Why did I decide to replace my previous, only 2 year since purchase, parts. Well, thats because I was very inexperienced in computer shopping back in 2007. All those years I had an almost a decade old laptop that was barely cutting it and for which I had to constantly cary around an external keyboard, mouse, + had to hardwire powersupply to motherboard because power connector got all messed up and .... along with many many other things I was desparate for an upgrade. Too desperate, in fact. I wanted "new/current technology" so much I did not pay attention to the market trends. I really wanted to play around with 64 bit CPU to see what its like so I made sure that the computer I was purchasing explicitly said 64bit CPU. Little did I know that in 2007 nearly all CPUs were already released as 64bit. In other words, it was understood that the motherboard is 64bit so it is not necessery to put 64bit on the label while I thought that Core 2 brand was just another 32 bit. The old models, however, wanted to show off the fact that they are 64 bit to stand out amongst standard 32 bit. So I got one of those "show offs" from must be 2003: Pentium D. Few days later I realized my mistake and was not very happy. Plus motherboard was damaged, since moron who brought the computer in it in took it out of the protective casing, and it got throughn all over the bagage compartment in the plane so my hard drives came dead and motherboard would not take another memory stick so I was stuck working with 1GB all this time which was NOT easy. Overall, working and making videos for you was not a very enjoyable experience with IDE crashing due to lack of memory, video recorder slow because of overuse of swap space, old cpu and transmition rates and sometimes it would not turn on at all etc. etc. etc.
All in all I got fed up one day and made a decision to collect ~$1000 to get upgraded parts. And this time I did all the necessery research.
So I was debating whether I should have live twitted my experience of puting all the parts together or not. In the end, for some reason I did not do it so I am writing a summary of it here.
That XFX x58 is so beautiful and big. Could barely fit it into my old case. I decided to not spend an extra $100 for a new case and now am paying for it with limited space and horrible ventilation (or rather lack of thereof so i am using it with side open; but the view is good :D). Took me almost 2 hours to get it squished in there and get all cables organized so that they don't inside of the fans (thanks for a load of tie raps I had laying around).
If I thought getting the motherboard and powersupply in was tight, then when I took out the GeForce GTX 275......
I could barely squiz that behemoth in there. Had to move hard drives 5 levels up for it to come in plus more cable organization for the fan to do its job. As big and bulcky as it is, its a beauty and totally owns my old Geforce 6800 which I picked up from one of my clients since he didn't know what it was or what to do with it.
So after 3 hours of getting it all layed out in that small box, finally all looked good. Before I turned it on, I went to get a cup of tea in case it didnt work and i would have energy to deal with the shock. After my tea I am turning it on and ... of course its all dead. Funs spean but no signal to monitor. Checking and rechecking all connections, re-reading installation manuals - nothing. Looking up POST code 88 rendered nothing usefull. Everywhere I looked it just said "88 - reserved". Reserved what and for what???
Not trying to lose my head, I am thinking back to all my research and then I remembered about someone who also had a similar issue and he solved it by chaning RAM configuration (which depends on which slots you put the chips in). So i take out 2 chips and try to boot up with only 1. Nothing. I try to move the chip around into different slots and on one of them .... it all finally came on!!! So of course I was all WTH ??!! Went around to look for more documentation and found that ..... color code and position of the RAM slots described in the install guide do not match the real board even though its for the same model. I found this after reading through the manual on the CD which i fortunately was able to do with my other old laptop (which was donated to me a while ago). So how would anyone get this thing going if they do not already have a working computer where they can check the CD, since the paper booklet gives wrong configurations!!!!!
Eventually, after following configuration from the manual on the CD it started to work.
There was nothing special to my OS setup: I just did a clean install of Arch Linux and pointed it to my existing home partition.
To see in numbers just how much better of I am here are the stats of some benchmarks I did.
By all means this is not ment to be an official benchmarking to be used as a definitive reference. Just something to have as a numeric representation of the difference. I am also not a "performance freak". By that I mean that as much as having a high number is cool its all meaningless unless they positively influence my work. In this case the influence from high numbers was very positive. And as much as XFX x58 may have been judged as "hit and miss" or whatever by some pro benchmarkes, getting 95.61 instead of 95.62 does not bother me too much. Having more cores (8 virtual compared to 2 I had), contributes to overall system stability when an application does something resource intensive or is unstable. For example, I could render my videos while still have an overall responsive system as the task was distributed between 3 cores while others could still let me use the browser. Something I could not do before. Same goes for running multiple IDEs (netbeans and eclipse).
Having more memory (6Gb) comes with an obvious advantage: Eclipse does not crash every 20 mins saying it ran out of resources (oh how frustrating) and now I can comfortably run Eclipse, NetBeans, 2 browser instances (FF and chrome) with many tabs each, Kate (text editor on KDE), all necessery background servers/services, full desktop (as in KDE with all good features enabled), AND have a screen capture recording what I am doing. Having high memory bandwidth also came important since the applications listed above are very large so need to have lots data passing to and from CPU. Even though applications would not crash due to lack of resources, without the nice QuickPath with those high numbers there would still be lag as I switch from one window to the next. That said, it never used up more that 2.5Gb but 6 was the only configuration available if I wanted to have full triple channel enabled.
So no more resisting from throwing the mouse at the monitor, YEY!!
I also noticed an interesting change in Java stats. Somehow Java arithmetic on i7 is on par with CPU arithmetic (65 on Java and 67 GOPS directly on i7 CPU compared to 6.25 with Java and 12 GOPS directly on Pendium D). From what I know i7s are not Java enabled so I wonder whats up with such a high Java performance on them compared to Pentiums.
My old laptop laptop which was a jumping board but in the end gave me so much grief of not being able to do anything sensible on it won't even register on the graphs (too bad its dead so I cant benchmark it).
It was always a dream of mine to own an up to date Geforce. I was overjoyed when I got GeForce 6800 in 2007 (notice the year mismatch there?) but it just wasn't cutting it. As much as games actually opened on them, compared to stock laptop onboard VGA, graphics were still jumpy (although doom3 was perfect and for once I was not shooting at polygons of shapes I could not recognize). With new video performance, again, I don't need too much out of it as long as I get a stress free game experience (games suppose to relax you not frustrate you even more when you get shot because because of lag while aiming) and can play MassEffect 2 and DragonAge Origins.
Talking of hit and miss for XFX x58, it does have a flaw in the PCIe arrangement. The board supports 3 way SLI (not that I need it but something to note anyway). However, only two video cards can fit in there! 3 way SLI will only work for low end cards that only take up on bay slot. If you are getting a higher end card that takes up 2 slots, it covers the second PICe slot making it useless. So there is one feature of the board that can never be used :(
Overall, I am ultra hyped about my new setup and I've been using it happily ever after.
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