New Computer, What Should I Get?

[ajs15822]

I'm also shocked on how quiet the thing is. Nearly all of the fans are running at 20%; CPU, RAM and Graphics card. Even during Far Cry 2 it didn't seem spin to go faster. It was worrying me as it reached 60 degrees. But since my old 7900GT used to be like that on idle, I guess it's the usual temperature.

It doesn't make sense; the computer is at least eight times as fast - with more fans to cool everything, but it's much much quieter.

I agree! I have about six 75mm fans running in my case (excluding the CPU fan and the GPU fan) and this baby simply purrs (I slept next to it with no problems). After playing Far Cry 2 for about an hour, I would've expected the components to get pretty hot (given that I was running @ Ultra High w/ 8x AA)-- but the CPU temp had only raised about 10 degrees and was back at normal temp within several minutes.

I think why the fans are unusually quiet is a factor of several things: larger blade speed (75mm), slower base RPM, and throttled control (increase RPM based on load). I do notice that under heavier stress conditions, the fans become a bit more noticeable-- but not by much.

Oh. Apparently I can surf the internet via the BIOS now. It even has some sort of Firefox browser in there; I'm guessing it's a very small version of Linux. I turned it off due to Windows being very quick at boot up. But since when did that become a standard feature? I know I've been out of the loop, but wow.

Oh cool-- I read about that and thought it was pretty nifty (my mobo doesn't have it), but yeah, since today's boot-up times are so quick, it seems a little unnecessary. (Though, such a feature sounds awesome for a minimalistic, pure-internet machine! Wouldn't require anything but a mobo, integrated graphics, and a case with PSU.)

[betajaen]

I think why the fans are unusually quiet is a factor of several things: larger blade speed (75mm), slower base RPM, and throttled control (increase RPM based on load). I do notice that under heavier stress conditions, the fans become a bit more noticeable-- but not by much.

I have eight fans in the computer. The loudest seem to be the three that fit over the memory, but the BIOS controls them so they are barely audible now. The CPU fan is spinning at 800 RPM!, but has a HUGE heat sink on it. Surrounded by two 120 mm fans taking air in and out. I bought a fan controller so I could tone down the noise of the big fans, but fiddling with it - it hasn't made any difference!

I don't think I could sleep with it on though, the harddrive is clearly the noisest part of the computer now. I am considering moving it to the other side of the room, and use an extra long DVI and USB cable for the monitor, keyboard and mouse, otherwise I could always upgrade my Seinhesser headphones to noise cancelling ones and giving the added bonus of drowning out the family and pets.

Oh cool-- I read about that and thought it was pretty nifty (my mobo doesn't have it), but yeah, since today's boot-up times are so quick, it seems a little unnecessary.

Thing is it's hardly a new feature. The Amiga had it. Half the operating system was in the ROM, the other half was on a floppy disk - closest I could describe it is, the GUI system, mouse pointer, plug and play code where in the rom. Workbench (like explorer) with all the programs was on disk. You could even boot from the RAM into a console.

Perhaps Microsoft could take some history lessons and work with BIOS manufacturers to include large parts of the operating system into the BIOS. However with the speeds of SSD these days, there isn't much point.

[Kojack]

Absolutely! I remember someone posting an addon to allow multi-core compiling. Let's hope it works in Express.

MPCL
No idea if it works in express, but it has vs2005 and vs2008 versions and it runs in xp and vista64 (and it's free of course).
I'm now a little mixed on it's use though. It works great for projects with lots of cpp files, like ogremain. But it works poorly (compared to normal visual studio) for lots of projects with only 1 cpp (like all of the ogre demos).
There's 2 ways to go with parallel compiling: one cpp per core or one project per core. MPCL does the former, Visual Studio on it's own does the latter (VS2008 can do both, but the user interface doesn't expose the flag for one cpp per core, you have to hand edit the project file's xml). Normally visual studio will sit there for ages with ogremain (a dependency of everything, so it has to be built first) compiling on a single core. Once finished, it can start parallel compiling all the plugins and demos. But with MPCL it flew through ogremain by doing 8 cpps at a time (hyperthreading), did the render system plugins pretty fast, then got bogged down doing one demo at a time, each with only 1 or 2 cpps do most of the cpu was wasted. The best performance I got was by turning mpcl on and off, depending on what I was building. If you are building one project and it's got lots of files, it kicks ass.

Thing is it's hardly a new feature. The Amiga had it. Half the operating system was in the ROM, the other half was on a floppy disk

Actually, the amiga is a bad example of it, compared to other early computers. C64, trs80's all those early systems had the whole os and usually a programming language built into rom, just hit the power switch and wait a second or 2. The amiga had the main kernel stuff and gui built in (exec, intuition, etc), but you can't turn on an amiga and boot into an os. The desktop environment or command line were external. All an amiga without a boot disk or hard drive could do was show a boot screen and wait.

I've got the asus motherboard with the mini os too. It actually seems pretty useful. Windows may be booting fast for you now, but it always gets slower over time. This mini os will always be the same speed. Great for a last minute check of something (address, map, order number, whatever) before running for a train.

Farcry 2 is a damn impressive engine. It ran great on my old pc.

[betajaen]

Absolutely! I remember someone posting an addon to allow multi-core compiling. Let's hope it works in Express.

MPCL
No idea if it works in express, but it has vs2005 and vs2008 versions and it runs in xp and vista64 (and it's free of course).

Thanks for that. I couldn't remember the name of it. I'll try and install it later when I install Visual Studio.

Thing is it's hardly a new feature. The Amiga had it. Half the operating system was in the ROM, the other half was on a floppy disk

Actually, the amiga is a bad example of it, compared to other early computers. C64, trs80's all those early systems had the whole os and usually a programming language built into rom, just hit the power switch and wait a second or 2. The amiga had the main kernel stuff and gui built in (exec, intuition, etc), but you can't turn on an amiga and boot into an os. The desktop environment or command line were external. All an amiga without a boot disk or hard drive could do was show a boot screen and wait.

Ah yes, I forgot about those , The newer Workbench 2.0+ models could boot into a CLI if you held down the right mouse button, and told it to boot without a startup-sequence, I'm pretty sure of it.

There is also the "RAD" drive. Which to our non-Amigan friends, is a RAM drive that can survive a soft-reset (or a power-off to about 5-10 seconds). Since when you turn of the computer, the contents of the memory doesn't go straight away; It sort of fades out. Which is why I've seen exploits lately of booting a computer into windows, turning the computer reset, and quickly running a memory dumping program to get the passwords of the OS.

In the Amiga's case; the RAD drive, was a RAM drive. A resizable disk that was stored in memory, since it could survive a soft-reset you could boot of it. The main Workbench was 880KB in size, just copy it over to the RAD drive and reset! So on an Amiga 1200, you had about 1 meg and a bit to play around. Assuming to didn't buy any more memory.

I've got the asus motherboard with the mini os too. It actually seems pretty useful. Windows may be booting fast for you now, but it always gets slower over time. This mini os will always be the same speed. Great for a last minute check of something (address, map, order number, whatever) before running for a train.

One thing that worries me, is can it access the harddrives? Because if so, that's a big security hole in my books. Sure you can boot from a USB or CD-ROM, but that leaves physical evidence. Anyway; I've turned it off for now, I don't have much use for it, and the timeout for booting into the main OS was way to long.

Farcry 2 is a damn impressive engine. It ran great on my old pc.

Indeed, and I'm going to play it now!

[nikki]

You guys are making me jealous! I won't be getting the new computer until March 30th, I decided. Its year 10 now in school and we're going to have the 'big final exams that are all-important' thing. Don't want to get very distracted from around next week (I'm already well prepared though ). I'll probably just get a new monitor to replace this one.

ps. Just noticed, phpBB3 seems to insert emoticons at the right place (wherever your cursor is) when you click 'em. In the old version, it just put it at the end.

[nikki]

Finally. I'm done with the exams, time to buy the new computer!

I found this at good price at the local store. I decoded to settle get the 9600 GT, because I don't think any games require anything higher than that as of now. If I do need something better later, I can get it, it'll be a lot cheaper than it is now. Also, the motherboard allows SLI fun.

Config: CPU - Intel Quad Core 2.8 GHZ, Motherboard - ASUS NF790i SLI, RAM - Corsair 4GB DDR3 (with cooler), Graphics card - Nvidia GeForce 9600 GT 1GB DDR3, HDD - 160GB, 1TB SATA.

I'm still wondering about i7 though.