The 2012 Post your PC's and Workstations Thread

[Grendel]

2011 thread here

Main rig:

ASUS Maximus Formula SE (X38), C2D Q9650, 4x2GB DDR2 PC6400
EVGA GTX280 FTW
3x Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 500G, RAID5
Intel 530 SSD 120G
LG WH10LS30 (BD burner)
Sound Blaster X-Fi Elite Pro
Seasonic X650
Koolance/DD Cooling
Lian-Li PC-8FIR
Deck Legend Fire KB
Logitech G9, G13
Dell U2711
W7U64



Folding comp:

ASUS P5W DH Del (975X), C2D Q6600 @3GHz w/ Arctic Freezer 7, 2x1GB DDR2 PC6400
EVGA GTX260/216
Samsung 830 64GB 3x Hitachi Deskstar 7K80, RAID5
Sony DVR
Sound Blaster X-Fi Fatal1ty
PC Power & Cooling Silencer 610 EPS12V
Antec 900
WXP32

Server:

Shuttle SG41J1, C2D E6850, 2x1GB DDR2 PC6400
ECS G210
Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 320G
LG GH22NS30
W7U64

[Krom]

http://krom.sploitz.com/temp/NewPC/
Specs:
Intel i7-2700k
8 GB Crucial Ballistix DDR3
Asus P8Z68-V Motherboard (Z68 chipset)
Gigabyte Geforce 460 OC
OCZ Modular 700w PSU
Intel 320 series 160 GB SSD (OS & Programs)
Seagate 7200 RPM HDDs: 500 GB (Games, OS images, virtual machines) + 750 GB (Downloads) + 1500 GB (Backups)
Lite-on Bluray burner
Arctic Freezer ACFZ13
Rosewill Challenger-U3 case

Parents computers (x2):
Intel i3-2100
Intel DH67CLB3 motherboard (H67 chipset)
4 GB Crucial Ballistix DDR3
(Intel on CPU video)
Antec EarthWatts 380w PSU
500 GB Western Digital HDD
Lite-on DVDRW
Rosewill Blackbone case

Old machine (currently connected to the 46" TV as a media player / server):
Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 2.4 GHz (overclocked to 3 GHz)
Abit AW9D-MAX (975x chipset)
8 GB Corsair DDR2 (4x2 GB)
XFX Geforce 8800 GT
Antec EarthWatts 380w PSU
320 GB Seagate HDD
Pioneer DVDRW
4 TB dynamic disk stripe (offsite backup of my brothers triple redundant media share)

Laptop (rarely used):
Asus AMD Athlon X2 1.8 GHz, 2 GB RAM, Windows XP, 320GB 7200 RPM HDD, Nvidia 7600 Go GPU.

In house network supports wireless N, but all computers are wired gigabit. Also feeds Netflix/bluray player & media streaming box.

[AceCombat]

The newest machine i just built last week:


Thermaltake Armor VA8000B Case

Asus SABERTOOTH Z77 Intel 1155 CPU

Intel Core i7 3770K w/ TB 2.0 currently pushed to a Turboboost 100x45 ratio when throttled

Corsair 8GB 4x 2GB CMX8GX3M4A1600C9 "Matched Set" DDR3 1600 on XMP 1.2 @ 9-9-9-24 Timings

eVGA 570 GTX HD 2.5GB GDDR5 PCIE 2.0

Western Digital Black 750GB SATA III 6Gb
Seagate 500GB SATA II 3Gb
Hitachi 160GB SATA II 3Gb

2x Asus DRW-24B1ST-a - 1.03 Firmware

PICS TO COME SOON!





Plays BF3 on Ultra @1920x1080x32@60HZ - 40-60 FPS

[Krom]

Not bad, but you should get rid of the HDDs, they will hold the system back. Pitch all three of them and get a SSD since they have dropped in price considerably this year, just get a single 2 TB mechanical drive for storage/games.

[Ryujin]

Wow, they sure have dropped. I currently have mirrored 10K RPM 150 GB WD Raptors. I wonder how much better these guys would work for me? I could use more space though so perhaps I should wait till one or both of mine bomb and the price continues to drop.

[AceCombat]

ya know what Krom, thats actually one of the more NICER things you have said to me!



LOL!!


back on topic, i know about the Mechanical drives, even on SATA III i cannot get my WEI Score above 5.9 for Drives and its only tallying the Primary SATA III Port 0 drive.


my next upgrade will probably be a SSD for OS and shuffle around everything on the WD Black 750

[Grendel]

Samsung 830 SSDs. Also check Amazon -- some are actually cheaper there.

[AceCombat]

ok, while we are on the discussion of SSD's

i have heard ( mostly from here ) that SSD's are best used as OS-Only drives? what confuses me is alot of people are putting there "OS" Based apps on the SSD.... does this hurt the drive or is it ok?


what im getting at is, arent SSD's not as reliable as a mechanical when in terms of lifespan when LOTS of data is being shuffled back and forth?

[Krom]

Ace, I calculated the endurance of my 160 GB SSD with my usage pattern (it has my OS and pretty much every non-game application running off it, totaling about 55 GB used which leaves 93 GB free) after a couple months of monitoring the average amount written to my drive would require roughly 300 years to reach the rated endurance of the flash memory. Endurance is a non issue in the consumer space. The reason to only use a SSD for the OS and regular productivity/browser/etc programs and not media/games is because first, media files/games take up a lot of space which is expensive on a SSD and second, neither of them particularly benefit from being on a SSD anyway (they have almost entirely sequential access patterns, which is where mechanical hard drives perform their best).

Ryujin, running hard drives in RAID1 (mirrored) is a worst case performance scenario (everything has to be written to both disks, and the slowest of the two will determine when it is done). The advantage the Raptors have over regular hard drives is a shorter access time due to the higher disk RPM, but to show an example of the performance difference between a SSD and a Raptor, well...



Both of these graphs represent the same test just reporting differently, since its a 4k test you can either report the raw data throughput in MB/sec, or how many 4KB IOPS (I/O Operations/Second) it performs. To note is the raptor drive in this test is the latest 1 TB model, which will be considerably faster than the 150 GB model. The SSD is over 21 times faster in this metric than even the latest and greatest raptor drive, and the SSD in the test isn't even a particularly fast one; there are newer and faster SSDs which can run this at up to 85,000 IOPS in random 4k (~350 MB/sec).

The place to use a hard drive is for things that require sequential accesses (like games and media): A good 7200 RPM consumer hard drive can easily manage 120 MB/sec in sequential reads or writes, which is hardly any worse than the low end SSDs (the Raptor 1 TB drive actually manages about 215 MB/sec sequential both read and write, its a pretty strong performer there). Sure you can get a high end SSD to push 500 MB/sec sequential, but that isn't as impressive a gain over a HDD when you consider the random numbers where the SSDs could easily be 350 times faster than a HDD.

[Ryujin]

Wow, those #'s are quite impressive - so long as they don't break down on you fast. You mentioned RAID1 being worse for performance but to me it seemed logical since I would rarely if ever have to worry about formatting my computer if my HDD dies on me and I don't have funds to do a higher level RAID. I suppose I could just use the one SSD and rely on backups but I feel warmer inside when I have mirroring AND backups.

[Krom]

Higher levels of RAID are often even slower for random access because more disks means more complications, they usually only give a boost to sequential speeds which are already generally good enough even on a single drive. There also seems to be a sort of law about hard drives: the more you have, the more likely one of them will fail. Buy 10 hard drives and use them in one household, and you will probably see one or two of them fail, usually within a few months. I've yet to see a case where a failure didn't happen once someone pulled together that many active disks. Statistically speaking the failure rate of hard drives is about 5%, which means if you buy 20 disks, you're almost guaranteed at least one of them will fail immediately.

Also RAID1 is not really a backup solution, and it doesn't provide protection against the most common modes of failure: accidental deletion/system corruption. The real purpose of the built in redundancy in RAID1/5/10 is to maximize the array up-time and availability, they don't really make that good of a backup solution.

If your data is that important, you should use an online cloud backup service (aka an offsite backup) and just regularly dump it to optical disks which have a fairly predictable shelf life. A monthly disk image is plenty for a OS/program backup or restoring functionality quickly after a disk crash, and doesn't come with any performance penalties.

[AceCombat]

okay so i can grab a OS Only SSD and throw everything else onto a mechanical?

[Krom]

Yup. For reference I have everything installed on my SSD with the exception of: Steam and all associated games (and any non-steam games, such as Descent/2/3), virtual box disk images, rotating monthly windows backup images (which obviously shouldn't be on the drive that is being backed up), and media collections.

So basically you put all your video on a mechanical hard drive, but you go ahead and install the video player on the SSD.

[Ryujin]

I liked the idea of RAID1 since I am always working on files throughout the day that I'd hate to lose. RAID1 offers me the ability to always remain online and not lose productivity (assuming I'm not the idiot who deleted the file). Yes, I could run daily backups but I'd lose a day of work running on only one HDD.

Anyway, thanks for the different perspective, Krom.

[AceCombat]

here we go..... pics:

[Grendel]

Main rig got updated:

ASUS Maximus Formula SE (X38), C2D Q9650, 4x2GB DDR2 PC6400
Cooling: Artic Freezer 7 v2, XigmaTek CN881, Enzotech CNB-S1L/MOS-C1
EVGA GTX 660 SC
3x Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 500G, RAID5
Intel 530 SSD 120G
LG WH10LS30 (BD burner)
Sound Blaster Z
Seasonic X650
Lian-Li PC-8FIR
XArmor USBL-S KB
Logitech G9, G13
Dell U2711
W7U64