Finally got a new rig!

[Gollum]

Heya everybody, its been a while since I was active in our little folding club! After what seems like an eternal delay, I've finally built myself a new rig last month (about damn time, I've built several systems for friends over the past years, every single one being far superior to what I had, got kinda annoyig toward the end!) and am now folding again, wohoo! My first new WU should be done in a little while... :grin:

Here's the specs:
Arctic Cooling Silentium T2 case
ASRock 939Dual-SATAII motherboard
Athlon64 3000+ Venice CPU (stock cooler)
1GB DDR400 (2x512MB MDT CL2,5 in Dual-Channel Mode) RAM
Gigabyte Radeon X800 XL 256MB Silent-Pipe PCIe
Samsung SP2504C 250GB SATAII HDD
Samsung SP1203N 120GB IDE HDD (from old rig)
NEC ND-1100A DVD+RW Drive (from old rig)

I tried to build the cheapest rig I could (short on cash, but a hardware failure in my old rig forced me to update), while not sacrificing features or performance and keeping upgradability in mind. I should be able to get a pretty substantial performance increase once the Dual-Core A64s become more affordable (and widely used). The rig's pretty quiet too, despite the default CPU fan and all.

Its a pretty sweet MB for the price though IMO, really the best price/performance ratio by far and it offers great flexibility (if my old R9700 hadn't had some overheating problems lately I might have kept it, the MB offers both AGP and PCIe slots). I had some sound-related stability problems this weekend with FEAR (haven't had a single crash before that the entire month) and while trying to fix the problem it actually became worse (lots of BSOD crashes, first only in FEAR, then in all games), but a BIOS upgrade solved the problem and everything's peachy now.

I've got WinXP with SP2 installed right now, anybody got any experience with the 64bit edition of XP to share? Is it worth the upgrade, like would it increase folding performance by chance (is there a 64bit client)? Could I dual-boot with regular XP (there are no 64bit drivers for the hardware dongle some of my graphics software requires)?

[Monty]

ive got a dual boot with xp and the 64bit one, all you have to do is install them on different partitions and everything is ok.

though for folding there is no difference as there isnt a 64bit client (and apparently wont be for a long time as 64bit doesnt have any or very small benefit for folding) , but the 32bit client version works with windows 64bit.

one thing ive noticed with 64bit os is just overall speed, everything loads faster, especially folders with a lot of files in it, i use to sit there about a min whilst windows 32 loads it up, but with 64 its just instant. same with windows starting, and after closing games, none of that wait a min before i can use my pc - so im happy with it up to now, cant wait until more things are moved to 64bits.

[Gollum]

Cool, sounds good! How's the driver support, security and stability, anything I should be aware of?

[Monty]

drivers support is actually pretty good for the stuff i do, gaming, encoding, watching videos, lisening to music.

codecs, such as xvid and ac3 all work for me, theres 64bit ati drivers, asrock have 64bit drivers as well.

the only thing im waiting for support with is a 64bit virtual drive, such as daemon tools (hopefully out by the end of the month :razz: )

as for security settings, same stuff as xp sp2, may be better as its based of server 2003 (not sure what the difference is though)

stability, my oc'ed 3000+ needs abit more voltage to run under a 64bit os for the same speed on a 32bit os, apart from that its rock solid, hasnt bombed on me yet since i upped the voltage.

good site here (http://www.3dvelocity.com/articles/win64compatibility/win64softlist.htm) for compatibility of software on windows 64bit

[digitalwanderer]

Congrats Gollum, looks like your new rig is pretty similar to mine....me thinks you're gonna love it!

Thanks for the dual boot info Monty, I've been wanting to play around with XP64 but didn't know I could just set up a dual boot. :)

[Gollum]

Thanks digi, I'm liking it already. Playing fear right now and it performs very well with quite high quality settings. The game is very cool, really love the intense firefights and style of the game.

Monty, thanks for the feedback, I'm prolly gonna give it a shot then, sounds like it should be able to handle most of my demands besides the frickin' parallel dongle. ;)