Falcon's Full Metal Ferret

[:FI:Falcon]

Okay gents

and Tac,



it's clench time!

Before you get jealous,

I've been saving for this for over three years

and if you've EVER tried to save a flippin' farthing around Eileen

and my perpetually broke kids

you'd know what an achievement that is!

Bill (Hunter82) at Magnum PC has sent his initial system build estimate to me.

I have in mind some slight changes but I'd like your input.

Here it be ...

2 X 7800GT I'll prolly get (2) GTX's instead
2G Kit PC-3200 EL Dual Channel Titanium 2-3-2-5
2 X 74 gb Raptors fast rpms but slower transfer rate (~150) and 8Mb buffer, there are some HD's that have transfer rates of up to 800Mbps and 16Mb buffer
AMD Athlon64 X2 4800+ BOX Bill assures me that the dual core 4800+ is just as fast as the FX57 and you save a few bucks
OCZ Powerstream 520W Power supply
ABIT Fatal1ty AN8-SLi Motherboard good board!
MS Windows XP Home gah! Home or Professional?!
Lian Li Server Case V1000 ooo so pretty!
Track IR Vector Pack yeah, I'll wear the dorky hat <sigh>
Kaspersky Security Suite
SB Audigy 2 ZS
NEC 16 X DL DVD R/RW
16 X DVD/CD Drive
Viewsonics G220fb giant 21" crt
I'll probably get 4-8 USB ports and other odds and ends

The wiff wants me to double check Vicious, Alien and Velocity again.

I s'pose it's a good idea, but this thing looks sooo cool!

Thanks for any thunks,


F

[:FI:WillieOFS]

XP Pro.....

Lose the Kaspersky suite. Been there and done that. Good AV proggie but I found it hard to use the interface, and it was rather "weighty".

For what it's worth, I don't run an AV program. I use my mechanical firewall, ( router ) and use the trendmicro online scanner, and common sense about E-mail.

IF I decide to go back to an AV program, I would go with NOD32. They have the BEST record of catching Virii "in the wild" of all of the AV proggies available. I used a BETA they had out for a few months and LOVED it. Unfortunately, they quit supporting the updates to the Beta so I dumped it.

As for the rest? I'M FEKKIN JEALOUS!!!

[:FI:Genosse]

2 X 7800GT I'll prolly get (2) GTX's instead
2G Kit PC-3200 EL Dual Channel Titanium 2-3-2-5
2 X 74 gb Raptors fast rpms but slower transfer rate (~150) and 8Mb buffer, there are some HD's that have transfer rates of up to 800Mbps and 16Mb buffer
AMD Athlon64 X2 4800+ BOX Bill assures me that the dual core 4800+ is just as fast as the FX57 and you save a few bucks
OCZ Powerstream 520W Power supply
ABIT Fatal1ty AN8-SLi Motherboard good board!
MS Windows XP Home gah! Home or Professional?!
Lian Li Server Case V1000 ooo so pretty!
Track IR Vector Pack yeah, I'll wear the dorky hat <sigh>
Kaspersky Security Suite
SB Audigy 2 ZS
NEC 16 X DL DVD R/RW
16 X DVD/CD Drive
Viewsonics G220fb giant 21" crt
I'll probably get 4-8 USB ports and other odds and ends

Jealous?

Me?

Never!!!

[:FI:TacticalS!]

WOW very nice rig Falcon. I only wish I could say YOU deserve it. So happy for Eileen.

Seriously, looks awesome and very happy for you. Just let the ferrets play Pacman on it once in a while.

Next we want pictures when it arrives.

TS!

[:FI:Heloego]

...Eileen will be gaming while you are stuck with the laptop?

Nice rig!!!! It should really speed up her Mah Jong sessions!

[:FI:Gurberly]

Keyboard?
Mouse?
Floppy drive


2 grafik cards?

The Western Digital raptors are kinda like new generation SATA disks. They have blisteringly fast average data seek time <5ms compared to average EIDE drive of <10ms It's the physical act of mechanically getting the data off the disk quickly rather than the electronic transfer of the data through the disk drive. Hence you see bigger Gb more cache more theoretical data throughput on other disks, but they don't count for much if they can't read the disks quickly enough. That's what you are being asked to pay a premium for here.

It's one of the few parts of the PC that is mechanical i.e. moving parts

You can see a bundle pair of them second item down

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/acatalog/ ... _sata.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Question over how the disks are to be set up. Am assuming he is looking at Raid 0 rather than Raid 1 or a simple master slave.

Raid 0 = when the two disks are run concurrently, e.g. the computer kinda sees them as one large combined disk e.g. 148Mb. The performance increase comes in as the work can be split across two disks especially where large files are concerned.. I.e, its quicker getting 50mb from disk a and 50mb from disk b and combine the result rather than all 100mb from a single disk. There is not much of a performance increase if it is a small file, or if the hard disk controllers decides to locate the entire file all on one disk. If one disk goes down, they both go down.

Raid 1 = when they are run serially. Data is simultaneously written to both disks so effectively a mirror image is created. If one disk goes down you can carry on working, but you'll only have the 74Gb (not an excuse to not back up data!!)


You can set up normal EIDE disks as arrays too.


OCZ PowerStream 520w ATX2 Power Supply
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/acatalog/OCZ.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Seems a bit pricy compared to it's 520w sibling... but you do get more flashing LED's to look at


XP Professional on the basis that most else seem to be using it and if they give you step by step instructions they won't have to figure out what you can see and can't see

The NEC 16 X DL DVD R/RW should be able to read write cd's too so you could drop the second DVD drive and save a bit (but simple cd/dvd readers are pretty cheap anyway compared to the rest of your components). Handy if you envisage doing a bit of disk copying rather than having to shuffle disks in and out.

Is it OCZ 2GB (2 x 1GB) PC3200 Dual Channel Platinum Series EL-DDR
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/acatalog/ ... eries.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

All are top notch items straight off the shelf

I'll have to price it up in pounds and compare it to dollar cost and see how much we Brits are getting ripped off

[:FI:Macca]

Falky, it is a monster!!!

Aren't ya scared?

Congrats, mate, your wife will finally have a decent puter:)

S!

Macca

[:FI:Falcon]

Thanks Willury and Gurbie and all!

Willie, I went and read some reviews on the Kaspersky suite and NOD32.

You're right, NOD32 is very effective and one of the best out there but EVERY review I read said you need to be a "Techy" to configure the dozens of settings for it. What's your experience with that?

I think Bill said one of the reasons why he picked Kaspersky is cuz it has a small foot print. I'll talk to him today and see what's what there.

~~~

Gurb, good advice and thanks for the info on the Raptor. I'm keeping my old mouse, keyboard, etc. and when I get a chance to go to Best Buy and CompUSA I'll get a look (and feel) at what's available.

The Raptors will be in (Raid0).

~~~

And all the rest of you lot ...

it's MY computer, not the wiff's!!!!

She IS half Sicilian, but I still can take her in 7 out of 10 knife fights!

I'll be alright ... as long as her family doesn't get involved.

<shudder>


Fal "The Mark" con

[:FI:Scott]

Falc,

Dont you remember those little words in the marriage ceremony about 'with all my worldly goods' ...etc...etc.

According to my dearest one that term included future 'worldly goods' and I should have paid more attention at the time.


I think that you will find that this is a common view among wiffs, sorry m8.
Save yourself the pain and let it go now.

As a old friend of mine so wisely put it on the subject of marriage 'It is all our own fault for getting randy'. short, sweet-true.

[:FI:WillieOFS]

Smaller footprint? I sincerely hope that Kaspersky has pared the size of their proggie from what I knew it as 3 years ago. It was a very large program (not as much of a system hog as Norton Anti-computer) but still large. Another interesting phenomena that occurred shortly after I bought and loaded Kaspersky's stuff, was that I was inundated by "love" letters from the Nigerians who seem to have ALL the money on the face of the planet locked up in various banks and need my help to retrieve it. Maybe a coinkydink, but I wonder, as I used one of my lesser travelled E-addresses for the sign up '.

I've no experience with the current relase of NOD32. I LOVED the BETA that was out. It was pretty much "fire and forget" and the default settings worked nicely for me.

These days I worry more about the various malware/crapware/adware stuff that loads onto your system than viruses.

[Ianus]

TWO gfx cards,,, and there 7800's. My poor old 9800 started artifacting when I read that,, or I did..

Monster rig m8

[:FI:TacticalS!]

My computer can't compete but here's the specs for my upcoming XBox 360 -

A 20GB hard drive, high-def game support and a 500MHz ATI graphics processor: Glimpse the Xbox 360's system performance specifications as provided by Microsoft.

Custom IBM PowerPC-based CPU
• Three symmetrical cores running at 3.2 GHz each
• Two hardware threads per core; six hardware threads total
• VMX-128 vector unit per core; three total
• 128 VMX-128 registers per hardware thread
• 1 MB L2 cache

CPU Game Math Performance
• 9 billion dot product operations per second

Custom ATI Graphics Processor
• 500MHz processor
• 10 MB of embedded DRAM
• 48-way parallel floating-point dynamically scheduled shader pipelines
• Unified shader architecture

Polygon Performance
• 500 million triangles per second

Pixel Fill Rate
• 16 gigasamples per second fill rate using 4x MSAA

Shader Performance
• 48 billion shader operations per second

Memory
• 512 MB of GDDR3 RAM
• 700 MHz of DDR
• Unified memory architecture

Memory Bandwidth • 22.4 GB/s memory interface bus bandwidth
• 256 GB/s memory bandwidth to EDRAM
• 21.6 GB/s front-side bus

Overall System Floating-Point Performance
• 1 teraflop

Storage
• Detachable and upgradeable 20GB hard drive
• 12x dual-layer DVD-ROM
• Memory Unit support starting at 64 MB

I/O
• Support for up to four wireless game controllers
• Three USB 2.0 ports
• Two memory unit slots

Optimized for Online
• Instant, out-of-the-box access to Xbox Live features with broadband service, including Xbox Live Marketplace for downloadable content, gamer profile for digital identity, and voice chat to talk to friends while playing games, watching movies or listening to music
• Built-in Ethernet port
• Wi-Fi ready: 802.11a, 802.11b and 802.11g
• Video camera ready

Digital Media Support
• Support for DVD-Video, DVD-ROM, DVD-R/RW, DVD+R/RW, CD-DA, CD-ROM, CD-R, CD-RW, WMA CD, MP3 CD, JPEG Photo CD
• Ability to stream media from portable music devices, digital cameras and Windows XP-based PCs
• Ability to rip music to the Xbox 360 hard drive • Custom playlists in every game
• Built-in Media Center Extender for Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005
• Interactive, full-screen 3-D visualizers

High-Definition Game Support
• All games supported at 16:9, 720p and 1080i, anti-aliasing
• Standard-definition and high-definition video output supported

Audio
• Multichannel surround sound output
• Supports 48KHz 16-bit audio
• 320 independent decompression channels
• 32-bit audio processing
• Over 256 audio channels

System Orientation
• Stands vertically or horizontally

Customizable Face Plates
• Interchangeable to personalize the console

-----

Customizable face plates. You can't beat that can you?

[:FI:Fenian]

don't understand any of this.

But if it's shiny and the game plays great......

CONGRATULATIONS!!!!!!

[:FI:TacticalS!]

But you're Swedish, you are suppose to understand Swedish (a.k.a. technobabble).

Indeed, all I really understand is this bloody thing will have 3 3.2MHz CPUs somewhere inside. And IBM at that.

[:FI:Gurberly]

Where does the kettle plug in?

It does have a kettle port doesn't it?

G