The uberatomic geekwizard e-peen show-off-your-PC-threads!

[Craigs]

BilboHicks said:

antec Nine Hundred case:

Welcome to the Antec nine hundred club! Members include me, my brother, and my dad. :)

[Doom Marine]

BilboHicks said:

CPU: I7 920 Quad Core, overclocked to 3.7Ghz (from 2.67Ghz)
RAM: 3G DDR3
GRAPHICS: ATI Radeon 4870 x2 (2G of memory)

Gigabyte motherboard, and an antec Nine Hundred case:
http://img503.imageshack.us/img503/2773/s5000089xa0.jpg
(leeched someone else's photo)

Cant remember the rest of the specs.
Will probably grab another 4870x2 when Crysis 2 comes out and run it in Crossfire mode. Running XP still, but will dual boot on another HD with Windows 7 eventually.
Very happy with it.

@Doom Marine: Congrats on getting to 4Ghz! My gigabyte motherboard and the help of some serious overclockers got me up to 3.7, but I haven't bothered going any higher. The ATI card I haven't bothered overclocking yet.

Nice overclock nonetheless. Hey, 3.7 is a good GPA, so it should be a good overclock too, amirite?

2 gigs of memory on your GPU is a marketing trick. The 4870x2 doesn't utilize the full 2 Gigs of memory. The second GPU's VRAM simply duplicates information stored from the first's VRAM to process the alternating frames. For all intent and purposes, your GPU as a single unit will only utilize 1 gig of memory.

As for getting a second 4870x2, I strongly discourage it. Four-way GPU systems suffer from communication overhead problems that can sometimes lead to negative impact on framerates:

http://www.cluboc.net/reviews/video/ATi/hd4870x2_2GB_Quadfire/page1.asp

On top of that, beyond 2 GPU's, there is a point of diminishing return where adding more cards will do little to help performance, all of while at the cost of power and heat.

It would be more beneficial (cost-benefit-wise) to performance, when it comes time to upgrade, if you sold the 4870x2 and purchase an AMD 6XXX series card (or two) that is coming out in the next few weeks.

[ReFracture]

I have never been a fan of multi-card solutions. In the best scenario they work great, but at other times the plague of micro-studder can reveal itself.

[Doom Marine]

Craigs said:

Welcome to the Antec nine hundred club! Members include me, my brother, and my dad. :)

your brother doesn't have a 900 yet, it's only you and your dad. Unless I haven't been updated here.

[BilboHicks]

Doom Marine said:

Nice overclock nonetheless. Hey, 3.7 is a good GPA, so it should be a good overclock too, amirite?

2 gigs of memory on your GPU is a marketing trick. The 4870x2 doesn't utilize the full 2 Gigs of memory. The second GPU's VRAM simply duplicates information stored from the first's VRAM to process the alternating frames. For all intent and purposes, your GPU as a single unit will only utilize 1 gig of memory.

As for getting a second 4870x2, I strongly discourage it. Four-way GPU systems suffer from communication overhead problems that can sometimes lead to negative impact on framerates:

http://www.cluboc.net/reviews/video/ATi/hd4870x2_2GB_Quadfire/page1.asp

On top of that, beyond 2 GPU's, there is a point of diminishing return where adding more cards will do little to help performance, all of while at the cost of power and heat.

It would be more beneficial (cost-benefit-wise) to performance, when it comes time to upgrade, if you sold the 4870x2 and purchase an AMD 6XXX series card (or two) that is coming out in the next few weeks.

Cheers for the tips.

@Craigs: Yeah its a sweet base unit.

[Sigvatr]

Craigs said:

Here's more shots of my awesome rigs for you jealous stupid shit faggots still living in the XP era to drool over.

Shut up you faggot your computer is a piece of crap.

[exp(x)]

You have terrible posture.

[Sigvatr]

I have Marfan's Syndrome.

[Craigs]

Sigvatr said:

Shut up you faggot your computer is a piece of crap.

Your system screams awesome but the pony tail screams fag.

[Doom Marine]

Lots of people here with pretty decent stuff, I'm surprised that Doomers have some killer rigs... But enough, they're cute in comparison to mine. I'm pulling out the BFG, the CyberDemon, the 747 of PC's that's as big as it is powerful:

CPU: i7-920 @ 4.0 GHz
MOTHERBOARD: Asus P6T Deluxe v2
GRAPHICS: 2x Radeon 4890's in CrossFire
RAM: 12 GB Corsair Dominator 1600 MHz DDR3

HDD ARRAY 1: 128 GB Crucial REALSSD C300
Operating System, Productivity Programs, DB2

HDD ARRAY 2: 300 GB 10,000 RPM WD Velociraptor
Programs like MP3 Players, CCleaner, etc.

HDD ARRAY 3: 2x 300 GB 10,000 RPM WD Velociraptors in RAID0
Steam Games, Blizzard Games, Games Games

HDD ARRAY 4: 640 GB WD Caviar Black 7,200 RPM
Videos, Music, DVII Project Folder

HDD ARRAY 5: 640 GB WD Caviar Black 7,200 RPM
Archives, Application Backups

PSU: Antec Quattro 1000 Watts
CASE: HAF-X, it's ginormous
OS: Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate
MONITOR: 21" 1080p HP 2159m




The SSD benchmark, SATA II's 3.0 Gb/sec is saturated in sequential read.


Notice the ATX mobo being swallowed whole. At 9 x 21 x 23 inches, it's the size of a Cyberdemon... Though it has the glow of a Cacodemon... hmm... sometimes at night, you can hear it hiss and shoot purple fireballs... but probably not :p


Airflow schematics. Designed for maintaining positive air pressure inside the case. As for the convection zones, I've done several tests, and there are definitely two separate environments in there.

With the huge volume of air moving comes the penalty of dust, which is the last thing I want inside the case, which would defeat the purpose of the positive air pressure and all those fans. How to circumvent this?


Dust filters. These are not your run-of-the-mill nets with holes in them. No dust is getting through these superfine medical mesh.


The Cyberdemon-sized Cacodemon getting ready to spit out a big blue fireball.

Oh yeah, all this to build DVII-SE, it's coming.

[DoomUK]

Athlon X2 4400 (@2.2GHz I think. Yeah, S939 era, baby)
Leadtek 8800GT
Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe (whatever the "Deluxe" designation implied, cant remember)
2GB Kingston DDR400
500GB SATA, 250GB SATA, 180GB IDE
AG Neovo 1280*1024 (a 7-year-old monitor).


Meh. It does what I need it to do for the most part. And it still runs most modern games at reasonably high settings at acceptable framerates (some flawlessly), which is pretty impressive for an old ass setup.

[Doom Marine]

Sigvatr said:

Shut up you faggot your computer is a piece of crap.

http://www.electricretard.com/junk/sigcomp1.jpg

http://www.electricretard.com/junk/sigcomp2.jpg

http://www.electricretard.com/junk/sigcomp3.jpg

http://img155.imageshack.us/img155/7167/dscn1358c.jpg

... But look, his cabling job's better than yours.

[Craigs]

Doom Marine said:

http://img155.imageshack.us/img155/7167/dscn1358c.jpg

... But look, his cabling job's better than yours.

also I've got the decency to keep pictures of my genitals off the internet, especially off the SA forums.

[darkreaver]

I use a laptop

[Csonicgo]

Craigs said:

also I've got the decency to keep pictures of my genitals off the internet, especially off the SA forums.

....

[Maes]

I only have respect for this here case mod:

Even better, if someone pops in an old tape munching beast :-p

[Sigvatr]

Your penis isn't on the internet because you're a pussy.

[John Smith]

Doom Marine: Whats with the awesome rig/boring monitor combination? Thats not a very impressive monitor no matter how you slice it. It's compact 1080p, with a very average set of connectors, but it's not IPS, it's not LED backlit, it's not 2560x1600, it's just... so boring. Not what I expected from you. Also I'd like to say that I'm unimpressed with what looks like just a weird HDD mix. If you could explain exactly what led you to that particular drive set I'd much appreciate it.

[Sigvatr]

Doom Marine said:

... But look, his cabling job's better than yours.

I suggest you try to manage cables for a five monitor command station.

[Craigs]

Sigvatr said:

I suggest you try to manage cables for a five monitor command station.

I suggest you don't refer to it as a command station.

[Doom Marine]

John Smith said:

Doom Marine: Whats with the awesome rig/boring monitor combination? Thats not a very impressive monitor no matter how you slice it. It's compact 1080p, with a very average set of connectors, but it's not IPS, it's not LED backlit, it's not 2560x1600, it's just... so boring. Not what I expected from you. Also I'd like to say that I'm unimpressed with what looks like just a weird HDD mix. If you could explain exactly what led you to that particular drive set I'd much appreciate it.

Heh, as much as I know hardware, I've never researched that deeply into monitor, but I do have several criteria when it comes to it.

2560x1600, dual monitors, triple monitors... had I wanted those, I would've gotten them. The goal of this system is to dominate games with maxed out AA and AF while maintaining 60 FPS, having higher resolutions would inevitably compromise this. I've considered 1920x1200, but 1080p is more standardized.

1080p at 21" gives thing a certain sharpness not found in bigger monitors where pixels are diluted. With 101 pixels/inch, it's a hair sharper than the 30" Apple Widescreen. Another bonus is that the 2159m is well-known for having super sharp text, I've seen side by side comparison with other monitors before, and you can't beat this monitor in terms of text sharpness.

Does backlit make that much of a difference? I actually had to turn down the brightness for my monitor because it was super-bright out of the box.

HDD ARRAY 1: 128 GB Crucial REALSSD C300
Operating System, Productivity Programs, DB2

HDD ARRAY 2: 300 GB 10,000 RPM WD Velociraptor
Programs like MP3 Players, CCleaner, etc.

HDD ARRAY 3: 2x 300 GB 10,000 RPM WD Velociraptors in RAID0
Steam Games, Blizzard Games, Games Games

HDD ARRAY 4: 640 GB WD Caviar Black 7,200 RPM
Videos, Music, DVII Project Folder

HDD ARRAY 5: 640 GB WD Caviar Black 7,200 RPM
Archives, Application Backups

HDD arrays, like almost everything else on the system, were carefully considered and deliberate. The overall goal of having five mechanical drives is to support the SSD and minimize the write/read demand put on it.

When you're buying an SSD, you're not buying storage space, you're buying seek time and IOPS, even the fastest enterprise mechanical drive is no match for a consumer SSD:



Tom's Hardware's got a pretty well written article on the ins and outs of the SSD compared to mechanical drives: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/flash-ssd-nand,2741.html

The OS on the SSD is a no-brainer. Productivity programs includes Adobe CS suite and Microsoft Office. The speed difference between the SSD and even the fastest HDD is magnitudes. It's nice to click on a word document, and typing on there in less than one second. Having to use Adobe and MS Office simultaneously and inter-exchanging information between applications multiple times per session, every fraction of a second matters. Some examples of an Adobe-MS combo attack: MICRO 411 Lab Report #4, MICRO 412 Lab Report #6. All illustrations in lab reports are 100% my work from scratch.

Not only is my SSD fast, it's much faster than most of the other SSD's out there at the moment:



The single Velociraptor works odd jobs, contains non-essentials such as Winamp, Avast, and miscellaneous programs that aren't time-demanding. It also serves as a scratch disk.

The Velociraptor RAID0 array is nearly as fast as the SSD for sequential read and write, but the random read/write, seek time, and IOPS are still severely limited by the mechanical drive format. It's best for storing large files that needs to be read sequentially fast, like games.

The other two 7,200 RPM HDD's are your standard garden-variety drives. Used for storage of media and archiving stuff, not much to be said there. It gets the job done.

With the amount of mechanical drive support, the SSD's I/O demand is mostly reduced down to OS requests, and its lifespan is greatly increased because of this. This storage arrangement maximizes the strengths of both storage media.

Anyway, for reading to the end of this long post (or skimming it), here's another shot:

[John Smith]

Doom Marine said:

Does backlit make that much of a difference? I actually had to turn down the brightness for my monitor because it was super-bright out of the box.

Using an In-Plane Switching (IPS) LCD monitor or an LED backlit display helps to improve color reproduction and give better overall image quality, and the IPS panel has the added benefit of enhanced viewing angle. The IPS panel does these things by changing the direction that the crystals in the display move to the panel plane, and the LED backlighting doesn't do so much to enhance the quality of the LCD display as much as it prevents the panel lighting from screwing up the color across the entire screen by giving a more even lighting source.


And, thanks for explaining your hard disk setup. Makes a bit more sense now. I can't say that I'd ever do that exact thing myself, mostly because my storage requirements are far smaller, but I get it now.

[Maes]

Doom marine[ said:
Stuff about SSD and link to Tom's hardware article

That article is clearly biased towards "enterprise" operators focusing on multiple simultaneous I/O, and even power efficiency claims and figures are based on power per I/O operation, rather than static/idling power consumption. Home users won't find themselves at the same position of e.g. google or facebook, which may indeed benefit from increased IOPS.

AFAIK SSDs still have a higher static power consumption than mechanical HDs at this point in time. It doesn't matter if it's just 2x or 3x higher and the I/O operations are 100 times more numerous, it's still more energatically expensive to run a SSD for one hour than a HD, regardless of use, and the entry level prices vs size are still an order of magnitude larger than conventional HDs.

Besides, such large corporations are more likely to use RAID and cached controllers anyway, and those can do miracles even with crappy HDs. It's more preferable investing on a high-end controller that will outlast several hard disk turnover/replacement/upgrade cycles and achieve UI speedups by using multiple inexpensive disks, rather than concentrate data on a few, low-density, premium-priced devices.

Let alone that "entry level" SSDs suck: they are based on MLP cells and are still plagued by shitty controllers that give almost none of the advantages cited in the article.

[Doom Marine]

Maes said:

That article is clearly biased towards "enterprise" operators focusing on multiple simultaneous I/O, and even power efficiency claims and figures are based on power per I/O operation, rather than static/idling power consumption. Home users won't find themselves at the same position of e.g. google or facebook, which may indeed benefit from increased IOPS.

From my personal experience as a non-enterprise user, the benefits of an SSD replacing my Velociraptor RAID0 is clearly noticeable.

Even the very fast Vraptors with access times of 7ms is left standing still in the face of 0.1ms (nearly instantaneous) SSD access time. The mechanical drive's relatively high latency is compounded by the head taking several passes to retrieve large files. So in this regard, in reading many large files, there will be multiple 7ms latency plus reading time, and this causes what is an otherwise fast system to wait on the hard disks.



Since the SSD find files by index and retrieves it from NAND like the computer from RAM, access is nearly instantaneous and only limited by the SATA bandwidth.

The benefits to a non-enterprise users like myself are fast boot times (8 seconds to launch Windows 7, vs 25 with the VRaptors), nearly instant opening of things like Photoshop, and an overall quickness that can only come from the 0.1ms response.

Maes said:

AFAIK SSDs still have a higher static power consumption than mechanical HDs at this point in time. It doesn't matter if it's just 2x or 3x higher and the I/O operations are 100 times more numerous, it's still more energatically expensive to run a SSD for one hour than a HD, regardless of use, and the entry level prices vs size are still an order of magnitude larger than conventional HDs.

I may agree with you if this was 2008, but it's 2010 and things have gotten better. SSD's are now more energetically efficient than HDD's by a large margin, even on idle.

Velociraptor 300 GB Idle: 4.53 Watts
Crucial REALSSD C300 128 GB Idle: 0.75 Watts

Maes said:

Besides, such large corporations are more likely to use RAID and cached controllers anyway, and those can do miracles even with crappy HDs. It's more preferable investing on a high-end controller that will outlast several hard disk turnover/replacement/upgrade cycles and achieve UI speedups by using multiple inexpensive disks, rather than concentrate data on a few, low-density, premium-priced devices.

But RAIDING HDs to match SSDs' speed means striping, which requires all drives to run for access, wouldn't this be much more energetically expensive, and ultimately more financially expensive than SSD's in the long run?

Maes said:

Let alone that "entry level" SSDs suck: they are based on MLP cells and are still plagued by shitty controllers that give almost none of the advantages cited in the article.

You meant MLC cells? MLC and SLC drives are similar in performance, but SLCs have 10x the lifespan of MLCs.

Two years ago, you could count SSD-producing companies with fingers. Today, there are 140 companies raising competition to a whole new level, driving prices down, and creating some seriously badass controllers at the consumer level. A notable one is the Sandforce-1200, and my Crucial C300 SSD's controller still beat it overall by a big margin, and SSD development is still progressing at a breakneck pace with no end in sight.

The shitty controllers you mentioned are probably first generation. Second generation is cutthroat competitive and almost all of the shitty controllers have died out. Pretty amazing how in just two years, the SSD market has reached critical mass.

[Csonicgo]

S.M.A.R.T. analysis says my HDs will last until 2115 at the rate that I use them. hooray.

[Maes]

@Doom Marine: you seem to be giving far too much weight on access time, which is really only a concern if you have ridiculous usage patterns and/or you want to be able to access a zillion fragmented files with NO slowdown whatsoever.

The hard disk used for comparison, the Velociraptor series, are hardly a reference point, too: they are awfully expensive per GB compared to more normal HDs, much more energetically hungry, and seriously, having something that costs 4x as much as a normal HD that spins at 72% (7200 rpm) of its stated rpm is really not the best investment one could make, IMHO.

It reminds me of that "audio enthusiast" magazine that claimed in an article, BACK IN 1995, that "nowadays, cassettes cost as much as recordable CDs and there's no reason to keep using them". I repeat, this was written in a 1995 magazine, while that statement would become actually true much later, at least in the 2000s.

So what was the trick? A recordable CD costed, in fact, several $10s in these days, so my reaction was to think that the article's author was full of shit.

It turned out however that the article's author was comparing the -then super-expensive recordable CDs- with the equally expensive high-end metal tape cassettes, which were anything from mainstream. You needed to go to specialty shop to even find them.

That didn't make the article any less pointless though, as it was essentially misleading "for the masses", which was not even the intended target group.

Same with HDs: you and the article are debating at a premium, high-end level that's quite unlikely it will interest or affect normal users.

[ReFracture]

Sigvatr said:

Shut up you faggot your computer is a piece of crap.

Haha.

I must know, how do you have all those hooked up?

Craigs said:

I suggest you don't refer to it as a command station.

You're just jealous of how badass it is.

[Doom Marine]

Maes said:

@Doom Marine: you seem to be giving far too much weight on access time, which is really only a concern if you have ridiculous usage patterns and/or you want to be able to access a zillion fragmented files with NO slowdown whatsoever.

Access time does matter in reading hundreds of small files per second, and the OS shows it:



A look at my system's Resource Monitor -> Disk Activity tab indicates anywhere from a score to several hundred I/Os ranging from 0 to 1 MB/sec at any given moment, which means that if the OS was on a mechanical drive, the head has to move back and forth in critical situations, hundreds of times a second to different areas of the disk to access these scattered small files, and this is on idle. The Velociraptor, for all its 10,000 RPM, can only handle about 150 IOPS at best:



Because at certain times, the OS disk I/O requests outnumber the VRaptor's max IOPS, the system is being bottlenecked and there is a noticeable speedup switching the OS to an SSD.

The 9-15 ms access time of a typical mechanical drive isn't noticeable by itself, but in practice, when applied to the OS, it's there... but most consumers are just so used to that small lag that they think it's normal and their system is "computing," but it's actually the mechanical drives bottlenecking their system.

I'm not saying mechanical drives are obsolete (there's five mechanical drives supporting my SSD), I'm saying that in order for the system to be at its full potential, the SSD should be the nerve center of storage devices (after all, it has faster nerves than most creatures!).

Maes said:

The hard disk used for comparison, the Velociraptor series, are hardly a reference point, too: they are awfully expensive per GB compared to more normal HDs, much more energetically hungry, and seriously, having something that costs 4x as much as a normal HD that spins at 72% (7200 rpm) of its stated rpm is really not the best investment one could make, IMHO.

While I agree that the VRaptors are not the best investment for mass storage or energy efficiency, it's the mechanical drive that has highest performance outside of 15,000 RPM enterprise products, and should be compared to SSD's.

If a person is using something like a WD Green for energy and cost efficiency in storage, why even bother with the question of speed, or SSDs for that matter? I don't see the point in comparing "green" drives with SSDs, as they are meant for different jobs altogether. SSDs are to replace very, very fast mechanical drives, and that's where it matters.

In servers, or OSes where IOPS matters more than storage, SSDs is more energetically efficient (and just flat out faster) than 15,000 RPM mechanical drives, even with RAID controllers... big storage is a different story.

[Doom Marine]

Sigvatr said:

Shut up you faggot your computer is a piece of crap.

http://www.electricretard.com/junk/sigcomp1.jpg

http://www.electricretard.com/junk/sigcomp2.jpg

http://www.electricretard.com/junk/sigcomp3.jpg

What's the specs on that?

[Maes]

Maybe it's just me, but won't decenct caching on many levels, starting from the OS itself, nullify the "zillion file zerging" problem, unless you're accessing many files AND they are cumulatively so large as to trash the cache? There are also solutions like ReadyBoost or eBooster for Windows XP that allow caching some data on a flash/separate HD.

In any case, if you consistently find yourself in such a situation, using clever caching, distributed reads/writes or even alphabetical defragging for HDs makes more sense that just blindly throwing brute force resources at a problem.

IMHO 10000+ RPM HDs are more of a proof of concept as in "Yeah, if you sacrifice capacity, power consumption and overall lifetime and reliability and manufacture them with tighter tolerances and at a premium, you can end up with a HD that shaves a hair off access times". Pretty much like "audiophiles" are prepared to pay for ridiculously expensive equipment with always diminishing returns.

If the best possible access times a single disk can deliver WITH NO CACHING is really what's desired then yeah, there's only so much you can achieve with a mechanical hard disk, and any solid state medium will beat it squarely. But that would be like e.g. insisting on getting the fastest possible single-core processor for a given task: unless the problem is broken, ill-posed or pathological, it could probably be served better by less powerful cores working in parallel. And trying to get maximum performance from just one disk IS ill-posed, no matter what.

I don't think any sane datacenter would purchase either arrays of velociraptors, nor arrays of SSDs to achieve low access times: they'd buy good CONTROLLERS (that means NOT the integrated "SATA RAID" crap on mobos) with plenty of expandable onboard cache RAM, connected to inexpensive disks. With the saved money, they can instead invest on redundancy and multi-level striping, although with a really good controller with NVRAM and autonomous power you can keep thousands of cached read and writes before finally writing stuff to disk.

P.S.: Yeah, there maybe be 100s of IOPS on your system at any given moment, but many of them "hit" caches anyway. I can't imagine constan uncached disk access being the norm for a typical modern OS, unless you have ridiculously low RAM to begin with.