Well last week my hard disk gave up the ghost. This is the first disk I've had that has actually died, the other two just started to produce loads of bad sectors and the SMART monitor gave me warning. But there was nothing with this drive, lucky I just backup most of the important stuff.
Anyway enough of my rambling. I could just buy a new hard disk and get every thing up and running, but I just might use this as an excus to update my computer (It's 6-7 years old), and get something more up-to-date and hopefully more efficient.
Finally my question. Has anyone got any experiance of the EffcientPC.co.uk guys? I was looking at the Flexible range that they do, and was wondering if I should go with the Camulus or Isis systems. The only difference is one is Intel/nVidia and the other is AMD/ATI (respectively) any thoughts?
And finaly has AMD open sourced the ATI graphics drivers yet? I am right in thinking that they committed to that when the bought ATI, am I not?
Anyway thanks for any thoughts. Torb
On Wed, Sep 3, 2008 at 4:45 PM, Torben Stones torben@stonesweb.org.uk wrote:
Well last week my hard disk gave up the ghost. This is the first disk I've had that has actually died, the other two just started to produce loads of bad sectors and the SMART monitor gave me warning. But there was nothing with this drive, lucky I just backup most of the important stuff.
Anyway enough of my rambling. I could just buy a new hard disk and get every thing up and running, but I just might use this as an excus to update my computer (It's 6-7 years old), and get something more up-to-date and hopefully more efficient.
Finally my question. Has anyone got any experiance of the EffcientPC.co.uk guys? I was looking at the Flexible range that they do, and was wondering if I should go with the Camulus or Isis systems. The only difference is one is Intel/nVidia and the other is AMD/ATI (respectively) any thoughts?
And finaly has AMD open sourced the ATI graphics drivers yet? I am right in thinking that they committed to that when the bought ATI, am I not?
Anyway thanks for any thoughts. Torb
-- You've got a lot of choices in your life. If getting out of bed in the morning is a chore and you're not smiling on a regular basis, try another choice.
AMD/ATI didn't open the fglx drivers up but they did give out hardware info to the developers of the open drivers and anyone else that wants them. NVIDIA's closed source drivers are more stable, support more features and have better performance from the reviews I've been reading. However if you compare the open source offerings i think the ATI drivers are in a good shape (and getting better) compared to NVIDIA's open source drivers.
Although i cant see an option for NVIDIA on there flexible range, they do have some Intel graphics cards in the Camulus witch have quite mature open source driver support although performance wise I'm not sure how the cards matchup.
My next card will be AMD/ATI i think, although i don't mind closed source drivers its nice to have everything work without having to play with recompiling the kernel module every driver upgrade.
Dennis
On Wed, 2008-09-03 at 16:45 +0100, Torben Stones wrote:
Finally my question. Has anyone got any experiance of the EffcientPC.co.uk guys? I was looking at the Flexible range that they do, and was wondering if I should go with the Camulus or Isis systems. The only difference is one is Intel/nVidia and the other is AMD/ATI (respectively) any thoughts?
I looked at efficientpc before deciding to yet again build my own box from parts bought from Ebuyer. If you compare spec for spec then they work out reasonably expensive. Installing Ubuntu (which is IIRC what you get) is hardly a chore. So really all you are gaining is one point of contact if there are hardware issues...I don't know but I think efficientpc is one guy in a spare room so support would probably involve shipping the whole box back...Personally I would rather diagnose the issue myself and replace the faulty components.
I guess it all comes down to what experience you have with assembling machines. Three of us on IRC built pretty much similar boxes at the same time..Only one run into serious problems and really that was mostly due to issues with the memory he bought (OCZ) and general uselessness of his supplier.
For our business clients now, unless it is something exotic we tend to supply off the shelf machines...in terms of business the labour costs just don't stack for assembling machine for resale..however for a personal machine I think self build is a rewarding experience that gives you ultimate flexibility.
On Wed, 3 Sep 2008 16:45:10 +0100 "Torben Stones" torben@stonesweb.org.uk allegedly wrote:
Well last week my hard disk gave up the ghost. This is the first disk I've had that has actually died, the other two just started to produce loads of bad sectors and the SMART monitor gave me warning. But there was nothing with this drive, lucky I just backup most of the important stuff.
Anyway enough of my rambling. I could just buy a new hard disk and get every thing up and running, but I just might use this as an excus to update my computer (It's 6-7 years old), and get something more up-to-date and hopefully more efficient.
Torb/All
Coincidentally I have just built myself a new rig because my older Dual core Pentium 4 box (whilst still very usable) was really struggling with the video transcoding I have been doing. So I decided to invest in a Core 2 Duo and chose the E6750 as the likeliest balance of price and power to give me a boost.
I have used 121Comouters in Diss many times so I went to them to see if they could do a reasonable deal on a processor. If so I was prepared to splash out on new motherboard, case, memory, disk and DVDRW (so I could keep the older rig largely intact). They were helpful as usual but as they didn't have a new 6750 in stock, they offered me one which had been istalled in a build for a customer who changed his mind. The price was good (under £100) so I ended up buying that, plus a Gigabyte board, 4Gig of Kingston RAM, a one terabyte (OK, 1000 Gigabytes...) disk, 20x DVDRW, case and PSU all for £368.
OK, you could probably save £30-40 on that if you went to ebuyer or somewhere similar - but here is the clincher in deciding to buy locally. The support and customer care.
When I got the shiny new machine built yesterday and fired it up for the first time, the POST reported that the processor was actually an E6550, not the E6750 I wanted. So I called 121. They apologised and immediately offered to refund me £20, or supply me with a an E8400 as a replacement at no charge. Now the E8400 is a pretty damned good processor so I decided to go with that offer. But I then had a hard time removing the E6550 because one of the cooler locating pins refused to release properly. I hate forcing anything on a motherboard for fear of damage so I put the whole PC in may car and trundled back to 121. Not only did they carefully remove the old processor, but they installed a new E8400 for me whilst I waited.
You don't get service like that from ebuyer. 121 are to be congratulated and I thoroughly recommend them.
And if you don't want to build your own machine, then they will build one for you to your spec.
Mick
(Oh, and of course, I have no relationship with 121 other than as a satisfied customer.)
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The text file for RFC 854 contains exactly 854 lines. Do you think there is any cosmic significance in this?
Douglas E Comer - Internetworking with TCP/IP Volume 1
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc854.txt ---------------------------------------------------------------------
On Thu, 2008-09-04 at 11:44 +0100, mbm wrote:
But I then had a hard time removing the E6550 because one of the cooler locating pins refused to release properly.
Glad I am not the only person that doesn't get along with that Intel LGA Heatsink arrangement, it just seems a very dubious way of attachment to me. It puts a lot of stress on the PCB.
If you look underneath the PCB with the stock Intel HSF fitted you can see the PCB flexing and bowing around the CPU socket (ok so socket is the wrong word when talking about LGA). Reattachment is not recommended with the board in situ because of the more than reasonable force you have to apply to the clips to get them to snap in.
Really it needs revising with a support frame underneath the PCB and perhaps sprung screws to mount the HSF, Either that or the BTX form factor needs to get about more as that supports the HSF by the basepanel not the Mainboard. ATX machines with a reasonable size cooler are getting to the point where shipping them with the HSF attached is a dubious proposition.
On Thu, 04 Sep 2008 12:20:48 +0100 Wayne Stallwood ALUGlist@digimatic.co.uk allegedly wrote:
On Thu, 2008-09-04 at 11:44 +0100, mbm wrote:
But I then had a hard time removing the E6550 because one of the cooler locating pins refused to release properly.
Glad I am not the only person that doesn't get along with that Intel LGA Heatsink arrangement, it just seems a very dubious way of attachment to me. It puts a lot of stress on the PCB.
Agreed. I think the arrangement is pretty dumb too. In the last couple of builds I have tried to install the CPU and heat sink to the board outside the case (with the board resting on a piece of foam on a hard surface). But this makes installing the board into the case tricky because the heat sink and fan then get in the way.
And I just /hate/ removing the damned things. Seeing a motherboard flex gives me nightmares.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
The text file for RFC 854 contains exactly 854 lines. Do you think there is any cosmic significance in this?
Douglas E Comer - Internetworking with TCP/IP Volume 1
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc854.txt ---------------------------------------------------------------------
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Dennis Dryden -
mbm -
Torben Stones -
Wayne Stallwood