News System Investigation

Silent posted this in a different thread. It needed to have it's own life, so I'm posting it here.

Silent Cold wrote:On a completely side note I am attempting to rebuild my system and in the line of the CPU drama thread apparently this may be a slightly a decent spot. Right now due to cost effectiveness I am choosing a 6320 chip which is a 1.86 chip and has a 4mb cache, the winning feature is the overclocking ability which gets it up to 3.36 stable with stock cooling [which I won't have and is higher than I will push it 3.- is happy for me].. just needs the right mobo. Anyone have any thoughts on the Gigabyte boards? Namely the GA-965P-DS3 version?

Please do not hesitate to take this piece to the Geeks R' Us thread.. was tempted but em already here and rambling.



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Oh and as for that Quad-Core that is 3Ghz.. Here she be @ 3.46.


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EDIT: after a little bit of google-fu apparently someone took thte overclocking to an even greater extreme taking the E6320 to a 3.72 max and a 3.64 stable Which looking through this guys efforts he was using the Asus® P5B Deluxe BIOS 1011 MOBO which puts it inline with pricing of the GIGABYTE GA-965P-DQ6 rather than the DS3.

When I built my system a few months back, that chip wasn't even mentioned. I wish it was because I really think the 4MB makes a big difference. My chip has the 2MB cache. My understanding is it is actually 1MB per core, so you double my per core cache rate. That can't be bad. :-)

Bubba and I were discussing this on Friday. I believe this is the exact chip he bought and he loves it. Bubba will have to chime in....

As for the 965P-DS3 Gigabyte mobo..... Let me put it this way.... It's running like a champ in the very system I am typing this post from. :-) It was recommended by several OKGG LAN guys when I was building my system. I have been very happy with it. The D in the name refers to the capacitors used in building it. It's an S Series that has D aka Ultra Durable Features. Since the capacitors have been the main problem I have experienced with every mobo that I've lost in the last 5 years, it was worth the extra 20-30 I paid for it.

The one thing I will say about this mobo is be very careful which memory you buy with it. I've read it can be rather picky, but that seems to be the case with all the 965/975 Intel chipsets right now. I went with a brand I had never heard of, that wasn't listed on the official mobo memory list. I wanted 2x1GB at a reasonable rate. This memory fit the bill. The real kicker was the number of people on NewEgg that had bought this memory for this mobo and loved it. I did not read one negative review of this combo, so I decided to give it a shot. It's been great so far.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?...N82E16820211066 - I paid $159 in March and it's $83 now. Even then, it was actually 200 with a instant rebate while the other recommended memory was $240+.

I bought a SATA DVD Burner and SATA HD for it. I am running an all SATA system and I really like it.

Atomm is exactly right. I have the 1.86. It way exceeds my old p4-2.8. Maps for bf2 load in seconds rather than minutes. Two things I learned in my younger days were as follows.

L2 cache is always worth the extra $20 or so. Typically if it's offered the bump on cache is about $20 and the cache makes everythign better in regards to speed, and stability. This chip is the faster FSB and the double cache, to me that makes it a better chip than some of the faster rated (by GHz) lower FSB and Cached chips. It should also make it more able to be overclocked.

I don't as a rule overclock. I have always run softweares that tax the proc, many people don't. CAD/Arcview are hard enough to keep running, I don't need to add the lack of stability and more heat to my systems. My impression is this is a good chip to overclock and people have been successful, as you know. I tend to run my systems until they are old and grey, overclocking wouldn't help me.

I got the MSI p6N SLI MB. I thought it was the MSI p6N SLI Platinum, but alas it wasn't. I beleive it's also a 965 chipset. I know many people have had good luck overclocking it. I have been 100% stable since I built the machine. Again like Atomm posted I read alot before buying this board. It seems getting some memory was hard for some. I read alot of people who couldn't get my ram to run on this MB, but it's worked great for me.

Both of you are basically supporting other items i have read about.. now its mainly just a matter of saving the cash for the beast. I belive my last mobo has decided it doesn't want to play anymore so in an attempt to move from laptop to desktop I am going to rebuild with what I can, which is case, optical drives and psu. Everything else is getting a redux.

As for the mobo I am still holding the DQ6 in the back of my head for its cooling features, but that is it and the cost is prohibitive. The memory.. well lets just say you have good taste there Atomm, it was one of the options I was looking at though I haven't looked into its upper limits. The http://www.newegg.com/product/product.asp?...N82E16820231098 memory chips that i found are known to be capable of handling the ddr2-1000 range that they would have to take if I were to take my processor up to ~3ghz which I would at least attempt.

As far as the ArcGIS/ArcView stability issues the increase in heat is not much and the tests that have been run are showing complete stability up until you reach the 3.6+ speeds. I am running Inventor/CAD so I will need some speed and graphics to keep mine running and the 1.86 wont work but any higher and my pocketbook wont work. Your ArcView is not a foreign language to me 😏 Though I wish I could spirit a computer awy from my work as I can get a dual processor capable machine with the Quadro FX 3500 x2 in them... Right now I managed to weasle out 3ghz dual cores out of them for at work...

Hey Atomm is there any sign when your capacitors do go bad? Does your motherboard just stop working completely or is there any noise that comes from the capacitors themselves?

The recent rash of bad caps, the one over the past few years often you would see them expanding. I.e. most times the top should be flat and you would see it bulging to a rounded top. Typically you wouldn't hear a noise from a cap that I can think of. Typically a bad cap will kill a mobo or at least cause some real voltage issues and thus constant crashes/ instability. Also if you see brown ooze on the cap is a sign and certainly really odd smells from your computer.

after a google search see: http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleID=195

Some people try to replace their caps. But beware, unless you are good at soldering, this is not an easy job on a 7-layer PCB, especially with home type equiptment. If you do you should use a soldering heat sink and remember a cap holds charge even without being plugged in. Only a hanful of microfarads are required to mess you up pretty good.


as a side note, I was trying to look up a table of how many microfarads to kill a person I seem to remember 13. In any case there are alot of dumb people out there in regards to electricity. I hit a mythbusters page with a handful of people saying a car electrical system can't hurt you cause it's only 12v. Just so you all know in regards to killing you with electrictty, voltage means very little, and amperage is king. You can run 100,000 volts through your system with no side effect, but it's at extreamly low amperage. A cars system would more than likely not kill you but depending on what you did it has the potential.

Bubba had the perfect description of bad caps. In one case, they were bulging at the top. It was rather weird looking. My last Abit board actually had a case of the nasty brown ooze. It was rather gross.

As long as the cost is reasonable, I'm going to upgrade for the better caps. To me, $30 was worth it. Bad caps can be a pain in the ass, not to mention it can hurt other components if there are voltage problems from it.

Bubbaspanky wrote:
as a side note, I was trying to look up a table of how many microfarads to kill a person I seem to remember 13. In any case there are alot of dumb people out there in regards to electricity. I hit a mythbusters page with a handful of people saying a car electrical system can't hurt you cause it's only 12v. Just so you all know in regards to killing you with electrictty, voltage means very little, and amperage is king. You can run 100,000 volts through your system with no side effect, but it's at extreamly low amperage. A cars system would more than likely not kill you but depending on what you did it has the potential.

Yes that is exactly right Bubba. I went to Control Data Institute in the mid 80's for electronics. I was going to get into computer repair at one time 🙂

A car battery is one of the worse things to get zapped with at 600+ amps. I never understood when you see people on shows like 24 getting hung in a shower and zapped with one, how in the hell they survive that after a few shocks is beyond me.