• Welcome to Overclockers Forums! Join us to reply in threads, receive reduced ads, and to customize your site experience!

I love the smell of a new motherboard!

Overclockers is supported by our readers. When you click a link to make a purchase, we may earn a commission. Learn More.

HankB

Member
Joined
Jan 27, 2011
Location
Beautiful Sunny Winfield
Not like a new car I suppose, and any 'new electronic smell' is likely illusory. ;) But the feeling is not too far removed. I just upgraded and I'm excited about that and I know I can share here and folks will understand. :D :)screwy:)
I just completed a mooc (Programming Mobile Applications for Android Handheld Systems) "with distinction" and felt the need to reward myself. I decided to upgrade my desktop from a Phenom II x4 820 to an I7-4770. Of course a new mobo came along with that. I looked at the selections at for the combos at Micro-Center and decided on the ASRock Z87-Extreme4 to go with it. For the rest, I used existing parts.

Here's the bad ... Cable management is a PITA! Part of this is because my PSU has 20 connectors including 6 SATA connectors and 8 Molex connectors. Part is because I have two SSDs and 2 HDDS along with a front panel thingy that includes USB, eSata and various flash card sockets and a Blu-Ray drive. Then there are two cables that go to the GPU and 6 case fans counting one for the CPU cooler. I did what I could to get things out of the way and that mostly just means stuffing extra cables behind panels in the case where they shouldn't hinder air flow. But it's not pretty.

The good. If you buy quality stuff, it can last a long time. I spent $150 on a PC Power & Cooling PSU 7 years ago and it is still going strong. At the time the route to big storage was to RAID a bunch of 200GB drives and so I got this PSU and a monstrous Lian Lee case that can hold (IIRC) a couple dozen drives. At 610 watts the PSU is about double what I need for the present system but it is still running strong and it has connectors to power all of the things I need.

Another good is RAM. I had 2x2GB and 2x4GB in the old PC and moved that over to the new. Once I realized that the 2x2GB was only 1333 and the 2x4GB was 1600 but was all running at 1333, I removed the slower RAM and am left with 8GB @ 1600 (for now. ;) ) I wondered why I bought it in the first place but when I looked it up at Newegg and saw that it was $40 2 1/2 years ago and is now $80. I guess I couldn't pass it up then.

I'm continuing to use the GTX 460 which is more than adequate to drive two monitors (*)

I recently upgrade my 32GB SSD to a 240GB SSD, leaving the old one in place. I went ahead and installed a slightly different variant of Linux on that one (Debian Sid vs. Mint 16.) I also have a pair of 200GB Barracudas that have over 7 years of operating time and show no signs of giving up. I guess that was back when Seagate made solid drives.

With everything together it booted without issue (save for a minor problem that resulted from drive renaming.) That solved, everything was great.

Before I do any overclocking, I'm evaluating stability with some stress testing. First was to fold for a bit and watch CPU temperatures. They seem to run anywhere from 52° to 60°C. (I also bought a Cooler Master Hyper 212 evo to use instead of the factory heat sink.) At idle it is running about 22°-24°C. I ran Prime95 overnight to see if that revealed any issues. It did not. So far the system has been rock solid. Time to start studying the Haswell OC guide. :D

The other thing I noticed... The PPD on FAH is about double what it was before. The AMD CPU produced about 5K/day and the GPU added about another 15K. Right now it is producing about 40K/day. I don't know how much that is a result of more processor crunching or whether the faster CPU produces more PPD from the GPU, but I like it!

This is fun. :D Anyway, I'm too excited about this to keep it to myself.



(*) I recently upgraded to two monitors. I had a 22" 1600x1200 LCD display and added a 21" 1600x1200 LCD. It's not very new but I much prefer that aspect ratio to the wide screen monitors. It's an NEC so it (as well as my 22" Planar) should last a long time. :comp: I was quite pleased with myself until SWMBO mentioned that she also has dual monitors on her PC at work. :rolleyes: I guess I'm not that special.
 
Nice setup Hank. And I too am a fan of your Avatar. I remember watching that episode the first night it aired and I laid in bed for over an hour thinking that "it" was standing in my closet waiting for me to shut my eyes!!! (I was only about 8 years old at the time).

Your CPU will have a core dedicated to help the GPU with some calculations in the F@H client v7. You need to be sure to set the CPU to -6 (even numbers of threads vs. cores), but you've simply got a better processor now. And the non-k version CPU is actually about 10% more efficient in single threaded applications than the k-version, which I believe is how the client is written (someone correct me if I'm wrong).
 
Back