profit to be made with lower prices.
Honestly the heat sink looks silly in your situation.
NOOOOooooooOOOO, what looks SILLY is a fucking square peg in a round hole!
Maybe when YOU have a turbine jet engine off a 737 that looks like it belongs in a disco sitting on your desk then YOU'D actually be able to see the beauty here; both the aesthetically exoteric of having round pegs in round holes as opposed to the square boat anchor I have now, and the esoteric beauty of the inherent aerodynamic superstructure of the case interior as a whole in regards to the jet-stream all of these factors combined as a whole will create. You have experience turning wrenches, you know better than anyone rate of airflow is the single most important factor to any motor, and how the smallest factor can have the biggest impact. Same with a computer! You also seem to be underestimating the dual slot applications of having a color changing fan with clear blades on the front. Watching photons has never been more entertaining!!
It's strange, I could almost swear I just set my Nook down... But here I am, trying my best to get through some non fiction work.
I don't know about the fan forums, and I don't mean to say that they're bad at what they do. They do some neat stuff and often do it well. But ever now and again they miss something. And I know they sometimes revisit things that they missed, but they also don't. That's just a small amount I know but that really drives me up the wall. Plus I generally don't like the two main guys, they annoy me. And please don't misunderstand, I didn't just drop it early on, I watched it for a very long time before dropping it. Also I think you just implied I was a brat pouting in a corner...
And I agree that the revisiting they do is very cool, that's definitely a first for a show. I'm not arguing that Mythbusters is bad, I'm just saying it twists my nipples sometimes... And not in the kinky way. (Sorry, I'll try to behave from now on)
And yes, SSDs are a viable option for some set ups. But for me, storage is exactly that. And $1000 for 500 GB isn't exactly economical. I have some pretty serious storage needs as do most power users, so SSDs aren't the ideal set up. As a OS drive they're great stuff. But still not cheap.
I know all about dropped HDDs! I love buying laptops people have dropped and showing them a little love. The profit is pretty decent if you buy from the right people. That's how I got my current laptop; $70 for the laptop, $50 for the drive, and then I threw the OS back on with one of my discs. Sigh... this price hike is killing me.
Like I said, HDDs have gotten faster and bigger. This is fine and great. But nothing really significant has happened aside from SSDs. And lets see, 2002? I want to say that we had reasonably sized drives back then? By that I mean like 40-80GB IDE drives. But my memory stops at the root beer float I had an hour ago so... I could be very wrong, like embarrassingly so.
Yes this is true, but as I said HDDs are a necessity for the most part. Not many people buy drives because they feel like it. So chances are the amount of drives being sold shouldn't change very much. And what little it does should be more than covered by the %20 (random number) increased profit margins. But I have no facts to back this up, I'm just making some guess work on current HDD sales.
I don't mean the actual looks of the thing, I just mean having a monster heat sink might not be necessary BECAUSE of your cases impressive airflow. And I didn't want to get into this because honestly, I don't really know what I'm talking about, but my thought was that you have your case. It got a massive fan sucking air in and a massive fan blowing air out. So it should have some pretty major air flow. If you stick a less powerful fan in the middle of that what will happen? Will the slower air collide with the faster flowing air and muck things up. Will it create some weird low pressure area just over the CPU? Or will the Higher flow rate of the case accelerate the fan beyond it's working limits and burn out the motor and send extra voltage back to your MB? For all I know it could cause some miniature dust whirlwinds!
Like I said I have no clue what I'm talking about here. Just had some curiosities.
I'd say go AMD for the CPU. Say what you will about them but their performance to price ratio is leaps and bounds beyond Intels. The FX 4100 is a pretty nice little chip for $120. Seems to be well within your budget and should be able to handle everything you throw at it... except for saltwater, Intel chips just rust so much better. (I'm tired. This is all the wit I can muster at current.) Also HDMI is a must, it might sound like a fun novelty if you haven't had it. But trust me, it makes life SO much easier. But pretty much any card you buy will have HDMI on it.
And, for me at least, your wish list seems to be defunct. It will be much easier to throw some real suggestions at you if I could actually see your wish list.
That works out at about £6.09 per gallon which works out at about £0.15 per mile. However the weird thing is that the petrol I buy is 95 octane and petrol in America is ~86 octane, so I am not really sure which of us gets the better deal. I can typically get ~40-45MPG out of my car and am thinking about getting a new car in the next year which (supposedly gets about 80MPG. Then again I will have to think about this some more.
As far as re-building a factory that has been decimated by HUGE floods goes. It probably takes at least 2 years for them to rebuild to the state it was in before the floods and get back up to the original production speed. ______________________________________________________________________
I have never used a 10,000 RPM drive before but then again I wouldn't pay the money for the capacity of those drives back when I firt heard of them. I never heard about this low life expectancy before though. _______________________________________________________________________
SSD's ARE a viable option, not for mass storage, but simply as an on-board boot drive or for smaller mobile applications. They are faster, more reliable
- they are definitley viable and are a great idea if you don't want your new and fast PC to be throttled by the primary HDD. Usually 9 times out of 10 poor performance can be pegged down to the HDD acting as a bottleneck. They are expensive though. I have one connected to a 6Gbp/s SATA port and it is extraordinary fast. I have no idea how long it'll last but I'd say that it is just as reliable as platter based HDDs, if not more so. I have had HDDs die in days and I have some 20 year old ones that still work. So only time will tell as far as my SSD is concerned. _____________________________________________________________________
So chances are the amount of drives being sold shouldn't change very much.
- Perhaps, perhaps not. As previously mentioned a lot of people in this thread would have bought some new HDDs if it wasn't for the prices. I certainly would have bought another pair of 2TB or 3TB HDDs if it was economical. Sadly this isn't the case due to a lack of time and money.
I'm not sure if the low life expectancy is something that people really notice. I can't really say my current and previous hard drives had a life expectancy. Some of them lasted a day, some a month, some nearly a year. I've had probably... 15 or so hard drives and all of them quit at completely different times. So you can't really say this drive will last longer than this one, they all cut their own wrists whenever the mood takes them.
But the faster something spins the faster it dies as a rule of thumb.
Yes people like me will hold off on any storage purchases. But for how long? Price hikes may put a dip in their business right now, but if they go on for 6 months eventually everyone will break down and buy their overpriced time bombs. Although if I'd just lost my factories to a flood I wouldn't want my sales to take a hit right now. But big companies have the resources to do that and not even blink.
Looks like a pretty good build so far. But you seem to be at your budget's limit right now, do you already have a disk of Win 7 lying around? Or will you need to adjust some things to be able to afford it?
And I'm not sure what you've got lying around at home but I can't speak highly enough of having a back up drive. Even just a small drive will makes things much less painful for you in the future.
Thanks for the comments. I do have an extra MSDN Win7 license I can use.
Since I haven't kept up on graphics cards or processors, am I spending too much somewhere and could probably get similar performance out of something cheaper? Would spending an extra $20 or $30 on a graphics card get me much better performance?
As for backup, I'm turning my current desktop into a home server, which will house the backups for a new computer plus our laptops. It currently has two 1 TB drives in it and I'll be expanding that as we start to use it up. This thing is going to make me want to start wiring my house with CAT6...
The inlet fans (plural) are low R.P.M., low pressure, high volume fans that are designed to keep the air moving through the case front to back. It's a very gentle current compared to the higher R.P.M. fan on the heat sink which exhausts directly out the back of the case. Besides, with the amount of case vents built into the case as a whole, it's not designed to do anything more than generate a small amount of positive case pressure that won't spin the fan any faster than if you were blowing on it.
Not to mention, you seem to have gotten the mistaken idea this is a sealed system like the intake on a care and with too much back pressure from the exhaust is going to blow the turbo if the waste gate doesn't engage. It's not like that as any extra airflow simply bounces of and is redirected elsewhere....like directly up through the Rosewill PSU because the inlet fan sits right above the heatsink.
Another user said he picked up a pair back when he got ten more bucks on the rebate than what I'm getting, but they're still on sale, and pretty damn good deal because it comes with a manufacturer limited 5 year warranty with online registration.
Well as I mentioned you can get pretty similar performance to the 975 with the 4100 and save $50. I think that in real world applications the 975 has a little edge over it, but not too big. And I believe the board you picked out is AM3 compatible so it should work with it just fine. Though after looking at the reviews I might pick a different MB, it seems to have a pretty high failure rate. Plus you can get something with all the same features for probably $30-40 less. But I don't really know all that much about board chip sets to be honest so I'll let someone else give you some suggestions on that.
Though this does seem to be a decent choice for $155. And the thing looks killer.
As for your video card, I honestly wouldn't bother getting anything better than that 560. AMD really seems to dominate this price range and I think you can get a little more performance for the same price if you go that route. But honestly I'd stick with your EVGA card, you can't seem to fault the things. And there's a very small amount of reviews mentioning lemons or failing cards so they seem pretty reliable.
Power supplies aren't a big issue. The one you picked gives you plenty of power and is a decent price, though it seems to be out of stock. As long as they don't explode and take a sound card, video card, and $100 pair of IEMs with them then you're in good shape.
The case seems to be fine, though a bottom mounted PSU might be a nice feature to have.
And Western Digital drives are the only one who've lasted much more than a year for me so hopefully they'll work well for you.
Haha, sorry. I think you said it was a turbine design or something like that to make the point. I just kind of ended up imagining the inside of that case being like a wind tunnel.
On the 3d gaming card market they do. Intel sort of competes on the low end with their on chip graphics and in the business non-3d market, Matrox is still around making cards (though I can't come up with a reason to buy one anymore).
What was the 'iron heart' fan thing for? (I couldn't find what it was when searching online). Now I'm jealous and want hardware to play with . . .off to the frys mobile with me. Let us know how it goes (and be careful with that zalman, I like them too, but the radiator blades can cut easily even though they aren't that sharp)
Also, the Titan Iron Heart is the north bridge cooler and it's a pain in the ass to find because the Egg, MC, and apparently Fry's no longer carry them, and their inventory of said item was apparently liquidated to online drop-ship retailers only. It and the Zalman are gonna help tie the whole 'Fatal Bruiser Cruiser' theme together; Red, Black, and Blue!
Couldn't use it on the current build because the CM Hyper 212 has too large, one of the reasons I needed to replace it. And thanks about the Zalman, that's what I keep hearing from other people who have one. Excellent performance, just wear gloves during installation, preferably kevlar....
I love those Zalmans as well, and have used them in my builds for years. The only other caveat to their awesome performance is that they do require cleaning with compressed air (and sometimes dental floss) more often than coolers with straight fins.
Since the blades fan out from the center, dust tends to get sucked in there and can cake together if not cleaned frequently. For that reason, I highly recommend them to enthusiasts, but never use them in builds for friends and family who don't know how to take care of their computers properly.
Otherwise, that looks like an awesome build! Let us know how it performs when you get it all put together.
I figure it'll hold out for six months to a year, long enough for me to find a more robust solution because I don't know if you've noticed, but static free air has gone through the f'n roof lately, and it's almost like you have to refinance the house to pick up a two pack every month or something. Plus, canned air is non sustainable, generates waste, and like I said, I just can't afford it anymore.
I DID see a rather innovative solution in a tiny air compressor with a static dissipation system built in like a mini version of the compressor systems used to fill canned air cans at the factory, but it's like 80 bucks and not currently in the budget. Minivac, next best thing! Specially for nine bucks, buuuuut, unlike the Egg, it's shipment scheduling falls more along the 2-4 weeks lines than anything so I'm still waiting on it, even though I ordered the damn thing first when my state check first came.
One more thing; I know you were being a bit sarcastic with the dental floss, but in all seriousness, I've found an old tooth brush works best for cleaning between heatsink fins prior to blowing it out.
Yeah, I have a rechargeable mini compressor with nozzle and brush attachments that does great for everything but really caked-on dust in tight spaces like laptops. For the those jobs, I picked up a case of compressed air on a crazy deal at Fry's a while back, so I haven't noticed the prices lately.
In reply to Trainrek, #7138: In reply to crazy4AWDs, #7139:
And yes, I was totally serious about the dental floss. The unwaxed, unflavored variety is great for cleaning between the fins of those Zalmans. Toothbrushes are definitely great for cleaning out computers, especially dog toothbrushes with those large and small angled heads on each end. And they're cheap!
