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i upgraded

Cyberman

Moderator
Moderator
Man I haven't upgraded in years :p

That makes 2 of us. This system is over 2 years old. It's an old quad core at 2.6ghz (3ghz pentium equivalent), with only 8gig of RAM and 2 1.5T 10krpm hard disks. Runs Linux just fine (but it is very weird to see a process run 395% in the system monitor). Wine runs what windows aps I want too mostly. Unfortunately as you heard me whine, gnome doesn't seem to handle OGL and a number of things properly. So I am transitioning to Enlightenment which is designed to be light on the system and supports OGL in emulation or in hardware (it appears to detect if the DRI driver is there or not unlike Gnomenuts).

I am looking at an 8 core and 32 gigs with 2 3T hard disks for the next machine. I am concerned about media (namely CD data) and my system. I'm trying to figure out how to be sure I can read my old CD's and my old Game CD's for the playstation.

Now you've reminded me I need to migrate the data from my old windead box to this as well. (SIGH).

I've been lazy dang it. :D

Cyb
 

Cyberman

Moderator
Moderator
and I remember when an old intel p2 with 256ram and 20GB hdd looked like a supercomputer.

LOL Well that was an upgrade from a
<windows>
Sempron 1.8ghz with 2G (the DEAD windows machine)
which was an upgrade from a Pentium Celron 300 with 192M (120G)
<linux>
which was an upgrade 768M Duron 800mhz with 200G HD
which was an upgrade from a Pentium 150 with 32M
which was an upgrade from a 386/387 40mhz with 8M (first linux box when I used a VT220 with it LOL).

See the chain of upgrades

I am considering what display card to stuff into it, as I would like to use OpenCL for CFD on it as well as tweaking POVray for real time rendering.

Cyb
 
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Cyberman

Moderator
Moderator
It still works that Duronomo machine barely but it does. Had a Nvidia with 128M (circa 2000) so it was top of the line at one time as well.

I ran dual screen with it (ooo ahhh), now I have 3 1 26" 1 22" and 1 19"

It's amazing how things change slowly.
I still use a mouse and the serial ports (surprised?) I still have the VT220 around too.
Very useful for when Gnomenuts went balistic from wine throwing up (set the display in some scrambled mode) on a game. So had to login via the serial port and kill the X session via root. The other option was less graceful, which was ALT-CTRL F12 and then login as root into one of the virtual consoles as root and nuke the X session that way.

Cyb
 

revl8er

That Damn Good
I recently got 2 more monitors to set up eyefinity with 3 monitors. I must say, it makes gaming better once you get used to it. Now I'm debating whether or not to put another radeon HD6870 in my system.
 

Martin

Active member
Administrator
I recently got 2 more monitors to set up eyefinity with 3 monitors. I must say, it makes gaming better once you get used to it. Now I'm debating whether or not to put another radeon HD6870 in my system.

Damn, sounds like a great system you got there :)
 

Cyberman

Moderator
Moderator
panoramic view?

I've been wanting to use my Kinnect with my PC games, under linux. I saw an interesting video of Morrowind being played using a Kinnect.

So a panoramic view would be a great addition to the fun. It certainly would give you exercise if you actually had to move your feet some to move in the game. As well as move your arms to swing weapons throw rocks toss plates at unsuspecting bar maids in the game (LOL).

To get a panoramic view however in most games you would have to have a way of exporting information apart from the standard forward view you see. This way the screen doesn't move but you do (some), you can possibly add a bit of panning. Something to think about at least. If anyone has seen OBGE (oblivion graphics extender) they appear to be adding geometry tweaking etc. Under linux the entire 3d chain goes through the Wine API so technically you can modify Wine and grab more geometry than the game normally hands you.

Interesting project there I would think.

Cyb
 

smcd

Active member
Old system (2008):
Core 2 Duo E8400
abit ip35 Pro board
evga 8800 GT
2GB DDR2

New system (parts in the mail!):
Core i5 2500k
Biostar z77 chipset (taking a chance. biostar's rep has been increasing)
evga 560 ti
8GB DDR3

I'm keeping the same keyboard/mouse/monitor, case, power supply, and hard drives.
 

Flash

Technomage
Just replaced 2x250Gb, 1x80Gb and 2x500Gb HDDs with 6x2Tb drives, old ones will be a part of PC for my parents.
Also added 8Gb RAM, now it's 16 and replaced GeForce 440GT with Quadro 6000 (got it for free, had to replace heatsink and that was good for two reasons - it's why i got it for free and also i replaced it with a hybrid water-air one which is almost silent and also much more efficient and reliable than stock one).

Got 2 new and sealed (never used) Sony Artisan GDM-C520K CRT displays, and one of them is absolutely perfect. I mean perfect geometry and convergence, like LCD but also perfect colours and no ghosting or input lag.

On top of it i tried overclocking experiment and i was shocked - Phenom II X4 955BE running at 4.2GHz undervolted by 0.15v.
3 weeks 24/7 and 3 days of mprime torture test - works like charm, and usually 955BE won't go above 3.8GHz on stock voltage.

Runs fr-063 Magellan demo at 2048x1536 full speed in wine, with old video card it was less than 15 fps at 800x600.
 

Cyberman

Moderator
Moderator
I suppose I'm due for an upgrade myself. It's been 2 years at 8 gigs. So I was looking at 32gig and a 8core (wee). My problem is the HD side of things I probably should get some 3T ( I have begun buying them). I have the 2 1.5T and 2 2T from my old windows box and my 2 1.5T in this box. I have yet to fill much of it. Video card wise I was looking at a one of the ones that support OpenRL and OpenCL from Nvidia. Anyone use those yet? I was thinking of playing with real time ray tracing.

Anyone know of a decent NAS I can use a pile of 1T + drives on?

Cyb
 

smcd

Active member
Luckily, all hardware arrived and seems to be in proper working order. Installed it all and ran some video and cpu stress tests and even with a power supply 50 watts under the recommended level for the video card (using a Corsair vx450w) it runs stably. Memtest86+ found no errors after 2 passes. Will give it some more time to ensure everything is OK, but for now it looks golden :D
 

revl8er

That Damn Good
I just got a 2nd SSD drive to install some games on and I went from 8 gigs of memory to 12 even though it's not really necessary to have that much. I also sold my Soundblaster 3D sigma headset and bought a Roccat Kave headset, easily the best headset I've owned.
 

Cyberman

Moderator
Moderator
I assume you are running Win 7 with that?

Any issues with win7 and the SSD?

Do the games follow the new method of windows apps by storing game data in the <user> directory?

I noticed Oblivion followed that (and it was a godsend let me tell you).

Cyb
 
Cyb: I gotta tell you, it's a good thing that you wrote "Cyb" after your comment, no one would have know it was you otherwise. :D

Just having fun, never understood the point in doing that.
 

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