- Joined
- Jan 19, 2004
- Location
- Tennessee
Hi everyone. It's been a long time since I had much to post; I've been getting by on a Dell Inspiron 1520 with an nVidia 8600m for about 3 years, and the last machine I put together worth mentioning was my X2 4400, 7800GTX SLI rig. I feel almost like a traitor that I was one of the first 2000 people in Club SLI and now I'm buying ATI.
After years of use and abuse, both are now smoldering wrecks. The X2 went through PSUs (even trusty OCZ and Enermax....) until the Big Typhoon cooler backplate sheared its screwholes from years of weight...
As for the 1520, if anyone's had one go out for the worst reason ever, you already know that the solder where the power socket connects to the mobo on these models is little more than silver superglue and corrodes relatively quickly for solder. It shorted and took the motherboard with it.
I haven't been able to "talk geek" about a computer in awhile so be ready for some lengthy
from me.
After 3 months of only having access to a Celeron 1.8ghz with 512mb of RAM and a P4 with the same, neither of which has a standalone GPU, I finally landed a job. Problem is, I don't get paid till May 17 and I have to have a rather high-end laptop for work.
It looks like the G73jh-a2 from Asus is the best for the money on the market, but it's on crazy backorder at every store in existence. As I'm sure you know, it's been like this since January and they now report a 6-8 week lead time. This kinda works out, as I can't pay for it for 3 weeks (I'm trying to surf XoticPC's pre-order "don't pay till it's ready to ship" policy).
But on to the fun. I had to go with default config, but I plan to sell the still-functioning parts of my 1520 (the 1680x1050 14.1" display, the 8600m, etc) to help cover getting an SSD in the future. I couldn't afford to spring for SSD or Blu-Ray quite yet, as the laptop itself breaks the bank for me. It will be used for game design, 3d modeling, multiple programming IDEs, audio editing, and 3d Engine work with OGRE and probably its C# buddy, MOGRE. And naturally, pwning f00ls. It'd just be improper not to.
Questions are:
1. Will using 8GB of 1066mhz versus 1333mhz be noticeable? The last time I bothered with RAM frequencies was overclocking the DDR 400 on the X2!
2. Does the built-in overclocking ability of the i7-720qm put significant limits on manual overclocking? Is it like the X2, where the weakest of the cores is the ceiling for performance, or are the cores handled differently?
3. Does anyone have this model, and if so, is the cooling system they're so proud of on Asus' site (and it does look fantastic) efficient enough to negate the usefulness of a laptop cooler?
4. I have an extra license of Win7 Professional that my school gave me before I graduated last fall (well, MSDNAA). It's never been activated. This machine comes with Win7 Home. Is it worth using the license to upgrade it on arrival?
5. This motherboard doesn't seem to have a RAID controller on it, from what I've read. Still, it's standard with 2x500GB 7200RPM drives. I know Win7 has a "soft-RAID" of sorts; is this similar in performance to RAID 0, or am I better off just using the unused space for storage and Ubuntu?
6. For my purposes, what sort of performance change will I have between my Inspiron 1520 and this machine in regards to applications like Maya, OpenGL development, Direct3D programming, and 3dsMAX?
After years of use and abuse, both are now smoldering wrecks. The X2 went through PSUs (even trusty OCZ and Enermax....) until the Big Typhoon cooler backplate sheared its screwholes from years of weight...
As for the 1520, if anyone's had one go out for the worst reason ever, you already know that the solder where the power socket connects to the mobo on these models is little more than silver superglue and corrodes relatively quickly for solder. It shorted and took the motherboard with it.
I haven't been able to "talk geek" about a computer in awhile so be ready for some lengthy
from me.After 3 months of only having access to a Celeron 1.8ghz with 512mb of RAM and a P4 with the same, neither of which has a standalone GPU, I finally landed a job. Problem is, I don't get paid till May 17 and I have to have a rather high-end laptop for work.
It looks like the G73jh-a2 from Asus is the best for the money on the market, but it's on crazy backorder at every store in existence. As I'm sure you know, it's been like this since January and they now report a 6-8 week lead time. This kinda works out, as I can't pay for it for 3 weeks (I'm trying to surf XoticPC's pre-order "don't pay till it's ready to ship" policy).
But on to the fun. I had to go with default config, but I plan to sell the still-functioning parts of my 1520 (the 1680x1050 14.1" display, the 8600m, etc) to help cover getting an SSD in the future. I couldn't afford to spring for SSD or Blu-Ray quite yet, as the laptop itself breaks the bank for me. It will be used for game design, 3d modeling, multiple programming IDEs, audio editing, and 3d Engine work with OGRE and probably its C# buddy, MOGRE. And naturally, pwning f00ls. It'd just be improper not to.
Questions are:
1. Will using 8GB of 1066mhz versus 1333mhz be noticeable? The last time I bothered with RAM frequencies was overclocking the DDR 400 on the X2!
2. Does the built-in overclocking ability of the i7-720qm put significant limits on manual overclocking? Is it like the X2, where the weakest of the cores is the ceiling for performance, or are the cores handled differently?
3. Does anyone have this model, and if so, is the cooling system they're so proud of on Asus' site (and it does look fantastic) efficient enough to negate the usefulness of a laptop cooler?
4. I have an extra license of Win7 Professional that my school gave me before I graduated last fall (well, MSDNAA). It's never been activated. This machine comes with Win7 Home. Is it worth using the license to upgrade it on arrival?
5. This motherboard doesn't seem to have a RAID controller on it, from what I've read. Still, it's standard with 2x500GB 7200RPM drives. I know Win7 has a "soft-RAID" of sorts; is this similar in performance to RAID 0, or am I better off just using the unused space for storage and Ubuntu?
6. For my purposes, what sort of performance change will I have between my Inspiron 1520 and this machine in regards to applications like Maya, OpenGL development, Direct3D programming, and 3dsMAX?
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