13 replies to this topic

[Hostile]

YOUR CUSTOMIZED HP PC

My new PC is coming

HP Pavilion HPE h8 Select Edition
• SAVE $21 on Genuine Windows 7 Professional [64-bit]
• Intel® Core™ i7-990X six-core Extreme Edition [3.46GHz, 1.5MB L2 + 12MB shared L3 cache]
• 12GB DDR3-1333MHz SDRAM [4 DIMMs]
• 160GB solid state drive
• No additional office software
• SAVE $49 on Norton Internet Security™ 2011 - 15 month
• 3GB DDR3 NVIDIA GeForce GT 545 [DVI, HDMI, VGA]
• 600W Power supply
• Blu-ray player & SuperMulti DVD burner
• 16x max. DVD ROM (player)
• Premium Wireless-N LAN card and Bluetooth(R )(2x2)
• 15-in-1 memory card reader, 4 USB 2.0 (front) w/USB 3.0 card (rear), audio, 2 USB (top rear-facing)
• TV tuner, ATSC-NTSC with PVR, remote
• Integrated sound
• Premium HP keyboard and optical mouse

[Ganon]

That is a nice rig!
Although, I hope your mobo supports a SLI configuration. Because, I looked up the video card, and it supports SLI, but the card itself has only DDR3 memory. That doesn't look too good.

My card has 1/3 of the memory, and DDR5 speed. So something's out of place.

Edited by Ganon, 18 September 2011 - 09:42 PM.

[Beowulf]

As soon as I saw HP, uber rig doesn't apply. Otherwise, some nice parts in there. Better know some SSD tuning techniques or you're gonna kill it.

[Hostile]

That is a nice rig!
Although, I hope your mobo supports a SLI configuration. Because, I looked up the video card, and it supports SLI, but the card itself has only DDR3 memory. That doesn't look too good.

My card has 1/3 of the memory, and DDR5 speed. So something's out of place.

I don't play games like I used to so I assume it should mesh fine. DDR3 or DDR5 means little for what I need.

As soon as I saw HP, uber rig doesn't apply. Otherwise, some nice parts in there. Better know some SSD tuning techniques or you're gonna kill it.

I've built my own, and had every manufacturer, HP is just fine.

Tweak #1: If your system motherboard uses a disk caching bus, change the BIOS setting from “Write Through” to “Write Back”.

Tweak #2: Use the “noop” simple I/O scheduler.

Tweak #3: Change the file system mount options on SSDs to “noatime” and mount your /tmp in RAM.

Tweak #4: Ditch the journal and RAID your SSDs. File system journaling is done primarily for increased reliability, but it’s a drag on performance. Given that SSDs by their nature are going to be less prone to reliability quirks than a conventional drive, Mandrake suggests creating a RAID1 of two SSD units and formatting the file system to ext2, or formatting them to ext3 and mounting them as ext2 in the /etc/fstab.

[EDIT 11/19/2010: It has been suggested in the comments that formatting the filesystem as ext4 and mounting with the journal enabled and RAID1 may actually be faster than ext2 RAID1 and provide additional referential integrity, and mounting a ext4 RAID1 in unjournalized mode may also be faster than ext2 RAID1. Your mileage may vary.]




Does any of this help?

[Beowulf]

More to it than just that, and those won't kill it nearly as quickly as leaving Superfetch running, or leaving indexing on... shit like that. An unoptimized OS will eat your drive faster than a BIOS tweak will save it.

[Ash]

How much?

[Beowulf]

Fast enough that you'll have a $300 paperweight sooner than you ought to. The more you write to the drive, the faster you burn the cells. The faster they degrade, well, you get the picture.

[duke_Qa]

Isn't cell death these days like 6-7 years anyway? I just got worried I might have to double-check a few more settings on my vertex 2 now (did do some windows optimizations for it, but I can't recall doing any motherboard tweaks...)


Do want one of those six-core cpus though. Going to make a few battlefield3 pcs for my brother and another guy, so I might have the chance to trick them into buying that.

[Beowulf]

Optimized, they last that long and longer. Since the OS does so many writes at default settings, it can reduce that time. Sometimes drastically, especially with things like System Restore.

[Ash]

No. I meant, how much did the rig cost?

[duke_Qa]

judging from Norwegian prices on that cpu, that alone is around $1100...before vat. thats pretty insane for just two more cpus.

Isn't there any dual-socket motherboards around for the i7s? that would have been more interesting for me at least

[Hostile]

It ran me about $2000. Which is acceptable. I'm naming it Zues as my current (pretty decent) rig is known as Poseidon,

Poseidon is going to work with me and Zues is staying home. I'll use MYPC.com to chain the two together.

Something about

• Intel® Core™ i7-990X six-core Extreme Edition [3.46GHz, 1.5MB L2 + 12MB shared L3 cache]
• 12GB DDR3-1333MHz SDRAM [4 DIMMs]
• 160GB solid state drive

that makes me go

[Beowulf]

I'm going to spend less on a better PC... if you don't count the monitors. But you enjoy yourself, I'm sure you will. Hell, I probably would.

[Hostile]

I'm already using a 32" 1080p 120khz tv for a monitor, and I'd hate the idea of having to build another from scratch. I'm getting married oct 8th, and I need a rig. So sometimes you pay for convenience. But I will be hitting you up on preventative maintenance on the SS drive...