the Geeky PC thread, building a Media PC similar?

bluechair84

rubins4 wrote:

Just for reference, I'm running a bottom end Cambridge audio stereo amp with B&W speakers off the intergrated audio card and it works fine for everyday use

I've just picked up a bottom end Cambridge + some small but decent Wharfdales. The difference in quality over my old PC speakers / TV speakers is simply stunning

I'm looking to keep using my soundcard though as if I move house this year (fingers crossed) I'll upgrade to a full 5.1 AVR which can utlise the potential of the Asus.

bluechair84

yeehaamcgee wrote:

Back in the Athlon 64 days, AMD (sort of) did away with the idea of a "front side bus", and used their "Direct Connect architecture.
This means that the motherboard effectively runs at the same speed as the processor. Things don't have to share time on a bus, because they're connected (more) directly.

If I was to upgrade mobo and CPU, would a second hand athlon chipset be worthwhile then?

Or would it be better just to sell the completed project and start afresh with modern architecture?

Anonymous

bluechair84 wrote:

yeehaamcgee wrote:

Back in the Athlon 64 days, AMD (sort of) did away with the idea of a "front side bus", and used their "Direct Connect architecture.
This means that the motherboard effectively runs at the same speed as the processor. Things don't have to share time on a bus, because they're connected (more) directly.

If I was to upgrade mobo and CPU, would a second hand athlon chipset be worthwhile then?

Or would it be better just to sell the completed project and start afresh with modern architecture?

Well, everything AMD-based, since the Athlon 64s has basically had the same architecture, but that's not a bad thing.
But, the greater raw power of intel processors means that they are better at pure number crunching, non time-critical tasks.
Intel also have the upper hand on ultra low power consumption processors that are still actually usable from day to day. Handy if you want a super quiet machine - and the only viable option in a laptop right now.

Basically, both are good options these days, and unless you're building a machine for a specific workstation use, then it all comes down to whatever you can afford.

I just wanted to point out that bus speed is not as much of an issue as people make out.
Especially when playing BD films, since the graphics card actually does (or should do) the workload, not the CPU.

nicklouse

and my Graphics card is a ATI Radeon HD 5670

http://www.gigabyte.com/products/produc ... id=3312#ov

bluechair84

yeehaamcgee wrote:

Especially when playing BD films, since the graphics card actually does (or should do) the workload, not the CPU.

That's interesting, I think my GPU is decent. It's pretty at least. I was wondering if my htpc would take a BD drive one day and assumed my CPU would be found in a ditch with it's head on backwards because of the abuse handed out by the drive...

Anonymous

Hell no. It's a lot of repetitive same-task number crunching, but the actual bandwidth of a BD film is nothing, really.
The problem is that CPUs just don't deal very well with that kind of processing, but graphics cards excel at it. A modern graphics card, as long as it CAN decode bluray (most released in the last 3-4 years should do) will not even be breaking a sweat.
Basically all the CPU is doing, is passing on a maximum of 40megabits (5megabytes) per second of data to the graphics card, which does all the heavy lifting.
When playing games, the amount of work the system has to do can involve over a hundred times as much data - so as long as all the right drivers for the graphics card are in place, and as long as the playback software is anywhere near decent, it's not somethng that any modern-ish PC should struggle with.

The whole decoding process and various codecs is still somewhat of a mystery to me. Our video dude has confuzzled the crap out of me on that issue, but the technical I.T. side of it is pretty straightforward.

nicklouse

so wondering what is going on with mine.. is there something that can be downloaded and run to "see" what may be wrong? if there is could you like it. just so i dont cause more probs with a crap DL.

Anonymous

nicklouse wrote:

so wondering what is going on with mine.. is there something that can be downloaded and run to "see" what may be wrong? if there is could you like it. just so i dont cause more probs with a crap DL.

In what respect "see what could be wrong?"
As far as I know there is no single complete diagnostic scanner for computers. But there are various specialist tools.
The variance of hardware and possible source of problems just seems a bit too large to be able to scan and find out what's wrong, unfortunately.

Raymondavalon

Here's my "PC"

It's actually a workstation and a somewhat beefy one at that..
Mainly used as a BSD Server that contains all my photos, manuals (PDF), videos and ISOs
I also use it for gaming thanks to the convenience of the hot swap bay

Intel SC 5275-E Chassis with 6 disk hot SAS/SATA hot swap bay
Dual Xeon 5345, 3GHz, Quad Core, 8MB Cache
8 x 4GB RAM = 32GB
8 x SATA-2 ports and 1 x IDE on board
On board sound
8 x USB2 ports, convenient
Dual Gigabit Ethernet with Traffic Offload
ATI Radeon 3950 1GB Dual DVI GFX PCIe 16x
250GB Seagate Barracuda Gentoo Linux boot
500GB Seagate Barracuda FreeBSD Boot
2 x 2TB Seagate Barracuda data store
1 x WD 750GB Unassigned
1 x WD80GB XP boot :oops:

Total cost: £0.00, yes, zero, zilch, free
Built from Intel demo stock and other assorted freebies come samples

POIDH with this Thread in the background..



The innards with the memory cooling duct removed and the hot swap bay moved forward

nicklouse

:oops: :oops: :oops:

Anonymous

Raymondavalon wrote:

Here's my "PC"

It's actually a workstation and a somewhat beefy one at that..

That's one hell of a workstation. What do you use it for?

Raymondavalon

yeehaamcgee wrote:

That's one hell of a workstation. What do you use it for?

Ashamedly, not much at all.. if it get's powered on once a week it's a lot
Usage? As below:

Raymondavalon wrote:

Mainly used as a BSD Server that contains all my photos, manuals (PDF), videos and ISOs
I also use it for gaming thanks to the convenience of the hot swap bay

nicklouse

PS the Blu Ray Drive works fine now.

Anonymous

I read about you using it as a bad server for photos and stuff, ray, but it strikes me as being completely overkill for that, as well as bad being an odd choice for something like that. I kinda guessed you did some film work or something on it.

Raymondavalon

No such luck that I could ever use it in anger that way
It was a freebie, all the parts were sample/eval stock laying around in the R&D division.
Sure it's overkill but I am certainly not going to outgrow it in a hurry

Anonymous

Sorry, that should have read BSD being an odd choice for that purpose!

bluechair84

:twisted: Did someone change the my thread title!?

Ray - 64GB for ram???? WTF?

Raymondavalon

bluechair84 wrote:

:twisted: Did someone change the my thread title!?

Ray - 64GB for ram???? WTF?

Oops, error there, 8 x 4 = 32GB

That's lightweight, it can take more for those who can afford 16GB modules, taking the beast up to an astounding 128GB

Anonymous

Raymondavalon wrote:

bluechair84 wrote:

:twisted: Did someone change the my thread title!?

Ray - 64GB for ram???? WTF?

Oops, error there, 8 x 4 = 32GB

That's lightweight, it can take more for those who can afford 16GB modules, taking the beast up to an astounding 128GB

I looked into how much it would cost to fill all the slots on our server with 16G modules once. I can't remember the exact value, but it was in the several thousands of pounds :shock:
The server board is basically two processors sockets, two PCI-e slots, and the rest is covered in ram slots. Looks really odd, especially since there's only 4 of them used

nicklouse

bluechair84 wrote:

:twisted: Did someone change the my thread title!?

yes

so here is the reason why I was having playback issues, if anyone has any ideas why it would be so please explain. To me is just seems to be poor software.

After the first BD drive was playing back poorly with 3Gb of memory I upped it to 6Gb. no change in playback. new BD drive and worse performance.
Back to Sweden try again make sure everything is updated and correct. no change.

buy a new BD drive plays the same as the first one (tis the same model) but the LG that did not play worked fine in my other PC (standard not touched intel quad core.....)

But when looking at its memory I noticed that the 6Gb were 2Gb/2Gb and 1Gb/1Gb.
when running a check on my media PC I notice that slots 1 and 2 were 1Gb and slots 3 and 4 were 2Gb. a Quick change to 2Gb in slots 1 and 2 and 1Gb in 3/4 and the PC plays the discs back fine.

Why? the position of the paired Memory should not make any difference?

64 bit and windows 7

thoughts?

Anonymous

It's quite common to see motherboards with slots 1&3 and slots 2&4 paired. Also, it's common to see other boards with slots 1&2 and 3&4 paired. Using dissimilar memory in these slots can cause the RAM throughput to halve. This often has a knock on effect on the front side buss, which also has a knock on effect on other system busses, depending on the exact architecture and/or how the other buses derive their clock speeds.

In your case it seems the memory clock was knocked down, and this affected whatever buss your BD drive was connected to.

nicklouse

the memory was put in the paired slots was the same.

just remembered it was one 2Gb to start with to which i added another (different make same spec 2Gb) and two 1Gb (same spec same make cards) all were the same speed.

the memory is now the same paired the same way but now works as it is in a different set of slots.

very odd.

bluechair84

nicklouse wrote:

bluechair84 wrote:

:twisted: Did someone change the my thread title!?

yes

Well, now at least I can post a picture of my (grand)motherboard without any denail as to my social status!

Anonymous

nicklouse wrote:

the memory was put in the paired slots was the same.

just remembered it was one 2Gb to start with to which i added another (different make same spec 2Gb) and two 1Gb (same spec same make cards) all were the same speed.

the memory is now the same paired the same way but now works as it is in a different set of slots.

very odd.

That's very strange then, sounds like just some strange configuration anomaly.
Some of the intel i7 boards had some peculiar compatibility issues which had us scratching our heads for ages. Turns out that using a PCI eexpress card in the topmost PCI express slot could potentially cause system lockups. The funny thing is, the exact same configuration would work on some motherboards, and not on others, making it very hard to track down.
Identical systems, problems with one, no problems on the other. Very strange, and enough to convince me that the next 'puter I build myself will not use intel chipsets.

Raymondavalon

Yehaa,

I think you need to point the issue with the board manufacturer and not the chipset.
Looks at the genuine Intel System Builder boards, they run 5-10% slower than the top Taiwanese equivalents in benchmarks and the System Builder board BIOSes are very locked down, but OMG they just work.
Often enough it's the little tweaks in the BIOS and on the compnentry (PCIe buffer sizes etc..) that can cause these niggling issues.

Anonymous

Raymondavalon wrote:

Yehaa,

I think you need to point the issue with the board manufacturer and not the chipset.

Ok, all the boards we have are Asus. But we worked with a software company to try to identify the fault, who had access to a pretty damned large sample pool. They found it was present on boards from any manufacturers, as long as they had an intel chipset.
But, like I said, not every single board, it was a very hit and miss error. You could take a handful of identical boards, and the fault was present on some, and not on others.

bluechair84

The grandmotherboard:

As you can see - the soundcard is rather close to the GPU fan.

Anyway, I've a problem now. I power up the system, it thinks for a bit, beeps twice in quick succession, then shuts down. I can't find what bios it has but from deduction I think it is a phoenix so the code might be a Ram problem. So I reseated the ram, changed nothing. I hadn't powered up the system for at least 6months prior to starting working on it again. Any ideas before I take to a computer shop this afternoon?

MountainMonster

Raymondavalon wrote:

Here's my "PC"

It's actually a workstation and a somewhat beefy one at that..
Mainly used as a BSD Server that contains all my photos, manuals (PDF), videos and ISOs
I also use it for gaming thanks to the convenience of the hot swap bay

Intel SC 5275-E Chassis with 6 disk hot SAS/SATA hot swap bay
Dual Xeon 5345, 3GHz, Quad Core, 8MB Cache
8 x 4GB RAM = 32GB
8 x SATA-2 ports and 1 x IDE on board
On board sound
8 x USB2 ports, convenient
ATI Radeon 3950 1GB Dual DVI GFX PCIe 16x
250GB Seagate Barracuda Gentoo Linux boot
500GB Seagate Barracuda FreeBSD Boot
2 x 2TB Seagate Barracuda data store
1 x WD 750GB Unassigned
1 x WD80GB XP boot :oops:

Total cost: £0.00, yes, zero, zilch, free
Built from Intel demo stock and other assorted freebies come samples

POIDH with this Thread in the background..



The innards with the memory cooling duct removed and the hot swap bay moved forward

Dude that is some amazing spec for a computer. All you need now is an amazing case for it, sell it to me for, let's say 50 pound, and it's a done deal.

I've still got my computer from 4 years ago, with 2gb ram, and nothing much else. Does the job for what I need it for, although I am considering upgrading to a bit better PC eventually.

Raymondavalon

MountainMonster wrote:

Dude that is some amazing spec for a computer. All you need now is an amazing case for it, sell it to me for, let's say 50 pound, and it's a done deal.

I've still got my computer from 4 years ago, with 2gb ram, and nothing much else. Does the job for what I need it for, although I am considering upgrading to a bit better PC eventually.

£50? LMFAO! That's about what I'd get for it on Ebay
The chassis is perfect for it due to the hot swap bay & two USB ports up front and tons of I/O on the rear, as in 6 x USB, 2 x GB Ethernet & RS232 Port so I'd never, ever find a 3rd party chassis to accommodate all that.
One thing I can say is that it's noisy, especially on power on boot when the BMC makes the cooling fan spin flat out doing an SDR self test.
Once running it's certainly noisier than any single processor machine would be, but it doesn't live on the desk, it sites on the floor to one side, so no bother at all

bluechair84

Right; mega happy now. HTPC is working, sharing folders set over the network, it's attached to the new Cambridge amp from the other thread and Speakers. All my digital media can now be accessed through the TV and amp, as well as DVDs and Playstation. All media can be moved around the network to our various laptops too. Eventually I'll stick a dual freeview tuner in there to finish the job as a PVR but we don't watch a load of TV and besides which, everything we're interested in can be picked up from SeeSaw on the HTPC anyway.

Immensely happy! Thanks to all the advice on the various threads over the last few weeks.