02-09-2007, 11:48 AM
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Vice Admiral
  
Join Date: Aug 2001
Location: floating inside of a giant egg made of stars
Posts: 4,861
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New rig.
Well here it is, new work machine built by yours truly.
 On the outside:
Probably will be adding a second (identical) monitor in the near future.  And the innards (annotated). Running WinXP x64 solely to provide support for >4GB memory. I went with the 2x2GB sticks so that I can add another pair at a later date for 8GB total. I have to tie up the cables a bit, they're currently a mess. There's a big wad stuffed into the space below the optical drive that is seriously hampering air flow from the top front case fan. The modular cabling on this PS is a beautiful thing though, it would be much worse without it. I admit that this machine is a little excessive for what I need. But not by as much as you may think. It will be used primarily for image analysis, pattern recognition stuff. I'll throw several hundred images, 1MB each, into the program and ask it to find patterns. That takes a lot (A LOT) of resources, especially memory. And the current project is still in the early stages- later on we'll have thousands of images. My old Dell (1GB memory, 3.2GHz P4 w/HT) choked at about the 400 image mark. So this one should do quite a bit better. I've never had a machine that was worth running benchmarks on, but now I do and I'd like to see how this thing stacks up. What should I run, suggestions anyone? I don't know squat about benchmarks.
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There is all the difference in the world between treating people equally and attempting to make them equal. - Friedrich Hayek |
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02-09-2007, 12:29 PM
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#3 | ||
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Vice Admiral
Join Date: Aug 2001
Location: floating inside of a giant egg made of stars
Posts: 4,861
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Quote:
Quote:
System specs for anyone who can't see the pics (sorry!):
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02-09-2007, 12:44 PM
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#4 |
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Lieutenant
 Join Date: Dec 2003
Location: Wisconsin
Posts: 223
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Just curious where you bought the parts? Various vendors or a preferred? Also If you don't mind what did the tab come to? I'm in the process of figuring the parts I want for mine and want to get started ordering next week. I may stick with a Core 2 duo, but the Quad would be kind of a fun extra!
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02-09-2007, 12:55 PM
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#5 |
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Picture of the Day Guru
Join Date: Oct 2002
Location: Sunny San Diego
Posts: 8,756
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The two best places for parts are www.newegg.com and www.zipzoomfly.com but watch the ads for deals on hard drives. A good place to check on that is http://www.salescircular.com/ca/computer/hdiskp.shtml
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I add new pictures to my photo gallery pretty regularly. You can see them here if you are interested: http://www.pbase.com/jeffryz 
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02-09-2007, 01:19 PM
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#6 |
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Secretary of the Navy
 
Join Date: Feb 2001
Location: Chillin' N Da 'Hood
Posts: 34,997
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I've even started buying some parts at TigerDirect.com (as well as NewEgg and ZipZoomFly....)
They must have a distribution center in the Midwest, because I can order a part there today before 12:00 noon and it's on my doorstop tomorrow. 
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 DarkFury's Pimptopia - Don't Hate the Playa, Hate the Game! Home of the Original OG Pimp (accept NO imitations) 
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02-09-2007, 01:20 PM
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#7 | |
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Vice Admiral
Join Date: Aug 2001
Location: floating inside of a giant egg made of stars
Posts: 4,861
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Everything for this came from NewEgg, the total was ~$3600. I really really like the motherboard, highly recommend it. It has a lot of nice extras- RAID support, WiFi, a remote control for playing media and such, great support for OCing (though I'm not doing any OCing on this). |
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02-09-2007, 01:50 PM
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#8 |
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Chief of Naval Operations
 
Join Date: Aug 2002
Location: San Diego
Posts: 10,086
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Shouldn't you be in raid 0 not 1. Any reason why you're running a big graphic card on a work machine.
Last edited by InfiniteNothing : 02-09-2007 at 01:55 PM. |
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02-09-2007, 02:08 PM
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#9 | ||
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Vice Admiral
Join Date: Aug 2001
Location: floating inside of a giant egg made of stars
Posts: 4,861
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Quote:
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02-09-2007, 02:21 PM
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#10 | ||
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Chief of Naval Operations
Join Date: Aug 2002
Location: San Diego
Posts: 10,086
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Quote:
Have you considered raid 5 (3 or 4 drives) and two hard drive partitions  Quote:
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02-09-2007, 03:34 PM
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#11 | |
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Vice Admiral
Join Date: Aug 2001
Location: floating inside of a giant egg made of stars
Posts: 4,861
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Quote:
Ugh, don't get me started. (oops, too late...) I originally got the 4 drives so I could do RAID 10 (1+0), which this mobo supposedly does support. Turns out that the 6 SATA ports on the board are controlled by 3 different RAID controllers and in order to do an array with 4 or more drives, the controllers have to be cross-configured. I messed around with it for several hours and could not get it to work.  I did have a RAID 5 with three drives up and running, OS installed, etc, then one time on startup it wouldn't recognize one of the drives anymore. I dunno why. So I went with a simple RAID 1 and that seems to be working long-term. I had never dealt with RAID before and was looking at using this as a learning experience. Still might pick up a controller card and do the RAID 10, but honestly I'm fed up with it at this point. That'll be a rainy day project for sometime in the future.Last edited by Napoleon54 : 02-09-2007 at 03:37 PM. |
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02-09-2007, 05:15 PM
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#12 | |
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Fleet Admiral
Join Date: Mar 2000
Location: Huntington Beach, CA, currently in Korea
Posts: 7,632
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I like the setup, and I figure if you have an external drive you should be fine, no? Are periodic backups to an optical drive a feasible answer or are you talking large file sizes?
As it is, I see that I feel something I haven't really felt since the end of high school, maybe beginning of college. Hardware envy.
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02-09-2007, 05:51 PM
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#13 | |
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Vice Admiral
Join Date: Aug 2001
Location: floating inside of a giant egg made of stars
Posts: 4,861
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I have been backing up my files to DVD up to this point, but it's a total of 10GB so far and that option is becoming impractical. So yeah, I'm looking at external drives now. |
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02-09-2007, 08:13 PM
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Admiral
Join Date: Jan 2001
Location: NYC
Posts: 6,302
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Id suggest a nice portable laptop drive in an enclosure. It'll run off of USB and you wont have to mess with power cords. (Speaking of which, Ill get that drive to you soon)
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Am I alone here? Is that it? Am I the only one who sees. Maybe we can learn to be just like him. Wear a little uniform. Yes, sir. No, sir. Thank you, sir. |
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02-09-2007, 09:47 PM
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#15 |
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Chief of Naval Operations
Join Date: Aug 2002
Location: San Diego
Posts: 10,086
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Me too. It's much more convenient than optical media.
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Linear Mode
