I wouldn't call a machine with a Z68 chipset or a GCN GPU "long in the tooth" - that's almost brand new 🤣 (some of those parts are less than 2 years old). Not saying it's a bad machine - it looks very nice on paper, and it absolutely should be running most things at pretty high settings (and older things maximized)!

Do you have any sort of RAID setup for the storage drives? Will you be putting the Radeon under water as well? What kind of power/case does it have?

obobskivich wrote:

I wouldn't call a machine with a Z68 chipset or a GCN GPU "long in the tooth" - that's almost brand new 🤣 (some of those parts are less than 2 years old). Not saying it's a bad machine - it looks very nice on paper, and it absolutely should be running most things at pretty high settings (and older things maximized)!

Do you have any sort of RAID setup for the storage drives? Will you be putting the Radeon under water as well? What kind of power/case does it have?

No RAID setup yet. Ran out of Drive Bays, so I'm going to setup a RAID10 NAS, for all my critical data.

I've been looking at one of the self=contained water loops, but I may move onto a mineral oil setup at one point.

ElectricMonk wrote:

obobskivich wrote:

I wouldn't call a machine with a Z68 chipset or a GCN GPU "long in the tooth" - that's almost brand new 🤣 (some of those parts are less than 2 years old). Not saying it's a bad machine - it looks very nice on paper, and it absolutely should be running most things at pretty high settings (and older things maximized)!

Do you have any sort of RAID setup for the storage drives? Will you be putting the Radeon under water as well? What kind of power/case does it have?

No RAID setup yet. Ran out of Drive Bays, so I'm going to setup a RAID10 NAS, for all my critical data.

I've been looking at one of the self=contained water loops, but I may move onto a mineral oil setup at one point.

honestly, water cooling is not worth it. Also raid 10 is horribly inefficient. Go raid 6.

Gotcha on the NAS. Personally I'd consider a canned solution unless you need huge amounts of storage - less hassle in most cases. RAID5/6 is probably easier to live with and won't eat up as many disks, like luckybob points out.

And mineral oil? That's a new one. 😊

On the water cooling - the BEST you can accomplish with straight water is ambient, but that assumes a pretty substantial system - some canned systems won't do much better than a decent air cooler. Just food for thought more than anything else. Do you have an upgraded sink for the CPU, or are you using the Intel one?

Mineral oil cooling for a home PC? From my perspective, that's utter nonsense. Think about it - everything will be covered in oil. No tinkering with the system, no swapping components and that stuff's extremely hard to clean off (I won't say impossible)! Besides how do you sell a graphics card coated in oil?

The CPU is fine, so is the RAM.

The main weakness is that you don't have a SSD. And maybe look at upgrading the graphics card. But I'm not up to date with the latest and greatest.

I wouldn't over clock modern i7 CPUs. Hardly worth it as they have built in Turbo that goes to almost 4 GHz anyway.

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

The CPU is fine, so is the RAM.

The main weakness is that you don't have a SSD. And maybe look at upgrading the graphics card. But I'm not up to date with the latest and greatest.

I wouldn't over clock modern i7 CPUs. Hardly worth it as they have built in Turbo that goes to almost 4 GHz anyway.

On the graphics card - the Radeon HD 7000 series are AMD's "GCN" and many of them have just been rebadged as Radeon HD 8000 and Radeon Rx series cards; the 7950 itself is based on Tahiti Pro and has been re-packaged/re-branded as both HD 8950 and R9 280 (which is, like the 7950 was when it was new, 3rd or 4th down from the top (there isn't much that's faster these days)). There's little advantage to rebuy more of the same imho.

Thanks for clearing that up! Gets quite confusing with graphics cards if you aren't up to date.

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

And maybe look at upgrading the graphics card.

Gosh, I was under the impression that Mau1wurf wouldn't accept anything less than two of these in CF...

The 7950 is okay... as long as you are playing 1080p. I have a 7970, and it does great got 90% of games at 2560x1600. I just bought a 2nd 7970 for x-fire, and it is glorious. The 2xx series are basically rebranded 7- series. The 280x being the 7970. While the core is basically the same, they are running it faster.

luckybob wrote:

honestly, water cooling is not worth it. Also raid 10 is horribly inefficient. Go raid 6.

I'm after RAID 10, purely because I have 4TB worth of data I just can't afford to lose, ever. Not counting the $5K+ software packages I use, I've been making images of every 5-1/4, 3.5, CD-ROM, and DVD-9 I've ever purchased. None of the current Windows OS's protect against bitrot. I want my collection to last, until they come up with some quantum storage that has some obscene billion to one error rate.

Half-Saint wrote:

Mineral oil cooling for a home PC? From my perspective, that's utter nonsense. Think about it - everything will be covered in oil. No tinkering with the system, no swapping components and that stuff's extremely hard to clean off (I won't say impossible)! Besides how do you sell a graphics card coated in oil?

I never sell my computer parts. And since mineral oil is non-electrically conductive, I can either use it as a closed-loop cooling system or just straight up immerse the entire system in a mineral oil bath. They use it for server blades in specialty operations, and certain supercomputer builds.

Make sure you take pictures and post them here. I like to watch people be stupid.

ElectricMonk wrote:

I'm after RAID 10, purely because I have 4TB worth of data I just can't afford to lose, ever. Not counting the $5K+ software packages I use, I've been making images of every 5-1/4, 3.5, CD-ROM, and DVD-9 I've ever purchased. None of the current Windows OS's protect against bitrot. I want my collection to last, until they come up with some quantum storage that has some obscene billion to one error rate.

A scheduled software backup would give better protection than RAID. Traditional RAIDs only really protect you against an obvious disk failure. File corruption or deletion (possibly resulting from user error, virus, hacking, or failing hardware) will be immediately permanent.
The main benefit of RAID is minimizing downtime, which isn't normally a big concern on a home system. RAIDs are too brain-dead to rely upon to protect data, and they come with some headaches I won't blabber on about.

RAID10 wouldn't have any way of identifying bitrot. It would need 3 copies of the data to do that. If there's a silent corruption at one of the disks, your chances are 50/50 which version survives.
There are some software based RAID-like methods that can deal with bitrot. FlexRAID and SnapRAID can, I'm not sure of others. They operate at the filesystem level, using checksums and file attributes to decide if a file's modification was intentional. I've been looking at using snapRAID, but I've gotten distracted and haven't implemented it yet. My thought is to use snapRAID for the active data, and then have a separate disk outside the array which holds software backups of those folders I consider critical. Under most circumstances snapRAID can handle recovery, but the external backup would be a fallback for critical folders.

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

The CPU is fine, so is the RAM.

The main weakness is that you don't have a SSD. And maybe look at upgrading the graphics card. But I'm not up to date with the latest and greatest.

I wouldn't over clock modern i7 CPUs. Hardly worth it as they have built in Turbo that goes to almost 4 GHz anyway.

I forgot to mention that I have a Samsung 256GB SSD I use purely as an OS drive. If I wasn't out of space, I'd have two.

Or if I won the lottery/robbed a bank, I'd get one of Intels PCI-E enterprise SSD boards.

*EDIT*

None of the newer graphics cards are worth the upgrade. Maybe in a few tick-tock cycles, when the latest and greatest GPUs come out. That's one of the reasons I haven't bothered upgrading to Haswell/Broadwell, etc...

shamino wrote:

A scheduled software backup would give better protection than RAID. Traditional RAIDs only really protect you against an obviou […]
Show full quote

ElectricMonk wrote:

I'm after RAID 10, purely because I have 4TB worth of data I just can't afford to lose, ever. Not counting the $5K+ software packages I use, I've been making images of every 5-1/4, 3.5, CD-ROM, and DVD-9 I've ever purchased. None of the current Windows OS's protect against bitrot. I want my collection to last, until they come up with some quantum storage that has some obscene billion to one error rate.

A scheduled software backup would give better protection than RAID. Traditional RAIDs only really protect you against an obvious disk failure. File corruption or deletion (possibly resulting from user error, virus, hacking, or failing hardware) will be immediately permanent.
The main benefit of RAID is minimizing downtime, which isn't normally a big concern on a home system. RAIDs are too brain-dead to rely upon to protect data, and they come with some headaches I won't blabber on about.

RAID10 wouldn't have any way of identifying bitrot. It would need 3 copies of the data to do that. If there's a silent corruption at one of the disks, your chances are 50/50 which version survives.
There are some software based RAID-like methods that can deal with bitrot. FlexRAID and SnapRAID can, I'm not sure of others. They operate at the filesystem level, using checksums and file attributes to decide if a file's modification was intentional. I've been looking at using snapRAID, but I've gotten distracted and haven't implemented it yet. My thought is to use snapRAID for the active data, and then have a separate disk outside the array which holds software backups of those folders I consider critical. Under most circumstances snapRAID can handle recovery, but the external backup would be a fallback for critical folders.

Any idea what I should use as an archive medium, until a filesystem comes along to guard against bitrot? I *think* MS is coming out with one, but it's still in experimental/development phase.

I've got ancient games, music, movies, anime, comics, Cisco IOS images, VMWare ESXi, VMWare workstation with a custom OSX Snow Leopard image, the latest and greatest Softimage/3DMAX/tons of render apps, every CBTNugget ever made, every Rosetta Stone language (and Pimsler et al) ALL documentation for everything from Cisco(IOS and Nexus)/Adtran/Juniper, as well as simulator tools for them on there.

There is nothing long in the tooth about that system, I don't see how 15% difference cpu side between what you have and the current gen be long in the tooth.

nforce4max wrote:

There is nothing long in the tooth about that system, I don't see how 15% difference cpu side between what you have and the current gen be long in the tooth.

I'm just used to being on the bleeding edge, so 2+ years (more like 3 for the CPU), starts down the slippery slope to "long in the tooth" to me. YMMV.

obobskivich wrote:

I wouldn't call a machine with a Z68 chipset or a GCN GPU "long in the tooth" - that's almost brand new 🤣 (some of those parts are less than 2 years old). Not saying it's a bad machine - it looks very nice on paper, and it absolutely should be running most things at pretty high settings (and older things maximized)!

Do you have any sort of RAID setup for the storage drives? Will you be putting the Radeon under water as well? What kind of power/case does it have?

Actually, I can still run new games on Ultra (Grid Autosport, Sniper 3, etc). Ideally, I'd have a closed cooling loop for both the Sandy Bridge (take that thing about 4GHz!), and I'd like to do the same for the 7950. I can over drive it to 1GHz, but I like pushing things to their limits.

For an example, waaaay back in the day when I was at a startup WiFi company, I managed to convert an ancient P75 into a captive portal WiFi hotspot using nothing more than the PC, a 64MB compact flash (shrank FreeBSD to 48MB RO, with a little left over for RW, and managed to run the user DB at the same time. Total cost of good was less than $100, back when Bluesockets and Colubris cost $2000 or more. We were eval'ing SBCs (Soekris, IIRC) to mount in a NEMA4 enclosure for outdoor installs. Too bad the investors bailed, and sank the company.

Ever go into a gas station that has flat-screen TVs that show in store sales, news, and stock tickers? That was my creation. We made the mistake of demoing that to certain Gas Station companies, and were rejected. 2 months later, those things are EVERYWHERE. (not bitter one bit).

ElectricMonk wrote:

nforce4max wrote:

There is nothing long in the tooth about that system, I don't see how 15% difference cpu side between what you have and the current gen be long in the tooth.

I'm just used to being on the bleeding edge, so 2+ years (more like 3 for the CPU), starts down the slippery slope to "long in the tooth" to me. YMMV.

Just overclock it another 400mhz and tweak the timings on the ram for an extra boost then save up for a 2011 system. Ivy Bridge wasn't upgrade at all and Haswell is small potatoes above that except for a tiny few instructions. If you want anything that is any better than what you have you will have to look at hex core i7s or 8 core xeons but personally a 4.4-5ghz SB i7 is more than enough. If your apps are very very floating point dependent you can switch Hyper thread off for another 5% or so gain there.