The Glade 4.0

Yay NTFS!

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

Do you really need to install steam games to seperate drives? Especially 2 TB drives? I've got A LOT of Steam games, and other games installed on my 1 TB drive and I still have plenty of space left. Of course, my 1 TB drive is dedicated to games only. I have a seperate System drive, and another drive for downloads/documents.

Also, DE, have you considered Windows Home Server for your wife's pictures and other important files? I built a WHS box a couple of years ago, out of some spare computer parts, and I threw a few 1 TB and 1.5 TB drives in it, which gives me 5 TB total for storage. I've got all of our pictures and important documents stored on it, along with all of our music files, and a ton of ripped DVD's and videos.

It works similar to a RAID, but without the hassle of having to have identical drives. This was the deal sealer for me. The fact that if one of my drives goes out, I can just buy any drive I want to replace it with. You just put whatever size/model drive you want in, and add it to the array. WHS automatically expands the array for you. And for every folder that has folder duplication turned on, it puts a copy of that folder on each separate physical drive. That way, say you have 4 drives, like I do, then I can lose 3 drives, and still have access to all the folders that were duplicated. Very, very handy. Plus, it backs up every computer on my network nightly, weekly, and monthly, and gives me complete control over which drives/folders are backed up, and how long to store each of the backups. If any of the backed up machines ever goes down, I just insert the WHS Restore disk in, boot up, pick the backup I want to recover from, and let it run.

Also, it's designed to run 'headless', so once I got it setup, I disconnected the monitor and keyboard, stuck it in a corner, and forget about it. It just does what it needs to do, with very little input from me. If I do need to change something, I remote login to it from my desktop, through the installed WHS Connector software, and make changes that way.

I was a little leary of it at first, being a Microsoft Product and all. I considered building my own server box with RAID and Linux, but I read a lot of good things about WHS, and ultimately decided to try it. I'm very glad I did. It has been very reliable, and easy to setup. And most importantly, It just works, without very much interaction from me. I just set it up, and forget about it.

You could easily build a WHS box out of spare parts. The only expense you'd really have is the drives and the cost of WHS itself. Definitely something to consider, especially if you have a lot of pictures and files that you don't want to lose.

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"I Live, I Love, I Slay, and I Am Content."
- Conan the Barbarian

Caleria, the reference to installing Steam games on multiple drives is with regard to installing game files on SSDs. Given their increased cost vs. platter-based drives, most people don't have more than hundred gigabytes or two of SSD space. If you're playing a few MMOs and FPSes, that can get gobbled up pretty quick these days.

That said, Home Server's a nice product. Or, rather, it's a useful featureset of a nice product, offered at an affordable price to a good market.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

I dunno, I'm not really into building my own stuff. It's a neat idea and all, but I don't know where I'd put it, either. I'd also have to buy those drives in addition to the computer I want, plus find a place to put it that has the potential for wife problems), connect it to the network at home, and so forth and I just don't see it happening.

I don't think dual drives will really be much of a hassle either; I'm getting a nice big case. She's never going to fill the whole thing up; she's got maybe 8-10GB worth of pictures so far, for the last 5 years or so. If I need for some reason to get an external hard drive or something down the road, I'll do that too. I've never had a hard drive go out before and I'm not that concerned about it, this is just a way of avoiding taking chances. I'm also told it speeds up access times since both hard drives can be working at once to load something so I figure combined with SmartResponse it should be nice and fast.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

I'm looking at about 240 GB of SSD space, part of which would be the system and things like web browsers if I get the AMD 1100T-based system.

With the 2600K, I'd probably buy myself a really big single SSD down the road for all my gaming needs, when I could afford it; something 300GB+ in size, or a pair of drives adding up to well over 300GB. The case I'm planning to get has oodles of bays but I don't want to eat them up with a ton of tiny drives either. It has hot-swappable drive bays too, though so I suppose it wouldn't be a huge issue.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

If you're going to have 240GB of SSD, don't bother with SRT. Load your games there, and maybe a couple commonly used applications, like web browsers and such. They'll load up faster than if you were relying on SRT to cache them, because SRT will end up booting things out of the cache when it fills up, and have to re-read them off the HDD if it did want to re-cache them.

If, on the other hand, SRT is fine for you, don't bother with the SSD, and save some more money. That's the purpose of SRT; to provide a cheap solution that provides some of the benefit of having an SSD without having to managing locations manually. Having an SSD removes both of those advantages. SRT is a compromise. You don't settle for a compromise and then go ahead and implement the uncompromised solution AS WELL.

Well, unless you're government. They might.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

Well, that's the thing. If I get SRT, I won't be getting 240 GB of SSD space. It's basically, get the Core i7-2600K and get 60 GB of SRT, or get the AMD 1100T and get 240GB of straight-up SSD space. The price works out to around the same amount either way; trying to have SRT AND a lot of SSD space at the same time would push the price up too high. Hence the original question about CPUs.

Down the road, I might like to get a large, dedicated SSD or two just to play games off and let the SRT cache work for.. well, everything else, but that'd be over a year from now, as I'm still planning on ordering the computer just before or just after Christmas.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Sandy Bridge is just running away with the performance market. Also, consider whether you want to manually manage what goes on the SSD.

For me, it was an easy choice to go 2600k.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

Manually managing isn't much of an issue, but if 2600k is really beating the tar out of the 1100t with the overall machine being about the same price, that's an easy choice. It's made far more attractive by the fact that I can get SmartResponse rather than just having a small SSD boot drive. If SmartResponse didn't exist I'd be debating "boot drive + 2TB + 2600K vs. 240GB SSD + 2TB +1100t".

Sounds like there's a consensus, so.. I think I have my machine essentially picked out!

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Pulled up Tom's latest CPU review. It's not for either chip, but it's got the 2500, 2600, and the 1100t being benchmarked alongside the new AMD chip they're reviewing. Flip through the benchmarking portions, and draw your own conclusions (or go forward a page from where I linked, and read theirs). The difference between the 2600 and the 1100t isn't mixed or subtle enough to take a bithead to figure out who's performing.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

I had read that review, which is partly why I started this thread. Interestingly, on Crysis 2, the processors are all within 1 or 2 FPS of each other; I dunno if that's a GPU bottleneck or what, but I figured I needed to get some opinions before relying too much on reviews. Some of the reviews are better written than others and a lot of it I just don't understand. "More FPS" I understand. "More cores" or "Higher clock speed" I understand. I don't, however, fully trust reviews since a lot of the more technical stuff is just beyond me.

If you say that's a trustworthy review though.. that's why I'm most likely going with the 2600K. I suppose I shouldn't worry too much; any of these choices would absolutely annihilate any computer I've ever owned but.. just once I want to have, even for only a few months, something that's really in the "king of the hill" class.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

When you see a wide range of hardware post up similar results on one benchmark, that typically means the benchmark in question is not stressing the component in question.

If you pay attention to where they outline the configurations, what you figure out is that good hardware reviewers will have "go-to standard" equipment that they use in all their benchmark tests for all components except the component to be reviewed/compared. The idea is to keep as much of the rest of the machine identical from one setup to the next as possible. At the same time, you want to pick high end components for the stuff you're not testing, so that you can minimize cases where benchmarks don't tell you useful things because some other component is bottlenecking all of the tested components.

Crysis is known for being ridiculously GPU intensive, and is evidently not a CPU heavy process at the resolutions tested at. So you ignore it, because it's not telling you useful CPU data -- all of the CPUs can at least run fast enough to keep up with the gasping and wheezing video card, and so you can't really get a good feel for which ones are keeping up at a jog, or which ones are breaking a sweat to do so.

Now, look at some of the tests that are CPU-bound, and so you see the difference come out. F1 and WoW (for games) in that set of benches. Flip over to a GPU review on the same site, and you'll see the roles reversed. Crysis will show a big disparity in framerates, while WoW and maybe F1 show very similar numbers across different cards.

But yeah. I feel pretty comfortable telling pretty much anybody that Tom and Anand tend to be pretty objective and run sound tests. Certainly if both of them agree on something, you can pretty much take it to the bank.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

I did notice that about Crysis; I knew it was a very demanding game to run (hence why I haven't bought it yet) and one thing I learned from these reviews is that it takes exceedingly powerful video card combinations to run it well (dual core cards like the 590 or 6990, or SLI/Crossfire setups of high-end single core cards like 570s, 580s, 6950s or 6970s). That was why I wasn't sure if it was a bottleneck, or if it was just a game where all the CPUs could manage just fine.

On reviews that tested more games, it seemed like the Bulldozer 8150 looked a bit better, but not better enough to catch the 2600k. It seems like there's a narrow set of applications the Bulldozer runs away with, but it struggles with most everything else.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Can anyone tell me anything about the advisibility and effects of overclocking the 2600k? They offer 10, 20 and 30% overclocking; on the system I'm building off of the 10% is free, 20% is $30 extra and 30% is $80 extra (including the $30 for the 20%, it's not $110 altogether).

I'm intentionally putting in a power supply about 100 watts higher than what ibuypowerpc recommends to allow for overclocking; cyberpower seems to severely underestimate power supply requirements, so I am going off the more generous supply recommended by ibuypower.

ibuypower also says they may disable overdrive in order to increase stability; I don't know if cyberpower does this or not.

Is there any concern about long-term serviceability with overclocking, especially at the 20% or 30% level?

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Any decent motherboard that you'd be selecting should make doing that yourself incredibly easy and allow you to skip paying for them to do it. From my own research the 2600k is perfect for OC'ing. Just make sure you have a nice cooler and you'll be fine.

I don't have the foggiest idea how to go about doing it. I feel a lot safer with people that actually know what they're doing, doing it for me.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

ohboyohboyohboy... 2700K is out, 3.5 GHz base processor speed!

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Update on my situation:

Smart Response Technology is awesome.

--Edit.

I did however end up learning that if you have a system with SRT, you can't then also have a raid on that PC, as supposedly they do not play with together? When having both, my computer begins to stutter, and then eventually completely lock up requiring a hard reboot after 30-45 minutes. That's a bummer to have to choose between SRT or a raid.

I was looking into this as well, and found this and this and this and as far as I can tell it should work.. but I'm getting leery trying it. Originally I wanted to use SRT with a 2TB RAID1 array but.. I may not do that now.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."