nforce4max wrote:

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.

I'm taking a wait 'n see on the hypercube memory that intel is coming out with, in partner with Micron. That, and the 2016 K12 from AMD before making the plunge. With closed loop cooling, I can take the 2600K up to 4.5GHz. I dunno about the RAM timers. Aren't those chipset dependant?

Not these days but just depends on the kit your using and what the memory controller in the cpu can handle. AMD tops out early but pretty much anything Intel can go for the moon, for good information start digging around on other forums and review sites. Now back to my ancient stuff again, trying to restore a old Matrox Mystique 😜

nforce4max wrote:

Not these days but just depends on the kit your using and what the memory controller in the cpu can handle. AMD tops out early but pretty much anything Intel can go for the moon, for good information start digging around on other forums and review sites. Now back to my ancient stuff again, trying to restore a old Matrox Mystique 😜

I double checked my motherboard manual (Asus P8z68-V/GEN3), and it lists the timings for my DRAM at 9-9-9-24. Any ideas what a safe adjustment would be? It's a Corsair 2x4GB DDR3-1333 kit.

Asus has a turbo option, but without a better cooler on the CPU, it tries to overclock it to 4.5GHz, immediately causing instability (stock cooler, until I can settle on a good liquid cooler). No idea what it tries to "turbo" the RAM to.

Each new iteration of Intel Core processors is just more of the same. You've got a 2600K which is a great CPU and I would wait one more generation before changing it. The gains are miniscule compared to the investment you have to make, if you're switching to Haswell. I'm still running an i3-2100 two years since I bought it. Considering buying the exact same processor you're running because it'll cost the least to upgrade and will bring considerable performance improvement.

Half-Saint wrote:

Each new iteration of Intel Core processors is just more of the same. You've got a 2600K which is a great CPU and I would wait one more generation before changing it. The gains are miniscule compared to the investment you have to make, if you're switching to Haswell. I'm still running an i3-2100 two years since I bought it. Considering buying the exact same processor you're running because it'll cost the least to upgrade and will bring considerable performance improvement.

The i7-2600K is well worth it. Just make sure to not use the stock heatsink/fan is you intend on taking it above stock clock.

That kit is pretty basic even though the timings are decent but a more modern 1866 or something better kit with similar timings will make a noticeable difference! Intel's floating point units love extra bandwidth and in general with SB and above cpus they gain rather nicely with faster ram. Even the first gen I series has plenty to gain even from a 1600 kit.

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.

Luckybob is right - RAID10 won't protect the data the way you want. The current standard is multi-format/multi-copy including offline/offsite to safeguard against things like acts of god, hacking, user error, etc. You will see a certain failure rate for all media, the idea is to spread things out well enough to sidestep it. So you go with RAID5 or RAID6 in the machine to stand up to a hardware failure of a disk or two, you have an additional NAS/SAN that runs RAID (same reason as in the machine) to have secondary copies, you burn functional copies to DVD/Blu-ray/tape/whatever and store them locally as well as extra copies at offsite locations (and if your data is really this mission critical some of those copies will be sent off to a high survivability service like Iron Mountain).

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.

If by "certain supercomputer builds" you're talking about the immersion cooling on Cray 2 or T90 that is NOT mineral oil you're seeing. It's $550/liter 3M Flourinert. That isn't a one time price either; Flourinert has to be replaced every so often (it has an expiration date), and the system requires a large heat exchange/handling system - immersion cooling is meant to provide higher conductivity than air, but you can't just drop the machine in a vat and hope for the best (it'll heat the vat up and then cook itself to death fairly quickly; the heat has to be removed soemhow). In the case of the Cray machines they had large external heat exchangers that cycled through (quite literally) tons of Flourinert to keep the machine from overheating. There's no point to such a system for a personal computer - the price is many orders of magnitude more than a PC is worth, and the cooling requirements for a PC are nowhere near high enough to justify the complexity. 😀

obobskivich wrote:

If by "certain supercomputer builds" you're talking about the immersion cooling on Cray 2 or T90 that is NOT mineral oil you're seeing. It's $550/liter 3M Flourinert. That isn't a one time price either; Flourinert has to be replaced every so often (it has an expiration date), and the system requires a large heat exchange/handling system - immersion cooling is meant to provide higher conductivity than air, but you can't just drop the machine in a vat and hope for the best (it'll heat the vat up and then cook itself to death fairly quickly; the heat has to be removed soemhow). In the case of the Cray machines they had large external heat exchangers that cycled through (quite literally) tons of Flourinert to keep the machine from overheating. There's no point to such a system for a personal computer - the price is many orders of magnitude more than a PC is worth, and the cooling requirements for a PC are nowhere near high enough to justify the complexity. 😀

Bob, no, he's talking about the hobbyist-level immersion cooled rigs, which people pretty much only do for "cool factor", not for cooling:
http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/06/passw … in-mineral-oil/
http://www.maximumpc.com/article/features/exc … ore_pcs_reactor
http://www.pugetsystems.com/submerged.php

That's...interesting, to say the least. On at least some of the images on those links I'm seeing blocks for the CPUs and GPUs though - so what purpose is the immersion cooling serving? (is this the "cool factor" you're talking about?)

obobskivich wrote:

Luckybob is right - RAID10 won't protect the data the way you want. The current standard is multi-format/multi-copy including offline/offsite to safeguard against things like acts of god, hacking, user error, etc. You will see a certain failure rate for all media, the idea is to spread things out well enough to sidestep it. So you go with RAID5 or RAID6 in the machine to stand up to a hardware failure of a disk or two, you have an additional NAS/SAN that runs RAID (same reason as in the machine) to have secondary copies, you burn functional copies to DVD/Blu-ray/tape/whatever and store them locally as well as extra copies at offsite locations (and if your data is really this mission critical some of those copies will be sent off to a high survivability service like Iron Mountain).

It's not all mission critical, just stuff I'll never be able to replace that I've spent decades amassing. But I see your point. I need to start price checking that (I do want a NAS, though).

If by "certain supercomputer builds" you're talking about the immersion cooling on Cray 2 or T90 that is NOT mineral oil you're seeing. It's $550/liter 3M Flourinert. (Holy Crap! 😮) That isn't a one time price either; Flourinert has to be replaced every so often (it has an expiration date), and the system requires a large heat exchange/handling system - immersion cooling is meant to provide higher conductivity than air, but you can't just drop the machine in a vat and hope for the best (it'll heat the vat up and then cook itself to death fairly quickly; the heat has to be removed soemhow). In the case of the Cray machines they had large external heat exchangers that cycled through (quite literally) tons of Flourinert to keep the machine from overheating. There's no point to such a system for a personal computer - the price is many orders of magnitude more than a PC is worth, and the cooling requirements for a PC are nowhere near high enough to justify the complexity. 😀

Yeesh... So much for my ghetto-fabulous cooling idea. I think I'll leave it to the pros.

Bob, no, he's talking about the hobbyist-level immersion cooled rigs, which people pretty much only do for "cool factor", not fo […]
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Bob, no, he's talking about the hobbyist-level immersion cooled rigs, which people pretty much only do for "cool factor", not for cooling:
http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/06/passw … in-mineral-oil/
http://www.maximumpc.com/article/features/exc … ore_pcs_reactor
http://www.pugetsystems.com/submerged.php

Actually, I was going more for the "Mad Scientist" route, and had even contemplated seeing if it would have a better cooling effect on my routers and switches (ports waterproofed, and sealed when not in use, naturally. )

Weird, I know. At least the Cisco gear is second-hand, and I can replace them for $80 or less, each.

ElectricMonk wrote:

It's not all mission critical, just stuff I'll never be able to replace that I've spent decades amassing. But I see your point. I need to start price checking that (I do want a NAS, though).

I know WD has some newer NAS units that have RAID and removable disks, and you might consider a WHS box on the other hand. 😊

obobskivich wrote:

ElectricMonk wrote:

It's not all mission critical, just stuff I'll never be able to replace that I've spent decades amassing. But I see your point. I need to start price checking that (I do want a NAS, though).

I know WD has some newer NAS units that have RAID and removable disks, and you might consider a WHS box on the other hand. 😊

Yeah, but it lacks that certain "I'm insane" je ne sais quoi. 😜

You should see my cisco lab. When ever someone sees it for the first time, jaws drop, and they're stunned by all the blinking lights, like a deer in headlights.

A NAS with built-in Raid, and hot swappable discs are probably my next purchase. I really need something in the 8-10TB range. Not sure what RPM to get, or 2.5 vs regular. I really want something in the GigE neighborhood (bonus points for fiber GBICs!) and it'll all be part of that lab setup. Make it a backup/distribution hub. That way, I can make a "thin client" HTPC that's fanless, and just stream movies to it, instead of storing it locally there.

ElectricMonk wrote:

Yeah, but it lacks that certain "I'm insane" je ne sais quoi. 😜

You should see my cisco lab. When ever someone sees it for the first time, jaws drop, and they're stunned by all the blinking lights, like a deer in headlights.

A NAS with built-in Raid, and hot swappable discs are probably my next purchase. I really need something in the 8-10TB range. Not sure what RPM to get, or 2.5 vs regular. I really want something in the GigE neighborhood (bonus points for fiber GBICs!) and it'll all be part of that lab setup. Make it a backup/distribution hub. That way, I can make a "thin client" HTPC that's fanless, and just stream movies to it, instead of storing it locally there.

Something like this could work:
http://wdc.com/en/products/products.aspx?id=1170

Or if you want more complexity, why not grab an old Sun/SGI/Dell rack server? Some of those can approach 50-100TB in a reasonable form factor, and generally have decent processing power to handle other tasks beyond just holding your files. 😎

RPM wise - really doesn't matter unless you need massive throughput (and then you want 10-15k RPM drives); for a NAS 5400RPM is pretty common, and shouldn't be an issue. Size-wise, no reason to go 2.5" unless you need the density or have a line on them for cheap.

> on VOGONS
> says a Core i7 2600K is "long in the tooth"

SquallStrife wrote:

> on VOGONS
> says a Core i7 2600K is "long in the tooth"

🤣 no way SB is long in the tooth. X99 is coming out this year, and I'm not in the least bit interested in changing out my X79 for it. You can safely skip another gen or 2, especially given how well they OC.

I run on a dual 6-core system that was "top of the line" in 2009. At first it kinda sucked because so few games were multi-core. Now its relatively common for quad-core to be REQUIRED. If anything MY system is nearing the end of its life.

As for raid, I went to my local computer recycling plant. The guy there owed me a favor, so when comcast dumped a whole bunch of NEW dvr boxes, I came in and took the NEW hard drives and replaced the missing weight with old crappy ide drives I had around. All told, I got twenty+ 500gb, 2.5" enterprise level hard drives. I use 16 in a raid-6 on my server, and the others are just sitting around. The point of the story is, keep your ears to the ground for deals. I could have easily just gotten 3x 2tb drives and be done with it. Honestly, the only thing I actually backup are things I cannot replace. Such as family photos, movies, etc. They make archive-quality blu-rays. Designed to last 50 years. I actually have one of the hard drives from before as a backup sitting in a safety deposit box at my bank. Every time I'm at the box I try to swap out the drive with a fresh backup. (every 6 months or so it seems) I also have a copy online "in the cloud" at http://www.carbonite.com/

Moral of the story, offsite-backup is WAY more important than ANYTHING else. A house fire is a LOT more likely to happen than bit-rot. Also it is relatively easy to use 20+ year old computer hardware if you need to retrieve something. Hell, the other day I found a 360kb floppy disk behind a bookshelf that had my parents 1983 tax return information on. Disk worked perfect. So I guess my advice is; keep a raid array with important data, keep at least 1 offsite backup.

SquallStrife wrote:

> on VOGONS
> says a Core i7 2600K is "long in the tooth"

sgt76 wrote:

🤣 no way SB is long in the tooth. X99 is coming out this year, and I'm not in the least bit interested in changing out my X79 for it. You can safely skip another gen or 2, especially given how well they OC.

Still on X58 here!

archsan wrote:

Still on X58 here!

My main computer is X48 based, and I'm typing this on the "little brother" that's X38 based. I've still yet to run into a game that I can't run, nor have I had to drop anything down to 800x600 at low settings to get things running; honestly when I built the machine I figured by 2010 I'd be running at low-medium settings at low resolution, but six years later and it's still got no problems at 1080p. PSU is still under warranty for another year and a half, and I'm honestly expecting the machine to still be plodding along just fine then. 😊

luckybob: +1 on offsite vs many-copy locally. On the "archival optical discs" - I've seen some of those after 20 years (obviously not Blu-ray) and can say they MAY last 50 years or they may not. Disc rot being the "gotcha" there.

ElectricMonk wrote:

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.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC

Seems like they finally(!) came with the BluRay version ?:
http://www.mdisc.com/

...which would reduce your total needs(4TB) to 'only' 160 discs($720)... 🤣
(vs the 1000x if using DVD option)

Haven't tested this yet, but strongly considering....

PS: and for the heck of it (and very! cheap) I bought a new box of these things:
http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/251576424970
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra_Density_Optical

But the actual drives seem to be waaay too pricey atm, so maybe later....