What's cool in Computing today?

I've been a bit out of touch with the "enthusiast" market recently. I've been working with business grade hardware (you know, dual processor 20-interface firewalls and the like), and I've managed to get some for my own personal use too.

The thing is the market has moved on a lot, as I can see from various mags and websites - and I can't remember what's cool. I want to get a new desktop in the near future, once I've got myself a laptop. I want a desktop that's going to be good looking - cause you know, that's what desktops are about these days. And also stupidly fast.

SLI seems to be pretty trendy, but I have no idea so far as RAM, processors go. Has the Core2 processor made it into desktops yet? I don't really know! Servers are stuck with PC2100 ECC ram because it's realiable. I want super fast RAM which breaks if you're not careful.

And cooling - do people still watercool? Or is it all about vapour cooling these days?

So tell me, what's "cool". What's awesome. What's geektastic.

"Someone throw me a fricking bone here"

 

LOL! I like this thread already!

Having an SLI rig at home, I can say that I like. Seems to run my top end games on full settings without breaking a sweat.

RAM has come quite a way. The top I've seen is DDR2 PC6400 running at 800MHz. Not too sure about the timings, but I imagine this is an overclocker's dream!

core2duo does have desktop models out, I've seen them priced at about $200 CAD (which by my rule of thumb equals about 100 english pounds). I've heard nothing but rave reviews about these chips.
There are apparently, quad core AMD and Intel CPUs available now, but I've heard nothing about their performance, and I haven't seen them for sale to quote a price.

Watercooling is typically done by the hardcore overclocker, methinks. I know that there is a budget Intel CPU (Pentium D 805, IIRC) that can be overclocked to 4GHz+ with a watercooler, but I couldn't imagine the need for one outside of such an extreme situation.

64 bit processors are great, but there's still a sad lack of software coded to use it!

 

Hey Goldy,

I just look at these things and dribble, not in a position to upgrade yet! But, have a quick look at some of these:

PC2-9200 Watercooled RAM http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2006/11/21/ocz_pumps_up_liquid-cooled_dimms/

Are you really into fiddling with your home machine after work? People at work wonder how I can even look at a PC after work! If you are into getting things just right then a pair of GeForce 7950's (Quad SLI)are the way to go but not all games support them perfectly. Failing that the GeForce 8800 is scarily fast, but with a scary price as well!

Core2 Duo is everywhere in desktops but supposedly don't provide a huge boost to games at the moment, not enough games are multi-threaded. I would be tempted with one of the Extreme Edition Pentiums or Athlon FX series CPU's.

Like I said, I'm constantly pricing up my ideal rig, after my honeymoon, I may start spending real money on it instead of pretending!

 

Ahhh, right! The 8000 series GeForce are the first to support DirectX 10, correct? That's pretty cool!

 

That is correct. For Vista only, though, xp can run the cards at DirectX 9.

 

Also, there is the corsair dominator ram:
http://www.corsairmemory.com/corsair/dominator.html

AMD 4x4:
http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=4963

Yes, Core2Duo and quadcore is out, but, I have seen many benches that do state that Core2duo is better than pretty much anything that AMD has.

 

I think the laptop/desktop of Kodo's is awsome,dont know if its what your looking for or if you'v seen it already,anyways

http://forums.majorgeeks.com/showthread.php?t=103403&page=2&highlight=kodo+laptop

 

Thanks, everyone

I thought I might get a bit of enthusiasm with this thread

As for Work/Play seperation - for me there is a fairly hazy line. In my spare time I like to play with things like CyberGuard firewalls. A bit sad, I know, but I don't get the chance to have a free reign with these things as they're all in production environments.

But I've not been able to play a decent game in a long time and I'm missing it. Warsow is cool - but it's multiplayer ONLY as my connection is crappy to say the least.

Quad SLI sounds veery nice. Water cooled ram sounds even nicer - a friend of mine rigged up something similar before using southbridge water blocks. That is until he broke the thing.

For a home client box (i.e. just for ME and not serving anything), I think a good dual core AMD 64 would be good, along with some speedy ram. Then I'd install VMWare or something and have Linux as the host OS and Windows as a guest OS (there are some things you just can't do with Linux - especially with video editing).

Also, I want to see if I can get a SCSI RAID controller. I deal with these at work and they are insanely fast. For video rendering they'd be amazing. To go with my 1TB worth of storage I should be good to go

 

Not sure how hightech yer working is at, but if ye want to go SCSI, I'd suggest, SAS (Serial Attached SCSI).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_Attached_SCSI

From what I've read (minimal), you can still use every day SATA drives within the array.

More info:

http://www.seagate.com/products/interface/sas

Excellent 28 page article:
http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/04/07/going_the_sas_storage_way/

 

Was flickin through my usual geek sites and came across this about nVidia's latest mobo developments!

The new 680i SLI chipset, that nVidia claim to have done 'the right way' this time.
Aimed at the O/C enthusiast, it allows you to set your FSB independently of your memory bus speed, PCI-E, PCI and Sata clock speeds.

I think you may like this one goldfish!

http://www.tweaktown.com/articles/987/1


Regards.....

 

The 680i will be my new mobo very soon, unless something comes out that is better in two months. Which normally it will.

Looking at the evga (even though it has a wee bit of problems, that are already worked out).

 

Yes, i reckon that you are on the money here theefool!

For better (our computing experiences), or for worse (our wallets), its becoming increasingly difficult to stay on the 'cutting edge' these days!

I envy your new choice in mobo, and would dearly love to hear your opinions from your testing results. Please keep me posted!

The hairs on the back of my neck stand up at the thought of taking the core 2 duo to its true 'overall' system performance limits and beyond. Awesome stuff!!!

Regards....

 

YUMMY!!!

That looks awesome. I'll have to put my pennies together for that one.

As for SCSI ... I have about 100GB worth of SCSI disks hanging around that work signed off (they failed data reliability tests - they can't sell em so they usually just throw them away. I just performed a man in the middle attack on the cylindrical filing system ). They're not broken - the data reliability test fails if 0.05% of written data has read errors, which to be fair most OSes can deal with.

That said I wouldn't mind getting a couple of 250GB SATA disks. Four of them and I can DOUBLE my storage

So, I'm liking the idea of overclocked Core2's. That sounds like a lot of fun!

 

2 TB's of Sata interfaced storage.....mmmmm, nice!

I'd hate to be your PSU!



Regards...