Zxian

SLI will only work on nVidia chipsets. You're outta luck if you want to use an Intel chipset and SLI. You can however, use two independent nVidia video cards on an Intel chipset - that's no problem.

Overall system performance doesn't just depend on which processor you have. Menu animations and such depend on whether or not you have the proper video drivers, loaded programs, etc etc. I don't think those two processors are interchangeable anyways. I'd stick with the CeleronD and just give the system a good cleaning.

I've got both of my systems using RAID mode (which is a version of ACHI) and both installed just fine from the DVR-212D.

I'm administering a number of computer systems, and I think that my life would be a lot easier if I had a web-based ticketing system for users to contact me with. Does anyone know of any good ones that I could use? PHP/MySQL based would be ideal, since I've already got that up and running.

I don’t know, but after spending THIS much, why don’t you sell that mobo on eBay and get your self a compatible mobo, is it really worth waiting for NOTHING to happen soon, just keeping a few hundred bucks in your pocket... I know what I would do! The problem that suryad's got right now is that there are no nVidia chipsets that support the Penryn-core CPUs. With the crazy-high resolution of the 30" screen... yea - you'd need SLI to get good performance. Personally - I'd just go get a Q6600 for the time being, and overclock it as much as you can (mine's at 3GHz and undervolted - I'm not even pushing the chip). Keep the QX9650 on the shelf until nVidia releases a new board that supports Penryn. When that's done, you'll have your main rig (with Penryn + SLI), and the fixings for a seconary system (Striker+Q6600) that you can use when a friend comes over to play. While we're at it listing our used operating systems... Win 3.11 + DOS Windows 95 Windows 98 + 98SE Windows ME (ugh) Windows 2000 (Pro and Server) Windows XP (Gold/SP1/SP2) Windows 2003 (Gold/SP1/SP2) Windows Vista (Basic/Home Premium/Business/Ultimate) Ubuntu 5+ Fedora 5+ FreeBSD CentOS5 I much prefer BSD to any Linux, but if I have to use a Linux distro, I'd go with some RHEL variant (Fedora/CentOS). I just find the setup structure of RHEL systems much better laid out than Debian-based systems. But I digress....

So, let´s wait till SP2 comes out for Vista . Did you wait until SP2 for XP before switching over from 98/2000?

Sure... XP less than 5% faster than Vista in most games. Looks like you didn't read the article I sent you (or at least looked at the graphs). The performance difference in games today is negligible. You didn't show me anything about it being "not the case". You just said that the current Explorer works for you and that you don't use the XP search (which is by no means a comparison for the Vista search). Don't get me started on hardware incompatibilities with Beryl - my system kept on crashing when I was using my onboard X3000 GPU. Vista Business with Aero enabled - works without a hitch. Why are you talking about "minimum specs" anyways - you've got a bloody SLI setup! Look - it's your system, and ultimately you can do whatever you want with it. It'd just be a shame for you to have spent over $6,000 on computer hardware and not get the most out of it (and I'm not talking about raw number crunching ability - even XP loses in that regard). Just keep in mind that all the things you're saying about Vista now - that's what everyone said about XP 6 years ago.

Two words - cable management.

@Brucevangeorge - I ran Vista Beta 2 on my laptop (P-M 1.86GHz, 1GB RAM at the time) and I didn't notice any significant slowdowns compared to my XP installation. I moved back to XP because some of the software I had purchased didn't run on the Beta at the time (Hamachi, NHC, Smart. They've now been updated, so when I get the chance over christmas, I'll be moving my laptop to Vista and Office 2007 (searching through 800MB of emails is getting to be a pain). @suryad - You haven't "countered" anything I've said. You've just said that you don't care about improvements. Do you have any proof that Vista is "less optimized" than XP? Have you looked at whatever optimizations are made at the code or compiler level? If you're really crazed about all out performance, why don't you just run command-line Unix? It's got all the straight raw-power performance you could ask for, and none of the "fancy crap" that comes with Vista (or XP for that matter). People are never satisfied with anything new. 98 was crap compared to 95 when first released (98SE fixed that). XP was crap compared to 98SE/2000. Now Vista is crap compared to XP... Let me make a guess - when Microsoft releases Windows7, it'll be crap compared to Vista.

I was actually referring to 64-bit XP when comparing the two earlier. 64-bit computing for XP was an afterthought - not a design criterion. Vista x64 was built from the start. Search, security, the improved Explorer interface (once you learn how to use it properly - address-bar, tags, etc), re-written network stack, better stability...There are TONS of examples of how Vista has improved on XP. Bigger - sure, but can you name one modern OS where new versions are smaller than previous versions? This certainly isn't the case with OSX updates or mainstream Linux. Besides - it's a whole 7GB... whoop de do. Disk space is cheap these days. If the OS took up a significant portion of modern drives, then yes, we'd have a problem, but 7GB... Takes more RAM - unused RAM is wasted RAM. Vista will pre-cache programs that you often use in memory. Linux caches just about everything you do. When I run 'top' on my Fedora workstation, I see a total of 50MB of free RAM (out of 2GB). Freeing up cached memory is quick, and the performance benefits of having it there in the first place are huge. Expensive? Have you looked at what a retail copy of XP Professional will set you back these days? When Vista was first released, the retail version of Vista Ultimate cost about $500, while XP Pro would set you back $450. Vista Home Premium OEM is about $20 more expensive than XP Home OEM - a small small cost for the extra features you get. Slower - did you read the article I linked to? You loose a couple of FPS in games... is it really that big of a deal if you get 92 FPS instead of 95? Vista drivers were the initial cause of performance drops, but after a year of being on the market, they've greatly improved. Flashy stuff? Just switch to the Windows Classic theme. Hmm... I remember people complaining about the "big and flashy" Luna when XP first came out...

http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/amd_nv...ormance_update/ You'll gain a couple of FPS by using XP, while sacrificing part of your RAM and a significant portion of your security. To quote from the conclusion:

http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/?p=320 That's the original article I was referring to. OpenBSD is a good operating system (I've tested it as a webserver base), but it's nowhere near as big of a target as Vista is. Remember how people used to say that Firefox was "more secure" than IE? There's another article showing that over the past year, IE7 has had fewer security holes than Firefox. If OpenBSD were to show enough market share to make a difference, I'm sure that the number 2 would quickly grow. I guess my definition of "major operating system" was a little unclear - something that you might actually hear people talk about in passing reference to computers. OpenBSD is still one of those "specialty" OSes.

@Suryad - That site is basing their entire conclusions on Office benchmarks... are you really going to use that as the be-all-and-end-all review? Vista has far better x64 support than XP ever did. 64-bit systems have a built-in speed boost over 32-bit systems, just from the fact that there are 16 registers in use under x64, while only 8 are used in x86. The problem with getting people to switch from one OS/Program to another is that the new program is often unfamiliar. Just last night, I told a friend to install Opera on his laptop - he then asked me "where's the home button?". I said there was none, and that with Opera, you just open a new tab. His immediate reaction - "Well this is getting uninstalled..." You need to give Vista a chance. Yes, it might not stack up in some benchmarks, but overall in useability I find it much better than XP.

Everytime people say that Windows is less secure than "the rest", I point them to the article that showed less than 30 critical updates in the first year of Vista's release. No other major operating system has matched that yet. I'll be moving to Vista when SP1 comes out - I'd just rather wait until I can slipstream the installation source.

As long as you integrate the proper chipset drivers, you should be fine. That's how I installed XP and Server 2003 on my systems (both have the ICH8R chipset - same idea).

That really does suck... Hopefully nVidia will stop being stupid and let other chipset manufacturers play with SLI.

Happy Birthday ripken!!!

Every piece of software is in a perpetual state of beta. Seriously though - can you name one operating system that hasn't been plagued by bugs in it's initial release? Have you seen the number of bug reports surrounding Leopard as of late? How about this one, which seems to affect most releases of OSX? As for Vista running on older hardware - there were numerous reports of people running Vista on systems as low-powered as a PIII with 384MB of RAM.

That's awesome...

Your PSU is plenty powerful for overclocking that CPU. I'm guessing that you're not running dual SLI setup with 10 hard drives and all that other crap. If that's the case, then my guess is that the system you're running is drawing less than 200W at the moment.

This is turning into another one of those XP/Vista debates... I'll agree with Idontwantspam on a couple of points, but then there's the fact that my laptop (running XP Pro) is sitting here... with over 1.5GB unused RAM. Unused RAM is wasted RAM afterall. Some of the things that make Vista far more user-friendly than XP: - Instant search - Better explorer layout - Flip3D - some people say it's "eye candy", but it actually helps in many cases to see all the windows of what you're working on at once Some people say that the system itself is slower when running Vista... but on which one can you get more stuff done? Vista has FAR better multithreading and multi-core support than XP. 64-bit was an afterthought for XP, while it was a major design consideration for Vista. People say UAC is a pain, but it's the way Microsoft wanted things to be done in XP. They just never actually implemented any of the security restrictions that they recommended programmers to follow. I'll be moving my system up to Vista x64 when SP1 rolls out. I've been waiting for SP1 to fix a number of minor bugs, and in the meantime, things are working quite well as they are. In the meantime, I'm stuck using only 2.93GB of RAM out of the 4GB total I have installed.

That's nothing... NCIX.com had WD5000AAKS drives on surprise sale the other day for $80 a piece.

Corsair for both the memory and PSU. Does your dad play games? If not, the 8600GT is completely overkill. You could alternatively find a motherboard with onboard video. For example, the Intel X3100 graphics accelerator (the GPU that comes with the G33 chipset) is plenty to run Aero on Vista. There aren't really too many other situations (aside from gaming and CAD tools) where a dedicated graphics card is needed.

@clidx - You're drawing more than 200W on that system, especially with the X1950Pro and the overclock that you've got. My system at home (see this post for specs) draws about 250W at full load. Since your overclock is higher than mine and you've got a more powerful video card, I'd say that you're using about 300W (your calculations were wrong ... 24+175 != 299... but you got the right number). Your seasonic PSU should be able to handle that load well enough. Seasonic's are generally made from high quality components and don't crap on you.

The number of voltage "rails" is immaterial in most cases. Most consumer PSUs have a single transformer, and then various current limiters on the different "rails". The manufacturers do this to pass ATX specifications, but they're kinda cheating. You're kinda comparing apples and apples here - the Corsair PSU is actually OEM'd by Seasonic, so there's no difference in the quality of the components. It's really just a matter of branding. I'm asuming these are the two models in question: Seasonic S12 Energy Plus 550 Corsair HX520 & HX620 I've got the HX520 in my workstation and the HX620 in my file server. In order to get the best efficiency out of your PSU, you have to figure out what kind of load you're going to put on it. My workstation pulls about 250W from the wall, which means that the HX520 is sitting somewhere around the 85% efficency mark (about as good as it gets with any PSU). Just to give you an idea of what the HX520 is running at the moment: Intel Q6600 @ 3.0GHz (1.2V in CPU-Z) P5B-DLX motherboard 4GB (4x1GB) DDR2-1066 @ DDR2-1000 4-4-4-12 2x WD3200AAKS Pioneer DVR-212D EVGA 8600GT OC (576/1500) Like I said before, my Kill-a-Watt meter shows a load of about 250W when running Prime95 v0.25.4 and rthdribl. There's plenty of headroom to move up to a more powerful video card while still maintaining good efficiency. If I had to recommend one or the other - I'd go with the Corsair, just because everyone at SPCR was stunned at how quiet it was while maintaining rock solid stability (I helped review it afterall... ).