For various reasons this will be my last system refresh for a while and my son was more badly in need of one than I was, so I embarked to update my PC and move the components from my system into his. As usual, Newegg.com had an undeatable combo of availability, pricing, and convenience, so I ordered my components from them on Monday and they were on my doorstep Tuesday.
I looked hard at the AMD Phenom II 940, but opted for the Intel i7 920 instead. The i7 is undeniably faster, but its greatest strength is in multi-tasking and threaded performance, which don't greatly benefit most games. I expect that to change over the next 2-3 years, and I'm likely to be using this system for 5 years or so. YMMV. This system should be capable of radical overclocks (3.6 to 4 Ghz from 2.66 Ghz, on average), though I don't foresee going that route immediately. My components will support it. The 940 is cheaper. You can get a great setup including 8 GB of fast DDR2, an excellent motherboard, and a very god CPU cooler, for ~$400. Hard to beat, value-wise. The a similar i7 setup costs about $250 more with only 6 GB of DDR3.
I spent into the wee hours last night struggling with Vista's idiotic issue with installing onto SATA RAID drives. The drivers for the chipset wouldn't load, so despite the fact that I went in forewarned, I struggled. Take this as a cautionary tale. Make sure you have drivers that will load into Vista install on a floppy of key drive before installing, and also unplug any other drives onto which you will NOT be installing the OS until after the OS install is complete. Finally, I got that working early this morning.
Then I ran into my next hurdle... random lock-ups. It seems that the DDR3 installation process on most X58 main boards is VERY finicky. After hours of frustrated installation attempts, I finally removed all but one of the three DDR3 modules I'm using, cleared the CMOS, and voila! Suddenly everything works great and the system blows my old Athlon 2 4800+ out of the water with only 2 GB of RAM. Supposedly I can add back in the other two modules, one at a time, and then I'll be ready for overclocking. Unfortunately, work intrudes and I'll post more on that tonight.
My new components:
Intel i7 920 2.66 Ghz CPU
MSI X58 Pro Main Board
3x 2GB Corsair 1600Mhz DDR3 modules
ATI HD4870 1GB DDR5 graphics accelerator
Noctua i7 CPU cooler
All of this goes into an Antec 900 case, which has enough airflow for any level of overclock I might attempt in the future.
Ariande Bard 20 • Nightfall Ranger 19
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3rd DIMM Installed
I received my replacement for the defective Corsair DDR3-1600 DIMM on Monday and installed it Tuesday. Everything worked flawlessly and I now of 6GB of tri-channel memory. No overclocking yet, but the system is rock solid stable and noticeably much faster than the 4800+ based system I upgraded from. Everything is more responsive and there's no waiting for windows based tasks. Neither DDO nor RoM are good benchmarks, but both are noticeably faster at absolute maximum 1920x1200 settings.
One annoyance... installing the 3rd DIMM forced me to activate my copy of Vista for the 2nd time in a week. It won't let me use on-line activation anymore, I have to use the phone service. Really stupid.
If anyone has experience with a Phenom II 940 or 920 based system, I'd love to hear a comparison. That's the way I almost went and it would have saved me at least $250.
What really surprised me is
What really surprised me is that I got all of the connections right the first time, which may have happened once before to me, but I don't recall it. True, the motherboard and cable labeling is much better than it used to be, and I didn't have to rewire any of the connectors, but it still felt good.
My understanding on even the fastest SSDs is that they offer little to no gain with current OSes. Windows 7 is supposed to have improved SSD compatibility and thus performance, but I've never had an SSD so I have no first hand knowledge. My venerable 74 GB Raptors still run my OS in RAID-0 and are about as fast as drives come.
Bad Memory Module
One of the three DDR3 modules turned out to be bad. About 7 hours of work to get to that conclusion. Fortunately, Newegg will credit me for the return. With only two modules all my "Windows Experience" scores are maxed. And it's quieter than my old system. Nice!
Nice!
Great new system! I don't think I have ever built a computer that worked the way I expected it to on the first try. Something like your memory issue and vista issues always goes seems to happen to me too. I never had any luck running my OS on a RAID; I have always opted to stick the OS on its own drive and used the RAID for everything else. My brother is actually in the midst of a rebuild too; I think he actually went for one of the solid state drives for his OS drive which I am curious about; he expects about a 15% performance boost for the OS. Who knows how that will translate to game performance though. Anyway, congrats on the new system!
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