I'm still on a single core Pentium 4... my upgrade path will be Core 2 Duo. I'm waiting until the holidays though because I'm still not happy with the price of the E6600.

I think Boxing day should hold some specials for me.

Posted by Particle Man I'm still on a single core Pentium 4... my upgrade path will be Core 2 Duo. I'm waiting until the holidays though because I'm still not happy with the price of the E6600. I think Boxing day should hold some specials for me.

The box I'm on right now is a P4. It's an OK CPU, and chipset. Runs a bit warm as all Intels used too...maybe I'll wait to see AMD's offerings!

Oh yah, as far as single core's go my CPU is pretty good. It's a P4 3.0E on an ASUS P4P800SE. From what I've read on overclockers.net, I've got an excellent overclocking combo. People said I should be able to do 3.4, maybe 3.6 on a good air cooler.

Even still though I'd like to do the Conroe build for piece of mind... you know, future proofing and all that jazz. Of course I'd also like to get in on PCI-E and SATA2.

Posted by Particle Man Oh yah, as far as single core's go my CPU is pretty good. It's a P4 3.0E on an ASUS P4P800SE. From what I've read on overclockers.net, I've got an excellent overclocking combo. People said I should be able to do 3.4, maybe 3.6 on a good air cooler. Even still though I'd like to do the Conroe build for piece of mind... you know, future proofing and all that jazz. Of course I'd also like to get in on PCI-E and SATA2.

I'm using a Abit IC7-MAX3 with a 3.41 GHz P4. SATA2 is nice, but SATA1 is OK, which is what this machine is running for HDs. I'm not going Vista! So I want to get my 64 XP Pro OS sometime, so a hardware upgrade will be needed. This is still a plenty fast machine, and 32 bit XP Pro beats 64 bit Vista any day!!!
Fuck MS and it's little DRM too!

/agree i highly doubt i will be upgrading to Vista...Sounds like it has a cool interface and all, but the DRM thing turns me off about it.

As for the core2 Duo question, does anyone know when quad core processors are going to be released? or a general idea of when they will be released?

Sadly, as time goes by we will most likely be forced to upgrade to Vista. Want DirectX 10? Upgrade to Vista. Want updates to IE7? Upgrade to Vista. Many games will in turn require Windows Vista to function, if DX10 requires Vista. Microsoft will ass fuck us again.

Posted by Particle Man Sadly, as time goes by we will most likely be forced to upgrade to Vista. Want DirectX 10? Upgrade to Vista. Want updates to IE7? Upgrade to Vista. Many games will in turn require Windows Vista to function, if DX10 requires Vista. Microsoft will ass fuck us again.

Happily it will be a long time until I need that, and many folks can do without it as well. Five years will help tone down MS's high brow BS. I would hold out on Vista as long as possible, plus you know it's gonna be full of bugs the first 4 years anyway.

MS can kiss my bits.

It's been 5 years and XP is *still* full of bugs

Posted by Particle Man It's been 5 years and XP is *still* full of bugs

Ba-ha-ha-ha! Thank god for 3rd party apps! If not for AVG, FF, and Zone Alarm, my OS would be crawling with bugs. I nailed a Trojan the other day with the free version of AVG. Fun times.

Posted by Kbasa As for the core2 Duo question, does anyone know when quad core processors are going to be released? or a general idea of when they will be released?

Q1 2007.

Check the review at AnandTech:

http://www.anandte...oc.aspx?i=2866&p=1

Too bad XP won't support DX10.... We need an open-source gamers OS. Seriously. I don't want to go vista. I really want an 8800GTX though (or 2 if that's easier)... and a Nvidia 680i SLI motherboard, and a Conroe, and a better PSU, and some better RAM. New case would be nice too.

Posted by Sinister Crayon Q1 2007.

in that case i would wait on upgrading...maybe even until summer 07....when prices on quads drop...its really up to you.

Posted by Kbasa in that case i would wait on upgrading...maybe even until summer 07....when prices on quads drop...its really up to you.

Heh, they'll need to drop faster than the 939 FX series did. These things start at $1K.

I'm probably going to hold off on upgrading everything at once, but I'm getting new stuff here and there. New keyboard and mouse should be here Monday or Tuesday, might get a new case without the cheapo plastic front. who knows. Speaking of the FX series, I might just grab a FX-57 if they drop a little more. Or just overclock my 3700+ to FX-57 speeds. Someone told me it was easy to do even on air.

You're better off overclocking. Just grab a good cooler and you should be able to do it easily.

Posted by Particle Man You're better off over clocking. Just grab a good cooler and you should be able to do it easily.

Yeah. I got it up to about 2511 MHz stable on stock HS. I probably could get it higher but I didn't really want to up the voltages without a decent heatsink. My 3dmark06 score broke 5000 though.

Now off to hunt for a heatsink.

EDIT:

Posted by Kbasa in that case i would wait on upgrading...maybe even until summer 07....when prices on quads drop...its really up to you.

I think I'm going to wait even longer for quad. The Kentsfield is just two Conroes bolted together. Kinda like the original Core Duo was just two P4s bolted together, while it was an improvement, it wasn't too much. Might be worth it to wait until they redesign the core to exploit the advantages of a quad core. Prices will probably drop by then.

Also, on the topic of overclocking, Some guy hit 5.7 GHz on a Conroe. Nearly a 100% overclock. http://www.xtremes...hread.php?t=120892

ergh, so my motherboard + ram suck at over-clocking, so I'm just going to leave it at default for now. Don't want to shell out too much money into an outdated system. But I do need to work on my RAID system, the on-board nVRAID officially sucks. I only get about 90-120 MB in benchmarks on 2x SATA II drives in RAID 1, and besides, every time I reload, I risk losing all of my data. Which I almost did last week. So what I want to do is run 2 RAID drives with OS and programs, and then two RAID 1 drives with all data. But what I can't decide is whether to make the OS/program raid a RAID 1 array or a RAID 0 array. I also can't decide whether to buy 2 PCI-e x1 RAID controllers, or just one for the OS and then run the other one on the nF4 controller. I plan on running the OS on two 80 GB drives and eventually upgrade to a pair of raptors for the speed rush, and the data will be stored on a pair of 400 GB drives in RAID 1. Currently I have the 400 GB pair and the 80 GB pair. (note: all of the 400 GB & the 80 GB drives are SATA II)

So basically, my questions are:

1. For the OS/programs RAID, should I use RAID 1 or RAID 0
2. Should I buy 2 PCI-E controllers, or just one and then run the data off of the on-board controller?
3. Do you guys have any good suggestions for any low-cost RAID 0/1 PCI-e x1 controllers that are fairly simple?
4. What is the best program for zeroing out a hard drive?

What mobo you got? Force 4 is good once you know how to set it up. What's the machine's main function?

Use the HD manufacturer's utility to z fill.

Posted by blackhawk What mobo you got? Force 4 is good once you know how to set it up. What's the machine's main function? Use the HD manufacturer's utility to z fill.

ABIT AN8-SLI (not the Fatal1ty version, mines got the shiny heatpipe on it.)

I have been running RAID 1 on it for the past 6 months or so with the nForce RAID drivers. I use it for gaming, web browsing, torrents, movies, and some video re-encoding. (I've started using my mac for somethings like photo/video/audio editing, word processing, and more. I swear by Final Cut Studio although it takes up a good chunk of my hard drive and all of my projects have to be stored on an external drive) But yeah, gaming is probably the most common use of it.

Mmmk, must go download WD drivers/cd then.

Posted by Sinister Crayon ABIT AN8-SLI (not the Fatal1ty version, mines got the shiny heatpipe on it.) I have been running RAID 1 on it for the past 6 months or so with the nForce RAID drivers. I use it for gaming, web browsing, torrents, movies, and some video re-encoding. (I've started using my mac for somethings like photo/video/audio editing, word processing, and more. I swear by Final Cut Studio although it takes up a good chunk of my hard drive and all of my projects have to be stored on an external drive) But yeah, gaming is probably the most common use of it. Mmmk, must go download WD drivers/cd then.

That's a nice mobo! I think Force4 kicks.

If you want you can use the morphing feature to turn that into a striped array! It works too. You have to have 30% or less HD space usage though.

You can also break your mirror by unplugging the one HD and save it for a rainy blue screen day. Simply zero fill the crashed OS HD and then reconnect the good half, and allow to rebuild. With yet a 3rd HD by using this technique + morphing, you can build a redundant 2-4 HD RAID1 A four HD RAID1 is a buzz saw, I've done it just as described on my ASUS a8n-sli premium.

Consider also using one drive for the pagefile and/or scratch disk. Use a SATA PCI-e to run off board backup HDs. You will get acceptable performance with just one HD, consider breaking the mirror you have as anything that corrupts the one disc, nails the other too. A mirroed OS servers little purpose.

Posted by blackhawk That's a nice mobo! I think Force4 kicks. If you want you can use the morphing feature to turn that into a striped array! It works too. You have to have 30% or less HD space usage though. You can also break your mirror by unplugging the one HD and save it for a rainy blue screen day. Simply zero fill the crashed OS HD and then reconnect the good half, and allow to rebuild. With yet a 3rd HD by using this technique + morphing, you can build a redundant 2-4 HD RAID1 A four HD RAID1 is a buzz saw, I've done it just as described on my ASUS a8n-sli premium. Consider also using one drive for the pagefile and/or scratch disk. Use a SATA PCI-e to run off board backup HDs. You will get acceptable performance with just one HD, consider breaking the mirror you have as anything that corrupts the one disc, nails the other too. A mirrored OS servers little purpose.

Heh, it's alright. Abit wasn't exactly to good with the nforce 4 chipset. I wish I had gone with the DFI board. Which I'll probably do with my next build considering they are smart enough to put the video cards starting in the top expansion slot.

The RAID feature on my board sucks, its either the bios or a sucky chip, but whatever is the problem, I can't seem to fix it, reverting to an older bios doesn't seem to help either. I'm probably going to go with a RAID 0 on the 80 GB drives. I'm just going to do 2x 400GB drives and 2x 80GB drives for now as I can't exactly justify going into savings for something I don't desperately need.

Now I just have to go find a PCI-e raid controller (any suggestions? I really only need 2 sata II ports on the inside. Needs to be capable of RAID 0 and 1) or two plus some better quality SATA 2 cables with clips.

I've got everything I can't replace backed up to a 250GB SATA 2 drive for now so I'm just going to zero-out all 4 Hard drives and then start setting things back up once I get my controllers.