how fast is your rig?

<b>your primary gaming rig is how fast?</b>

Where do I put 345 Hz? It's kind of slow, but it runs great. I think this poll is very biased towards the Mega and Gigahertz community. I demand equal representation.

<font color=red>Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.</font color=red>
Pablo Picasso

It's 300 Hz OC'd to 345 Hz. Never crashes. Nice rig...

<font color=red>Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.</font color=red>
Pablo Picasso

Use it mostly for 3Dmax4 and Matlab....

<font color=red>Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.</font color=red>
Pablo Picasso

That's unecessary speed. See the flourescent lights run at 60Hz or so, and I'm WAY above that, and it's plenty. It must be windows slowing you down. I'm running in binary...

<font color=red>Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.</font color=red>
Pablo Picasso

matlab is just another programming language/package. It didn't cost me that much. Got the educational version. I use it for physics. Great for running numbers and graphing and analysis. But I'm sure I'll need something more powerful down the road.

<font color=red>Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.</font color=red>
Pablo Picasso

Didn't Tom review on AMD Athlon scaling analysis? It's right <A HREF="http://www4.tomshardware.com/cpu/01q1/010308/index.html" target="_new">here</A>

------------------
This site is cool.

ok. When I get my 1.2GHZ TBird at 1500MHz (once my watercooler is fixed) let's have a comparison. (Im on A7V133).

not that im supporting via, im just dissing ali

-----------------
"648kb is all the space anyone will ever need!"

Bill Gates, 1980s

i hope it doesn't come to that for a 3rd time LOL

-----------------
"648kb is all the space anyone will ever need!"

Bill Gates, 1980s

1st time the bracket screwed and there was an eletric arc (1st cpu gone)

2nd time water got shut off and it fried it cpu and motherboard (2nd cpu gone and 1st motherboard gone)

3rd time ??????????

-----------------
"648kb is all the space anyone will ever need!"

Bill Gates, 1980s

"over 3GHz!
1 3%"

i give this person with his so called 3+GHz computer 5 days to show us proof or his vote isnt valid!

I know the watercooler works, it's just accidents have been happening. Seems I am doomed to bad watercooling hehe

-----------------
"648kb is all the space anyone will ever need!"

Bill Gates, 1980s

Agreed... the person with the 3GHz , you don't add multiple computers together, you consider each one seperately.

"Dave, my mind is going. I can feel it. My mind is going. There is no question about it."

I doubt it...........
AMD Convert, (updated)

Ultimate internet/gaming system- even with a $800 to 850.00 budget

First off I'd like to thank AMDMB and Tom's Hardware for all the reviews and advise, and a big thanks to the people that answered my original post for their input and suggestions. I'd also like to thank D.I.T corp. Computers, UBID, PriceWatch and Paragon Technology Inc. for the great prices and service I received.

And last but not least. SisSoft Sandra and MadOnion for the freeware benchmarking tools.

Ok on to the good stuff.

Well, Ok I did it. My first Athlon system. Yes I made the switch from Intel. With the pricing as it has been lately I just couldn't resist- If you want to know how to build a killer system for about $800 to 850.00- read on.

The System-

AMD T-Bird @ 1425mhz (1.2 "C" chip) with golden orb
(9.5x150) New Via 4.29 drivers (tweaked)
EPOX 8KTA3 Mother Board
3- 128meg sticks of Tiny Bga PC 150 6ns for a total of 384 megs of ram
Western Digital 40 gig 7200 rpm ATA100 drive
Enermax power supply 370 watt, switching with dual fans. Enermax medium tower case with 2 fans up front, 2 fans rear, 1 top, 1 side. (the top and side fans I installed)

The Burn In and performance-

After getting it all up and running I did the burn in using SisSoftSandra 2001. I then did the performance testing, and oh my- this thing is, well, fast, very fast, fast as a speeding bullet (holy #%*% batman) -scores as listed below:

Dhrystone- ALU 4909 mips
Whetstone- FPU 2017 mflops

Interger MMX Enh 8557 it/s
Floating point 3DNow Enh 10495 it/s

Int ALU Ram Bandwidth 565 mb/s
Float FPU Ram Bandwidth 669 mb/s

My Set up-

Not to shabby. After a few more weeks of testing/tinkering I hope to get a bit more speed out of my new PC. It blows away any and all INTEL/AMD set ups listed in the Sandra comparison charts-WOW. Another nice little ditty was the memory performance, it was very close to that of DDR and for the money I am glad I decided to stay with SDRAM, the performance difference just isn't enough to suite my taste for the added expense of DDR. Onward- After a bit more tinkering I did try to find the max point of overclocking with this present set up. I tried 160 buss speed and it wouldn't boot windows (haha I had to try!). So I worked backwards from there, the max I could get stable was 152, but I was a bit leery of that speed (can we say nope aint gonna do it,too soon to have to buy new parts LOL) so I decided on a happy medium. I must say its pretty tempting to see it run at near 1500 MHz+ speeds even though its not very safe or reliable, and in reality pointless for stability, I.E. the reason I backed it down to a sane real world dependable level (150 at present).

The EPOX board was a dream to work with and the Award software bios was very easy to use, tons of settings for all you overclockers. You can adjust about every setting you can think of including the AGP buss and by the way the max on the CPU multiplier is 12.5 not 12 as the adds state. A very nice feature is the little numericaly coded l.e.d.s that confirm boot sequence, and if you screw something up it tells you. Ah but only if we had a perfect world, two complaints I have are as follows; first off, Hardware monitoring can be done through the bios and this is nice if ya want to boot to the bios all the time to check on things. However, for some odd reason the included software Hardware monitoring package that the mother board came with was unsettable and wouldn't stay set as a usable program, EPOX a little help here please? UPDATE: Use the drivers from the Winbond folder, it will then work. Secondly, the board has 4 dimm slots but there is a catch- dims 3 and 4 are joined so you must use single sided memory in the dimm 3 and 4 positions if you plan to use all 4 dimm slots together. No problem for the TinyBGA memory as it comes single sided. Dimm 3 OR 4 can however be used in conjunction with dimm slots 1 and 2 using the standard memory. So no great loss if all you have is regular pc100/133, after all every other Athlon KT133 board I know of only has 3 dimm slots anyway, but if you use single sided ram-it's a nice feature.

As for 3D (up-date very soon), well I still have (had-see below) my voodoo 3000 installed due to budget restrictions so I wont boar any one with the results of the Mad Onion 2001 3D test, they were pretty sad compared to the newer graphics cards (3800 ugh.). Any one out there have cheap 64 meg DDR Radeon or 64 meg DDR GForce Ultra that they don't need any more hint, hint ;~>

As for the Hard drive, I am really impressed how quite the Western Digital drive is you can barely hear it run, if at all most times and through put is quite fast compared to my old 33.

As for cooling, I must say I really think the case is a very nice case, it locks front and side, tons of room and lots of cooling fans, excellent power supply, slide out everything- including the cooling fan brackets. With the Cooler Master golden ORB cooler installed in this case and all the intensive tests (over 8 full hours) the temp never went beyond 98/100 degrees f/h (39 C). My advise, dont be a miser on the case you'll regret it later on.

Any way on to the totals.

The Prices-

The total for this new set up as follows: (updated as of 4-4-01)

Enermax Case and power supply $ 110.00 (new in box from DTI)
AMD 1.2gig Boxed Processor $ 219.00 (new in box from U-Bid not an OEM part)
Epox Motherboard $ 19.00 (new in box from Paragon)
3-128meg TinyBga PC 150 6ns $ 39.00 (new in package from U-Bid)
Orb cooler $ 19.00 (new in box from DTI)
Western Digital HD 40gig ATA100 7200rpm $ 130.00 (new in box from DTI)
Windows 98SE $ 119.00 (new in package from DTI)
Creative DXR3 Dvd and drive $ 129.00 (new in box from Best Buy)
Yamaha 16x10x40x CD burner $ 145.00 (new in box from Best Buy / on sale)
Panasonic Floppy drive $ 7.00 (new in box from DTI)
Internet ready soft touch keyboard $ 12.00 (new in box DTI)
Misc..cable ties and audio cables, therm paste $ 8.00 (Radio Shack)

Updates:since last posting

Lead Tek Winfast Gforce 2 GTS 64meg DDR TV out $ 179.00 (new in box from U-Bid)
ECS Dolby Digital 24 bit 5.1 sound card $ 35.00 (new in box from ebay)
Creative 5.1 speakers and sub set up $ 99.00 (new in box from Compusa)

Sub-Total so far: $ 1369.00

previous video card was a voodoo 3 3000 ($100.00)
no sound card, was using on board s/b chip (N/A, onboard)

total build time- 2.5 weeks

However, originally, the voodoo 3 video card I robed from my old machine so you could subtract $100 there if you already have a video card you like, as well the same follows for the CD burner and DVD drives, another $275 . So subtracting $375 from the total I come up with $778 (originally) and if you have your operating system you can save there too, another $119 in my case, for a real total of $659. Add in a decent video card and sound card and your right at $800-850.00 mark.

Not to shabby considering the same P.C. from say Dell or IBM, Compaq ect. would run you well over $2000 and it wouldn't be near as fast/upgradable nor would it be exactly what you wanted. A word of advise though, for the average builder (like me) if you plan to build a similar system make sure you plan it all out in advance and don't be afraid to ask questions, make a list of things you'll need, AMD has a very good check list at their website for just this reason. But remember the CPU, MoBo, Case/pwr.supply and System RAM are of the most importance, buy them first.

Update- So I must now add in $179.00 for video card, add in $135.00 for sound. for an additonal expense of $314.00 for a grand total of: $869.00 (inc. taxes and shipping charges) for a brand new PC with warranties, I challenge any PC manufacturer to beat this in price or performance.

Conclusion-

To summarize, making the switch from Intel to AMD was pretty painless and I am very happy with the results thus far. In time I am sure I will be able to achieve even better performance results as I have updated the video and sound systems. If your looking for a new PC, give this a try it's quite easy to build and pretty fun too.

If anyone has any questions feel free to email me- Dragonz1r@qwest.net

Thanks all, Alpha_00
----------------------------------------------
The New System overview-updated

Amd 1.2 T-Bird "c" blue chip @ 1.42Ghz
Cooler Master Golden ORB (modified
EPOX 8KTA3 (VIA 4.29 drivers)
3-128mb sticks of TinyBGA PC 150 / 6ns CAS 3/2/3 @150-Mhz
Windows 98SE
Enermax Dual-Cool 370 watt switching power supply
Enermax 10 bay Mid-Tower server case, 6 cooling fans total, lockable
ViewSonic G-810 21" monitor (for normal PC stuff)
Sony 35" XBR (for DVD and games and of course general tv viewing)
Western Digital 40gig ATA100 7200rpm HD
Yamaha 16x10x40x Cd burner
Creative DXR3 hardware decoder and DVD Drive
Acer 52x CD-ROM
Panisonic 1.44 Floppy drive (lol)
Microsoft Track Ball
Internet Keyboard

(New as of 4/4/01)
Lead Tek Winfast Gforce 2 GTS 64DDR TV out
ECS Dolby Digital 24 bit 5.1 sound card
Creative 5.1 speakers and sub-wofer set up

more soon to follow.......................

I WAS THE ONE WHO PCIKED 3GHZ I WANTED TO SEE WHAT PEOPELW OULD SAY EHHEHE

-----------------
"All alone in his own little world"