My Computer / Build Log

[KingCub]

[quote="juhouh"]Even those RAM sticks looks so "1337", only hard drives are normal [/quote]
Haha, its not that hard to get good looking RAM these days! Especially with the price of RAM being so cheap.

[quote="DGFone"]^... Unless you use solid state drives, in which case even the old hard disk drive is very old school, and your new SSD is '1337'

But the windows update is what catches my eye the most. Good thing Linux can update itself while you are logged in and using the OS.[/quote]
I love the look of the newer SSD's, its not long before the older style HDD drivers are fully replaced!

Windows does that normally also, just not on the first shutdown for getting the main drivers installed

[DGFone]

^ I don't know about the HDD vs SSD because while newer SSDs are getting better and cheaper, they still have the Achilles's heal of that they have a severely limited rewriting capability compared to traditional HDDs, so when SSDs will completely replace them? I don't actually really know.

[Kiburi]

[quote="KingCub"][quote="juhouh"]Even those RAM sticks looks so "1337", only hard drives are normal [/quote]
Haha, its not that hard to get good looking RAM these days! Especially with the price of RAM being so cheap.
[/quote]

I didn't find this the case with RAM when I bought it for my build about 3 weeks ago. I think RAM prices have gone up a bit in fact. I paid $85 for 8gb (2x4) of low profile RAM. Wouldn't call that "so cheap".

[KingCub]

[quote="DGFone"]^ I don't know about the HDD vs SSD because while newer SSDs are getting better and cheaper, they still have the Achilles's heal of that they have a severely limited rewriting capability compared to traditional HDDs, so when SSDs will completely replace them? I don't actually really know.[/quote]
Thats true. But also one thing to remember, SSD's are still considered a new technology in the PC world, so I think that there still is a lot of work to be done with them, and I hope it will all be good work! First I think will be larger sizes (I think Intel is already working on a 4TB model) then more speed fixes, like you said. But agreeing with you, Im not sure how long or even if this switch will happen!

[quote="Kiburi"]
I didn't find this the case with RAM when I bought it for my build about 3 weeks ago. I think RAM prices have gone up a bit in fact. I paid $85 for 8gb (2x4) of low profile RAM. Wouldn't call that "so cheap". [/quote]
Thats one of the neat/bad things about RAM! The prices are always changing, wither that be dropping or raising, there always different. When I first got those sticks, they 65$ and I bought them at around 57$ with a coupon. Now the same stick is at about 80$-90$! Just depending on when you get them!

[KingCub]

Alright, next on my list of overclocking is the RAM. Now, before you say everything about how overclocking your RAM has a very little effect on performance, I know. I'm mostly doing it just for the sure fun of it, and its a nice little challenge for myself. And also I have seen a bit of improvement in terms of performance during my testing.

Alright!! So before I start, might let you know that there are not any pics. First off, its pretty boring. Literally took me a few hours and nothing really changed in terms of settings. And second, it was all done in the BIOS, so no screen shots there!

Here we go! First thing to note is starting settings. Timings, speed, voltage, things like that. Unfortunately I'm a fool and forgot to write down all of the settings. But I do know, the core settings was at 1600mhz, typical RAM speed. First thing was first. I bumped the clock speed up by two, getting it to 1650 I believe. Nothing really changed. After the first boot, all was good.

So next up was 1700 speed. First boot, nothing. Now, here is the bad thing about RAM. When RAM does not want to work, nothing wants to work. So if you have a bad RAM setting, be expecting a short boot, then a crash, followed by another boot into the BIOS. There you will only find out that all of the BIOS settings have been all switched back to default settings. Luckily, I have a MB that offers BIOS saving, so I was able to restore a save pretty quickly. But its still no fun! So after all that was fixed, it was just time to kick up some voltage into her. After that, all was working.

Next up was 1750, and that was all good. Then came 1800. This is where things get tricky. Once the computer did boot up, it crashed with a error message. Basically saying that the timings where off. Great. If there is anything that I hate, its messing around with RAM timings. Just a lot of work and a slim chance of things working if you don't 100% know what your doing. And trust me, I don't know 100% what I'm doing!

So times. Like I said, I forgot the original times of the RAM, but it was a while before I got something stable. Finally I found that 11-11-11-28 was working pretty good for me. Along with a little voltage bump everything was running well in the stress test (Prime95 on Blend setting).

Next up was the jump up to 2000. After a first boot fail, a tweak to the voltage and lots of time playing around with the timings, nothing. I could not get anything to hold a stress test. So I finally gave up and just went back down to 1800. After about 12 hours in the test, I though everything was good.

So, Final settings~ 1800mhz in speed, 11-11-11-28 timings!

[Kiburi]

May I suggest that you change your timings to 10-10-10-28?
Lower CAS latencies are faster, and according to THIS, which appears to be the same RAM you have, your timings should be set at 10-10-10.

[KingCub]

[quote="Kiburi"]May I suggest that you change your timings to 10-10-10-28?
Lower CAS latencies are faster, and according to THIS, which appears to be the same RAM you have, your timings should be set at 10-10-10. [/quote]
Surprisingly, for some reason my RAM came at a higher timings setting then what I have it set to now! I have no idea why it would have done that, my guess is that my MB auto set the timings based on other things before I overclocked it.

But I will certainly try a 10-10-10-28 setting soon! I tried a 9-10-9-26 or something like that I while back also, and that was a no go.

[KingCub]

Hmm, it's been a while...I should probably post an update!
In the past few months, not a lot has changed (been a little too busy to stay focused on it) but a few things have been upgraded!

First off, I finally got around to Overclocking my GPU, and that seems to be running stable, while still on air cooling. (Details in a later post)

Second big thing, was the introduction to a new HDD, just for more room. This was another 500GB WD drive, picked up from a local store. I would have gone up to a full TB, but 500 was all they had. In the end, this drive became partitioned into a 325/170 GB split, for the reason below.

The last big came with (what I though was going to be) the selling of my MacBook Pro. Because I would not longer have Macintosh to run needed software, the only other option was to set this computer up as a dual boot. I'm not going to post too much info on the installation, just note that it required a lot of messing around with drivers and Google searches

I would be more then happy to post how I did this if anybody is interested!!

Anyways, here is just a pictore of the OSX Mavericks running on my device~

(For some reason, OSX will not read CPU OC's above 4.3)

Thanks, and feel free to ask anything!
Have a lovely day

[Regulus]

I see your computer, but when are you going to post the log that you built?

[KingCub]

[quote="Regulus"]I see your computer, but when are you going to post the log that you built?[/quote]
Oh sorry!! Aseed mobo, GtreeX 750, CorsAIR 800w PSU. Good stuff in here!

[spoiler][/spoiler]