RTB

I'm doing good.

If you want to test your maximum bandwidth using wireless is often a poor choice. Wireless g has this theoretical speed of 56mbit, which is in practice at the very least halved. Wireless n might have enough bandwidth to cap out a 75/35 connection, but only if the laptop is really close to the router. The ethernet result shows that something is wrong. It can be a hyperactive anti-virus, a virus, a cheap router unable to hit 75mbit, congestion, routing at the ISP side, or a bad signal for the modem, etc. Definitely worth investigating, since you're not even close to what you're paying for.

Much depends on where you need the system for, so I'll just go for the generic details. They're both refurbished and probably returned for a reason. Both have Nehalem CPUs, which offer good performance but at a cost. The W3520 has a TDP of 130 watt, and if the cooling system was skimped on, it will overheat. The other system has 2x60W CPUs, which should be easier to cool. The dual socket system has 8 slower cores, so it will only provide a notable speed increase over the single socket system if the software you run is heavily multithreaded. Oddly enough, both systems are triple channel yet run 4GB, so that's dual channel at best. The single socket system has a mere 500GB harddisk, and the dual socket one is anemic at 250GB, which would probably require you to replace it. The FX1800 is based on the peculiar 8800GS, and I have no idea if it's useful in any way.

That would not solve the issue, and would essentially give you a single average number that is better left as a set of numbers for more information regarding routing. There are two speed graphs that I think are most important for an internet connection: a graph of speed tests to an internal server (within the ISPs network) to determine the average and variance during the day/week/year/millennium of your connection to your ISP; and a graph of speed tests to a server outside the ISPs network, to find out how good your ISP is at handling that. Latency tests can also be very useful. You are right in that a single server can be hampered by a single bad network, but it does point to a problem that is not supposed to exist, and will affect many more servers which you want to interact with.

It's safe to say that x16 gen2 isn't fully utilized yet either. Depends on the game and your CPU power. One 7970 is going to be overkill for 99% of all games out there, with exceptions being stuff like Metro 2033 and extreme battles in Starcraft 2 (CPU limitation). Averaging over many games, they're about equal. Nvidia gets CUDA and physx, because it owns both sadly. Custom water cooling is going to provide better temperatures at a much higher cost and maintenance. Then there are the closed-loop systems like the H100, which tend to be just a bit better than top-end air cooling. The advantage of such systems is that you don't have a huge block of aluminium/copper hanging on your motherboard. At this point, 8GB is downright affordable, so for a high-end system the goal is now 16GB (2x8) or even 32GB (4x8). It'll be overkill if you don't overclock your CPU to 4.5+Ghz. The only time that wouldn't be overkill would be OC'd CPU + OC'd crossfire 79070s. Sounds like you wouldn't have much use for an expensive high-end rig, it would be better to save the money. That's just the official maximum. You can run the RAM at 1866 speed, but you'll probably have to set it manually in the BIOS.

Let's see how well it works: As opposed to east coast server: A little surprised that it won't go faster to Washington. Would it be an idea and even possible to include a small ping test inside the download/upload test, so one could see whether latency is the bottleneck or not?

It's not especially hard to drive two or even three displays of that size, but it's still a very welcome upgrade to the laptop screen market. If only this was done 5 years ago, imagine how much further monitor specs would be compared to current day screens.

The stock market value isn't the same thing as a company's worth though, it's what speculators think it's worth.

I can't see how you come to your conclusion at all. Both aircooling and liquid cooling get temperature problems when a fan dies or a pump dies. The CPU will shut down/throttle either way. In terms of endurance, a fan should give out way earlier than a pump, which more or less justifies the price difference (which is not as big as you indicate by the way). In terms of moving heat away from a heat source, liquid is a superior medium to air by miles. Regardless of how you cool your CPU, you still need a fan or two to get sufficient airflow in the case to make sure the remaining components (VRMs in particular) get enough airflow so they maintain efficiency and don't overheat. If you liquid cool your CPU, you are making sure that the heat generated by the CPU is transported more efficiently to a different location, keeping temperatures down at the CPU sockets, but at the same time you don't get the airflow going down on the CPU socket that is typical for aircoolers. I don't really see how the tubes interfere with airflow that much more than the usual cable mess in a case, but oh well. The testing I've seen indicates that average aircoolers are beaten by average closed-loop watercooling sets (Corsair H50 for example), top-end aircoolers can get close to closed-loop watercooling sets, and that custom watercooling is in a different league altogether. Finally, the temperatures you post are not realistic unless the ambient temperature in your house is about 5c or less. This is because both ordinary aircooling and ordinary watercooling cannot ever result in temperatures below ambient, it'd be a violation of the laws of thermodynamics, and we don't do that here at testmy.net. AMD is known to have inaccurate temperature sensors since the introduction of the original Phenom CPUs, so don't trust that.

In that case, I'm going to second getting a trackball. If you then fiddle with the orientation and placement of it you can very much limit any movement of your elbow and wrist, which should be beneficial for you. By the sound of it, you're not in a state anymore where you care for competitive gaming.

Given how specific your requirements are, you have the choice between making it yourself, or buying one for 30 bucks. Perhaps the cheapest method is coating your desk with a material that is similar to mousepads.

Slowdowns with wireless are normal, due to too much interference from all sorts of devices. You should check signal strength (with a program like inssider) or the connection speed whenever it's lagging. Which router are you using?

It's rare to see anyone using Bulldozer, considering that they hardly match Phenom 2 CPUs. Since the introduction of turbuboost (and the AMD equivalent), overclocking has become a bit tricky, because the CPU can be in various modes which all have different voltages and clock speeds. Considering how cool you're currently running, you should certainly be able to get it to run at 4ghz on all cores. The convenience of overclocking inside windows is useful, because you're not waiting for windows to load over and over, but it also means that settings don't stick after a reboot. So once you find a stable OC, you'd have to set it properly in the BIOS.

Worse, the channel expired. So it's not his bot doing this, it's the network. I guess #tmn died.

If option 1 is "SSD, single card" and option 2 is "no SSD, SLI/crossfire", then you really want option 1. You will notice the speed of the SSD on everything you do on that computer, as opposed to better average fps at the cost of higher energy consumption, which you won't even notice if the fps is over 60ish to begin with. As for 80 gold versus 80 bronze: label Load-> 20% 50% 100% 80 PLUS Bronze 82% 85% 82% 80 PLUS Gold 87% 90% 87% 650 watt, single 580 idle: ~130 watt load: ~400 watt bronze idle real wattage: 130 / 0.82 = 158.5 bronze load real wattage: 400 / 0.84 = 476.2 (84% assuming graph is linear for about 61% load, which it is not, but close enough) gold idle real wattage: 130 / 0.87 = 149.4 gold load real wattage: 400 / 0.89 = 449.4 (61% load -> 89% efficient assumption) difference at idle: 158.5 - 149.4 = 9.1 watt difference at load: 476.2 - 449.4 = 26.8 watt if kept on 24 hours a day, difference at idle: 9.1 * 24 = 218.4watt = 0.2184 KWh thus yearly, the difference is at least 0.2184 * 365 = 79.72 KWh which is roughly 79.72 * 0.15 dollar = 11.96 dollar a year likewise for full load 24/7/365 it's 26.8/1000 * 24 * 365 * 0.15 = 35.22 dollar/year[/code] Note that a 7970 is more efficient at idle and at load, so you won't even need a 650w PSU for it.