New machine up and running

[mattclary]

Just built my new machine last night! Everything went really well, one of my smoothest creations yet. One thing I determined is, the VP 970 does NOT like Neverwinter Nights :eek: but I haven't given up on that, still need to apply some patches from Bioware and contact support for both products. Icewind Dale II worked great once I set the drivers to optimize for it.

I've seen some 10-15 second hangs, but they seem to be related to moving the mouse and I don't have USB 2.0 drivers loaded yet, so hopefully that will go away.

Specs:
P4 3.0c (800mhz bus and hyperthreading)
Intel D875PBZ motherboard
2x512mb DIMMs in dual channel mode
3D Labs VP 970 video card

Benchmarks (2 threads):
Nebula - 1m 33s
Radiosity Reflective Things - 46.3s (!)
Raytrace - 1m 31s
Tracer Radiosity - 7m 21s
Sunset - 1m 52s

These times are about half of what my old AMD XP 1900+ did.

[Exper]

Originally posted by mattclary
Specs:
P4 3.0c (800mhz bus and hyperthreading)
Intel D875PBZ motherboard
2x512mb DIMMs in dual channel mode
3D Labs VP 970 video cardSpecs:
AMD XP 2400+
VIA KT333 motherboard
512mb+256mb DIMMs single channel (unfortunately 266Mhz :()
Nvidia GeForce4 Ti 4200
Benchmarks (2 threads):
Nebula - 1m 33s
Radiosity Reflective Things - 46.3s (!)
Raytrace - 1m 31s
Tracer Radiosity - 7m 21s
Sunset - 1m 52s

These times are about half of what my old AMD XP 1900+ did. Note: these times were obtained after a working session (without rebooting).

Nebula - 1m 34s
Radiosity Reflective Things - 1m 50s
Raytrace - 2m 43s
Tracer Radiosity - 11m 42s
Sunset - 49.1s (!)

P4 is a a lot faster, as you can see, only using SSE2 which XP doesn't have [ note the other differences about the two machine... ;) ]

Bye.

[Alliante]

Don't forget that your Atlhon is both not SSE2 enabled and that its running at a clock core 2/3's the speed of Matt's 3ghz :)

Those number are both a heck of alot better than my 1ghz P3 :D

[Darttman]

Looks like that vp970 card is better at gaming than a VP560. That's ok though.....I have a game box with an ati radeon9700:D

MSI K7D Master-L
(2) AMD mp-1200
1.5MB 266 ddr ecc

My benchmarks 1 thread
Newbula - 3m 23s
Radiosity Reflective things - 2m 42s
Raytrace - 4m 16s
Tracer Radiosity - painfully slow :p
Sunset - 4m 31s

2Threads:
Newbula - 2m 5s
Radiosity Reflective things - 1m 54s
Raytrace - 2m 38s
Tracer Radiosity - 15m 17s
Sunset - 2m 59s

8 Threads
Raytrace 2m 18s

[korn_kid]

mattclary wrote:
Just built my new machine last night! Everything went really well, one of my smoothest creations yet.

I want to be able to build/upgrade/fix a machine, how did u learn to build one?
Is it difficult to do?
Can u recommend any good books/links for begginers?

[electroNIX]

well its mostly learning by doing...at least with me...

http://www.tomshardware.com

is a good place to get a lot of knowledge and more links...

but a websearch will help too...

get some old pc-parts and start playing with it like you did as a toddler playing with those wooden-bricks (dont know the english term for them)
build at first some PI or PII with 133 or 233MHz and 16MB RAM 250MB Harddisk and 1MB PCI-Graphiccard... :)

This way it wont be that $painfull$ if you kill some parts...

[Exper]

Hi korn_kid,Originally posted by korn_kid
I want to be able to build/upgrade/fix a machine, how did u learn to build one?
Is it difficult to do?
Can u recommend any good books/links for begginers?Some other good places:

AnandTech
http://www.anandtech.com/index.html

AMDZone
http://www.amdzone.com/sites.cfm

Digit-Life
http://www.digit-life.com/platform.html

GamePC
http://www.gamepc.com/

But there's a lot more... use a "search engine"! ;)

Bye.

[Alliante]

Just to make you feel better: :)

Pentum 3 1ghz, 512 megs

Raytrace: 5 minutes 10 seconds
Radiosity Reflective Things: 2 minutes 48 seconds
Tracer Radiosity: 22 minutes 46 seconds
Sunset: 1minutes 58 seconds
HV_Nebula: 4 minutes 18 seconds

Just thought you'd like a life of confidence in your cool systems :)

[mattclary]

Korn_kid, yep, learnt by doing. I've never owned a computer I didn't build. It's pretty simple actually. I'll post some tips on how to do it later.

I was able to resolve all the issues I ha with the new machine. I applied SP1 to XP and the latest patch to Neverwinter Nights and it works beautifully now! Turned on all video features and ran at 1280x1024 and it looks awesome! Applying SP1 also resolved my 10-15 second hangs with mouse movement.

[hrgiger]

Here's my benchmarks:

Radiosity_Reflective things: 61.6seconds

Raytrace: 2 minutes 12 seconds

Tracer-Radiosity: 10 minutes 6 seconds

sunset: 1minutes 7 seconds

Running a 2.4GHZ P4, 512 MB of RAM. I'm glad I didn't get the 3.0GHZ now. For how much more money it was, it doesn't seem that much faster. I'll wait until Moores law kicks in and the 6.0GHZ comes out (in which case I'll buy the 5.0GHZ :) )

How much did it cost to put your system together Matt?

[mattclary]

I gutted my old machine, and just replaced mobo, cpu, memory, and video for ~$1150. I was going to get the 2.6 or 2.8ghz CPU but my wife said, "Just spend the extra $200". This is the first time I've ever did "top of the line", probably won't be replacing this equipment for quite some time! :)

Finally was able to get a cable modem at my hous yesterday! Comcast took over Time Warner in my area. Comcast actually tries to provide decent service... Set up a wireless network. It is sweeeet! It so freakin simple! Now I need to go over to Arstechnica nad read up on wireless security.

[korn_kid]

Thanks for the links and suggestion's u guys.
I agreed with u guys, the only way I'll be able to learn how to build a machine will be by doing.
When I get enought information on this subject i will try to build a very basic(cheap) computer for practice.

Originally posted by mattclary
I'll post some tips on how to do it later.
I'm looking forward to your tips.
Thanks,

[Alliante]

Hey Matt, just set your WEP Key to Mandatory and 128 bit and make a unique passphrase on both your accesspoint(or router) and your Wireless NIC cards and you should be set.

I use the BEFW11S4 (http://www.linksys.com/Products/product.asp?grid=33&scid=35&prid=415) Linksys (http://www.linksys.com) Router/Wireless Access Point. It's been great for me since I upgraded my Firmware (which is pretty dead-simple compared to some other routers I've dealt with in my profession), and it's inexpensive and stable. The only thing I wish it had was that it answered SNMP directly instead of using SMTP broadcast and having to pick up on it with an SNMP Trap program (for MRTG (http://people.ee.ethz.ch/~oetiker/webtools/mrtg/)). Otherwise, this router's been a trooper.

I've had this router on Time-Warner (http://www.rr.com) for about a year now and I've been so happy with it and the cable service.

[mattclary]

Alliante, I am SOOOO glad you posted! I spent HOURS dicking around with this last night trying to set up security! Now I consider myself a reasonably intelligent person, and based on the Linksys documentation and what I found at ARS, this should be dead simple! But, I could not get my network to work when I used WEP! One thing that threw me off (which, from what I can determine, shouldn't have caused it to not work), is after applying SP1 to XP, the "Keylength" field no longer exists. It just asks you to eneter the key twice (like a password) to eliminate typos. I assume XP just figures out if it should use 64 or 128 bits????. I had my wife's laptop connected by hardwire to the router and would test on my machine, just could never get the f*cker to work, had to revert back to no WEP. I'll proably give it another go soon, any helpful hints?