Building questions

[Candy72]

Lets say I decided to go with a 7950 gpu along with a Asus motherboard. Everyone keeps telling me that Asus makes the best brand. Now the problem with this motherboard however is that the graphic card covers up 2 of the 3 pic slots. And if I'm thinking of ever instilling 2 it will cover up all 3 of them. Is there any way I could instill a pci such as a sound card to my computer without the use of a pci slot?

I'll post more questions later as I get them. I decided to make a new thread for this as I think it's not along the same topic as my dual cpu one.

[iceyfw]

it might or might not. it depends on how many pci slots you have on your motherboard.

and why get a 7950gx? its a waste of money imo. and a single 7900GT is enough to max out most games for half the cost and the 7950GX2 won't really live a longer life before being obsoleted.

[Candy72]

I'm guessing that none of the new 975x motherboards have SLI navadia support? Any plans on some in the works?

[Kurz]

Sli... waste of money for amount of gain in FPS.
Unless you are planning on playing games at resolutions of 1600x1200 and higher then by all means get SLI.
Nvidia SLI boards are in the works, you just have to wait.

[Candy72]

Skip to the second part for the actually question if you don't wish to read the reasons.

Don't you just love it when everything in your life just seems to be going fine and then suddenly your gf decides to speak. Long story short the big spending I was planning to do might have to be pushed back a little. I still want to upgrade my system but my buget went from like 2,000 to like 500 after looking at the cost of a ring just so I can ask some question that she thinks will never happen. This will be followed by a ban from the computer and a ongoing rant about how you don't spend enough time with me. The difference between Girlfriend 1.0 and Wife 1.0. For those of you who know the joke. Only thing the joke doesn't mention is that girlfriend 1.0 forces you to upgrade to wife 1.0 if too much time passes before you plan to upgrade.

Anyway, I have a Nforce4 MB and I wanted to know what AMD cpu would be the best upgrade if I was only to be using it for 4 to 6 months? Samething with the graphic card. I think my memory is good at 1 gig though. Also will my 450 watt power supply be good enough?

[ryomakun]

you know what, intel core 2 is about to release, and its very cheap, so far as i have read, it runs at 25 degrees when idle and 45 degrees at load(not sure if full load)
and the power consumption is 65 watts i think compared to 90 watts of amd, you might want to wait for intel core 2, cheapest i think around 200 us dollars.

450 watts is very good i think.

[Candy72]

I would buy the intel instead. However, that would also mean that I have to buy the mb and new ram. I'm not going with cheap ram(overclocking) this time around so I'm going to have to pay a pretty penny for that. Just the ram and MB might put me around 600+.

[ryomakun]

yeah ... :X how do we grow money! haha good luck on your choice anyhow

[Kurz]

Those Watt expenditures are a bit... Off.
I cant find the link, however Conroe does use less Watts but its not 25 watts in difference. Nor is the watt usage that low IE (65 and 90, which oddly looks like the process size).

Get a Fortron PSU
They are pretty good for Overclocking and are better Quality.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...ice=&maxPrice=

Edited to make more sense

[ryomakun]

i think you misread, its 25 degrees at idle not 25 watts hehe =), read it at toms hardware recently.

[Kurz]

Talking about the difference of watt usage...
http://www.tgdaily.com/2006/07/14/am...claims_skewed/

There are several ways to use data.

What you probably talking about is Heat generated.
Since they use a bit more watts in terms of Energy Draw.

[Candy72]

"Those Watt expenditures are a bit... Off.
I cant find the link, however Conroe does use less Watts but its not 25 watts in difference. Nor is the watt usage that low IE (65 and 90, which oddly looks like the process size).

Get a Fortron PSU
They are pretty good for Overclocking and are better Quality."

I guess I wasn't clear enough. I was saying I had a AMD motherboard already. Since the prices of the AMD dropped down so much I was thinking of buying a AMD and a new graphic card. I want the intel but I no longer have the money to buy a new motherboard(300+) and a new cpu(300+) along with new ram(also around 300) on top of the price of the graphic card(300-600). Oh and the PSU(100-200).

So what I was thinking of doing was to upgrade my AMD processor now and use that for 3 or 4 months and then pass it on to my mom who doesn't play games but uses a lot of business application. Virtiual PC, SQL, stuff like that. Then when I get the money for the new board I'd just transfer the gpu over to the new motherboard and give her the old gpu along with my old board.

So I need a recommandation on what AMD X2 processor would be good. 3800 or 4000 is what I'm thinking. Which GPU is going to be good. 7900 GTX or the 7950 for what seems like 80 bucks more. I looked that the 7900GT and notice that one only has 256 while the others have 512. Now sure how much of a difference that makes.

Future plan will be 6600 intel a brand of kingston 2 gigs ram(haven't compared prices yet). Asus motherboard(depends on how the navaida board looks). The gpu I'm about to buy. I'll check on the Fortron PSU if you think my old one doesn't work. Probably be safe to get something higher than a 450watt for overclocking. 24 inch monitor. Thinking of Samsung from circuit city. Along with the new heatsink and stuff like that.

[Kurz]

http://www.zipzoomfly.com/jsp/Produc...ctCode=80724-9
The last of its kind...
1MB of L2 cache for each core.
Quite the Deal.
Get a Zalman 9500 and overclock that sucker ^^
Of course its AM2 socket I aint sure you have one...

[Jinto]

I'ld not advice to overclock CPUs with large caches. Its a terrible waste of energy. Large cache architectures waste enough energy if they are not overclocked, overclocking the CPU 15% usually results in additional 33% thermal energy.

In streaming data applications (like decoding a videostream), large cache architectures, branch prediction and gimmicks like hyperthreading are pretty useless (on a CPU with branch prediction, hyper threading and large caches there will be 5% of power wasted for branch prediction, another 30% is wasted in the large caches -cache miss ratio can reach > 90%-, hyperthreading will waste another 5-10%). Thats 45% of energy wasted for almost no speed improvement (only few applications will make a fairly well use of those parts of the architecture).

For said streaming data applications, SIMD abilities (like MMX SSE -Streaming SIMD Extensions- 3DNOW) and fast/wide FSB + RAM architectures are actually far more important. Video data usually is too large for a cache (a video i.e. is decoded by calculating little parts of the complete frame -quantized units- which would fit in such little 128kbyte 1st level caches easily... no need for huge 2nd level caches there). And in the case of video decoding its also a waste of instruction cache most of the time. There are few instructions used on huge sets of data blocks.
Thats also the reason why the Single Instruction Multiple Data feature is such a speed increasing feature for video decoding/encoding.

Okay time for a cut... I just wanted to say, that there are features in some processors that cannot be deactivated if not needed, leading to high power consumption by a small increase in performance (at least for streaming data applications). And if such a processor is additionally overclocked... total waste of energy.

[Candy72]

Originally Posted by Jinto Lin

I
Okay time for a cut... I just wanted to say, that there are features in some processors that cannot be deactivated if not needed, leading to high power consumption by a small increase in performance (at least for streaming data applications). And if such a processor is additionally overclocked... total waste of energy.

I'd be so lost if you didn't say that. It leaves me with a question. Say my cpu ran at 2.4ghz. If I overclocked it to 3.6 I wouldn't notice any difference? Instead I'd just waste a whole lot of power? I know overlocking takes more power than normally. I also thought that it brought better results though.

[Kurz]

It does, only you need a nice cooling solution to reap the benefits.
It would waste a bit more energy, however performance wise on apps that need that extra cache it could be quite useful. 198 dollars isnt bad for a dual core.

Of course you need the whole package moderate/good ram, A good Motherboard and a good powersupply.

However where did Jinto get info on Large caches CPU's wasting energy makes me scratch my Head.

I frequent www.ocforums.com I never heard that before...

[Jinto]

Originally Posted by Kurz

It does, only you need a nice cooling solution to reap the benefits.

What does this sentence actually imply? All that overhead of heat the overclocked processor has, needs to be handled with bigger = better cooling systems. But the CPU is not the only device responsible for the increase in power consumption. The PowerSupply Unit will have to serve a higher powersupply for overclocked processors, that increases the output of thermal energy of the PSU (changing high voltages to low voltages -that means low currents to high currents- needs either huge coils or is a pretty lossy transformation -energy wise).
And a better cooling systems will use more energy too (well the difference here is however somewhat marginal compared to PSU and CPU).

Originally Posted by Kurz

It would waste a bit more energy, however performance wise on apps that need that extra cache it could be quite useful. 198 dollars isnt bad for a dual core.

A dual core per se is a good thing for well balanced multithreaded applications. Even streaming data applications might take advantage of that feature. But the big caches are really useless for such applications.

Solving complex equations (middle sized matrix operations) and similar tasks using highly localized data will have a nice boost in performance thanks to the caches, but only few applications need it (i.e. Folding at Home would benefit from large cache architectures, or compilers maybe, or i.e. 3D applications with high polygon counts -3DS Max, Maya, AutoCAD... - will benefit too). Pipe and Filter architectures (like codecs) will not make good use of the cache however.
And the cache cannot be partly deactivated if not needed, its an always active component of the CPU.

You can ask the people who run google datacenters, their TCO becomes more and more dominated by energy costs (with low end server systems -PCs-)

Thermal Power: 89W for the afore mentioned type of CPU. Considering the additional thermal power loss of the PSU... these 2 components alone will use ~120W.

Originally Posted by Kurz

Of course you need the whole package moderate/good ram, A good Motherboard and a good powersupply.

Quality/Performance vice I'ld rate these components far higher than a cache monster CPU.

Originally Posted by Kurz

However where did Jinto get info on Large caches CPU's wasting energy makes me scratch my Head.

I had lectures in processor architecture, and systems enginieering (i.e. the thing with the google approach to design low cost systems), and lectures regarding parallel computing (massively parallel) concerning that issue.
If you've seen the size of a 1MB 2nd level cache on a die, you will understand why it uses so much more energy.

Regarding the cache issue, I've done a little google research:

http://www.lostcircuits.com/cpu/amd_x2-3800+/

edit: You can see this little picture of CPU in front of the dies, guess which part on these dies is the cache

Spoiler:

Yes it is really that big homogen looking area that shines in green and red on the dies (which covers ~50% of the die)

another interesting article from this site:

http://www.lostcircuits.com/cpu/amd_x2-3800+/10.shtml

Originally Posted by Kurz

I frequent www.ocforums.com I never heard that before...

Well to be honest, I don't think Overclockers care much about energy consumption and performance per energy cost ratios

[Candy72]

Originally Posted by Jinto Lin

Well to be honest, I don't think Overclockers care much about energy consumption and performance per energy cost ratios

Very true. It's still good to have a understanding of it though.