Build Thread

[AwesomeOcelot]

Anyone else with a tech chubby for this WD dual drive ... a distinct 120GB SSD inside the same 2.5" case as a 1TB pair of mechanical disks. It's not a hybrid, the OS recognizes two different drives in one, on one SATA III port. $299 MSRP. Sounds perfect for that low-bloat Linux Steam Machine I'm investigating.

I really like the concept but the performance and price aren't great. I'd be more interested in it for a laptop SSD+HDD without having to remove the ODD, but it would also be perfect for a tiny Micro ITX build.

[Humanoid]

I reckon these days for any remotely mobile device, I'd not just prefer SSDs, but I'd actively refuse to use spindle drives at all. Indeed I'd leave the 2.5" bay blank and just run off the mSATA/M.2 drive in such a scenario. For various reasons of noise, weight, reliability/ruggedness. Heck, the machine I'm using now only has an eMMC system drive plus a microSD card for extra storage.

 

Those massive Alienware-style desktop replacement notebooks might be exempt I guess, but then such devices would have enough upgradability to not require the combo drive.

[Orogun01]

New computer, new problems. Windows 8.1 problems, I don't think anyone here knows how to get it to recognize a Portable Hard Drive?

 

Edit: Hooray! I fixed it, now to install all my programs.

Edited December 2, 2013 by Orogun01

[Gorgon]

Still on win7. Any reason to upgrade ?

[ShadySands]

Maybe if you have a touchscreen but otherwise I wouldn't bother

[Orogun01]

Still on win7. Any reason to upgrade ?

Don't, my new rig stuck me with windows 8.1 and i'm not liking it one bit. Definitely for touchscreen.

[Humanoid]

Just bought a family pack of Win 7 (three copies), half to cover myself in future, plus Haswell i3 and board, a couple cases, coolers and PSUs. After the holidays I plan to do the following:

 

1) Rip out the i5-2400 and Asus H67 motherboard from my HTPC and stick it in a Bitfenix Prodigy M. This computer will have no particular purpose, but I wanted to pre-empt the inevitable failing of the first-gen, pre-recall motherboard, where all but two of its SATA ports will fail. Also because it doesn't have proper 23.976Hz video support. Besides the case it'll retain everything else including the system disk, PSU, stock cooler, etc, since it's probably just going to gather dust.

 

2) Install the Haswell machine in the HTPC, also replacing the Corsair CX400 PSU with a quieter Seasonic G360 in the process. Other parts: i3-4130, Asus H87M-E motherboard, Gelid Slim Hero CPU cooler, 256GB Sandisk Ultra Plus SSD, Win 7 HP. Win8 is not a viable choice for a HTPC due to needing not only the Pro version but also to buy the Media Centre on top.

 

3) Got a Fractal Design Define R4 Black Pearl case for a future NAS, one Seasonic G360 PSU reserved for this, a Silverstone AR01 cooler and also a 128GB Sandisk Ultra Plus SSD. Will probably learn FreeNAS on the fly. The guts of the machine are on hold until I determine whether Kaveri will bring any benefits (power consumption, possibly) for the purpose, and also for the 5TB HDDs release next year so I can start the migration without getting tangled up shuffling data around.

 

 

Notes: Why the Sandisk Ultra Plus SSDs? Because they were dirt cheap, other than that they're thoroughly mediocre, but reliable performers. I'll be reusing some old RAM sitting on my shelf, four 2GB sticks of DDR3L, between the two new systems, though I think one stick is faulty - no matter, don't need dual channel memory for this type of system.

Edited December 13, 2013 by Humanoid

[Azure79]

My laptop hard drive died so I'm trying to replace it.

 

I don't need anything too fancy so I thought I'd buy two of these. 

 

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=22-236-562

 

Any advice would be appreciated. 

[Humanoid]

Two?

 

Not much to say other than the usual: if your space requirements/budget allows, go SSD.

[Azure79]

Yeah, I found there were two HDD slots in my laptop, so I figured I'd fill both of them. 

 

As for SSD, I like having more space than speed. I've never felt I waited too long for something to happen on my laptop.

[Humanoid]

If space is a factor then I wouldn't go for 500GB drives - far more sensible to get up to a 2TB drive (the largest available 2.5" drives currently) and an 120GB SSD or larger. (Or 2x2TB spindle drives for raw storage capacity I guess). Saves on noise and weight, and it ought to be more reliable as well. Heck I'd just run one large drive and leave the other bay empty rather than go two spindles. Hybrid drives are an option too I guess, but I personally dislike them - I like having full control over my storage instead of relying on software to guess at my usage.

 

Check if your laptop support mSATA and you might be able to get two spindle drives *and* an SSD, though that'd be somewhat overkill.

[Azure79]

Thanks for the tip. I'll look into doing that.

[Gorth]

Arghhh!....

 

Something in my PC is dying on me and I don't know what. I *think* it's temperature related, as it only seems to happen as part of a transition from start to working temperature. It will simply die on me and crash. Screen goes black, a second later sounds starts stuttering and then it reboots.

 

Worse, it will happen (if timing is right) during POST too, showing memory and cpu info, then die (so I'm fairly sure it's not Windows/Driver related as HDD's haven't even been detected at that time).

 

Not sure if there is anything in the crash dump files that is worth searching for or just toss out the innards and replace the core of the system. Damn thing is, it's 6-8 months too early for my budget for what I had in mind. I can then either go really cheap or just get a "good" system.

 

I figured a new motherboard, cpu and memory would be a good place to start as I got all the rest in fairly good shape (PSU, case, drives, gfx card etc.).

 

Anyone know if coolers for the previous 1156 (or however many pins) are compatible with the LGA2011 cpu size? Would love to keep my old water cooling block.

 

My shopping list looks like this at the moment:

 

CPU

RAM (x2 for 64gb)

Motherboard

 

I can get a custom fit water block for the motherboard from EK Waterblocks.

 

Any suggestions, ideas, improvements? Or am I wasting my money on soon to be obsolete tech?

[Humanoid]

LGA2011 mounting is different to LGA115x, yeah. Depending on the specific cooler, they can come with alternate mounting hardware, but it's not a sure thing. The other thing is that the current LGA2011 platform is pretty old. Intel in their typically irritating way, have a third generation of LGA2011 to be released, LGA2011-3. These sockets are NOT cross-compatible. If you look at the spec sheet for current models you'll see that a lot of functionality is still offloaded to third-party chips because the aging X79 platform does not support them, USB 3.0 support in particular is handled by an ASMedia controller here, which won't perform as well as native support.

 

So yeah, I'm not a fan of IB-E at all save for very niche purposes, it's a legacy product sold at a premium price. I understand that some people have requirements that might preclude the use of the mainstream-targetted products (i.e. Haswell), but now more than ever does the mainstream product carry a technical advantage over the lagging workstation solution, which is at a more or less literal dead end: IB-E is the final product in which both the socket and DDR3 will be relevant for the workstation.

Edited February 28, 2014 by Humanoid

[Gorth]

So, I'm better off suffering the regular crash for a while yet?

[Humanoid]

Not as such, but troubleshooting aside (I don't really have much to go on besides running Memtest and monitoring temperatures in the OS), but if you are set on a workstation build, and were planning to do it later when Haswell-E is released, then maybe a stopgap partial rebuild with cheap and cheerful mainstream parts would be a more effective and cost-efficient short-term solution. It's not common advice to skimp on parts, but it's one thing when you're spending nearly $2000 on the latest and the best, another to spend nearly $2000 on the questionable soon-to-be obsolete IB-E. So if you can't solve the crashing, then a $300 investment on a basic Z87+i5 combo, which you can later reuse or sell for a decent amount, might be best here.

[Gorth]

Point taken. I'll shop around a bit more

 

Did the memtest thing btw, came up clean.

 

Last resort before hitting the checkout button is, over the weekend, to take the pc completely apart and only stick the basic necessities back in. Leaving out various cards like soundblaster card, tv card, usb 3 expansion card, sata 3 expansion card etc.

 

If it still acts up, it's history. if it works, then I'll have to do the painful process of testing each individual piece.

 

Edit to add: One thing I didn't think about but need to try is to "unhook" it from the UPS and just plug it in the wall power outlet. Stranger things have happened.

[Bartimaeus]

If you think it's temperature related, have you opened up your case while it's on and checked to see if your CPU, GPU, and PSU coolers are working properly, (and/or checking temps like mentioned by Humanoid)? A non-functioning CPU fan would definitely cause something like that, for example.

 

If nothing there looks funky, I'd probably start swapping out components. I would definitely not throw everything away...lol

Edited February 28, 2014 by Bartimaeus

[Gorth]

It's all liquid cooled (motherboard, cpu and gfx card). Water temperature is constant 40 degrees (room temperature is about 32-35 here in summer). I tried running the bios diagnostic screen (hitting the del key during boot) and keep an eye on motherboard and cpu temperature. Nothing seems to get above 40 degrees when it croaks. You can almost set your watch after it, like x minutes after startup. After that point however, it becomes stable again and can run for 24 hours without a hitch.

[Humanoid]

Could be power related, although that's a hard one to test. The most basic check would be to take a multimeter and use the back of the ATX or molex connectors to check the voltages are in order.

[Spider]

With the description you give, my instincts are screaming power related.

 

So my guess would be either the PSU or the motherboard is failing. So I'd try and test the machine with a different PSU before I start replacing anything if possible.

[Gorth]

Since I had planned on using the retired parts anyway later this year (putting in my old antec p182 case together with half decent gfx card), I might as well try buying a "cheap" PSU (i.e. good enough to put in the future spare pc) and give it a shot. It's effectively not going to cost me something I wasn't going to spend anyway

[Spider]

I always plan on dioing that, reusing my spare parts. But I never do, so I just ending up having lots of spare parts lying around...

[Keyrock]

 

Broadwell?  That should be Q4 2014, and would indeed work out well time wise.  I may do the same, or I might splurge for Haswell-E, though the more I think about it, the less attractive Haswell-E becomes.

Yeah, I thought about Haswell-E, but I fiqured the 6-8 core broadwells would make more sense as hopefully future games will make better use of multiple cores with the new console generation. The cost will make me cry no doubt but I rather get things done right the first time, don't want to have to upgrade during the next 5 years after that.

 

Broadwell is supposed to have hexa core and octa core versions?  If true that makes me lean even further toward Broadwell.  The extra cores of Haswell-E (the higher up models will supposedly be octa core) was one of the things that attracted me to them as I plan to build the rig for more than just gaming (as of right now the vast majority of games don't even take full advantage of 4 cores, let alone more, though that may soon change).  With Haswell-E I'd wind up triple-overpaying:  Overpaying for the CPU itself (the -E CPUs are always quite overpriced).  Overpaying for the motherboard (no chance x-99 chipsets will be cheap).  And overpaying for DDR4 memory (it will no doubt be quite expensive at first, and for basically no performance gain besides a little lower power consumption).  I can take all the money I'll save by buying Broadwell (which will likely wind up having higher IPC anyway) and use it to buy a better video card or a second video card (for SLI/crossfire).

Edited March 11, 2014 by Keyrock

[Guest Slinky]

Heh, looks like I mixed Broadwell with Haswell-E, it was info about Haswell-E models they released, not Broadwell. Though I would imagine Broadwell will have 6-8 core models too.

 

Doesn't change my plans though, like you said upgrading to Haswell-E will be quite likely overpriced. Don't know will DDR4 prices drop from the orbit they are bound to jump on launch, but hopefully the worst is over by the time Broadwell comes out. And broadwell's 14 nm process appeals to my inner technology geek.

 

I just hope my current rig I build during the jurassic period holds up that long.