Computer advice needed

ok, that's got to be it, cause i just called FF from psp on my 64 bit vista machine. so, it's most likely running in 32 bit. so, you shld be fine, since you're getting win7. it will most likely install like mine did, under the (x86) folder.

I use FF on Windows7 64bit, and I had it on Vista 64bit before.
As Kraellin said, it'll install into the Program Files (x86) folder.
Don't know if it'll work with as a plugin with 64bit software though as I only have 32bit versions of PSP and Photoshop (works fine in those).

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Beliria wrote: Must not get too excited till I get the email saying the PC is on the van heading my way

It's probably ok to get excited now

DooonT trying not to get excite yet!!! Otherwise will be beside myself if it's delayed or something goes wrong etc etc!!!

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Beliria wrote: DooonT trying not to get excite yet!!! Otherwise will be beside myself if it's delayed or something goes wrong etc etc!!!

I went through it myself when I built my i7 system... and I just put my girlfriend through it with her new build. Hopefully all will go well and you'll be playing with it soon.

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Beliria wrote: I mean it took them 3 days to reply to the email I sent to confirm the person even worked for meshcomputers, bad reply time at the start makes me dubious about what they would be like if there was a problem.

I agree there. The only sites I deal with here in Canada reply to emails within hours usually. One of them even has a button on the site that you can press to request a phone call (and it shows the approximate wait time too).

Anyway, good luck... get excited (at least a little )... and if you need any more help/advice feel free to ask. Oh, and let us know when you get it up and running.

hehe, merry christmas, bel

info of what I plan to stuff the hard drive with meyendlesss?

um.. will have a look at them things you mentioned cause am curious to see if it is running as it should be anyway, hope you survive no internet, mind least your have a computer to twiddle on anyway.

downloaded them tester things you mentioned will have to read up to figure out what each does etc, mind best get a move on the HD one only has 15 days trial

Never really tested a pc before tend to just start using them.

Downloaded the free version of HDtune and here is the results for the test.

2x 1 TB (1000 GB) SATA-II HDD UDMA 300 7200 32MB on raid 1 mirror is all the info I can find on that...
and when I search through the pc all I can find ref drives in the device info is volume 0 plus the dvd drive can find far more info when I look for stuff on my old pc using XP.. ggrr kinda getting to the point of will I need to take the machine apart to make sure it does even have 2 hard drives.

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SHould have read through the other post first and seen you had allready ordered your system
sorry
I see you went with a I7 good choice I love my rig

One allternative to the boot ssd is cf

You can buy a cheap ide or sata adapter for compact flash cards
My main linux box uses that for /boot /tmp /sys /bin /opt /sbin
leaving the big stuff like /home and /usr free for the bigger sata drive
Ive thought about doing that on my win 7 comp since its so easy to clone cf cards and I could keep a spare inside the case so if it ever crapped out I could swap out cf cards in an instant and be back up

Would love the ssd as well but the price for decent cappacity is outrageous

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I just built a I7 Core box and have a similar spec quad core duo

the quad core is 3.2 ghz
the I7 3 ghz

the difference is night and day

first off
the newer boards bus speed is incredible
12gb trichannel ddr3 is incredible
but the real kick in the pants is the return of hyper threading
the new I7 cores utilize hyperthreading again now that the tech has matured enough

That is why a quad I7 shows up as 8 processors
the hyperthreading allows for more calcs on the same dye

If your not to intimidated
I built my entire rig for $700 (not including graphics card upgrades)

so with 2 ati 5870
and one nvidia 285 card

well lets put it this way I had ff open photoshop 4
blender inkscape and gimp

all minimized while playing crysis warhead at max settings

and several other apps open

and the responsivness was amazing
I could move back and forth between windows with no lag

so out of curriosity I fired up a bunch of other high end apps and never really suffered any lag

Your gonna pay top dollar for a prebuilt rig but check out some of the bare bones systems online

if your afraid of auctions (warranty and all)
tiger direct (whom I normally dont use) has incredible kit computers

What kind of lag issues are you having, and how much are you running when it happens?
With your setup you should be able to do some fairly heavy multitasking without much of a problem.
A bit of lag can be expected if you're doing a lot of things that use the CPU heavily though.

i7 on the x58 chipset is definately the way to go at the moment.
That may change soon, but things always change soon...
You made a very good choice, and should be very happy right now.

Building a computer really is pretty simple.
You just get your parts and follow instructions.
There's a risk you may break something, but if you're careful that risk is very low.
If you are ever looking at getting another system I'd suggest you seriously look into building it yourself.
Not only for the possible money savings, but it's a good way to understand how it all works.

voldemort is right about the cf option... not quite as good as an ssd, but quite a bit cheaper. Honestly though, in your case a couple good hard drives is probably just fine.

Aside from the hyperthreading, another thing that the i7 brings is simple/stable overclocking that pretty much makes all but the cheapest chip (the 920 right now) a waste of money. There are a lot of little things to learn if you want to get serious about overclocking, but if all you want is a boost there's nothing to it really. As long as your motherboard BIOS allows overclocking you can easily get an i7 920 to match an i7 975 (which costs over $1000). Results vary from chip to chip, but I've yet to see an i7 920 that can't hit at least 3.6GHz. This requires better CPU cooling than the stock intel cooler can provide, but unless you're going for 4GHz or more something cheap like a CM Hyper 212 would work just fine. It may not be something you are interested in doing, and there are potential risks involved, but the gains can be huge. There are reasons to get into this besides just having a faster computer (though that's probably the best reason). It's also sometimes possible to have a more energy efficient computer. In my case, unless I'm doing heavy rendering or gaming or something, I run my chip @ 3.4GHz... but I'm able to use less voltage than I would running stock, which leads to power savings, less heat output, and less wear on my motherboard and power supply. If I drop down another .5GHz I can use even less power. You could leave your system running at stock speed with the cooling you have now and likely use a fair bit less power. Of course, it may just be something you aren't into, but if you are or ever want to it can really be worth it.

Anyway, glad to see you're enjoying your computer.
Do we get to see something you've done on it?

I posted this at hardwaresecrets.com but so far there has not been a single view - except for that automatic one that seems standard to all forums.
Anyway, I know most of the hardware people are here, so I thought it best to recycle this thread.
I am going to purchase a low-end workstation and since this is a huge amount of money for me, I would like some advice before I click buy.
Here is the tentative configuration:
ASUS LGA 1366 Intel X58 ($370)
Intel Core i7-970 ($880)
Quadro FX 3800 ($835)
24GB SDRAM(2x) ($552)
1TB 7200 RPM SATA 6.0Gb (2x) (as raid 0) ($180)
Corsair 80GB SATA II (SSD) ($235)
OCZ Z 850W ATX PSU ($175)
RevoDrive 80GB ($295)
Win 7 Pro Full ($260)

This will be my workstation but I will also do my rendering on it for the next few months. I am most uncomfortable with how to configure the drives. I'm thinking of using the sata 6gb drives as raid 0 work area. This would be footage and high res textures, comping and editing. The small high speed Revo would hold cache for dynamic sims and the windows paging file. And the small sata 3gb ssd would hold the windows os.
Is that sensible? Any ideas on how it could be done better?

Btw, I realize raid 0 is unreliable but since these are working drives only, it is a risk I can live with. Iow, my data (projects) folder, reference lib, archive and backups are on the local network.

Thanks

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ronviers wrote: Ok I'm about to do it. If no one says anything int the next hour I'm clicking buy.

oo 24gig ram! What I read sounds sweet but no clue if it works together or not.

No clue if the pc buffs are around either hope someone turns up before you hit the buy buttons.

Okay best scoot watching tv at the mo.

Looks like a killer system! The only thing I might reconsider is the raid configuration, disk is something I have experienced a few times - a raid 0 setup kind of doubles the chance..

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ronviers wrote: I sure wish it would get here.

yep the mega downside to buying stuff.. no instant delivery system in place yet

ah! usb 3 mobo. nice but, where are the extra sata ports and are those 4 pci slots or something else? and where are the extra pci-e ports? i see one, but only one.

6 core cpu? nice! is that the one that does the virtual 12 cores? ah, just looked, it is. it also has the new turbo boost that intel has been advertising. i'll be interested in knowing how well this performs. it sounds great.

and that vid card looks pretty sweet. big price, but wow, looks fast!

24 gigs of ddr3 ram. very sweet!

western digital is fine. surprised you didnt go for the 10,000 rpm for the price you're paying for the other items. and, i prefer raid1 to raid0 for the backup reasons. if one drive goes out your data still ALL resides on the other. but, raid1 treats both drives as one, so you're only going to see 1, 1 tb drive in your system. raid0 is supposed to be good for speed since it's writing every other bit or block or byte to alternate drives, which saves time. so, raid0 is good for speed but lousy for backups and raid1 is good for backups but takes a speed hit. for as many harddrives as i've lost over the years, i'll take the speed hit. and since you're getting 24 gigs of ram, you're not likely going to be doing a lot of swap file action.

why two ssd drives? one for windows start up and one for a workspace? and one is sata II and one is pci-e? seems a bit odd, but then i've not used ssd yet myself, so i dont really know.

dont know anything about that psu, but at 850w it shld be able to power a small car

you're paying a bit much for window 7 pro, though. i think staples had it cheaper. i think for that price you could get win 7 ultimate, but check, my memory's not as good as it used to be

most mobo's come with nic's these days. it's sort of like integrated graphics were for a while. but, check. if you dont have it, then that's another slot that gets used up in the pci's.

i'm guessing you're going to like the system. it looks extremely fast and fast is good the price tag is high, but so is the performance. that puppy is going to scream!

I think I'm finished canceling and re-ordering my order. I hope I didn't get anyone at newegg's back up, but it's automated anyway so why should they care.
Now I really wish it would get here.

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Kraellin wrote: extremely good backup system

How do you do it?

Is it just me or are the emoticons different today?

Thanks Craig. I think the raid backup is the way to go.
I have not spent much time using win7’s backup utilities. All I am using them for now is to keep an image current.
I use a utility called ‘richcopy’ to keep my projects folder synced to another drive. It runs on an old xp computer. Every two hours, using xp’s ‘scheduled task’ utility, it does an incremental copy from my work computer to one of its usb drives. I still have to save often and do autosaves.
I was hoping to get something like this and configure it to use one of the fault tolerant raid options. Instead I had to settle for one of these and keep my existing backup strategy - unless I can come up with something better. The docking station is not as nice as the server solution but it will allow me to swap in and out archive drives.
A raid server is still on my wishlist.

It posts!
Counts 24gb, runs idle at 99ºf and clocks in at 3200mhz.

Now I get it, anything pcix that will fit, will work - nice
Learning that, I got the revo working.
So what we now call raid 0 is what I used to call spanning. It's no wonder sans are popular, everything local can be scratch.