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What hardware are you going to buy in 2010?

veK

By veK
in Technical Issues, News, & Reviews

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Mahdi

Mahdi

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Interesting Gruntlord - unfortunately I still ahve two years left on my contract before I can even consider switching providers. Additionally, Rogers and Bell have bandwidth caps - xplornet does not. That's a huge thing for me, since I work from home, do a lot of uploading and downloading, and also watch the majority of my TV online.

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Mahdi

Mahdi

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Got a new laptop from work yesterday - HP Pavilion dv7-4057ca. It is fantastic so far, although having some troubles with the bluetooth connection to my blackberry. I'm also not sure why 7 is supposed to be mroe user friendly than 7 - so far I'm having some difficulty doing simply things in 7. Fingerprint login is cool, though.

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Andrew

Andrew

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That's a monster of a laptop. 6gb ram!

ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5470 switchable graphics with 512MB DDR3, up to 3226MB total graphics memory

And a recent ati vid card. I was thinking of putting one of those 5xxx models in my new computer build I am looking to buy.

Make sure to get rid of all the crapware preinstalled so you can enjoy the speed. And do backup disk of your install (need 3-4 or so DVD)! It should be nagging you to do that now.

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gryphon

gryphon

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I'm also not sure why 7 is supposed to be mroe user friendly than 7 - so far I'm having some difficulty doing simply things in 7.

Give it the benefit of the doubt and see if you get used to it in a couple of weeks. :-)

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veK

veK

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I might finally build a new gaming pc soon. Don't know if it will be by the end of this year or maybe in january. I'm tempted to go for the OCZ RevoDrive (maybe X2) which seems to be a performance beast. Unfortunately it's pretty expensive but I was planning for a SSD and this might be worth the additional costs. I'm not sure yet. Looking forward to finally being able to play on a PC again after 2 years of absence and only playing on consoles. I'm really excited to play Mass Effect on the PC after I played through the second game on Xbox over 10 times already and with more hotkeys and mouse-aim I can own even more on the PC. I'm also excited to play some Starcraft 2.

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veK

veK

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I'd like to go with 240GB because I plan to use it for the OS and also all the game installations and I'd like to have some games installed permanently. The price is killing me though on a 240GB drive. Maybe I'll settle for the standard RevoDrive instead of the X2 version. It's still a lot faster than the usual SATA SSDs.

OCZ Vertex 2, 3,5" 240 GB: 285MB/s - 275 MB/s - ~380€

OCZ Vertex 2 Extended, 2,5", 240 GB: 285MB/s - 275 MB/s - ~430€

OCZ RevoDrive, 240GB: 540MB/s - 490MB/s - ~440€

OCZ RevoDrive X2, 240GB: 740MB/s - 720MB/s - ~540€

The price difference between the Vertex and the RevoDrive is marginal. But another 100€ difference between the standard version and the newer X2 version is really bad. I'll have to see how much money I can spend, maybe I'll settle for 120GB in the end due to prices because 400-450€ is a lot of money for just one fast piece of hardware. I can buy a good CPU, RAM, mainboard and the PSU for that same amount of money.

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Gruntlord6

Gruntlord6

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Interesting Gruntlord - unfortunately I still ahve two years left on my contract before I can even consider switching providers. Additionally, Rogers and Bell have bandwidth caps - xplornet does not. That's a huge thing for me, since I work from home, do a lot of uploading and downloading, and also watch the majority of my TV online.

At the end it says they are also doing it.
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veK

veK

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After doing some more research I decided against the OCZ RevoDrive. I'm neither buying the original nor the X2 version. I've read some professional reviews and opinions, pros and cons vary a lot but in the end I trust the two most important ones (to me because I've been a member of those sites/forums for years and know they make good tests and know what they are doing) which both pointed out some negative aspects. So now I'm pretty sure I'll get a Crucial RealSSD C300 (http://www.crucial.com/store/partspecs.aspx?IMODULE=CTFDDAC128MAG-1G1) which is a really great and very fast SSD. As I'm going for new hardware I can get a mainboard with SATA 6Gbs so I can use the full potential of that SSD. Right now I'm also leaning more towards the 128GB (although the 256GB also has faster write speed) just due to prices. I guess I can have some software and games installed and occasionally make space for something new and put the money I saved into a better videocard, CPU or RAM.

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  • 3 weeks later...
Gruntlord6

Gruntlord6

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Bought my new computer, put it together. fubar my old computer (forgot to backup 1 important file :(), fixing now. Installed ubuntu 10.10 on my 2x60gb in RAID.

Nice, my new PC is almost done.

Antec six hundred case

Amd Phenom II X4 965

Ultra Power 550W PSU

Western Digital Caviar Black WD1002FAEX 1TB

Gigabyte 9600GSO, but im changing it for a gtx460 later

G.SKILL Ripjaws Series DDR3 1333MHz (PC3-10666) 4GB (2x2GB)

Asus M4A88TD-M

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Gruntlord6

Gruntlord6

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I installed winxp on old computer. got that up to date.

New computer now has win7. It didn't like RAID, so only installed to one ssd, but other SSD is available to install stuff to (games etc). Crossing my fingers nothing else goes wrong.

I thought raid was for mechanical drives?

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Andrew

Andrew

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I was trying to make RAID0 for speed (worked for ubuntu). Win7 didn't like it (I think needed motherboard RAID drivers which at the time I didn't understand) and I was getting frustrated, so I got rid of RAID0 and just have both SSD setup as normal sata connections. win7+apps+other stuff installed on one SSD, currently other ssd has no data on it. So I still got 2x60gb SSD in computer that will be used, just not in RAID at the moment (and probably won't until I format much later).

RAID is software I think. Whatever gigabyte motherboard offers.

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gryphon

gryphon

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Quickly looking at the specs of your motherboard it seems like software RAID. If you have hardware RAID it will show up as pre-boot option. Press F8 or something for the RAID configuration.

Software RAID is good for only one thing. And that has nothing to do with your computer.

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Gruntlord6

Gruntlord6

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Software RAID is usually CRAP. You could add a SWAP partition on second SSD for Linux or a SWAP file for Winloose.

Hardware raid is expensive though, and if implemented well it can function good for a home user.

Its almost never done well though, and anything more then home use cant even begin to think of using soft raid for any purpose.

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Andrew

Andrew

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lulz, the backups I made of old computer apparently did not go through to 1tb hdd and usb stick (using grsync+ubuntu 10.10). No idea why, it said everything worked fine, and I assumed it did work as it took a while to sync up. So now to find paper trail of bank receipts and mail letters.

Worst computer upgrade ever from a backup and transfer perspective, since everything failed. :P

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Gruntlord6

Gruntlord6

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lulz, the backups I made of old computer apparently did not go through to 1tb hdd and usb stick (using grsync+ubuntu 10.10). No idea why, it said everything worked fine, and I assumed it did work as it took a while to sync up. So now to find paper trail of bank receipts and mail letters.

Worst computer upgrade ever from a backup and transfer perspective, since everything failed. :P

maybe it was the computer?

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Andrew

Andrew

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maybe it was the computer?

Nope, computer works perfectly. My best guess is that using grsync, I accidentally had my backup copy(overwrite!) to my real files (at first). Then backing up the outdated files was pointless. grsync GUI in ubuntu 10.10 is different than what I was using in ubuntu 9.10

Looking at another hard drive. Probably 1tb caviar black for $80 free shipping.

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