Getting a new computer.

[Eagle_Driver]

Quote:

Originally posted by Audio&Me I like the Quantum Fireball Plus lineup of IDE hard drives. My KA is much quicker access times than the latter. The merger is confusing. I prefer the quantum drives over the Maxtor counterparts.

Well, now that the merger has been completed, Maxtor is now using Quantum's old facilities to produce its performance hard drives - and Maxtor's own existing pre-merger facilities for its value drives.

For the record, someone at a computer publication had tested the access time of the Quantum Fireball Plus KA under Windows 98SE, and came up with the same 12.7ms average access time as my brand-new Maxtor D740X-series drive. (This access time speeds up even more - to 11.1ms under Windows 2000/XP.)

 

[kwkarth]

I just bought two new 1.6GHz P4 boxes with 512mb of DDR Ram. According to the specs it's actually only 30% slower than RDRAM, so that makes it a great deal. The boxes are HP Pavilion 750n's and I'm pretty pleased with them. 80GB UDMA HD, DVD-ROM (16x) and CD-RW (16x8x40), 32mb nVidia TNT2 M64 video.WinXP, Intel EtherPro 10/100, yada, yada. Anyway, I'm pretty pleased with the performance and they were only 1049 ea.

As far as monitors go, I bought a couple LCD's, one 15" and one 17", both from Microtek. The 15" (C586p) was only $329.00 and the 17" (C783) was only $549.00. There was only one 15 incher that I found with a better picture and that was a Philips for 100 bux more. The 17" has a better picture than many that I looked at, but I would judge it to be somewhere in the top 70% of 17" LCD panels. The 15 replaces a 17" jug that was on my wife's old pc and the 17" replaces a 19" crt that was on mine. We both fine the LCD panels more restful on the eyes than CRT's and of course the geometry, linearity, and focus is perfect corner to corner, edge to edge.

 

[dhwilkin]

TNT2 MX? Eeeeewwwwwwww!!!

 

[kwkarth]

Quote:

Originally posted by dhwilkin TNT2 MX? Eeeeewwwwwwww!!!

Yeah, I know it's not a gamer's delight, but it's more than enough for home office stuff.

 

[dhwilkin]

I know, I know. Sorry, it was a knee-jerk reaction.

 

[Eagle_Driver]

kwkarth, and that 80GB HD is not a 7200RPM model, but a 5400RPM one. Retail off-the-shelf PCs cheap out on their internal components just to attain a lower price point for a given CPU. In fact, retail off-the-shelf PCs use crappier internal components than a customized mail-order PC at each price point. (Though even that 5400RPM HD is more than sufficient for the typical home user.)

 

[ai0tron]

I personally think 5400 rpm harddrives are only good for backing up information. I find my 7200 RPM harddrive slowing me down all the time. I had a 5400 back in the day and that thing could only be classified as a POS. I don't know why 5400's are even manufactured anymore. Having a fast harddrive will improve system peformance almost as much as adding memory in my experience, and sometimes even more so. My 7200, which I thought was good, actually can barely keep up with my TDk 24x cd burner. I find this annoying, but at least it works. The thing is unless I add another gig of ram the harddrive is going to be constantly assailing me with its torturous slowness. In short, kwkarth, if you want to unleash your system, get a 10,000 rpm scsi 160 and install the os and major programs on it, then use the 80 gig drive for mp3's, video files, etc.

 

[Audio-Me]

Lol, any Nvidia product is ewwww. Might suit 99% of the people out there just fine, but hell no, not for me. Matrox all the way (ATI for multimedia and games).

If you ask me, any hard drive, no matter how fast, is your biggest bottleneck if everything else in your system is decent.

 

[kwkarth]

Quote:

Originally posted by Eagle_Driver kwkarth, and that 80GB HD is not a 7200RPM model, but a 5400RPM one. Retail off-the-shelf PCs cheap out on their internal components just to attain a lower price point for a given CPU. In fact, retail off-the-shelf PCs use crappier internal components than a customized mail-order PC at each price point. (Though even that 5400RPM HD is more than sufficient for the typical home user.)

I was told that it was 7200rpm UDMA. I haven't verified that personally, but that's what I was told.

 

[kwkarth]

Well, the guy lied. I checked and it is a Maxtor 4D080H4 which is a 5400RPM disk. Oh, well, now I have something to upgrade!

I can always ghost my stuff to the new HD.

 

[Eagle_Driver]

4D080H4? My current - and newest - 40GB drive is a 6L040J2; the 60 and 80GB 7200RPM Maxtor drives in production are model-numbered 6L060J3 and 6L080J4. And you wanna know why Maxtor had decided not to produce a 120GB 7200RPM 6L120J6 or 6L120L6? Because having more platters in a given hard drive design would have actually slowed down its seek performance!

BTW, kwkarth, I checked Maxtor's Web site - and found that Maxtor currently manufactures three series of IDE/ATA hard drives: the 5400RPM Ultra ATA/100 541DX (made in Singapore), the 5400RPM D540X (4K {Ultra ATA/100}-series made in Japan, 4D {Ultra ATA/100}- and 4G {Ultra ATA/133}-series made in Singapore), and the 7200RPM Ultra ATA/133 D740X (made in Japan). Thus, your 4D080H4 is an 80GB (40GB/platter) drive made in Singapore (the Japanese-made Maxtor 80GB 5400RPM drive is model-numbered 4K080H4).

Audio&Me, the last Quantum Fireball Plus hard drive produced was the Fireball Plus AS, a 20GB/platter design that was still on the market when Maxtor completed its acquisition of Quantum. BTW, the Fireball Plus KA (the very first series of Fireball Plus hard drives) is getting a bit long on the tooth - its data density is only 5.1GB/platter, which translates into a maximum capacity of 20.4GB (using eight heads on four platters). And due to that low (by today's standards) data density, the KA's maximum sustained sequential transfer rate is only 22GB/s on the outer tracks - lower than some of the newest hard drives' minimum sustained sequential transfer rate (on the inner tracks). And though the Fireball Plus KA used an Ultra ATA/66 interface, its maximum sustained transfer rate is well below the maximum sustained transfer rate of an Ultra DMA/33 interface. So, if you want to know which Maxtor hard drive is a Quantum hard drive, and which Maxtor hard drive is an "old" Maxtor hard drive, check the model numbers. All of the 7200RPM Maxtor hard drives that are now manufactured are the "Quantum Fireball Plus" D740X hard drives, since all of Maxtor's 7200RPM hard drives are now made in Japan (where all of the Quantum hard drives were made). If instead you bought a 5400RPM Maxtor drive, you may get lucky and find a Quantum hard drive (4K020H1, 4K040H2, 4K060H3, 4K080H4) - but chances are that you will get a "made in Singapore" Maxtor hard drive, which is the "old Maxtor" hard drive.

And the access speed of Quantum's pre-Fireball LCT 5400RPM hard drives (such as the Fireball EX that I used to own)? Well, that Fireball EX had an access speed of 14.7ms, which is (surprisingly) about equal to that of the latest 7200RPM Western Digital hard drive!

No wonder why the Fireball EX came very close to the performance of the fastest 7200RPM hard drive of its day, the IBM Deskstar 14GXP.

 

[skippy]

hey guys, i'm getting a new comp too, but i don't know much. can anyone point me out to an faq on this stuff or a place to read up on the basics? thanks

 

[Audio-Me]

Anandtech has some good information for the general public.
http://www.anandtech.com/guides/index.html
They have both guides and FAQs.

I don't agree with a lot of the hardware suggested, but that is of personal preference/needs matters.

 

[Eagle_Driver]

Fellow Head-Fiers,

I have just upgraded my computer again, from a two-year-old Intel PIII-700 to an AMD Athlon XP 1600+ processor!!

When I decided to upgrade, I had first upgraded just my PIII motherboard to a Tyan/VIA chipset mobo (which actually proved slower than a BX-chipset Asus motherboard that had been giving me intermittent problems) - and I found that Intel has discontinued its Coppermine PIII processors!

I originally wanted a 1GHz PIII - but then I thought "Screw it - upgrade to AMD!" So I bought an Athlon XP 1600+ processor [which, BTW, is actually clocked at 1.4GHz on a 133MHz (DDR266) FSB], an ECS K7S5A mobo (based on an SiS735 chipset), and 256MB of PC2100 DDR RAM (okay, I could have used my existing 256MB of PC133 SDRAM - but that would have dropped my "new" system's performance level to that of a 1.7 or 1.8GHz Pentium 4 running on an Intel 845 chipset-based motherboard and PC133 SDRAM). It took me a while, but it's now up and running!

 

[Eagle_Driver]

Now, here's an update of the DDR chipsets for AMD processors that have shipped thus far:

VIA KT266A > SiS 735/745 > AMD 760 > VIA KT266 > ALi Magik-1 (original version)

Which means that the SiS 735 chipset on my mobo is either the second or third fastest DDR chipset for AMD processors (depending on how you look at it) - but it's also by far the cheapest!

And the non-MP AMD 760? That older chipset is no bargain; it's the most expensive chipset of the lot, and still gets whooped by the cheapest chipset of the bunch!

So, if you're building an AMD Athlon XP-based desktop, do yourself a favor and buy a mobo based on the newer revisions of the VIA chipset (e.g. KT266A, KT266E) or an SiS chipset. (And I'm assuming that you'll be buying a mobo that supports DDR RAM, and has none of that integrated "graphics-accelerator" crap). The nVidia n-Force 420 looks promising, as well - but technical glitches relegate that chipset to "great product/crap drivers" status (for the time being).

Quote:

Originally posted by Ctn When "they" mention 256kb Cache they really do mean L2 cache since L2 is usually bigger than the L1 cache so it looks better when they advertise a particular cpu. Speaking of which the AMD XP chip has 128K L1 cache & 256k L2 cache.

And not all processor cache is created equal. The Intel Pentium 4 still suffers from an inclusive L2 cache design that harks waaaaaay back to the days of the 386DX; that is, if there's an L2 cache either on the motherboard or on the processor chip, then part of that L2 cache will actually hold a copy of the processor's L1 cache. In this case (P4), a small (20K) L1 cache is copied onto part of the current P4's 256K L2 cache. No wonder why the L2 cache amount is pretty much equal to the total available cache memory, for all Intel processors and pre-Thunderbird AMD Athlons. But the AMD Thunderbird Athlon broke the inclusive L2 cache rule (in which the amount of L2 cache must always be greater than the amount of L1 cache) by incorporating an exclusive L2 cache design (in which the contents of the L1 cache aren't copied onto part of the L2 cache). In the Athlon (Thunderbird) and Athlon XP (Palomino) processors, which have 128K of L1 cache and 256K of L2 cache, the total available cache memory adds up to 384K (versus 256K for Coppermine PIIIs and current P4s)!

And in the AMD Duron, having an exclusive cache design allows the size of the L2 cache to be smaller than the size of the L1 cache (in this case, 128K L1 + 64K L2 cache = 192K total available cache).