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Originally Posted by PowerStream
Okay I guess that makes sense. I just haven't seen and external cooling systems.
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Some times things are cramped enough you don't want to further restrict air slow, so you might want to move the cooling reservoir outside the case - those would allow for the plumbing.
My Deviant Art page link-link
CoH/V Fan Videos
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Several great sales going right now Fox I don't know what lists you are on but many sites you don't even have to be a preferred customer to get on their deals list (it helps though as you can sometimes get first crack at stuff before the "public" see's it) ...sign up for a few. A casual search of my lists turned up 32" 1080p under $400 and 40" around $550. Don't know what you are looking to spend and I don't have time to go digging further but the deals are there. I just snagged a 28" 1080p for myself last week that was half price for myself (1 day sale... sold out in a few hours).|
Originally Posted by the_fox_Rox
I run 1440x900 too! Although i'm trying to find something in the 30" range that'll do full 1080p, but those are expensive...and i'll need a bigger desk. I think a 22" screen is the biggest screen i can fit on it. however, as a TV replacement which i'm also considering a 32-40 would be hella awesome. I totally drifted here...sorry.
here is a external LC kit. http://www.frozencpu.com/products/88...html?tl=g30c83 I think thermaltake used to have a big external radiator (like 3ft tall) but surprisingly that wasn't very popular so it looks like they stopped making it, i can't find it anywhere. |
The reason you can't find the huge external cooling tower under thermaltake (if I am thinking of the same one you are) is cus it's made by Zalman... it's called the Reserator as in part reservoir and part radiator... it was fanless and totally silent.
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Originally Posted by Manny
This is shaping up to be a dream rig for sure, great work CR, I like what I see so far. Thanks again to you and Pyro for sharing this with us, I have enjoyed the trip and the knowledge you have shared with us. I don't know much about building computers and their parts so following this has taught me a lot. Makes me want a custom computer badly so I can reap the benefits of the upcoming graphics upgrade.
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Originally Posted by The_Foo
I'd like to know what kind of price range this thing is in the end, just so I know how broke and how far from affording something like this I actually am.
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Several of the parts (exact part names and even pictures) are already in the thread so someone ambitious enough could come up with a pretty good number on their own. For my part I usually charge $35 -$50 per hour for my time but I do also have flat rate builds and occasionally sales.
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Originally Posted by Blood_Wolffe
Just thought I'd chime in with an update on my pc... I got a deal on a 40 inch 1080p tv, and am going to be using that. Hah! The only problem is it will be about three feet from my face. Aaw. We'll see how it works out. I'm pretty excited.
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P.S. Nice butt grab in the Hot pencil thread lol.
Some light reading to keep ya busy... there were no less than 15 manuals that came with the system ranging from 8 page booklets to a 131 page motherboard manual... a lot of it I know already and am well versed in the processes described within but there is a bunch of new tech with this build that I did have to read up on... good thing I trained myself in speed-reading a few years back. 
Bonus: the top manual actually mentions a pc Simplified on it's cover hahaha.
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Yup, a price range is all I was looking for, not exact.
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Originally Posted by ChristopherRobin
Well I don't give out what customers paid for their systems but I would be willing at the end to put up a "what it's worth retail" if that helps ya Foo.
Several of the parts (exact part names and even pictures) are already in the thread so someone ambitious enough could come up with a pretty good number on their own. For my part I usually charge $35 -$50 per hour for my time but I do also have flat rate builds and occasionally sales. |
Speaking of new tech (and one of the things I said "more on that later" about) when I was speaking with Arcanaville about fastloading of the game zones I mentioned there were two new things that may impact the possibility of "insta-loads", this is the 2nd.
It's called LAN "teaming."
Typical Broadband connection on my (albeit optimized) gaming pc.
Same internet connection on Pyro's PC using both LanPorts... 
I wasn't able to use it (no network access) because my router doesn't support the
protocol needed (drat!) but there it is.
Teaming or Link Aggregation is nothing new servers and data centers use it all the time rather than upgrade to a whole new setup they just aggregate and add on to their existing one to keep up until it's no longer viable, but it's not something you see in the home market or for gaming much. Nvidia released a few chipsets a while back that supported the feature but I never got to try one. Supposedly the you join two connections into one superfast double speed connection and if there is lag or any delay due to packet loss on one connection the other picks up the slack and compensates. Looks awesome on paper but not sure what effect it will have as I cannot test it with my current setup. Anyone else have it or have tried it before?
Quick update: Anyone who looked at the last pic could see the Windows 7 manual... yes it finally arrived late Tuesday after I closed up shop for the day but I got the OS installed first thing this morning then proceeded to get all the drivers hotfixes and patches followed by a few "hey there is no driver support for x that's made for Win7 yet it's too new" and sadly a few of my goto apps don't work with 64bit Win7 yet either. So I hunted for alternatives and emailed a few companies to see if what could be done to keep busy while the system is being put through it's paces and I get things ready for shipping. I'll load up the game in a bit and see how that performs in a bit and give another update then. It's almost there...
Note: a few of my burn-in utilities are low level and self contained meaning they run outside of and have no
need for windows and those are long done I'll see if I can get some more teaser pics up in a bit.
My early impressions of the build though are...
MINE! CANT HAAVE IT! CANNOT TAKE MY PRECISOUSSSS... err I mean, damn maybe it's time I upgrade my other machines.
Plus I think I caught my DragonPC giving Pyro's box the evil eye from across the room... {>. >}___{< .<}
P.S. Hey Foo what game is that "Engrish" from in your sig... looks like an 8 bit nintendo wrestling game... muscle? tag team wrestling? acme?
CR I didn't know you liked Engrish. I lurve it.
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You mean like... Ra Ra Ra, Ra Ra, Ra Raaaaah. |
Originally Posted by GeneralKnowledge
CR I didn't know you liked Engrish. I lurve it.
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Originally Posted by The_Foo
Whoa, 2560 wide. Mine's only 1440. Daaaamn. I think my videocard would collapse in on itself and disappear if it tried to run anything a that rez!
Anyway, when you manually put the breaks in, the forum wraps the lines around and then wherever you put a break, it adds another. So it ends up looking like this: I will give it until Monday evening to arrive and if it's not here I will drive out and pick it up. Can't use a 32bit one for Pyro's rig as he has waaay more than the 3.5GB cumulative of total memory in his computer addressable by a 32bit OS. Anything more than 4GB would be going to waste so make note of that anyone building/buying /ordering a PC built if you have more than 3.5GB total (including the memory that comes on your Videocard) in your system make sure you get a 64bit operating system or you are needlessly bottlenecking yourself. Probably easiest for you to just type and add breaks at the end of a paragraph and save yourself some grief! Holy crap, 2560px... |
Ok so no page breaks or if I do I'll try to use them at about 1/3 my screens size so it won't mess up on smaller monitors.
So does the above all look ok?
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Originally Posted by DarkEther
Cool! Your system comes with extra fingers!
You never know when you might need those... |
This thread needs more pics to showcase teh awesumms.
It will spoil one surprise but it's a minor one. So without further ado...
Oooooh Ahhhhh Shiny!
That is a 56 in one card reader with bonus USB on the front. I got a great price
on a bulk purchase so I grabbed 5 of them, 3 in black and 2 in silver so I tried
out the silver but I'm thinking now the black might go better... opinions?
P.S. The blue light isn't nearly that bright even in total darkness but I shot this
with my camera in a nightscene mode that leaves the shutter open to absorb more
light. The effect is pretty subtle during the day or with lights on and about half that
brightness in the dark.
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"A winner is you" is an ancient example of Engrish from the NES version of Pro Wrestling from the halcyon days of 1986-7.
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Originally Posted by ChristopherRobin
P.S. Hey Foo what game is that "Engrish" from in your sig... looks like an 8 bit nintendo wrestling game... muscle? tag team wrestling? acme?
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CR, I loved the M.U.S.C.L.E. game for Nintendo. I also collected the figures and staged huge wrestling matches for myself to enjoy. Built a little ring for them to fight in too. Oh man I miss those days gone by. I still have a few of the figures left but I wish my mom hadn't sold them all in a garage sale years ago.
The other wrestling games for Nintendo I wasn't too good at though.
Seeing all this computer goodness is really making me jealous and eyeing up my bank account. I too would love to see a ballpark figure so I can judge what it would take me to get this done for myself.
Member of the Hyperion Force
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Done. Black it is then. |
Originally Posted by Pyro_Nympho
I think the black would mesh better within the black front face of the case...just thinking.
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Originally Posted by The_Foo
"A winner is you" is an ancient example of Engrish from the NES version of Pro Wrestling from the halcyon days of 1986-7.
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Originally Posted by Manny
CR, I loved the M.U.S.C.L.E. game for Nintendo. I also collected the figures and staged huge wrestling matches for myself to enjoy. Built a little ring for them to fight in too. Oh man I miss those days gone by. I still have a few of the figures left but I wish my mom hadn't sold them all in a garage sale years ago.
The other wrestling games for Nintendo I wasn't too good at though. Seeing all this computer goodness is really making me jealous and eyeing up my bank account. I too would love to see a ballpark figure so I can judge what it would take me to get this done for myself. |
/end rant... sigh.
Speaking of computer goodness... time to fire up the game and see some numbers.
Ok the last pic looked nice but didn't really capture the look of the
fine mesh facade so I tried a bunch of setting on my camera...
the pictures don't do it justice you really gotta see one
in person but this shot comes close.
You can almost see swirls and patterns in it when the
light hits it just right, it's totally sexay!
Yeah that silver drive has gotta go... it really sticks out like
a sore thumb in photos.
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No I don't and don't tell me. I gave all of mine (which I bought at a thrift store when I was 12) to my brother-in-law as a sentimental Christmas gift two years ago. He was the one who got me started on D&D.|
Originally Posted by ChristopherRobin
Don't feel bad my mom threw out all my first edition Dungeons and Dragons hard cover books... Players hand book Monster Manual etc etc cuz they were "evil"... any idea what those things are worth now that Gygax is dead??? Do you?!!
/end rant... sigh. |
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That's called MOIRE. Sometimes it's the sexay but try to convince your photo client of that. |
Originally Posted by ChristopherRobin
You can almost see swirls and patterns in it when the
light hits it just right, it's totally sexay! |
That is a totally awesome case. So I know you've alluded to much of the items but do you plan on giving a final list once Pyro has the comp? I too am curious as to price range. I know you don't want to list prices on the forums as it's against the rules and puts you in a possible pickle with future clients but if I had a list of the dream machine's innards I could price it roughly and add in your build time and voila I have a ball park idea to go along with this run on sentence!
Here we go. This is closer to what it looks like in direct daylight... in most normal situations It's between shot #1 and #3.
Not sure how nic teaming would do much other than iron out latency as far a speeding things up is concerned. Optimally you want both connections to go through different switches/routers, possibly as part of a vlan or vpls setup, that way, no matter where the 'lag' is, the other 'route' can compensate. If you have a link in common with the teamed cards, it becomes a single point of failure for both.
We use NIC teaming on our servers for an entirely different reason: redundancy and automatic failover. If a nic goes bad, a cable comes loose, or a switch goes down, the other NIC will assume the IP of the "team", the router upstream of it will immediately advertise a new failover route, and the network traffic is never interrupted. We can then fix the problem 'hot' while the server is up, or, we have time to truly fail services over to another box before taking the affected machine out of service for repair (if the card is an onboard NIC instead of an expansion card NIC, for example.)
"City of Heroes. April 27, 2004 - August 31, 2012. Obliterated not with a weapon of mass destruction, not by an all-powerful supervillain... but by a cold-hearted and cowardly corporate suck-up."
Ok see that is exactly what I was thinking but didn't know how to word it correctly. I am more of a hardware geek/artist and my networking-fu is but beginner level. I can set them up and maintain them but knowing how to do an advanced setup or what effect certain protocols will have is beyond me.
Most of what I have read sounds like it may work well as a lag prevention (or reduction) system and not so much to get "double speed" as you are still capped by the CoX server.
Or it may let you be DL a bunch of stuff from the internet while playing with no slowdown... don't really have the setup to test it either way.
The computer system itself has no slowdowns or bottlenecks that I can detect (if anything the graphics have caught up and it's starting to go full circle around to the processor being the slow link but Pyro is only playing @ 1600x1200 rez currently and so he should be good for years to come) and is very well balanced so my only real goal on the network front is to never have his connection drop or cause lag... then the game would just fly along at all times.
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Sorry to say, teaming isn't likely to improve City of Heroes performance. It might even hurt it by a microscopic amount.|
Originally Posted by ChristopherRobin
Speaking of new tech (and one of the things I said "more on that later" about) when I was speaking with Arcanaville about fastloading of the game zones I mentioned there were two new things that may impact the possibility of "insta-loads", this is the 2nd.
It's called LAN "teaming." Typical Broadband connection on my (albeit optimized) gaming pc. Same internet connection on Pyro's PC using both LanPorts... I wasn't able to use it (no network access) because my router doesn't support the protocol needed (drat!) but there it is. Teaming or Link Aggregation is nothing new servers and data centers use it all the time rather than upgrade to a whole new setup they just aggregate and add on to their existing one to keep up until it's no longer viable, but it's not something you see in the home market or for gaming much. Nvidia released a few chipsets a while back that supported the feature but I never got to try one. Supposedly the you join two connections into one superfast double speed connection and if there is lag or any delay due to packet loss on one connection the other picks up the slack and compensates. Looks awesome on paper but not sure what effect it will have as I cannot test it with my current setup. Anyone else have it or have tried it before? |
Your fundamental bottleneck is going to be your internet feed itself, which is probably a lot slower than 100mbit/sec unless you live in NCSoft's data center. Teaming won't provide a bandwidth improvement because the 200mb/s will get reduced to your internet max one hop later.
Moreover, most teaming implementations suffer from one of two problems. First, some implementations keep all the packets from the same connection (or in the case of UDP the same src/dst ip/port tuple) on the same card. So you might find all your CoX traffic using only one card anyway. The reason why is because the alternative is to balance the packets between cards, and you could get out of order delivery of your packets (where packet 45 arrives before packet 44). In a game like CoX, that could actually create odd problems or occasional studder. Between that and the link management protocol, its possible it could be worse (although, in any reasonable implementation, not noticably worse).
Teaming is more of a server thing than a workstation thing, unless you have a workstation that is doing a lot of different things at high bandwidth on the network.
Probably more trouble than its worth for a workstation. Besides, if you want faster connectivity within your own house, buy a gigabit switch. I'm assuming the new mega-rig has gig ports, and not 100 meg ports. One gig port should be plenty (and far higher than any internet connection you could have).
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I am curious why they put that on an enthusiast motherboard then. Also I did a double take when I noticed it says 200 as they are indeed gigabit ports and all my equipment as far as I know is also gigabit compliant and the house is only a few years old and I had all cat6 wiring installed throughout. It's probably something I'm not setting correctly, I may have to dig into it more after the holiday rush passes however my game never really lags (maybe once or twice during a holiday event a few years back) and so if it aint broke...
yeah haven't had much cause to learn more about it. I am curious now. Lemme give the game a whirl on Pyro's rig and I'll post back.
FYI genrally speaking 30fps is the minimum you ever want to see to avoid lag
...60fps or better is the goal for truly "smooth as buttah" gaming.
The command for those that want to check their own frames per second rate is
/showfps 1
(notice the space between the s and the 1)
/showfps 0 ...or just log out to turn the counter back off... I kinda like having mine on at all times though.
P.S. It's funny I thought teh purdy pictures would be getting all the attention rather than a network spec lol.
Oh well I think I have something to change that coming soon....
Oh and from a hardware standpoint the system is now complete and most burn-in and stability testing is done as well (one or two still wrapping up) so it's down to boxing the accessories up for shipping, burning the receipt CD, swapping out the silver card reader for black and changing the drivers for it, affixing the Windows 7 Certificate of Authenticity sticker to the rear of the case and a final rundown of my check list and build notes to tie up any loose ends and then it's time to look into shipping options between UPS, USPS and FEDEX. I know which I want but it never hurts to make a few phone calls and double check stuff.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH....
*wipes tear away* sniff
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA....
I'm speechless a.t.m.
I'll let others answer... anyone else want to post what they are getting
for average frames per second? The in-game commands to check are in the post above.
Yeah, my FPS are typically something like 55-65, so that's only like 5x more...
*single tear*
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Your new rig is running the CoH client at 224 frames per second. My guess is that you'll probably consider that a good thing.
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Originally Posted by Pyro_Nympho
I take it...that's a good thing too?
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(Please support the best webcomic about a cosmic universal realignment by impaired angelic interference resulting in identity crisis angst. Or I release the pigmy water thieves.)
Just thought I'd chime in with an update on my pc... I got a deal on a 40 inch 1080p tv, and am going to be using that. Hah! The only problem is it will be about three feet from my face. Aaw. We'll see how it works out. I'm pretty excited.