The Official PC building thread - 4th Edition

I could darn near afford 990X come february. I might just upgrade my current to 1090t(won't have to replace the board), and build an intel primary system. It's high time I gave them a shot. But it does depend on how things pan out over the next few months.
Ah, bit of an audiophile myself. 2 15" subs in my Ford Explorer. They're slightly underpowered. But they sound very good.
I respeakered my Dads old towers a while back. Fosgate 12s. I didn't even know they made an 8 ohm speaker til I got my hands on them. They're very nice for Computer speakers Provided you have a receiver/amp that can push um. They aren't extreme, but they do try at times. FL studio for instance has the ability to push them quite nicely. Certain frequencies do quite nicely. I think 60 and 80Hz and 200Hz get things vibrating like mad LOL!
I'm sitting on a 1955 chevy pickup. My dad put a 1969 chevelle engine in it once upon a time. Bored it to the max! That sucker borders on scary loud when you rev it LOL! Unfortunately, he drove it out to minnesota a while back. Lived there for a time. They put salt on the roads there in the winter. It has cancer...

 

With those 18" subwoofers I'll bet you can tune them down to around 10Hz and really move some air.

Fosgate's are good I've used them and like them. The Truck must of really spun the rear tires if your dad through a 396 Chevelle engine in it with that light rear end, I'll bet it was fun to drive. I had a '67 442 with a W31 455 and a Holly double pump 850 plus headers and few other things. The only buddy that could beat me had a '69 Barracuda with a 440 interceptor that was also built up some.

For low wattage, 200w or under it's hard to beat the Klipsch Horns for the money but a 15" folded Horn Woofer takes up a lot of space so I'm building a 3-way 12" aluminum cone subwoofer with two large compression drivers in a 4.026 cu.ft bass-reflex tower. I should achieve around 20hz fs and with the horns I'll have a very good SPL. Even though I have a separate Subwoofer it really isn't necessary with my 5 Klipsch speakers as the 4 (2 front, 2 back) have very crisp low bass. I'm hoping the news ones don't let me down so that I can sell the large fronts.

 

LOL! Yah, he said the rear end was maxed. It won't let him do more than 90 - 95 mph.
I believe it is a dual feed holly He doesn't like it though. He says it's finicky.

He also had a 73 grand am. He loved that car. So did I. He called it georgia for whatever reason.

 

Actually the spread bore quad Rochester's were much easier to tune and you were less apt to get the hiccup when you jumped on the throttle. Holley made a spread bore too but were not as common as their 4 big bores versions, 650, 750, and 850's.

 

Thanks for the compliment
I don't want to be seen as someone who allies with a certain company whenever they feel like it. There are good reasons why I state brands that I do. It seems coincidental that whenever a well-reputed benchmark site posts something that isn't to everyone's liking, they immediately get slammed for being in leagues with whichever brand they showed to be the best.

I disagree, I'm voting for the GT200 as nvidia's best. The G92s were the worst of the lot for failures, even moreso than the G80s. The bumpgate scandal cost nvidia dearly here. Thankfully the GTX200 series cards were better built, they don't seem to go wrong as often (so far).

Wanna bet? Situations like this are rare, but trust me, CPUs are becoming quite important in gaming. In modern titles like Battlefield 3, Phenom 2s are just hanging in there, a tiny fraction over the 60fps point. It won't be long before they start falling under it on a regular basis. What then? It's not like in 18 months' time AMD have a new latest and greatest in the pipeline to make up for it. Bulldozer was the cure-all. It's cured nothing.

Nope - I had a ping of 6ms on a 4Mbps connection, yet I know plenty of people with a ping of 25ms on 24Mbps connections. How so? ADSL Interleave, for a start. Network capacity, distance from the exchange, distance between you and the remote sever, it all adds up.
The speed of light means even at full light speed (which fibre-optic cables can't make full use of) in 1ms light can only travel 300km. If we take the assumption that fibre optic cable carries information at a third of light speed, then to travel 5000km between here and the US east coast, that'd be 50ms. As you may notice, latencies between the UK and the US are indeed, a minimum of around 60-70ms. This has nothing to do with bandwidth, you could see this with a 40Mbps pipe, or a 100Gbps pipe. It's simple physics.


All this said, it's important to take CPU speed into perspective for things like gaming. It may be a considerable step ahead of the Phenom 2s, but I recently throttled back my i5 to stock clock speed (thermal paste problem, the cooler needs redoing), and really, I practically don't notice the difference. This though, is probably because even at stock it equates to a Phenom 2 at 3.6Ghz. This then, when considered the newer i5s are 35% faster to start with and will overclock to almost 50% beyond their stock speeds, you can understand why I tell people to stick i5s in their new gaming systems, $220 isn't a lot to pay for a CPU that can do that sort of work, especially when these people are spending at least that sort of money, often more, on graphics hardware.

 

Estuansis,

That's all well and good, but don't you think we should at least get a chance to see what these new chips can do before we hold the wake? We just got 3 new FX CPUs on Newegg today!



How about we can all the BS and speculation until we find out what they can actually do!

Russ

 

No speculation, the official benchmarks were released yesterday, and that's what we've been using. They're pretty terrible in all regards, especially at those prices.

 

That's the sum of it in a nutshell - the FX-8150 may have more cores, but they're substantially slower than the Phenom II cores that preceded them.

 

Sam,

Take a look at the chip lineup on your graph. Look at all the crap they show for AMD cpus. A 3.0GHz Phenom IIx4 940 BE, an obsolete chip, not even produced anymore. Then there's another obsolete, no longer produced chip in the 2.6GHz Athlon IIx4 620, and yet another in the Phenom IIx2 550! There seems to be a little bias towards Intel, but I'm sure you won't find anything wrong with the way they've done things though. All Intel chips shown are modern except for the Q9550 and the E8400. Where's the Phenom IIx4s, x3s, and x2s? Where's the 1090T BE, which is a better all around chip than the 1100T BE?

Then there's the motherboards. They chose an obsolete GIGABYTE GA-MA790GP-DS4H AM2+/AM2 AMD 790GX with DDR2 to test the AMDs, but chose a more modern P55-GD55 motherboard with DDR3 to test the Intels. But it's a fair example, right? Not by a long shot! Get rid of all the junk and give us an honest showing next time!

Russ

 

The P55-GD55 is as old as LGA1156 gets, that was one of the early boards from late 2009. On top of that, you can't test Sandy bridge CPUs in an LGA1156 board as it's a different socket!

Meanwhile, in the land of people that can actually read:

You'll notice the use of an 890GPA-UD3H for the AMDs, A Crosshair 5 Formula for the Bulldozers, a DX58SO2 for the i7 6-core, a P5E3 Premium for the Core 2s and a P7P55D-E Pro for the sandy bridge CPUs. All seems fair to me.

Here, a Crosshair 5 Formula is used for all the AMDs, and an MSI Z68A-GD65 for the sandy bridge CPUs.

Funny, not an MSI P55 or 790 chipset AMD board to be seen!

 

Russ I don't see any bias there. They're testing CPUs at stock speeds. Also, they're testing the fastest CPUs AMD has ever made, against decidedly not Intel's best, disregarding the 990X. If anything, the test is biased heavily in AMD's favor. The AMD CPUs are just slower. This is a fact. I don't know what you keep looking for Russ. Finding the right graph won't suddenly make AMD CPUs faster.

Also, I see nothing about the boards you mentioned at all. Disregarding the fact that none of the CPUs in the shown tests will even work in the boards you mentioned. So I really don't know what angle you're going for.

I mean wtf do you keep going on about it's not a fair test? Is it not a fair test unless AMD wins? If I was shown a graph with AMD winning, common sense tells me that's the unfair test. Every single benchmark we've seen so far has shown Bulldozer getting its ass handed to it. Are you trying to say that every single reputable review site is in Intel's pockets and that's why Bulldozer sucks? Sorry Russ, but Intel bribing a review site doesn't suddenly make a CPU better or worse. If Bulldozer sucks, there's nothing a slightly skewed graph is going to do to change it.

 

Here you go. Anandtech's review on the FX-8150.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/4955/the-bulldozer-review-amd-fx8150-tested. I'll post it on the AMD thread as well

Russ

 

for the CPU argument, I used to have an e5200 at 3.5 GHz, which is a dual core chip. I then added an extra 4870 into crossfire, and in battlefield bad company 2, I saw near no increase, maybe 5 fps. I then added a q6600, clocked it to 3.4 and it damn near doubled my frame rates.

CPU bottleneck indeed.

bulldozer is onlygood in insanely multithreaded programs. So what one program you use or two, compared to the tens to hundreds that end up being worse of compared to the 1100t.

not to mention very soon sandybridge e will be coming out to further the gap, though that's a different price point.

 

Sam,

First, please watch your wise mouth and respect your elders. I can read perfectly well, thank you! Please look carefully at the top of the graph!



There's also a Gigabyte MA785GT listed as well, but it's not a valid motherboard. I forgot the MSI X58 Eclipse Plus model that's obsolete as well, but still DDR3! Also note that there is a grand total of one modern AMD CPU, and that's the 1100T, the other 3 AMD CPUs are all obsolete and out of production. I stand by what I said!

Russ

 

Same story here Shaff, when I first went crossfire with the HD4870X2 I saw almost no benefit at all with my E4300, even clocked all the way to 75% beyond its normal speed. Once I stuck a Q6600 in there, and latterly a Q9550, the frame rates jumped enormously.

Russ, with all due respect, I have to be brash sometimes to get your attention. Every discussion we have on these matters is littered with mistakes from you, and by the time we've cleared these up, the original argument is lost in pages of back and forth about who said what and who meant what. The only reason I posted that chart from GameGPU was to illustrate that some games can be extremely demanding on the CPU and it's not all just about the graphics! Did you not notice there's no Bulldozer on that chart?

 

Sam,

With all due respect I understood you were only using that chart as an example. All I was pointing out was the most definite leanings toward favoring the Intels. It still turned out to be a poor example though, for an entirely different reason than the graph was intended to be posted for. I thought it was rather comical and a bit ironic. Here we are complaining about AMD not getting a fair shake by testing on the older AM2+ motherboards, and other things wholly intended to make AMD look worse than they really are, and you go and hand us the proof to validate that point on both counts. ;<) Thank you Sam!

Russ

 

Favouring the Intels in what. Who from? It's difficult to interpret your point of view, but all I can gleam so far is that every single review site favours Intel. If that's the case, then they're probably not biased, Intel are just better than you thought they were!

 

I thought this interesting. It does make one wonder, just how much it effected the tests. Probably not much, but it does require attention eh?

 

I'm all excited to go Sandy Bridge now. i5 2500k here I come baby. Speeeeeeed!!!

 

I'd like to see how much you spend on that system If I go intel, I'm gonna have to buy ALL new parts. I suppose the same is for AMD. I want to keep my current for a secondary. If I have time today, I'll try and do a comparison for myself.