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.

2. im wanting a mobo with 2 different gen3 pciex16 slots for my graphics card(s). whats the big difference right now in terms of will it be too long before they get fully utilized. i know gen2 slots still are perfectly fine.

It's safe to say that x16 gen2 isn't fully utilized yet either.

3. do i really need crossfire 7970's for a single 1080p 60hz monitor? i doubt it but if i can get away with a great increase then why not haha.

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).

4. i heard 7970's are way better at rendering and video editing than nvidia 680's. is this true?

Averaging over many games, they're about equal. Nvidia gets CUDA and physx, because it owns both sadly.

5. i've never used liquid cooling for my cpu (a closed loop system). should i go with a really good air cooler or will liquid cooling be better for the case air flow?

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.

7. ddr3 1866mhz ram. 8gb ...should i hit 4gb of this beastly stuff or go ahead for 8gb. its really only like 15 bucks more so why not double it to 8 right?

At this point, 8GB is downright affordable, so for a high-end system the goal is now 16GB (2x8) or even 32GB (4x8).

8.if i go liquid cooling should i get the push/pull 240mm setup or is that a little overkill?

It'll be overkill if you don't overclock your CPU to 4.5+Ghz.

9. i have no clue how to calculate how much psu usage a system will have. so i always just guess a little higher than i think i need. im thinking a coolermaster 80+ gold rated 1000W. 0_o

The only time that wouldn't be overkill would be OC'd CPU + OC'd crossfire 79070s.

sorry for the list lol. im trying to get back into the loop. im so dang busy at the moment its crazy. full time job, keeping up a server for gaming, baby on the way, etc. busy times lol.

Sounds like you wouldn't have much use for an expensive high-end rig, it would be better to save the money.

i do have one more question. what is the fastest ram that i can use with a 3770k cpu? newegg specs for the cpu only have ddr3-1600 as the fastest it supports. so if i bought the 1866mhz ram it would effectively downclock in a sense, right? or does it not matter? cause if i get the mobo i want, i really want the ddr3-1866 ram. not that with 8gb i would notice a major difference but still....im curious lol.

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.

I have the microsoft trackball explorer v 1.0 , had it for years. After a carpal tunnel surgery and two elbow surgeries I'm limited in what I can use and what position.

The mouse I'm using now is setup very sensitive, I can get across two screens with roughly 2" of mouse movement. Because of the acceleration properties, and adjusting the properties of the mouse config files.

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.

HDD: 120 GB OCZ Vertex 3 SATA-III 6.0Gb/s SSD - 550MB/s Read & 500MB/s Write [+57] (Single Drive)

Why this change?

MONITOR: 24" Widescreen 1920x1080 Asus VS247H-P LCD [+157]

What would a Dell U2312HM cost there? Feature comparison here.

POWERSUPPLY: * 1,000 Watts - Thermaltake TP-1000M ToughPower Modular, 80 Plus Silver Certified, Quad SLI Ready, CrossfireX Ready & Active PFC Power Supply [+208]

Seems to be a fairly decent PSU, for SLI 580 you'll need 1000 watts too.

PRINTER_CABLE1: 6-FT HDMI Cable HDMI to HDMI mini, Male to Male Cable, v1.3 [+14] (1 piece)

What is this?

TUNING: Intel® Core™ i7-2600K Performance Tuning Protection Plan by Intel [+29]

Afraid to fry it?

VIDEO: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580 1.5GB 16X PCIe Video Card [+259] (EVGA Superclocked [+20])

VIDEO2: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580 1.5GB 16X PCIe Video Card [+515] (EVGA Superclocked [+20])

For 1080p gaming this is way overkill, so again it's the question if you want to fold 24/7 at huge speed/cost or you want the power for gaming. Note that a single 580 is enough for now, and that it's cheaper to keep the 500 dollar and buy a new videocard when it's no longer sufficient. Of course, the only reason to get a 580 at this point is for folding, because the 7970 is plainly better (and still overkill for 1080p).

im defnitely already ahead of you about the SSD. for some reason i had corsair on the mind, not crucial. not sure what happened there haha. must have been thinking of the RAM i had in my old laptop. Also, what about the A-DATA SSD? i've had ram from that brand, and it was some beastly stuff. never had a problem with that brand.

Sadly, they run sandforce controllers.

and as the psu, i went ahead and changed it also. it was a bit more $$$ but worth it. then again i've had psu's by choice that people hated and i loved them. such as my Hipro 500W psu in my old desktop build. lol.

Just be aware that it's a cheap PSU, and will not do the "80 plus gold" advertised.

and as for the monitor choice, i definitely research those as much as the other components. i've been in the boat where i've bought a crt monitor (when lcd's were expensive as hell) and it was fuzzy and the colors were horrible even after adjusting. it was most likely a defect, but still. i check the amount of RMA's and low reviews and compare them to the high reviews.

I'm of the opinion that there isn't such a thing as a quality TN screen. It's just absurd that in almost a decade there has been so little progress for monitor technology. Given that the manufacturers received fines for price fixing yet continued on their merry way after that, I doubt we'll be seeing good progress from them ever.

just curious as i've heard that the 2600k does very well on air cooling. in fact ive heard some people say that they've OC'd it and kept it well under the 70 degree C core temp.which hell, ive always had air cooling (hard to change to liquid as who knows how much i will forget about it or whatever haha.) and with the amount of people on the net who have air cooling (and screens to post temp and videos and what not) i believe air cooling is decent enough.

Yes, air cooling works fine, and some towers are on par with Corsair's closed-loop sets.

here is a link to just one of the reviews for the cooler i chose.

http://www.overclock...r_hp1216b/4.htm

suprisingly it was one of the best air coolers in a few sites and quite average and decent in others.

Looks like an average tower aircooler to me, and it's really only 'the best' there because it's being compared to coolers I've never even heard of before.The more famous ones like the thermalright ultra 120 aren't listed.

HDD: 60GB Corsair Force Series SATA III 6.0Gb/s SSD - 550MB/s Read & 510MB/s Write [-39] (Single Drive)

In the end the choice is yours, but I'd still like to stress that Corsair is only one of many companies that sell drives with sandforce controllers. Likewise, the 500+MB/s read and write is a theoretical maximum and only applies to very compressible data. Last time I checked, RMAs for such drives are unusually common, whereas Intel, Crucial and Samsung have much lower return rates.

POWERSUPPLY: 1,000 Watts - Raidmax RX-1000AE 80 Plus Gold Power Supply [+71]

Had to look it up, and this is apparently a rather dodgy brand. Such a pity that 80+ certification is already being cheated with, because it had a decent start. It's still worth it to restrict PSU choice to supplies with the certification, because the good PSUs will have it anyway, and the bad ones will fail during reviews.

The question is, what are you after in videocards? You plan to get a cheap 1080p screen, so a single 580 is pretty much overkill to begin with for gaming at that resolution. Don't think that video cards don't last long nowadays, as video games are mostly console ports now, so they don't have excessive graphics. If you're after folding performance, of course SLI 580s will be huge, but that comes at a price. 24/7 folding with two 580s is like 600 watt plus PSU inefficiency, which will cost quickly cost more in electricity than the price of the video cards themselves. Not to mention the heat.

by the way, is intel smart response technology really worth it? i honestly cant see much of a difference from using a normal SSD...of course im sure the only way to do this is with a RAID setup. but is it really worth it or is it better to just have an SSD

also forgot to add, i went with air cooling as i have no experience in liquid cooling, and why get liquid cooling for the cpu if im not gonna cool the gpu the same way? lol plus im paranoid and dont trust myself to not have the thing spring a leak.

I haven't looked into intel's smart response stuff, so you'll have to ask someone else. If it's a caching thing, then I doubt it's going to make a difference, especially with a small SSD. Custom watercooling is going to take maintanaince, but there are coolers like the Corsair H80, which have a closed loop, so they doesn't need any.

also, i seem to have hit the wrong HDD. THE hard drive is a 1TB Sata III drive. not a 500gb Sata II

For traditional HDDs SATA3 offers no real benefits, but there's probably no price difference at the same size harddisk anymore.

CARE2: CoolerMaster Thermal Fusion 400 Extreme Performance CPU - Thermal Compound Optimized for Thermal Dissipation [+10]

Sounds fancy, which means it probably doesn't do much

CD: 24X Double Layer Dual Format DVD+-R/+-RW + CD-R/RW Drive (BLACK COLOR)

If you say you want the system to last as long as possible, consider a blu-ray reader.

FAN: Xion HP-1216B Five Heatpipes Direct Core Contact Copper Heatsink CPU Cooling Fan (Extreme Silent at 20dBA & Overclock Proof) (Extreme Silent at 20dBA & Overclock Proof) [-3]

More fancy words for a fan

MB_SRT: 60 GB OCZ Agility 3 SATA III 6.0Gb/s SSD - 525MB/s Read & 475MB/s Write [+106] (Single Drive)

You'll want the SSD as dedicated boot drive, not as caching thingy. You also picked an SSD with a sandforce controller, which are not that reliable. If you want the machine to last, you should look for Intel 510, Crucial M4, or Samsung 830. Those are considered significantly more reliable, and are latest generation drives. The size depends on how much you want to install on it, 64GB might be a bit small.

MEMORY: 8GB (2GBx4) DDR3/1800MHz Dual Channel Memory [+65] (Corsair or Major Brand)

In general Intel's sandy bridge CPUs are not that sensitive to memory speed, I only mentioned that for serious video editing work. 1600mhz is probably a bit cheaper.

POWERSUPPLY: 1,000 Watts - XtremeGear SLI/CrossFireX Ready Power Supply [+53]

Power supplies are the most efficient when supplying a wattage at or above 20% of their maximum. This means that you'll want to pick a PSU for which the idle wattage of your system is at about 20%, and full load is at roughly 50%. Even though you plan on folding with the card 24/7 I still think that 1000 watts is overkill, and 800-850 watt would be fine. Secondly, at high wattage the efficiency rating of the PSU becomes more important in my eyes. The difference between 80% and 90% at full load for your system is quite a lot. If possible, look into adding a PSU that has a better 80+ certification.

VIDEO: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 590 Dual GPU SLI 3GB 16X PCIe Video Card [+543] (Major Brand Powered by NVIDIA)

At this point I find it difficult to recommend a video card for gaming sake, but if you're after folding speed then I guess the 590 can't be beat. It's still a dual GPU card, which I find iffy, because average fps can be deceiving.

so im still at a small toss up there, but i figured the 3930k would multitask just a bit better and considering that the systems i built online were all around the same price (2600k and 3930k models) i just went ahead and went with the 3930k lol.

so as for that point being said, i still see reason for both sides of the arguement, and will do some more looking around online.

I don't see the advantage there, both chips are more than sufficient for 'multitasking'. The reason to go with a 3930k would be to render CPU-limited things faster if your time is more important than the extra 300 dollar investment. Though, if you go that way you'll want more and faster ram, something like 1866mhz 16GB. The one thing you didn't add which helps multitasking more than a bigger CPU is an SSD. At this point I can't really recommend sandforce drives due to their instability, which leaves the Intel 510 series, Crucial M4 and Samsung 830. If I'd have to pick between investing 300 dollar in the CPU versus an SSD, I'd pick the SSD for sure. Likewise, both CPUs are unlocked and OC nicely, but you picked the no 'OC option'. Do you plan on OCing it yourself?

Your choice of video card really depends on what resolution you play at. At the moment pretty much any midrange current-generation card from nvidia/ati can run any game at 1920*1080 and the higher models have no problems with 2560*1600. As for the CPU, currently there's no real need to go beyond an i7-2600k or even a i5-2500k with a good cooler to run either chip at 4.5Ghz or so, because as you increase the graphics settings any new game becomes mostly GPU-limited. I'm no fan of crossfire/sli because a single card is always more efficient, and it's less buggy too.

On the laptop side, there isn't much to specifically recommend as it's a real mess. As long as you get a 1366*768 screen (which by the way is pathetic in various ways) most midrange cards should work, if you go 1920*1080 things get tricky because the card needs to be beefier and that causes lots more heat and power usage. For CPU you don't have to look beyond intel's i5-2xxx or i7-2xxx series, which can be dual core (with hyperthreading) or quad core (with and without hyperthreading). If you care about battery time nvidia seems to have the advantage with Optimus, but there is no way to see if a laptop has implemented that before buying and testing it. Optimus shuts off the video card entirely reducing idle usage. Ati has a similar technology but doesn't advertise it as well, and it's hard to find info on which laptops have it.

Edit: Note to self: when checking out a thread, don't forget to click the second page before replying. Facepalm-inducing, really.

Or wait for the spambots to take over, whichever comes first

Can't believe I missed this thread. I will test your server CA3LE, mark my words.

Or maybe he's messing with us... This might be photoshopped, or he's running a program to simulate a broken screen. I don't see any shards of glass on the keyboard.

Actually, having both an internal and an external server lets you find out more specifically where a problem might exist. If the internal server is slow to begin with, the problem is local. If it's fast, but the external server is slow (might have to test at multiple locations) then there's a problem with peering. Of course... this is assuming such a bog-standard flash test bothers to do an accurate test. Of course, a fast internal test only says something about internal speed, and claims that it's an accurate representation of browsing speed are merely lies.

The reason why 90% is considered perfectly fine is that sending data over the internet has overhead. There are headers/footers added to data as it's being sent/received, and those count in the maximum throughput but not for download speed, because they're not part of the data being sent/received.