Finally I built my new gaming PC (Info, price & benchmarks..)

[doctor lo]

First of all I would like to thank all the people that helped me out choosing my components through this forum. I pretty much asked about every single component here and there was always someone ready to give at least some tips or ideas.

I finally bought all the components a couple weeks ago.. and built it in a couple days (I didnt have as much time everyday for it). And well, I´m really happy with it.

There has been just a small change (due to availability) in the power supply: I went from the 650TX to 750TX (here is the orignal post with my idea of the build: http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/forum2.php?config=tomshardwareuk.inc&cat=13&post=256410&page=1&p=1&sondage=0&owntopic=1&trash=0&trash_post=0&print=0&numreponse=0&quote_only=0&new=0&nojs=0#bas )

And here is the final setup:


Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 G0 2.4Ghz FSB 1066 8MB Box
Asus P5Q-E Socket 775
Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 PRO Socket 775
A-Data Vitesta Extreme Edition PC2-6400 2x2GB 4-4-4-12
Western Digital WD6400AAKS 640 GB SATA300
Antec Nine Hundred
Corsair TX 750W
Sapphire HD 4870 512MB GDDR5 PCI-E
Samsung SH-D163B (DVD Reader)
Samsung SH-S223Q (DVD Writer)
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That made just below 900€ in Spain, which I consider a good price, since I really check for good prices then.


I added 2 Old Maxtor 300 GB PATA drives as well


Here are some CPU-Z screenshots:

Some Catalyst screenshots:

And finally some 3Dmark Vantage results (The systems is not OCed!!!) :

I think they are quite low.. at least thats what it seems compared to "similar systems" that ORB provides, do you guys nkow where else I can compare my results ? I ran the test with the antivirus running in background.. and a couple programs that the motherboard came with, and catalyst, but I think thats all... could this also be affecting the results ? Or why could this be happening (or is it just normal ? )?



Hope you find it interesting. Thanks once more

 

[doctor lo]

OK, I did some more research about the 3Dmark Vantage benchmarks and perhaps this is not a bad result for a non overclocked pc !
Anyway, don´t hesitate to make any comments !

Here are a couple related links:

http://www.guru3d.com/article/3dmark-vantage/3

http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=260544

 

[Proximon]

Images aren't loading for me.

Yes push the FSB up a bit, see if you can get into the 3ghz range and I'm sure you'll be happy.

Don't run ASUS probe or AI Suite.

 

[doctor lo]

Thanks Proximon! I can´t believe this had 75 reads and no one had say anything about the screenshots :-S Now it should be fixed.

What´s wrong with those programs ? I thought they were just for monitoring... right ?

And yeah, I will do that. Right now I just felt that the computer was flying.. so I didn´t feel the need. I was saying that just because of the benchmarks... but the impression i get is that it works great :-D

 

[Proximon]

AI Suite is an overclocking utility that works poorly and causes issues.
PC Probe is inaccurate and so unneeded overhead. RealTemp is good for your CPU cores.

I'm glad it's running well Your system is clearly overclocked though. If you didn't do it a program is doing it.

Just don't allow windows based programs to OC. Do it yourself from the BIOS and you'll end up with a more stable computer.

You can simply overclock your CPU by nudging up the FSB, leaving the CPU voltage on auto. When you do that you will also need to keep your memory in check, as the P5Q -E BIOS will automatically OC your RAM as you nudge the FSB, and you want to keep it down. Keep it around 400Mhz in CPU-Z.... Which will be about 800Mhz in your BIOS. As you increase the FSB you won't get a multiplier that will put you right at 800, but you get figures near there. You'll see what I mean.

From your shots it would appear that something is messing with your setting already. Your RAM is running at an odd frequency that would only be done by AI Suite

 

[doctor lo]

Well yes... the Asus six-engine thingy add´s a 4% clocks in the highest performance mode (is that the AI suite I imagine (?) if it is it then it seemed to work OK lowering voltage, clocks and fan speed when the PC doesnt need it) . That setting was on when I took the screenshots, since I had been benchmarking right before.

No problem getting rid of PC probe.. I actually didnt use it at all. I´ll try RealTemp... I had being using HWMonitor which looked simple and clean. Also tryed speedfan which was a bit more confusing but probably has a lot more potential.

Regarding the memory, maybe I messed up the memory settings myself, since by default the timings were wrong I had to set them manually (4 4 4 12), I didnt touch the voltage since they were supposed to work at those timings at the stock V (and they seemed to perform well after a few hours of prime95 testing).

How good is it the auto mode for the CPU voltage when pumping up the FSB ? If it works well for medium OCing then it really sounds like would make things a lot easier.


Thanks once again, that was useful

 

[Proximon]

I took my FSB from 333 to 400 without ever touching the voltage... actually much higher, but that was where my E8400 was stable and cool still.

There are some other settings in there that you want to look at... one off the top of my head is called AI Tweaker I think. Whichever it is it's sort of a built in tweaker that should be turned down or off while you OC, then turned up gradually later. Like the DRAM frequency, it's fairly obvious once you spot it.

I don't think much of Six Engine really. I have it running on my XP boot, but it's just added clutter. I avoided the ASUS disk entirely after installing Vista 64. I had the few newer files I needed from ASUS handy, and Vista actually found newer Marvel drivers than ASUS had.

 

[doctor lo]

Something really weird happened... I uninstalled the AI program and the PC probe... (and well, also installed a new monitoring app), and all the DVD-CD drives stopped working.. more exactly all the drivers of these units weren´t able to load properly any more. Updating, uninstalling and re-installing drivers (reseting PC with them conected and without) wouldnt work; neither a full scan of the PC with and up to date antivirus gave any clues..... So I restored my computer to a couple days ago state and everything was fine again...

So in short, now I´m more than afraid of unistalling those... I guess I´ll just make them not load when windows starts up... and see what happens.

For overclocking.. I´ll keep what you said in mind, and I can follow some of those guides posted in this forum

Cheers !

 

[Proximon]

Odd. Were you running Vista 64? I looked but didn't see where you gave an OS.

Could be those Marvel drivers.

 

[doctor lo]

Yes... Windows Vista Business 64, also up to date (i checked some of the latest updates included marvel drivers..). Got a license through my engineering school

 

[Proximon]

Ah nice. When I installed Vista 64 premium I never touched the installation CD. Never loaded any of that stuff. Can't imagine why they would do that...

One thing I have noticed is that the BIOS has a little oddity regarding hard drives. You have to select your boot drive in one area and select the boot order in a different area. Can be confusing and tends to reset easily, at least if you have separate bootable drives as I do.

 

[doctor lo]

Yeah, I think I also noticed that in the BIOS settings yesterday....but so far it´s OK cos I only have one bootable drive rigth now (even though I´ll probably have 2 or more in the future!).
I also saw you can set different boot orders within hard drives, dvd-drives, etc (i mean, one list for each kind, apart from the "general boot order". Or at least thats what I think I saw

 

[doctor lo]

Now that I read this again, the optical units "disappearing" issue, was a Windows issue... that apparently hasnt been really fixed since XP; and it seems to happen to quite a bunch of people cos I found some guides and how to fix it googling around (you actually have to download some stuff from Microsoft.. if anyone is interested I could check it again).

So in short, nothing to do with the asus software. Anyway, I think I´m gonna start OCing this Summer so I´ll probably get rid of it