The Official PC building thread - 4th Edition

So not the same compound, but similar eh ddp?

The local PC shop gave me the stock AM3 cooler for my quad. They're very nice people. They trusted me to try it, and if it works, pay 7.50 later. I asked them about it, when I walked in, and they all but laughed. "Been steering amd fans to intel since 2000" is what one of them said. Intel fanboys! I told them that usually when I'm in the market, AMD seems to have the best price/performance ratio. They didn't say anything. Their comments were based on preference, and nothing more. Honestly, the real world differences between the two manufacturers are nearly negligible, depending on the software.

Russ, I found the leak! It's precisely where the power cable comes out of the pump!

 

Missing the point somewhat I think. From massive overclocks on cheap CPUs like the e4300, to the unmatched power of the I7s, there is much that separates Intel from their rivals. My only correction would be that it should be 2006, not 2000.

 

Indeed. Intel had nothing in 2000! The Athlons were excellent. 2006 is definitely about right. AMD hasn't really released a competitive product for a while. Not REAL competitive anyway. Price/performance is definitely helping them. But they really need to release something special now. Bulldozer reminds me of the first generation phenom. Although not quite as bad. If it were just 25 - 50% better, and not quite as power hungry, we'd really have something.

Federal tax return is in!!!!!!!!!!!! YES!!!!!!!!

 

I can't say I'm impressed with my new i5 it certainly doesn't hold up to the benchmark garbage or the percentage of improvement claimed by the Intel fanboys. I wish I had gone with an A6/A8 instead of the i5. However I don't hate my Intel it's OK but for trancoding AV I would have been better off with an AMD quad instead of a 2C/4T processor with TurboBoost, TB is a joke in my book.

 

Sam,

Actually, CoolIt has been very good about taking care of problems caused by leakage, because it's such a rare occurrence. They handle it on a Per case basis. Hey, it never hurts to ask!

Russ

 

Let's set aside the Nvidia vs Ati for a moment, and concentrate on only nvidia. It's what I require. Having said that, this card is looking highly tempting.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814130683

CPU coolers?
I'd like a high CFM for when encoding. I can more than likely manually control it with my Scythe controller

 

Actually, in 2000 AMD held the lead from a technological advancement standpoint, but Intel held it in terms of an actual product quality standpoint. The K7 Thunderbirds were the first to break the 1Ghz barrier, but they were awful CPUs, with poor extension support, and no thermal safety limiters!
The Athlon XP is what turned AMD from cheap Intel rip-offs into a serious big-time player. After the failure that was the first Pentium 4, the Athlon XP, a successful architecture in its own right, got another head start, and was successful right until the last, when it was diverged into the not so successful Sempron range, and the impressive Athlon64, which, combined with further disappointments in the Netburst architecture in the form of Prescott, gave AMD further advantages.
All was going swimmingly for AMD, with vastly superior dual core processors, right up until June/July 2006. Then the Core 2 Duo came out, which left AMD in the dust. From that point on they never really recovered. AMD have never since then been at the forefront of CPU technology.
They enjoyed a bit of a renaissance in the early days of the Phenom II as the low asking price allowed competition with Intel's mainstream quad cores, and high front side bus speeds limited the overclocking prowess of the Core 2 Quad rivals. That all ended with the launch of the i7s though, and from there, three subsequent technological advancements (integrated northbridge, QPI and the 32nm process shrink) have furthered the success of this architecture to such an extent that the four core versions of these CPUs can win more fights against AMD's best 8-core offerings than they lose, and the overclocking ability they post, while not quite to the same ludicrous extent of the early core 2 duo days (100% in some cases), is still very impressive and far surpasses any of AMD's CPUs in that regard.
AMD price their CPUs well, and they will always offer good value for money, but ultimately, you're still buying 8 year old technology with AMD unless you buy Bulldozer, in which case you're buying new technology that's worse than 8 year old technology. AMDs are great for frugal bargain hunters, but to the performance-seeker, or the enthusiast, buying a new AMD CPU is verging on ludditism.
The only exception to all this is Llano, the one successful product to have come out of AMD's CPU division in recent times. Integrating an onboard GPU of some actual worth onto a CPU of moderate performance, all within a 65W or 100W power envelope, for minimal cost, is a fantastic way to build an incredibly cheap system that actually has sufficient performance to do everything but play high-end games, right off the bat. It's a low-end solution, but a very good one.

Mr-Movies: The hype was about the quad cores. Buying a dual core in this day and age and expecting it to perform better than a quad core is pretty laughable, even with a good architecture.
Remember, there is an i5 quad core, and it's this CPU that wins the benchmark praise, not the cheaper dual core versions.

 

Omega: The 560Ti is better than most other Fermi cards, but it does lack high-end resilience. More than that though, it's only about 10% faster than one of these:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814161389

That's quite a compelling price saving, wouldn't you agree?

 

So the card I posted is faster, and it's Nvidia which I require. Money is no object at the moment Well, not entirely true. When I can save, I'm all for it. But the 250 - 300 range is where I want to be. Unfortunately, I can't use Ati for the applications I want to work with. I say again, I'm not a fanboy, I simply have no choice but to stick with Nvidia once again. There are similar situations with Intel. A lot of softwares have been coded in intels favor. I'm not stabbing intel here, these are facts. Games are often coded in Nvidias favor. So here is another winning point for an nvidia card. It's unfortunate though.

I updated my last post to include CPU coolers.

 

Well, you'll always get something faster if you pay more, you can take that right the way up to the $3000 8-core rendering workhorses, how far do you go up the line?
The 'no choice' argument is complete nonsense, it's simply that you've chosen a bit of software that you like, and it in particular uses nvidia. That's fine, but the 'I can't use anything but nvidia' statement simply isn't true if you weren't entirely against looking at any other bit of software. Brand preference is fine, but people shouldn't throw the term 'fanboy' at people when they exhibit some of the same behaviour themselves.

Also, games are coded in nvidia's favour for different reasons to why software is sometimes coded in Intel's favour. Those aren't the same issue, so they shouldn't really be compared like that.

 

As for a cooler, maybe try one of these
http://www.performance-pcs.com/catalog/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=28417
and shove your own high power fan, such as:
http://www.performance-pcs.com/catalog/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=30013

in it. Make sure you're fan controller is up to the job though. Those fans are BEEF.

 

I like the looks of your recommendations. Thanks. Definitely considering them

I like my software. And I hope you don't think I was suggesting you a fanboy. Not it at all. I just like to make clear that I am not one I'm very neutral. I just wish I had more money to try more products. This is a spendy hobby

 

Sam,

I would never call the E4300 a good overclocker, let alone a great one. As I recall, you struggled to get past 3 GHz with yours. Mine ran out of gas at 3.56 GHz. The E6750 was a much better and faster chip, with more L2 Cache.

Personally I'm more than happy with my 1090T BE @3.6 GHz, with the 990XA motherboard and DDR3 1333 MHz cas 7 memory, in spite of all the bugs in Win7. It has many annoying glitches, and I hate the idea that it try's to outguess you, forcing you to spend more wasted time to do things the way you need them done. They made a bunch of boneheaded errors with Win7, like having to sort the desktop icons twice, because it flips the order from A-Z to Z-A. The windows picture viewer sucks. It's also missing icons for a lot of common file types, and there's no preview for picture files unless you open the Preview program, and there is no Gif support. It also has a nasty habit of not asking you before it installs updates, despite my having it set to ask me before it downloads and installs an update. The only saving grace with the Control Panel, is the search function. Otherwise you can't find a thing! 51 Icons, to do the same work in twice the amount of time as the 23 icons I had in XP! Marvelous!

Russ

 

I don't know. This cooler looks and sounds very impressive.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835233087&Tpk=N82E16835233087

 

Sam,

Yes, and quite unacceptably loud!

Russ

 

Loud is almost meaningless to me. I can control the fans manually. I want the ability to highly cool(loud), but quiet when I want. So regardless of noise, I want a fan that CAN move a lot of air
Man this 8600gt sucks! I'm getting all sorts of graphical lag...

 

My i5 is hardly better than my old AMD X2, not the new ones, so I'm sorry but your laughable just doesn't apply.

I've now tested my i5, and yes I'm aware of all the variants on both sides, and it just isn't as good as the hype, no surprise there I would say. In fact I had a friend that is not very knowledgeable play with my new system and he is thinking of staying with AMD. When I can get a AMD quad for the same price as a 2c4t (iX) Intel and it will perform better why would I go with the Intel 2 core or spend even more for the 4 core? Hardly laughable but then I'm not a fanboy. My friend was swayed toward Intel for his new rig as he lives around a bunch of the iPeople (Apple) and Intel fanboys, but after playing with mine, which he liked, he was not overly impressed nor am I.

Regards,
Stevo

 

Hey! I didn't say that LOL!

 

Sorry, I didn't pull your quote marker out when I stripped a bunch of the other comments, it should look correct now Kevin.

Stevo :0