POST YOUR SPECS

[Humanoid]

Bit at Amazon's current Gold Box deal, Hitachi 4TB external drive for $150. $20 shipping to Oz, but eh, I've had a couple boxes of scissors sitting in my cart for a few weeks so the combined shipping works out well.

 

Deal ends on the hour.

[Gorth]

Besides the previous stuff, the rather frequent blackouts in my suburb eventually became one too many (3 times in one week), so I added an UPS to the list.

 

It just happens too often and for hours at a time. While it only provides between 2 and 8 minutes running time, at least it's enough to do a proper shutdown.

 

Scheduled to arrive Monday.

[mkreku]

My current rig:

 

Windows 7 Professional 64-bit

Intel Core i7 920 (@3.2GHz)

6 GB 1600 MHz Corsair XMS3

Gigabyte X58A-UD7 motherboard (with USB3/SATA3 support)

Powercolor OC Radeon HD5870 1GB GDDR5

Corsair Force Series F120

Western Digital Caviar Black 2TB

 

Asus VH242H 24" (1920x1080)

 

Sometimes I love myself. Because I researched and overpaid a bunch of monies for that motherboard, I actually haven't felt the slightest need to upgrade anything for the past three years!

 

The only thing I've done was add another 6 GB of RAM (when RAM prices hit rock bottom) for 12 GB total.

 

I remember that NOTHING used USB3 when I bought this. Not even now does everything use it (my brand new phone, for example). SATA3 is now the standard, but back then even the SSD's were still using SATA2. I actually think my own SSD is using SATA2.. The only thing I planned for that didn't really take off is eSATA. I actually have 3 eSATA connections in the back and even one extra power connector on the outside. Never used any of them.

 

Can't believe I've had the same overclock for 3+ years (bought it on 2010-01-11) on the stock cooler without problems.

 

BTW, NEVER retire this thread, no matter how big it becomes. So much fun to read people's old post bragging about their 4GHz Pentium 4's.

[Bokishi]

The P4 rig in my very first post, I still use as a Linux box. It's very slow now and can barely handle regular Ubuntu, but it runs alright on a lighter graphical shell

[samm]

Haven't updated my system in here since my 2009 rig it seems. I'd upgraded the processor there to a Phenom II X6 1090T, but some time last year I upgraded some more:

 

Asus Crosshair V Formula Z

AMD FX 8350

16 GB 1866 "MHz" G.Skill

XFX Radeon HD7970 BE

Samsung 840 Pro 256 GB

Samsung 830 128 GB

 

 

The only HDDs I have in use currently are an external WD Green 1 TB, my old data drive, now used for backup purposes only, and 2x1TB Seagate Hybrids in Raid 1 in our file/media server (my former HTPC). The server's system drive is a Crucial C300 64GB, and a Micron C300 relative with 128GB in my laptop at work. Wouldn't want to miss the SSDs anymore.

 

Yeah, one of the few AMD users left (including Laptop, with an A6 3410 MX, and said server with an Athlon II X4 630). I hope team green stays alive, wouldn't want to miss customer choice in x86 / AMD64 processors. Especially seeing how it slowly convinced Intel to keep up in terms of APU / OpenCL development. Haswell will be the first time Chipzilla will deliver a usable GPU part (potentially - let's see how the drivers turn out).

Edited May 21, 2013 by samm

[LadyCrimson]

BTW, NEVER retire this thread, no matter how big it becomes. So much fun to read people's old post bragging about their 4GHz Pentium 4's.

I loved my P4! Once.

Unlike Bok, I don't still have mine. I kept it as a backup/storage for ages but it finally went to the dump's recycle center.

 

As to the disc drive stuff from a month or so ago ... I do a lot of 50GB chunks video recording and editing. Or at least, I do sometimes. It goes in flurries. SSD would not last long. If they were cheap for the space, that'd be fine. On the O/S drive ... eh, don't really care. I still don't use/load up the PC in a way that makes programs slow to load, including turning it on first thing in the morning. People mention their long loading times for cold-Firefox or the O/S but doesn't seem to happen to me. Saving 20-30 seconds on the bootup isn't really important enough to justify the price per space.

[samm]

Well to each his own To me, SSDs are the single most significant recent addition to mainstream computing.

It's not just boot time, it's everything that has anything to do with loading or storing data where the computer just feel substantially faster when using a good SSD. Sure, there are always cases where an SSD would not be ideal. But they are few, like long time storage, or on an algorithmic level, database storage engines that are optimized for handling hard disk drives' particularities that might do redundant and thus counter productive work in combination with SSDs. When handling huge chunks of data, the added speed and access time improvement would surely make themselves felt, too, but yes, they're still pretty small for the price.

 

Edited May 22, 2013 by samm

[Keyrock]

I was an AMD user back in the P4 days.  I still remember my Opteron 165, man that thing was a beast.  Overclocked from 1.8 to 2.9 GHz on stock cooling and ran like a champ for years laughing at whatever I threw at it.  That few year period where the Althon64s were beating the pants off the P4s was a glorious time for Team Green.  That seems like eons ago now.

[AwesomeOcelot]

As to the disc drive stuff from a month or so ago ... I do a lot of 50GB chunks video recording and editing. Or at least, I do sometimes. It goes in flurries. SSD would not last long.

That's not relevant, the size of the recordings doesn't matter, it only matters if you're writing on average more than 30GB a day. If you record 200GB of video in one day in a week, that's still less than 30GB a day, if that's irregular so you miss out 2 weeks every month, that's less than 15GB a day.

 

I still don't use/load up the PC in a way that makes programs slow to load, including turning it on first thing in the morning. People mention their long loading times for cold-Firefox or the O/S but doesn't seem to happen to me. Saving 20-30 seconds on the bootup isn't really important enough to justify the price per space.

Boot up is probably the biggest difference, but I use sleep/hibernate most of the time, so everything is still in RAM. I have 16GB of RAM, Windows 7 caches over 10GB of stuff I'm not even using, which is faster than a SSD. Most programs loaded in under 3 seconds with my Spinpoint F3 HDD. Firefox, LibreOffice, and GIMP don't take long to load when you've got nothing in them, it's the difference between 3 seconds and no seconds, but loading Firefox with 30+ tabs on a HDD and you'll know it. MSE quick virus scan takes over a minute on a HDD, and under 10 seconds with the cheapest SSD.

 

A big difference is when things are competing, so you have Windows services and your video editor both trying to read and write to a HDD at different parts of the drive, trying to load a program then can be really slow. I used a separate HDD for media storage to the OS, which gives a major performance boost, but when the HDD died I didn't need a 500GB HDD for the OS, the SSD was silent, much faster, and uses less power, it's a $64 upgrade that drastically reduces load times. After getting a sufficient amount of RAM, getting a SSD is probably the biggest value for money upgrade for performance you can get.

 

Having a SSD for the games you're currently playing would be well worth it. A lot of games take ages to load, they have a lot of data and most of it is only written once. Video editing would be way faster with a SSD, but the storage required would also be prohibitively expensive, capturing and encoding wouldn't be effected.

[LadyCrimson]

That's not relevant, the size of the recordings doesn't matter, it only matters if you're writing on average more than 30GB a day.

Ever use FRAPS? 8-10 minutes of 1080 game recording = 40-60GB. I hit that record button all the time. I don't always keep the resulting video (most of the time not) but the point is I hit that record key many many times during a single day's play session.

 

Look, I'm not trying to devalue that SSD may be great for other people (especially maybe laptops?), depending how they use their computer. All I've ever been saying is that it is NOT a worthwhile benefit to me ... not yet, at their price per GB point. My husband bought one for one of his work computers. He then replaced it because it wasn't as fast as he wanted and he thought it might be defective. The new one was better, but he's still not that impressed and hasn't gone out to replace all his work stations with SSD. When I ask him, he basically says "the way you use computers, there's not much benefit." So I'm going with what he says + my impressions from what I've read.

 

As to them making things go faster if I'm processing a video and trying to do something else, my solution has always been - even before SSD's - to have a 2nd computer (usually the old one leftover from after I build a new main rig) that I can surf the 'net with, play videos on, play some games on, etc. while the main PC is busy doing whatever. eg, no benefit ... to me.

 

Edit: P.S. btw, game-wise, I have 120GB of games-only installed. Maybe more. 60-80GB SSD would not do, and if I install them on a non-SSD instead, what's the point. Unless the SSD still is game-beneficial in some way even if the games aren't installed there. Not sure on that point.

[AwesomeOcelot]

I can't say whether something will benefit someone, if they don't care about speed, have endless patience then loading things faster will be of no benefit to them. I can't say whether drastically improving loading times is worth $64 to anyone, perhaps they only ever boot up their PC in 1 minute, load their browser with 1 tab in 10 seconds, and then shut down. I don't care whether people get a SSD or not, but whoever you are, if you get a $64 60GB SSD and install your OS and most of your software (apart from games) things will load much faster, at least twice as fast and sometimes many times faster. $ per GB is irrelevant if all you ever do with the SSD is install the OS that's 20GB or more smaller than the capacity of the drive.

 

If you have 120GB of games and get a 120GB SSD for $90 those games will load many times faster. You don't have to install all your games on one drive, even Steam now has the option to install games on different drives.

 

I also use multiple computers, but I tend to shove batch processing work off to the older computer. I'd rather not wait for it to boot and switch over to it if I don't have to, especially for little things I'd like to do immediately.

 

On write endurance, some people are writing to SSDs constantly. The Crucial M4 64GB, running for 238 days at 5874GB writes a day, no reallocated sectors, P/E = 23748 (drive rated at 3000, other drives with same chips rated 5000). A Crucial M4 128GB would have double the write endurance. They're MLC drives, TLC drives like the Samsung 840 (not Pro version) have a 3rd of the rated life.

[LadyCrimson]

I can't say whether something will benefit someone, if they don't care about speed, have endless patience then loading things faster will be of no benefit to them.

I'm not sure I like the implication that just because I don't yet think SSD's are quite worth it (they may be, even for me, someday), it means I care nothing about speed/my time or whatever it is you're implying. You seem kinda defensive about someone not thinking they're worth it yet, when, again, I was never trying to discourage anyone else from considering SSD's, only stating why I don't use them yet myself.

 

I tried to state that nothing *I* do on the PC feels slow at all. The O/S (which I boot up only once a day, leaving the PC on until I go to bed) loads up in 90 seconds or less and no, I'm not so impatient that I must have it load in 25 seconds instead. I rarely have more than 8 tabs or so open at once in a browser and so far, even with 12 tabs open, speed issues there have been non existent. 1.5 seconds instead of 3 seconds or something is negligible to me. I do get that browser complaint tho, since hubby talks about it a lot (he'll have dozens and dozens open at a time).  If I think I'm going to do some multiple projects/multi-tasking I turn on both PC's at the same time and keep them on all day and use a switchbox for the KB/mouse which equals pressing one key and bam I'm on the other desktop, press it again and bam, I'm back to the other one.

 

There are plenty of intensive tasks that would definitely be speedier, I have never disagreed with that. But I don't do large paid-work/deadline projects, work on many multiple projects at once (most of the time), or anything of that sort. I don't care if PaintShopPro opens in 3 seconds. Offline games I personally play load plenty fast (so fast I don't have time to read all those hint pages) already. And so on. If video processing is going to take 30 minutes, or an hour, or two hours, I go clean the tub or catch up on a TV show, I don't sit and stare at the computer screen.

 

Except for a defective HDD recently, all my HDD's have lasted for years with constant abuse. eg, they're still going 4-5 years later when I want to build an entirely new PC and sometimes I toss them into the 2nd computer where they keep on going still.

And to some of us, price per GB *DOES* matter. I don't expect SSD's to be as cheap as HDD, but I do want them to be cheaper than they are. I like getting my dollar's worth, and all I can say is obviously what is worth that dollar for me is different than it is for you. I even do things like consider dollar per hour in terms of whether I think buying a game is worthwhile.

[AwesomeOcelot]

I wasn't really making a point about you, I was making a point about not being able to judge what something is worth to someone else, I'm not really interested in that. I don't have an issue with what's worth it to you. I was only interested in the facts. 4 facts:

 

SSD don't care about fragmentation.

 

MLC SSD drives can last years even with extreme writing that no one hear would ever do.

 

What ever you load will load a lot faster on a SSD, especially if it involves seek time or random access.

 

Price per GB doesn't matter if all you do is put a OS on it. What you're paying for is price per MB per second read speeds, which on a SSD are way better than HDD, and random access or seek time there's an even greater disparity. If you're never going to use the additional space, it's worthless to you. I feel like this is the only point you actually disagree with me on. I don't really understand your point of view, it's like demanding a 3 litre bottle instead of a 2 litre bottle to carry 1 litre of water before the bottle is recycled, even though you're going to have to wait longer for the 3 litre bottle.

[LadyCrimson]

To me the speed increase isn't yet enough to be worth the extra cost. There's a point where the benefit isn't really necessary or practically all that useful (it's not likely to even save me an hour a day), and one is just going for the number crunching or emotional relief from impatience (and that's fine, if that's your desire). But to me, while a Porsche can go from 0-60 a lot faster than my Subaru Legacy, I don't find that ability worth any extra money, since it has little practical value. Therefore, price per speed or whatever is a useless number and all I'm interested in practical considerations like space, not having to have stacks of multiple discs, and so on.

[Keyrock]

I'm with LadyCrimson.  I definitely see the appeal of SSDs, but their price per GB is still way too high for me to even consider getting one.  Space is still far more valuable than speed for me.  Hopefully in 3 years or so, when I get my next system, the prices will drop far enough to allow me to go the SSD route.

[Humanoid]

I respect the decision to hold off on getting SSDs, but just pointing again that it's more accurate to think of it as not-a-storage-device. It's not an either-or proposition between an SSD and a spindle drive (unless you're on a notebook with no provision for a second drive or mSATA), but rather, something extra you have in addition to your traditional storage.

 

Effectively then, an SSD is a plug-in device used to speed up your PC, in the similar way a video card does. Start with a baseline of integrated graphics and sound and a spindle drive. Want better graphics? Buy a video card. Want better sound? Buy a sound card. Want better I/O responsiveness? Buy an SSD.

 

 

Yes, capacity is convenience, but one that can be stepped around in a practical way. If you can live with a fixed limit on the number of games you can install on the SSD, great. If not, you can do some trickery with junction points to make use of the limited space: install all your games to your spindle drive, then copy the folders of the games you're currently playing to the SSD. Don't remove the folders from the spindle drive, just rename them, and create a junction point on the spindle drive pointing to the new folder on the SSD. When done with that game, you can just delete the folder on the SSD, delete the junction, and restore the name of the original folder.

[Keyrock]

I respect the decision to hold off on getting SSDs, but just pointing again that it's more accurate to think of it as not-a-storage-device. It's not an either-or proposition between an SSD and a spindle drive (unless you're on a notebook with no provision for a second drive or mSATA), but rather, something extra you have in addition to your traditional storage.

 

Effectively then, an SSD is a plug-in device used to speed up your PC, in the similar way a video card does. Start with a baseline of integrated graphics and sound and a spindle drive. Want better graphics? Buy a video card. Want better sound? Buy a sound card. Want better I/O responsiveness? Buy an SSD.

 

 

Yes, capacity is convenience, but one that can be stepped around in a practical way. If you can live with a fixed limit on the number of games you can install on the SSD, great. If not, you can do some trickery with junction points to make use of the limited space: install all your games to your spindle drive, then copy the folders of the games you're currently playing to the SSD. Don't remove the folders from the spindle drive, just rename them, and create a junction point on the spindle drive pointing to the new folder on the SSD. When done with that game, you can just delete the folder on the SSD, delete the junction, and restore the name of the original folder.

Bingo.

[Humanoid]

Heh, incidentally my decrepit old notebook falls into that category. But since it's used for nothing but Internet surfing, I went for an SSD, the much lauded Samsung 830. It's an old Core2Duo but ironically it's now snappier than my much newer i5 desktop, which has a relatively sluggish first-gen Indilinx SSD. Feels like a new machine, except when I load up a game on it, it immediately falls flat on its face in a forest of 3D artefacts (the video chip has completely failed for any sort of 3D load).

 

 

If I wasn't so lazy I'd swap the drives around, especially as the Samsung is twice the capacity of my desktop OS drive.

[AwesomeOcelot]

USB2 is good enough I find. When installing a SSD in a laptop, get an enclosure for around $20, now you have a portable 2.5" HDD of whatever capacity the laptop had.

[LadyCrimson]

I understand all that, and SSD at its price point in either of my current PC's as an upgrade wouldn't give me much return for dollar, just like how most of the time, upgrading my GPU with the newer version of GPU would be a waste of funds even if the newer card is faster.

 

I think the difference in way of thinking (regarding my preferences) is thus:

 

---if a computer is outdated enough that newly bought software I wish to run on that specific PC isn't running like I want it to or won't run at all, I build a new computer and delegate the old one into the "non-main rig" category, which = no longer bother to update it, period. And except for games, I don't buy new software very often. Hardly ever.

---I like having one large O/S/program software install drive and a couple of nothing-but-file-storage drives. I do not like doing all that junction, multiple O/S install/disc splitting, RAID configuration, etc. type of stuff that people do. I find the former much less confusing and easier to deal with/navigate, as well as less headache to troubleshoot. It's just how my simple brain works and it means I don't have to holler for my spouse and drive him nuts every time something bloops. As I get older, I want to fiddle with PC's less and less, so the less complex/the less stuff I have to remember about an install/configuration, the better. eg, I got old.

 

[Bokishi]

I do use a small intel ssd as a smart response cache for my os drive. It may not be the fastest most cutting edge solution right now, but it is snappy enough for my storage needs. My rig also doubles as a media server that is piping terabytes worth of HD movies to my big tv in the living room, as well as tablet and iphone, so I currently value space more than speed

[Pidesco]

ASUS P8H77-V LE

INTEL Core i5 3450 3.10GHz
GEIL 8GB DDR3 1600MHz

EVGA GeForce GTX 580 1.5Gb

ASUS Xonar D2X
Canton Movie 60CX Speakers
OCZ SSD Vertex Plus 120Gb
Seagate 1Tb 7200 RPM S-ATA2 32Mb
Samsung 19" 923NW
Gamepad XFX XGear Dual Reflex
Cyborg V.5 Rumble Pad

 

 

I replaced my mobo, processor and RAM almost a year ago and never updated here. The old components went into the wife's build.

[ManifestedISO]

Yeah, one of the few AMD users left 

 

 

We may be few, but our passion is great.

 

Tried some new vendors this time ... ASRock and MSI, in particular. Got a true quad-core Llano (A8-3850) right as Trinity launched, with the A75M chipset, HDMI and v3.0 of USB and SATA. Sniped 8GB of Corsair DDR3 1600 right at the bottom of the market, $40. The most exciting new part, is the SSD. Got the 830 128GB for $80 right when the 840 series launched. It is fast ... fast, fast, fast: Win7 boot time is ~15 seconds. Skyrim is the only game I put on the SSD ... all the others are stored on a 10k rpm Velociraptor. Load/save times are measured in 0-3 seconds, even with HD texture packs. Graphics are a Pitcairn, MSI Twin Frozr 7850 2GB. Tomb Raider and Lara Croft's TressFX hair rendering completely changed my priorities in life.  Oh, and Viewsonic. I took PC Gamer's advice and went for the 23" LED IPS panel ... it really is beautiful. And a very reasonable $160. For 1080p gaming, this system is ultra-satisfying. The whole reason I built it, was to get ready for Project Eternity. Woot!  

[Humanoid]

Just built a mini-ITX box now after a few months of delaying. The need for it hasn't actually materialised yet, so it's going to my sister.

 

Antec ISK300-150

AMD A10-6800K

ASRock FM2A75M-ITX

8GB G.Skill Ripjaws X DDR3-2133

Samsung 120GB 840 SSD

TP-Link Mini Wireless N USB wi-fi adapter

 

Might throw in an old 500GB 2.5" hard drive I have lying around.

[Humanoid]

Resurrected my old box so I could give it away.

 

Antec P180B

Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 @ 2.4GHz w/ Scythe Ninja cooler

Gigabyte 965P-DS3

4GB OCZ Gold DDR2

Gigabyte 1GB HD5850 w/ Arctic Cooling Accelero Twin Turbo II cooler

60GB Corsair Force Series 3 SSD

Sound Blaster Audigy

Sony DVD-ROM drive (yes, ROM)

3.5" Floppy disk drive!

Zalman 460W PSU

 

System is a bit of an odd duck. The video card isn't original of course, but a trickle-down from my current system which was built with it originally. The SSD was an RMA return which had been sitting in a drawer for over a year. The system has no spindle drive. I had to search boxes high and low for a ribbon IDE cable for the DVD drive. And I have no idea whether the Audigy is even worth installing these days under Win7. The GPU cooler was the only part I needed to buy to finish this system.

 

The sad thing I guess is that this system is a fair bit quieter than my current one (which is, in absolute terms, still pretty darn quiet). Partly down to the fan controller it has, so the CPU and case fans are mostly running at 7V instead of 12V. I've been too lazy to do this kind of thing with my later systems, and they probably need the extra airflow anyway.