$2500 Build

Aside from EAX support and a few more FPS? No, the Prelude isn't going to be magic. You already have a card with really good SNR.
 
alright, you might have just saved me another $180.

why are you so down on EAX though? doesnt it add a whole to level to games, FPS specifically?

ive been in the dark ages for 4 years. getting back into all of this would have been impossible without all of the feedback ive had here. thank you all so much for responding to this post for the passed week. im sure some of you are getting sick of it being bumped to the top every night when i get to work and start wondering how to improve this rig.

just out of curiosity silent, what kind of rig are you running? or from your sig i see you are putting one together. mind posting some parts?
 
EAX just isn't that great. I've got a reasonably good speaker setup (Boston Acoustics A400 and Acoustic Research AR3a tower speakers running off a couple of Yamaha NaturalSound receivers) and... put simply, I was unimpressed. Modern games have good positional audio without bothering with EAX. I share your Creative distrust/hatred, too, though mine is due to my purchase of a then $120 X-Fi Xtreme Music (the original one, not the even worse 1/2 height card). Worst drivers I've ever dealt with. Sold the card and the guy that bought it was happy with it, so it was alright in the end, but I took a big loss on it.
 
yea i didnt think that EAX would make much difference on my speakers. i was hoping it would with the sennheiser 595 headphones.

also, what the hell is RAID, what is it good for, why is it good, what does it do? (going to read about raid now wherever i can find it, but would still appreciate a little rundown here)
 
Moved the machine info down.

Previous rig:
CPU: E6420 @ 3.6Ghz, 1.55vcore, watercooled
GPU: OCZ 8800 GTX, 675Mhz core 1620Mhz shader 2000Mhz RAM, watercooled
Motherboard: eVGA 680i SLI SE (sold, replaced with an XFX 680i LT, same clocks, gets along better with the quads), watercooled
PSU: PC Power & Cooling Silencer 750 Quad Black
RAM: 4GB OCZ DDR2-800 (4x1GB) CAS 4 (4-4-4-12)
Case: Antec P180B with 4 Yate Loon mid speeds
- case mods: floppy bay and middle drive cage removed, radiator top mounted externally
HDD: Seagate 7200.10 SATA
Optical: 2x LiteOn 16x PATA DVDRWs

Watercooling:
Swiftech Apogee GT CPU block
DangerDen 680i northbridge block
D-Tek Fuzion GPU block
Swiftech MCR-320 radiator (3 Yate Loon mid speeds, pull config)
Sunbeam Rheobus fan controller
Laing D5 Vario pump
1/2" high-flow barbs, 7/16" tubing throughout.

I just sold the E6420 and I'm trying to pick up a quad.
Bought a second 8800 GTX, another water block, another pump. Need a radiator and I'll put the GTXs on their own loop in the new machine.
In short, going from 3.6Ghz dual core and a single GTX in a single water loop to a ~3.6-3.8Ghz quad core and SLI GTXs with dual water loops.
Hopefully I can fit the radiator (now radiators) internally this time around. Not happy with how the top mount looks, though it's likely better for temps. I may end up selling the P180B and buying a more water friendly case... though I really do like it.


As for RAID... there are lots of variations. What most run around here is RAID 0, or "striping" RAID.

Pretty much, reads and writes are spread evenly across two drives. You write to both drives at once, half the data to one half to the other, staggered between the two. You break a file in to "blocks" and block one goes to one drive, block two to another, block three to the first drive (assuming a 2 drive array -- it scales to more drives), etc. You read from both drives at once -- ideally you end up with 2x the performance of a single drive.

Unfortunately the kind of RAID controllers most enthusiasts have access to (sub-$500 dedicated cards, onboard RAID on motherboards) is at least partial software RAID. There's some CPU overhead with these less expensive solutions, and some slowdown. Even in an ideal config you won't end up with true 2x bandwidth.

Another, more serious disadvantage of RAID 0 is that it is not fault tolerant. If one of your drives fails, all your data is gone. All of it. So if you have a really fast 6 drive RAID 0 array and one drive fails, it's all gone. More points of failure means you're more likely to lose data in a given period of time.
 
i considered picking up one of the 1TB hard drives strictly as a backup. if i lost my ever increasing 40gb collection of music, i think my mind might shatter. im not willing to put that music at risk for death. but if running raid with an onboard controller doesnt really provide a significant boost with the risk/reward, im not going to even look into it. F raid, and maybe F the 1tb drive, at least until the prices come down.

silent, thank you for all your helpful advice. if you had cancer, i would download folding home and let it access my 4 cores all night long while i slept/was at work.
 
That's cool of you -- here's hoping it's not necessary.

RAID can be worth the risk when you consider things like this: You can get two 320GB Seagate 7200.10s for less than a single 150GB Western Digital Raptor 10k drive. In RAID 0 the Seagates are almost always faster than the Raptor, but you get ~2x the space for less money, at the cost of slightly higher risk of failure. In this case the risk is almost completely offset because the 7200RPM drives are more reliable than the 10000RPM drive, so the over all risk of failure is about the same.

In RAID 0 you get the capacity of the drive making up the array -- so a 2 drive array made up of 320GB drives has a 320GB capacity (not a 640GB capacity) and so does a 6 drive array made up of 320GB drives.
 
so im guessing that read/write and overall access times are supposed to be ~2x faster in raid 0. but that the actual increase is probably closer to ~1.5x faster? seems like a fairly drastic increase either way. also seems like a bit of a waste of money for someone like me who wont be grinding away at the HD's.

i dont think ill do raid, id rather have another 500gb of free space. just because i dont remember, what will be the indexing system? i remember NTFS, and then you have to choose cluster sizes. i will be creating a partition for the swap file, or paging file, whatever its called. last time i set it up i set it for something crazy like 12gigs. what is the correct choice given my current selection of 2x 500gb drives?

was going over the OC guide for c2quads on the intel forum. thin strip of thermal paste on the cpu eh? im glad someone posted a picture of that, it always confused the hell out of me how to put paste down. usually ended up making a window design, square with 2 perpendicular lines across the chip before i put the thing down. ive tried applying and then smoothing out over the chip, probably all wrong and created higher temps. any specifics for the abit IP35 or the g.skill ram for the OC'ing bit? prime95 i know i will need, benchmark programs like 3dmark06, etc. cpu-z. cant remember what else i read in the thread.

anyone have any specific voltages/multipliers/oc amount for a decent OC on the q6600 with the abit board?

do you ever reccomend using a program like TuneUp for its ram memoptimizer app?
 
You've got 4GB of RAM -- swap doesn't come in to play near so much anymore. Give it 2GB (and I wouldn't even bother with partitioning) and don't worry about it. 8GB if you want to follow the old "rule" of 2x RAM, but that's kind of crazy.

I agree RAID isn't really worth it in your situation. About all it would do is somewhat reduce loading times for games between levels and such. Plus it complicates setup a bit, though not near so much as it once did -- pretty straightforward anymore.

Yes, real world performance return with onboard RAID varies from 1.2-1.6x over a single drive, depending on the size and number of files you're copying/working with. RAID does better with large files than small, in general.


Also, I'll catch a ton of flack for this, but this first thing I would do after patching Vista up to current and disabling the annoyance which is UAC (start, run, msconfig, common tasks, disable UAC, reboot) is to kill the Indexing and Superfetch services to end the constant hard drive thrashing. That is, unless you actually use the Search function more than like, twice a month.

Wouldn't bother with TuneUp or any kind of "optimization" stuff -- tends to be questionable at best and full of nasty spyware at worst.

About max OC for a Q6600 on air is 3.6Ghz, which is 1600Mhz Quad Pumped FSB (400Mhz real, 400x9 = 3600). 400x2=800. Keep a 1:1 ratio, FSB to RAM, and the RAM will be running at its rated speed when the quad is at 3.6Ghz, which is ideal. Obviously don't try for 3.6Ghz right off.

As for vcore, start low, and if it doesn't boot or doesn't stay stable, bump it up slow. You want to keep it as low as possible while maintaining stability at a given clock speed.
 
UAC, guessing thats a big part of the search feature which yea, i usually dont use more than once a month if that, as you said.

is there anything you can tell me about disabling the vista file permissions thing. i forget the actual name of it, but ive heard a lot about some vista permissions crap that interferes with a lot of games and misc other software.

id be satisfied with a 3.2ghz oc, even 3.0 would be ok. ive never done more than go into the bios and change the multiplier. never screwed with voltages and that other stuff. ive realized from reading that all cpu's are different and may have different limits or voltage requirements.

when you say keep a 1:1 ration for FSB and RAM, that means what exactly? basically as ive seen, ill change some multiplier to 9x333mhz which will give me ~3.0ghz. what does that mean for the ram change though. is it as simple as turning down the timings from 5-5-5-5-xx to 4-4-4-4-xx?

as i said ive read through the OC page once and am just trying to pull things from memory. doesnt seen too complicated. just want to be careful. i always learn better from someone telling me than just from reading and hoping ive interpreted it correctly.
 
UAC is the permissions thing. User Access Control. It's useless -- supposed to save you from making potentially dangerous changes... and instead asks you to allow or deny /everything/ all the time. It's horrible, but gladly, it is easily dismissed. The Indexing service is part of search, and it wastes hard drive space and makes a lot of noise trying to keep track of everything. Search works fine without it, results are just slower.

As for the 1:1 thing, I mean that when you set it to 400x9 there'll be another setting for the "RAM divider" or similar. It varies from vendor to vendor exactly what they call it in BIOS, but it should be pretty obvious. at 400Mhz FSB you'd want a 1:1 divider as that'd make the RAM run at 400Mhz SDR, which is 800Mhz DDR, their rated speed.

If you were going for a 3.0Ghz OC that's 9x333, so the RAM would be running at 333Mhz SDR, 666Mhz DDR. You could change the divider to something like 10:12, which would get it nearer its rated speed, but you'd not see a big performance increase.
 
sounds like a second instance of zone alarm. ill turn that ish off right quick and in a hurry.

just wondering, what keeps you up so late? 5:12am EST, live outside of the states, night owl, or you work the night shift like me?
 
Apathy said:
just wondering, what keeps you up so late? 5:12am EST, live outside of the states, night owl, or you work the night shift like me?
Click to expand...

Insomniac college student who doesn't have classes until 1:40 pm on Tuesdays and Thursdays. ;)
I'm on the east coast, actually. Charleston, SC.

That said, I should probably be making another attempt at sleep here shortly.

Got any other burning questions before I bail for the night/morning?
 
just one or two more now that i can think of.

is the samsung 226BW going to murder my eyes more than its 2" bigger brother will?
registry cleaning apps: good or bad, which one?

cos cob, Ct here. full time job 2 classes tuesday and thursday 5 - 8. nightshift 11 - 7 usually 5 days a week, sometimes they screw me over and put me on a day shift 7-3 or an evening 3-11, they all suck because i never really get to sleep on a nomral schedule. night shift differential for pay keeps me coming back.
 
I had a 20.1" Samsung 204B for about 2 years and I loved it. Replaced it with a 24" Soyo (which more or less prompted this latest round of being dissatisfied/upgrading/being even more poor). The 22" shouldn't be bad at all. Suckers are pretty big, honestly.

I considered a 22", but I'm a resolution whore, much to the chagrin of my bank account for many, many years now. At 16 I paid $500 for a used HP P1100 CRT. 21" Sony Trinitron tube. Loved that thing. It'd hit 1880x1440 at 75Hz. Lasted years and years.

Unfortunately it gave up the ghost a couple of years ago (or so I thought -- since fixed it) and it was murder to move anyway. Thing is literally 75lbs and the bulkiest, most awkward piece of equipment to move I've ever dealt with.

Very happy with the Soyo, though 1920x1200 is just too many pretty little dots to game with. SLI is destroying my bank account, and with my luck the cards will both be worth $50 in a month. Who knows.


No sleep for the wicked... just the occasional fugue. Hopefully that'll hit in the next few minutes here.

Best of luck. I'll be around tomorrow, as will all the others I'm sure.
 
alright silent dude, take it easy man. again, thanks for all your knowledge.

*sees samsung 2253bw post on display forum replacing 226bw*

hmmm might have to wait for the replacement monitor with the better contrast ratio, or whatever the hell it is.
 
If you're concerned about your eyes, you may very well have a better experience with the 22 inch than the 24. The native pixel size on the 1680x1050 resolution will be as big it gets on a 22 inch, where as a 24 inch monitor jumps to a higher resolution of 1920x1200. This is a significant jump, and while the monitor is 2 inches wider across the diagonal, you may still find that the text, widget size, window size, etc. is smaller on the 24 inch due to the increased resolution. Best bet is to head to a Best Buy or Circuit City and try some monitors out for yourself.
 
Apathy said:
*sees samsung 2253bw post on display forum replacing 226bw*

hmmm might have to wait for the replacement monitor with the better contrast ratio, or whatever the hell it is.
Click to expand...

What you really need to do is go to Best Buy or Circuit City or something like that and /see/ these things in person. Just going by the stats is not a good way to play the game, in this case.

For example, with a good signal (may have to go to several places, as they tend to use shitty VGA splitters, etc) back when I was buying the Samsung 204B, which was 600 nits brightness, 800:1 contrast according to its spec sheet, it actually looked significantly better than a Viewsonic that claimed to be 600 nits brightness 1000:1 contrast sitting right next to it. So I bought the Samsung.

In theory, you're looking for a very high contrast ratio and 500+ nits brightness, but in reality you're just looking for the one that looks best to you, and to hell with the stats, and to hell with all the guys on the forum claiming that this one or this one is better.

I'm not advocating buying in the store, as they tend to do absolute murder on price, but you should definitely go see it there first.
 
From what I read, creative drivers suck for vista64 compare to auzentech drivers. They might of fix this problem already. The auzentech sound card is a lot of sound card and you need a good speaker setup to fully enjoy it. Add other audio deceives to it and you've used all it has to offer. I also read that the prelude has a better build quality. For me, I been with creative for years and I thought I would switch, so far so good. $200 on a sound card is a lot of money. However since I haven't build a computer in 3-4 years I thought why not? Its nice to know creative doesn't have a grasp on me when it comes to sound cards. The card does look nice in my tower.
 
The vast majority of issues regarding Vista x64 creative drivers were solved by a new release last fall.
 
Creative is still the devil, though. And the M-Audio Revolution 7.1 is still a really strong card.

If you do end up replacing it, I want to buy that thing. :)
 
i was at bestbuy last week picking up a dvi -> dvi cable for my current pos lcd. was going dvi -> vga for too long. i saw the 22" and 24" samsung's there. dont remember the exact model numbers, but they looked tastey.

i think i am going to order the sennheisers tomorrow and see how they sound on the revo. ill probably be so happy i wont want to get the prelude. going from airplane headphones after using some decent mdr-v6's for awhile really sucks. need to get that checked out first.
 
Word to the wise: pick up most cables from monoprice.com instead of BestBuy. Saves some serious cash.
 
dude, bestbuy wanted ~$49 for a 6ft dvi->dvi cable. luckily there was one open box sitting on the bottom rack for $19. still got ripped off, but at least it didnt suck as bad. not going to buy cables in-store ever again.

you know, locally all we have is an overpriced store called computer supercenter, a bestbuy and a circuit city about 20 miles away. if someone opened a speciality store that sold pc parts from low end - enthusiast level gear, i think they'd make a lot of money. if i had the startup capital, id open my own business here and be rich. compusa closed, theres nothing left around here. and nobody carries anything worth buying. its all the mid range crap that bb normally has. god, if you exist, WE NEED A FRYS IN FAIRFIELD CONNECTICUT
 
Apathy said:
dude, bestbuy wanted ~$49 for a 6ft dvi->dvi cable. luckily there was one open box sitting on the bottom rack for $19. still got ripped off, but at least it didnt suck as bad. not going to buy cables in-store ever again.

you know, locally all we have is an overpriced store called computer supercenter, a bestbuy and a circuit city about 20 miles away. if someone opened a speciality store that sold pc parts from low end - enthusiast level gear, i think they'd make a lot of money. if i had the startup capital, id open my own business here and be rich. compusa closed, theres nothing left around here. and nobody carries anything worth buying. its all the mid range crap that bb normally has. god, if you exist, WE NEED A FRYS IN FAIRFIELD CONNECTICUT
Click to expand...

mom and pop or small corparate computer store would likely charge you more. The big corporations are the ones that are more likely to charge you less. then again this goes against what apple does but they only sell their own product.
 
im back with one more question before i make my final purchase. already picked up the 226bw samsung 22" widescreen and the sennheiser 595's. cant even adjust the contrast ratio on the monitor. guessing its because of the 6800oc video card limiting driver options? monitor looks decent so far, but the contrast/brightness/everything definitely looks like its being hindered by the video card i have in there now.

i have to buy 4 yate loons for the coolermaster 830 evo. there seems to be 3 different variations on the 120mm models

i visted yateloon.com and see that they offer 120x120x20, and 120x120x25, and 120x120x38.

petras tech shop offers this:
120mm Yate Loon D12SH-12 Case Fan - Black (88 CFM, 40 dBA)
which looks tastey. should i buy the extra screws... and how the hell are all of these going to plug in with the power connectors?

also thinking about switching out the corsair 620vx.. or hx, whatever it is for the OCZ gamexstream 700w.

what is the diffence in the last number. 20/25/38? will these not fit into my case?
 
The 20/25/38 is the width of the fans. The 25mm is the standard width of most fans. 20 is thinner, 38 is pretty thick but sometimes loud. Go for the 25mm since they're usually the best bang for the buck units. And 25mm will fit, most likely not 38mm.

That particular Yate Loon fan is pretty damn loud at 40dBA IMO. Shouldn't have to buy the extra screws since the case should come with it. You can daisy chain all the power connectors if needed.

I recommend ditching that OCZ GameXStream PSU. It's based off the FSP Episilon PSU design which has out of spec ripple, or voltage fluctuations, at high loads that can damage or kill your system. Granted, you may not reach such high loads but why pay for PSU that can kill your system?
 
alright, thanks for the clarification on those sizes.

so the corsair 620HX is good enough then. +reliable etc.
 
For just about any single card system, yes. If you're going dual card I'd recommend more of course.
 
rig just arrived today, got most of it together, few questions though.

corsair 620hx power adapters confuse me. so many freaking cables, only have to use the ones i need.... where are the 4-pin connectors? ive got the psu plugged into the mobo with the square 4 slot plug and the big ass adapater. how do i plug in the rest of the crap?

now the 3870x2....

it has at least 2 power connectors that i can see on it. a 6 pin and a 8 pin i think. both must be plugged in im guessing. what is that 4 pin molex plug for on the mobo underneath the pci-e slot on the IP35-PRO mobo?

hd question:
both 500gb's can be set to primary or one has to be set primary and one slave? not running raid, just dual 500gb's.

sound card question.
what the hell is that cable with the little clear whitish probes on the ends of them that came with the auzentech prelude.

sorry for all the question, just had about 45 minutes to get as much done with the rig as i could when i got home from class before i had to come to work. im sure i can figure most of this stuff out by reading the user manuals when i get home, but i just didnt have the time. just looking for some quick help. thanks in advance.
 
What do you mean "where are the 4-pin connectors"? Just look for them in the box or the bag of cables. Then just connect them whereever you need it. All of the plugs only go in one way.

Yes both connectors on the HD3870X2 need to be connected if you're planning on overclocking. If not, the 8pin will do I believe. The 4pin molex on the mobo is to prvide extra power to the mobo.

They're not IDE drives. Just plug one drive into the first SATA port. Then plug the second drive into the second SATA port. That's it. REad the manual or look at the mobo itself to see which slot is the first and second SATA port.

NO idea what the sound card probes are.
 
so then theres no downside to only connecting the 8 pin on the 3870x2 which gets plugged directly in from the psu?

also, cpu fan connector has 4 pins on the ip-35 pro board but fits in its slot fine with the 4th pin exposed. any issues with that?

from looking at the corsair 620hx picture of the user manual on newegg, it looks as though the psu has addition ports in the back of the psu itself to add/plug in all these extra cables. i rushed through this hardware install so quickly that i wasnt really paying attention. just want to be prepared when i get home.

as for that 4 pin molex beneath the pci-e slot, does it need to be plugged in from the psu or does the mobo not need that additional power?

what the hell is this:
https://server9.kproxy.com/servlet/...n=AuzenTech+Auzen+X-Fi+Prelude+7.1+Sound+Card

sorry for proxy link, at work. www.newegg.com auzentech prelude -> pics -> black cable with 2 whitish tips.


also, checking the seagate jumper settings, looks like on the sata drive having no jumpers on allows for the max data transfer rate, and putting jumpere on the left 2 pins cuts that in half. guess i should remove the jumpers?
 
The cable is an optical audio cable, like a Sony TOSlink cable. You probably don't need to use it.

The 620HX's power connections will become much more clear once you have it in front of you -- just look at the little booklet thing if you get confused.

I think the drives come preconfigured for max throughput.
 
awesome. thanks dude. will be putting the rest of it together in 6 hours when i get home. if it explodes, ill take a picture.
 
Apathy said:
awesome. thanks dude. will be putting the rest of it together in 6 hours when i get home. if it explodes, ill take a picture.
Click to expand...

Take a picture regardless.

I'm looking to build a gaming rig soon, and can take any advice I can get, just as you did :D
 
7F post error, no video. tried multiple monitors, nothing. unplugged drives/all usb etc, nothing. 3870x2 has a 6 pin and an 8 pin connector on it, only came with the cable for the 6 pin, does the 8 pin need to be connected as well?

anyone else ever seen this error?
saw a bunch of threads but nothing resolved while searching google. about to start sprawling the [h] here.
 
Plug another 6 pin connector in to the 8 pin port. It'll fit, but only one way, so just don't try to force it. The card will not work without a connector in both ports. It will work fine with two six pins, but you won't be able to OC it without a 6 to 8 pin adapter. Call or email Corsair (calling is probably faster) and they will likely send you an 8 pin PCIe cable for free. They're cool like that.

If the machine still won't post try with no drives connected and only one stick of RAM. If that works, set VDIMM to 2.0v in the BIOS and try with both sticks. If that works, connect drives and try again.
 
alright mr. wizard. i will be right back after i try that. currently been on hold with abit tech support for the passed 15 minutes in a supposed 20 minute wait time.
 
you are a god among gods among gods amongst the very gods of the gods. im going to go smile a lot now and install vista. i will be back when my happy time is completed to the internets and beyond.
 
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