New PC, looking for suggestions

[Ded10c]

I wouldn't go for an SSD yet myself. At least, not until the price comes down and the size goes up (which should be happening soon, with people like Seagate and WD apparently entering the market).

[Psychedelic Rhino]

Living in Texas, where we have the AC on for months, the less computer heat the AC has to remove, the better. The rule of thumb for data centers is that for each 1 watt of computer power, you spend 2 watts of cooling.
-- GSH

No kidding. In the winter I do not heat this room at all.

[-APOCALYPSE-]

I know My CPU (AMD Sempron SI-40) can do 3D as it has 3DNow! intructions in it but I think after the phenoms, i think they either removed it or renamed it to something else. Not very sure.

Most CPUs these days are capable of doing high detail graphics processing. AMD use 3DNow! intructions meaning it will increase game performance or something making the CPU and GPU bond together. Just read it up. It might be wrong.

[GSH]

AMD's 3DNow is a royal joke, and stop smoking the same stuff as AMD's marketing department. A few games used 3DNow. Everybody else went to Intel's SSE. I had a longer rant about this in the nettips/readme13 file for a while. I deleted it, because I thought that everyone had learned to stay away from oddball x86 extenstions like 3DNow. Oh well, guess a n00bster proved there's always a bigger idiot out there.

Here is that section, from the nettips.rtf file included with about 1.3pb1/2:

6.3 Why are K6 processors so slow in multiplayer?

The readme that shipped with BZ2 says that K6 processors are not recommend in multiplayer. Why is this? The problem with the K6 (and K5, and other x86 clones like the NexGen, WinChip) was that their floating point unit (FPU) *STANK*. Computer processors do two types of math-- integer (2 + 2 = 4) and floating point (3.5 * 3.14159 = 10.995). Integer math is great for 2D stuff and general calculations, but when 3D is involved, floating point math is more or less required. It used to be possible to fake floating point with integers, but that's a horrible hack and has some severe limitations.

I seem to remember an old article (probably on http://www.tomshardware.com/ , but I can't find it now) that compared the floating point units of various chips, and found that the the K6, 300-350Mhz had floating point performance about on par with the Pentium 166. For the chips listed above, that was the general rule of thumb-- the FPU was roughly equivalent to that of an Intel chip running at half the speed. Most consumers didn't care-- Windows, word processing, email, web browsing didn't stress the FPU that much, and the non-Intel chips were cheaper.
BZ2 *hammers* on the floating point unit of your CPU. For starters, it does all the transform & lighting ("T&L") on your CPU that modern video boards do internally. BZ2 also uses floating point math all throughout the game for physics, AI, etc. There is no avoiding it.

What AMD tried to do with the K6-3 was to add on a few instructions, the "3D-Now" instructions, and that would "close the gap" with Intel. There were some severe disadvantages to this approach, namely the fact that all code touching floating point needed to be written twice-- once for standard x86 chips, and once for 3DNow. This meant a lot of programmer time needed to be invested to make up for the shortcomings of the K6. No standard tools for programmers could make the two sets of code automatically, one needed to get out and write the assembly by hand. My reaction to such a thing is this: "why the heck do you think you can write blank checks on my time?" AMD got out a whole lot of whiny fanboys to try and pressure games to add 3DNow; some did, some didn't. Things like video card drivers and DirectX are naturals for adding 3DNow support; that's where such things belong.
Fortunately, this story has a happier ending. The AMD K7 (Athlon) series has a better FPU than comparable Intel chips (Pentium 3), and that's without resorting to hacks like 3DNow. Programmers didn't have to go out and do all sorts of nonsense to support things. The K7 series has picked up the SSE instructions, and the K8 (Opteron/Athlon64) has picked up the SSE2 instructions from the Pentium 4.

Intel's C/C++ compiler (used in part in the forthcoming 1.3 patch) generates code automatically for their processors, without any additional work required on the part of the programmers. This is what I prefer.

In so many words, that is why the K6 sucks for games, and the K7 and up doesn't. Fortunately, most people these days have a more modern chip.

-- GSH

[Ded10c]

i think they either removed it or renamed it to something else. Not very sure.

3DNow was removed in August 2010. The Phenom IIs were the last series to support it. Frankly, I don't see why it's still around, as so few programs take advantage of it anyway.

[Zero Angel]

[pic]

Whoa. Nice setup.

[Nielk1]

If I own the OS Disk, can't I reinstall once I get an SSD down the road? Or maybe clone the data onto the SSD from the normal HDD after moving the bigger stuff off and setting up symbolic links to the other drives for that data?

Should I just scrap waiting and get a standard pre-assembled PC in my price range with an i7?

[Ded10c]

I prefer scratchbuilding, as I have more control that way, but it's up to you. However, when I changed the HD in my old PC, it amounted to a full reinstall of Windows.

[Nielk1]

True true, newer OSs are VERY attached to their hardware configuration.

Though I am still left indeterminate between getting an i7 now and waiting for zax's golden goose AMD Bulldozer.

Also, I like nVidia, which is likely to not go over so well with a Mobo that would have to be special for said processor.

People can throw up technical specs and everything they want on graphics cards but until they can make an AMD/ATI GFX card soft-crash like my nVidia instead of hard-crash, I will probably stick with nVidia. With nVidia I get a freeze and my textures swap until I refresh DX by changing screen size of minimizing. With ATI, I would blue screen or just flat loose video and hear some tower beeping.

Maybe my order of purchase will have to be: CPU, Mobo, Tower, Monitors, Keyboard and Mouse, HDD, GFX & PSU. (Order of placing in cart or finding, thus, order they take from the theoretical wallet. I don't need my GFX card preventing me from affording a monitor after all.)

[Zax]

You say ATI and Nvidia, yet you don't say which one

For all I know you can be talking about the pre- Radeon HD series, which was possessed by evil spirits.

I had my OS win7 on a HDD and migrated it to the SSD. Nothing but problems ever since

[Nielk1]

You say ATI and Nvidia, yet you don't say which one

For all I know you can be talking about the pre- Radeon HD series, which was possessed by evil spirits.

I had my OS win7 on a HDD and migrated it to the SSD. Nothing but problems ever since

I have used many of each in my time. Though normally I start out with ATI and change over to nVidia.

Last ATI was a Radeon, not sure if it was HD or not.

[Axeminister]

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6883113172

[Psychedelic Rhino]

I wouldn't go for an SSD yet myself. At least, not until the price comes down and the size goes up (which should be happening soon, with people like Seagate and WD apparently entering the market).

Oh yea I agree, in 3 or 4 years mechanical hard disks will start phasing out on larger personal computer platforms (PC and LT), but that's a long time to wait for a 25 second cold boot-up to being fully ready in win7.

[Nielk1]

Its not like I nearly ever reboot.

[Psychedelic Rhino]

Just an example. Anything needed off the SSD is going to be close to instantaneous compared to a HD.