Home of the Five Fingers of Fury

Well, had my folks down visiting a couple of weeks ago and during that time I decided to move my workspace around….Murphy’s kicked in and my old AMDx2 machine decided to fry it’s cpu when I turned them back on (yes I know, a UPS is next must-buy). It’s been sitting round looking all forlornly at me, but since it was a socket 939 there was not much I could do but retire it, scavenge parts and build a new box.

Looking over it, the only thing I could really salvage were the 2 7800GTX’s and the hard drives since when I decided to test the PSU with another older mobo/cpu I had, that cpu lasted about 5 seconds before frying as well so I figure the PSU was effectively dead and don’t want to take the risk. The hard drives were all PATA, which posed a small problem (this box was my file server) until I found an item called a TeraBox at the computer markets…it’s a small box with a 150W PSU that holds up to 4 PATA drives (to 2GB total) and can either have them set as individual drives or seen as one and then connects to a PC through USB. Given I have previously had issues with spanned drives, I have set these up as individual drives and has worked flawlessly so far under XP, Vista and a Mac, the only issue found with the Mac was I had to let the Mac reformat one of the drives to be able to write to it since it seems they can read NTFS but not write to it.

With the drives sorted, and my mind already set on what I wanted out of the new PC (quad core, sli, 8Gb RAM), I decided that I could get by with just getting the RAM, CPU, Motherboard and case/PSU this week and use the GTX’s initially to see if I need to look at upgrading to the 9800 series (either GTX or GX2) so off to the markets I went this weekend and grabbed what I needed, to be pleasently surprised. I ended up getting an evga 780i motherboard, 8Gb of PNY RAM (though a little annoyed, thought it was 5-5-5-15 but is 5-5-5-18), a Q6600 CPU and a cheapish case with PSU for $800. The case I gimped myself with as my current main machine was in a Super Lanboy case with a 650W Antec PSU so decided to put the new build in that and so just needed something to hold the current build of Q6600, 4Gb, 9600GT and this seems to be holding well. If it becomes an issue I intend to grab an Antec 900 case and 850W modular PSU anyway so it’s not a major problem to have that machine out of action for a week till the next markets.

I spent all saturday putting the new pc together (well also taking the other one apart and putting it back together in the new box) and installing Vista64 SP1 which all went reasonably quickly, the only concern I had was the new botherboard has an 8 pin power2 while my PSU only had a 4 pin but reading the manual it seems the 8 pin is only needed if running quad SLI so I gave the 4 pin a try and the system fired up and appears stable still.

Once built and in place I ran the first testto see if I could see any improvement in multiboxing World of Warcraft, and I put one monitor on on card, the second monitor on the other and had SLI disabled (mainly because I intend to run 4 monitors on this machine) and found the effect to be disasterous…I was getting single digit framerates on all 5 instances of WoW which was unacceptable, machine was turned off and both monitors plugged into card 1.

For the second attempt, I’m not sure what the issue is but I am getting only around 15fps on all 5 instances when running at the same time, and only around 35fps when running a single instance of WoW which is about 1/2 of what I was seeing with a single 7800GTX under XP32 SP3…at this stage I am thinking it is something to do with having the SLI bridge in place between the two cards, so I’ll likely try taking that off tonight and see if I see any improvement, and I also have to see if going to SLI shows me any upgrades with FSX.

At this stage I’m happy with the new pc, but not ecstatic since I haven’t seen the improvements I’d expected and found one of the reasons for going with a new SLI build (running monitors on all cards) is likely not going to work. It might be the 7800’s that are the issue so the next phase will be to finialise what I planned and add either 2 9800GTX’s or 2 9800GX2’s, so will update this once I get them in place and tested.