More computer questions...

[lil_Blue_Ford]

So yea, I'm back to playing with my computer again... who would have thought that I could have fallen into this trap?

I'm starting to think about planning to build another computer for myself... that would be built by the end of this year, but I'm starting to wonder a bit if I should really just leave that go for awhile and be happy with the one I already have. The idea is, if I build it, to build a higher-end computer. I may be out of my mind though...

But back to my current computer...

I have the stock heatsink and cooling fan on the CPU. Is this good enough or should I invest in an aftermarket cooling setup like this one:



Should I get a larger harddrive and just run one, or should I just get another harddrive and run one as primary and one as slave? (I'm surprised with how fast I'm filling up my 250 gig after all these years of being content with 40 gigs.)

I'm thinking of getting an add-on sound card instead of just using the built-in sound, as I've started playing with hooking my comp up to my TV and my stereo... I'm willing to take thoughts/advice on this subject and also any suggested sound cards to look at.

I think that's all for the moment... lol


Oh, yea, for those who don't quite remember, my current desktop has the following:
Intel Classic Series mobo
2.2ghz Intel Core Duo
4 gig Corsair memory (two matched pairs, 1 gig per stick)
XFX GeForce 8600gt vid card
twin Samsung DVD-ROM drives (SATA)
48x CDRW (IDE)
Sony 3.5" floppy
WD Caviar 250 gig HD (SATA)
twin 80mm case fans
120mm case fan
PC Power & Cooling Silencer PSU (610 watt IIRC)
Windows XP Pro

 

[Twizzler09]

As far as your heatsink/fan goes, as long as your not overheating, don't replace it.

From the standpoint of a former Computer Tech, Aftermarket cooling isn't always what its cracked up to be. The watercooling systems, though, are friggin sweet if you get it setup proper.

My advice to you for Harddrives, use two. One small drive to run your O/S from, and then one absoluetly massive one to store your programs/games/music/whatever else. The reason being, running games etc off the same HDD as your O/S increases read times/load times, because the computer is trying to use the same reader head for multiple tasks, instead of just one.

Now for Sound. Creative makes some damn good sound cards, including ones that have built-in functions that were specifically designed to work with Home Stereo's and hi-fi surround systems. Depending on just how extreme you want to go with it, theres lots of options. I suggest you check out www.newegg.com, they have pretty much everything that exists for computers, and decent pricing. Keep in mind, though, that built-in sound cards aren't always bad, but if your serious about hooking your home stereo into your computer, an add-on card would be a better choice.

 

[Mark_88]

Well, you might not like my advice so I will give it to you...free~!...and if you want a second opinion I'll tell you twice (lol)...

Computers are like trucks...once you start tinkering with them you're never really happy until you find you're spending more money on the thing than on yourself or anything else...

However, having said that...

the cooling fan should be fine...unless you are seriously overclocking (not even sure if that's possible nowadays) you can always upgrade and spend more money...it's probably better to look at case cooling than the CPU so adding a case fan if you don't already have two or three might be a better investment...

If you're rapidly filling up a 250 Gig HDD then you're probably saving things that are best put onto disks...buying a good CD burner and a stack of discs to back everything up would be recommended...and remember that if your HDD crashes you loose everything unless you back it up...

Running two hard disks is fine but what I would suggest is to ccreate a backup bootable HDD that is maybe 40 gigs and don't attach it to your system...just keep it aside in case you need it...and put only your OS and maybe your favorite game...and maybe some music if you haven't already burned it onto CDs...

the more RW you do on a hard drive the sooner it will fail...and if your OS has to skip around 250 gigs to find things it slows things down considerably...even with dual processors...they have limitations just like the older systems...HDDs spin to access the information...if they can find the info faster your system runs faster...pretty simple stuff that you're probably quite aware of...

but people tend to forget the basics and start loading more programs and download more stuff than they'll ever have time to play with...and then the system starts to run slow and eventually crashes...and if you don't back up what you really, really need...you start over again...

But if you want to build your own system that's great...nothing quite as satisfying as working with a system that you hand picked the components for and put it all together yourself...just like a truck...eh! As long as you're having fun and have the resources...go for it!

 

[lil_Blue_Ford]

As far as your heatsink/fan goes, as long as your not overheating, don't replace it.

From the standpoint of a former Computer Tech, Aftermarket cooling isn't always what its cracked up to be. The watercooling systems, though, are friggin sweet if you get it setup proper.

My advice to you for Harddrives, use two. One small drive to run your O/S from, and then one absoluetly massive one to store your programs/games/music/whatever else. The reason being, running games etc off the same HDD as your O/S increases read times/load times, because the computer is trying to use the same reader head for multiple tasks, instead of just one.

Now for Sound. Creative makes some damn good sound cards, including ones that have built-in functions that were specifically designed to work with Home Stereo's and hi-fi surround systems. Depending on just how extreme you want to go with it, theres lots of options. I suggest you check out www.newegg.com, they have pretty much everything that exists for computers, and decent pricing. Keep in mind, though, that built-in sound cards aren't always bad, but if your serious about hooking your home stereo into your computer, an add-on card would be a better choice.

Well, I was considering the thought of increasing cooling capability because I've found it idling in the 42-42c range lately. Because of dusty conditions I was force to fit the case with filters to keep the dust out as much as possible. When the weather was colder (and the house as well), I was idling in the upper 30s, but as the weather (and the house) have warmed up, so have my temps. I'm somewhat hesitant to go as extreme as water cooling with it being just a decent everyday comp.

With running two HDs like you suggested, do I run one as a master an one as a slave or is there some other way to hook it up?

I know all about Newegg... I bought everything to build my computer from them, lol. My problem is more that I am a bit behind the curve here, I never was big into researching deep into computer stuff and knowing what's best and all. When I built my computer I figured that it would be fine and I could be hands-off and just leave it alone. After all, I had a laptop for nearly 7 years now and never got crazy trying to find any way to make it better. Now that I got a decent desktop though, I'm finding myself hooked on the thought of bigger, better, faster. Like I need something else to spend money on, lol.

Basically, when it comes down to sound, I'm just not sure what is good to look at, or even if I should bother. I could hook the sound from the mobo into everything if I really wanted to. I probably wouldn't use it very often all hooked in, but I just can't help the thoughts of hooking it up to everything... hell, I already have my computer hooked to my stereo, which sports two receivers hooked together with 4 speakers...lol. I'm a nut when it comes to electronics...

 

[Hahnsb2]

Stock heatsink is decent if you don't OC. I personally have 820GB of space on my rig and I want to add another 500 soon, you can never have enough storage. Just plug the new drive in and set it as the slave and format it and it should be good to go. Sounds cards I don't know, I use the onboard since it sounds good to me... Just don't get bitten by the computer bug like I did

 

[lil_Blue_Ford]

Well, you might not like my advice so I will give it to you...free~!...and if you want a second opinion I'll tell you twice (lol)...

Computers are like trucks...once you start tinkering with them you're never really happy until you find you're spending more money on the thing than on yourself or anything else...

However, having said that...

the cooling fan should be fine...unless you are seriously overclocking (not even sure if that's possible nowadays) you can always upgrade and spend more money...it's probably better to look at case cooling than the CPU so adding a case fan if you don't already have two or three might be a better investment...

If you're rapidly filling up a 250 Gig HDD then you're probably saving things that are best put onto disks...buying a good CD burner and a stack of discs to back everything up would be recommended...and remember that if your HDD crashes you loose everything unless you back it up...

Running two hard disks is fine but what I would suggest is to ccreate a backup bootable HDD that is maybe 40 gigs and don't attach it to your system...just keep it aside in case you need it...and put only your OS and maybe your favorite game...and maybe some music if you haven't already burned it onto CDs...

the more RW you do on a hard drive the sooner it will fail...and if your OS has to skip around 250 gigs to find things it slows things down considerably...even with dual processors...they have limitations just like the older systems...HDDs spin to access the information...if they can find the info faster your system runs faster...pretty simple stuff that you're probably quite aware of...

but people tend to forget the basics and start loading more programs and download more stuff than they'll ever have time to play with...and then the system starts to run slow and eventually crashes...and if you don't back up what you really, really need...you start over again...

But if you want to build your own system that's great...nothing quite as satisfying as working with a system that you hand picked the components for and put it all together yourself...just like a truck...eh! As long as you're having fun and have the resources...go for it!

LOL.. yea, it's already cost me about as much to build as my choptop has... I have roughly $1,400 into my comp as it sits... and my choptop as it sits I have roughly $1,650. Actually, it's disgusting to think of how much money I've thrown at my various hobbies and interests so far in my life... hell, I probably have well over $10k into tools alone...

My mobo does not permit overclocking, and I already have three case fans (2x 80mm, 1x 120mm).

I have a good burner, but a good portion of stuff on the drive is stuff that I don't want to burn onto disks because I've been accessing it relatively often. (I'm big into photography and finally able to do some photo editing that I always wanted to be able to play around with, but my lappy wasn't powerful enough). I guess it may be a good idea to try to separate things by what I use often and what I don't use very often, and burn the stuff that doesn't get used often onto disks.

 

[lil_Blue_Ford]

Stock heatsink is decent if you don't OC. I personally have 820GB of space on my rig and I want to add another 500 soon, you can never have enough storage. Just plug the new drive in and set it as the slave and format it and it should be good to go. Sounds cards I don't know, I use the onboard since it sounds good to me... Just don't get bitten by the computer bug like I did

If I end up building a higher end rig... it'll probably end up looking kinda like that...

 

[Twizzler09]

Hahns, that reminds me of my old desktop. I had a clear side-panel with red neons. It was awesome.

"With running two HDs like you suggested, do I run one as a master an one as a slave or is there some other way to hook it up?"

Master/Slave is the ONLY way to hook up harddrives/CD-ROM/DVD-ROM/Burners. If you go with the normal ATA drives (which is outdated now) you have to manually set Primary Master/Slave or Secondary Master/Slave by changing the jumper positions on the HDD itself, or use a Cable Select ATA cable, plug it into the appropriate place on the MB, and then plug the Master/Slave Drives into the appropriate location on the cable. SATA drives are the new(er) thing. Fortunately they set Master/Slave by themselves, thus eliminating the hassle of setting up the configuration yourself.

If your idling a little high, the easy fix is to blow the dust out of your computer case. That'll bring the temps down a bit, by allowing more air to flow (kinda like a truck's intake...more air = better). If thats not sufficient, either more fans, or a larger fan/heatsink combo is your best bet. My old computer had a total of....8 fans on it. I'll draw out a diagram for you and post it.....

*EDIT* Heres that layout of the cooling on my old desktop. It idled at 96 degrees Farenheit, and under even the most extreme loads, only evergot up to 136 degrees farenheit. Pretty cool running for a gaming computer.

 

[lil_Blue_Ford]

Hahns, that reminds me of my old desktop. I had a clear side-panel with red neons. It was awesome.

"With running two HDs like you suggested, do I run one as a master an one as a slave or is there some other way to hook it up?"

Master/Slave is the ONLY way to hook up harddrives/CD-ROM/DVD-ROM/Burners. If you go with the normal ATA drives (which is outdated now) you have to manually set Primary Master/Slave or Secondary Master/Slave by changing the jumper positions on the HDD itself, or use a Cable Select ATA cable, plug it into the appropriate place on the MB, and then plug the Master/Slave Drives into the appropriate location on the cable. SATA drives are the new(er) thing. Fortunately they set Master/Slave by themselves, thus eliminating the hassle of setting up the configuration yourself.

If your idling a little high, the easy fix is to blow the dust out of your computer case. That'll bring the temps down a bit, by allowing more air to flow (kinda like a truck's intake...more air = better). If thats not sufficient, either more fans, or a larger fan/heatsink combo is your best bet. My old computer had a total of....8 fans on it. I'll draw out a diagram for you and post it.....

*EDIT* Heres that layout of the cooling on my old desktop. It idled at 96 degrees Farenheit, and under even the most extreme loads, only evergot up to 136 degrees farenheit. Pretty cool running for a gaming computer.

Ahh, I see now with the SATA thing as to why I didn't have to worry about master an slave with my DVD-ROM drives. Plug and play is nice.

There should be virtually no dust inside of my case because I rigged up filters over the air vents and fans.

For fans, I have the one fan in the PSU shooting out the back. Stock fan on the processor. Stock fan on the vid card. One 120mm fan exhausting out the back. One 80mm puller sucking air into the side and shooting it right on the processor. One 80mm exhausting out the top.

 

[kaskirov]

i upgraded my comp last month. i got a new case, powersupply, video card, mobo, ram and a quad core all for around $800. bought all the parts from memory express but i don't think they are in the US. anyway, for sound cards check out the creative store, they usually got sweet deals: http://us.creative.com/shop/

 

[Will]

Pick something to finish.

It seems like your truck is always a shambles and your computer is always on the blip. It's obvious to me you haven't the resources for either one. I suffer from this as well, but on a grander scale.

I got the computer bug (pun intended) out of my system by pulling my old Pentium 75 computer out and doing all of the upgrades on it that were cost prohibitive at the time. Now it's upgraded to 2mb video, 128mb ram, 200mhz overdrive--the works baby. I did it for about $40. It's my backup. Now I don't care about computers anymore.

Just my thoughts.

 

[MAKG]

I'm a believer in RAID.

Want to be impervious to disk failures? RAID 5.

Remember the "R" is for "redundant." You need two simultaneous failures to knock these out.

Now, sometimes POS controllers can form single point failures (and any engineer that releases one of those should have it on his pacemaker and see how the F he likes it).

I've designed clusters large enough to be effectively un-back-upable. I had a 1 TB disk in one 10 years ago....

Oh, and RAID is niiiiice for video playback. Very fast (as long as you don't use RAID 1).

Having said that, when is the last time you had a hard disk failure at home? It's been over 15 years for me. I tend to outgrow the disks well before they fail. Last one I dealt with was a hardware-buggy Seagate 330 MB SCSI in a Sun shoebox that was continuously thrashing and suffered nearly weekly blackouts in winter. That was 1992. At work.

It's been my experience that operator failures are orders of magnitude more common. THIS is why one backs up. Stupidity. The cluster I mentioned earlier had two replicated RAID 5 clusters, one for backing up the other. This was a $500K cluster with 512 CPUs, so getting a tape robot was out of the question. It was cheaper to get another disk array.

I don't know how the later Microsoft OSs dealt with "software RAID," but Windows 2000 was a flaming POS that slammed against Amdahl's Law after only 2-3 disks. Linux ("md" driver) was substantially better, but it's still always preferable to have a hardware RAID controller, as long as it is itself redundant (or else a blown controller still can wipe out all the data).

The one I really liked was the Origin 2000 (SGI) controller I had in the Viz Lab. We used that for uncompressed video playback at monitor resoultion and it had a practical bandwidth -- in 1999 -- of more than 100 MB/sec.

 

[DeanMoriarty]

What's up LBR... Haven't seen you around in a minute.

I'd run a couple of Raptor's in a RAID array, and get another massive HDD for extra storage / backup purposes.
I've found that the more fans you add, the more dust you collect, and unless you keep up with cleaning it often, it'll run hotter than it did without the extra fans. I'd swap out the heatsink before I added another fan.

 

[lil_Blue_Ford]

Pick something to finish.

It seems like your truck is always a shambles and your computer is always on the blip. It's obvious to me you haven't the resources for either one. I suffer from this as well, but on a grander scale.

I got the computer bug (pun intended) out of my system by pulling my old Pentium 75 computer out and doing all of the upgrades on it that were cost prohibitive at the time. Now it's upgraded to 2mb video, 128mb ram, 200mhz overdrive--the works baby. I did it for about $40. It's my backup. Now I don't care about computers anymore.

Just my thoughts.

But I thought that neither trucks nor computers could ever be truely finished?

I'm not so much having computer issues anymore as just trying to tweak here and there to get it to where I want it. Big thanks to Dean Moriarty and Smokey for helping me get my computer together so that I actually have a decent and reliable computer. I would like to build a more powerful computer geared towards gaming and high-end photo-video stuff, but after considering what you said, I'll put that on the back burner... behind my trucks.

And speaking of trucks, I think I've finally made a little progress on that front. Yes, I'm still working on stuff pretty often, but I've learned a good deal more about them in the past few years and haven't posted much about them other than the bit here and there of things that I want another opinion on or help doing. I've also managed to have two roadworthy vehicles for over a year now.

It's not easy, but it helped after I got my head out of my @$$ and started digging myself out of the debt I accumulated with my last gf.

I'm a believer in RAID.

Want to be impervious to disk failures? RAID 5.

Remember the "R" is for "redundant." You need two simultaneous failures to knock these out.

Now, sometimes POS controllers can form single point failures (and any engineer that releases one of those should have it on his pacemaker and see how the F he likes it).

I've designed clusters large enough to be effectively un-back-upable. I had a 1 TB disk in one 10 years ago....

Oh, and RAID is niiiiice for video playback. Very fast (as long as you don't use RAID 1).

Having said that, when is the last time you had a hard disk failure at home? It's been over 15 years for me. I tend to outgrow the disks well before they fail. Last one I dealt with was a hardware-buggy Seagate 330 MB SCSI in a Sun shoebox that was continuously thrashing and suffered nearly weekly blackouts in winter. That was 1992. At work.

It's been my experience that operator failures are orders of magnitude more common. THIS is why one backs up. Stupidity. The cluster I mentioned earlier had two replicated RAID 5 clusters, one for backing up the other. This was a $500K cluster with 512 CPUs, so getting a tape robot was out of the question. It was cheaper to get another disk array.

I don't know how the later Microsoft OSs dealt with "software RAID," but Windows 2000 was a flaming POS that slammed against Amdahl's Law after only 2-3 disks. Linux ("md" driver) was substantially better, but it's still always preferable to have a hardware RAID controller, as long as it is itself redundant (or else a blown controller still can wipe out all the data).

The one I really liked was the Origin 2000 (SGI) controller I had in the Viz Lab. We used that for uncompressed video playback at monitor resoultion and it had a practical bandwidth -- in 1999 -- of more than 100 MB/sec.

So is RAID 5 really something I need to consider? I've only ever had to deal with one full-on disk failure and that was when my deathstar.... err... travelstar harddrive took a dump after 3 years of abuse. I have over 3 years of abuse on the replacement Samsung drive in my laptop, which has been relegated to note-taking duty because it will no longer work with the internet (near as I can tell, the NIC card took a dump).

What's up LBR... Haven't seen you around in a minute.

I'd run a couple of Raptor's in a RAID array, and get another massive HDD for extra storage / backup purposes.
I've found that the more fans you add, the more dust you collect, and unless you keep up with cleaning it often, it'll run hotter than it did without the extra fans. I'd swap out the heatsink before I added another fan.

Hey Dean! Yea, I haven't been around here much lately, been putting in some really long days when I have been working, and when I haven't been working I've been putting in long days working around the house or on my trucks. Squeeze 3 courses of college in there and any free time after that has been spent either hanging out with friends or playing COD4 to unwind. To say I've been busy might just be an understatement.

Any suggestions on aftermarket heatsinks? I was wondering if there was really much benefit, I remember when my bro built his, he bought some wicked huge looking thing to use.

 

[Hahnsb2]

The best air heasinks are the Tuniq Towers and the Thermalright Ultra 120 Extreme.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835109125
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835154001