Post and rate each others rigs

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here my rig

CPU: AMD FX-6300 unlocked
Ram: 8GB DDR3
HDD: 1TB seagate
case: LEPA something or other
GPU: ASUS radeon R9 270
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA 970A-D3P ultra durable
Monitor: A 19 inch acer one that I bought from some sketchy shop in Chinatown
keyboard: Another acer thingy that I bought from some sketchy shop in Chinatown
Mouse: Gigabyte M6900
Headset: Headrush gayming headset
Fans: One blue and One green aerocool fans

That's a pretty solid rig. Have you considered an SSD for running your OS and games/applications? I just built a similar rig with a Crucial M500 120GB SSD and the transfer speeds are awesome! That, and upgrade the stock CPU cooler. I like the Cooler Master Hyper T4.

I think posters should mention which OS they're using. The OS will have a major impact on the functionality of the build.

My PC is a first-time build that I put together with cheap/used parts.

- used Asus M5a97 motherboard with AMD Athlon II CPU (2.8 Ghz and can handle 32 or 64 bit) and 2GB RAM, slots are DDR3 and can be expanded to 32GB (£50)
- Radeon HD 5450 graphics card (goes for £20 and has both VGA and HDMI output and still packs a pretty big punch in the gaming world)
- used 160GB SATA hard drive (£10)
- internal DVD drive (£15)
- internal Wi-Fi card (£10)
- Corsair CX500M power supply (£60)
- used Dell VGA monitor (£20)
- Gigabyte speakers (£7)
- used Dell USB keyboard (£1.50)
- used Acer USB optical mouse (50p)
- Ubuntu 14.04 OS (32-bit version, free)
- hand me down PC case (free)

Last edited by EnglishInvader on 14 Oct 2014, 1:45 pm, edited 1 time in total.

For a Windows based system, I'd say a solid state drive is a necessity if you want decent boot-up speeds. Use an SSD for the OS and a regular hard drive for general storage.

y'all are fancy compared to me with my lil' ol' HP pavilion g6 with 17" screen, 2.3G core I3, 6G RAM and 250G SSD. it is barely powerful enough to do regular websurfing.

Barely powerful enough for websurfing?!? That should be more than powerful enough.

Anyway, the machine I've been using lately has:

- Core 2 Duo E8500 @ 3.16GHz
- 4GB DDR2 800MHz RAM
- 1GB Radeon HD 5770
- ASUS P5QPL-AM motherboard
- 1TB Seagate hard drive
- Xubuntu 14.04
- Thermaltake Lanbox Lite case
- 550 watt power supply

It's a pretty nice machine, but the motherboard it has is a bit limiting, and the case has major cooling issues. I'm thinking of transplanting most of its parts into my old Pentium Dual Core rig, so that I can upgrade it to 8GB of ram, and see what the overclocking potential of that Core 2 is. The only problem I can see is that my Pentium Dual Core box has an older motherboard which may not properly support 1333MHz FSB CPUs. I'm going to give it a shot anyway, because worse comes to worse, I'll still have two semi-decent desktops to work with.

For comparison, my other desktop has:

- Pentium Dual Core E6300 Wolfdale @ 2.8GHz (I used to have this overclocked all the way to ~4GHz, but I eventually started having stability issues. Ran great like this for a while though.)
- 4GB Corsair XMS2 DDR2 ram @ 800MHz (used to be overclocked to ~945MHz, but again, I lowered it to stock for stability)
- ASUS P5B motherboard (a rather old Core 2 board, but great overclocking features and CPU support nonetheless)
- Radeon HD 4650 with 512MB GDDR3
- 3 500GB hard drives; one is a Samsung, two are Western Digitals. I also have a 500GB Seagate someplace that used to be in here.
- Cooler Master Storm Scout case, in rather poor shape
- 350 watt hideously ghetto-modded power supply out of some old dinosaur (I needed a quick replacement when the previous 400 watt supply started dying, and I had to splice in some extra wiring to not only reach my 4-pin connector, but also so I could hook up all of my fans. I'm amazed this thing hasn't started a fire, and I'm afraid to use it now for this reason)
- Windows XP Professional x64/Zorin OS 8 Gaming/Slacko Puppy Linux 13

If I don't merge these two machines together to make one "good" desktop, I at least want to put a better power supply in the old one, and figure out how to fix the cooling on the new one.

Dual 12-core Xeon E5-2697 @ 2.70GHz (yes, that 48 hardware threads with hyperthreading enabled)
256GB DRAM
2x nVidia Kepler accelerators
2x Intel Phi accelerators
2x Infiniband optical NICs (one QRD, one FDR)
An NVRAM card, forget the size at the moment
Two SSD drives and two SATA drives (enough storage that I don't have to worry about it)
Integrated graphics (ooops, oh well)
Running a variant of Red Hat Linux

I have four of these bad boys. It's nice to have a research budget.

anybody here working on their own supercomputer [or what used to be considered a supercomputer [in terms of flops/over all computing power] say 30 years ago?

The heyday for that was the Beowulf clusters, where piling enough workstations together could return a decent price/performance ratio. In a way, that approach has succeeded to the point where it's the new norm: there are no custom processors in supercomputing anymore (although we do still tend to use custom interconnects).

Jack Dongarra has a great set of slides (google sc13-UTK.pdf) that gives a historical overview. Slide 3 shows a 70 GFLOPS laptop in 2013 would have been the world's fastest supercomputer in 1993. Put a Tesla K40 accelerator in your workstation and its 1.43 teraflops (double precision) would have taken the #1 spot perhaps as late as 2001. And that, for better or for worse, is where the field is going: cheap x86 processors can't compete on price or watts when compared to accelerators.

The good news is that for $5k you can buy a teraflop of double-precision floating point. And that price is going to keep dropping.

I will have to research accelerators. it would be neat if somebody would write software to take advantage of such speedy machines, in fields like digital audio/video restoration, I can just imagine how good the results would be then.

Not counting Mr. Variadic's freaking research beast, I think I got most of y'all on here beat.

CPU: AMD FX-8350 4.0GHz 8-core
Ram: 16GB Crucial DDR3 1600MHz
Storage:
- 500GB WD Caviar Black 7200rpm (Software)
- 3TB WD Caviar Green 5400rpm (Storage)
GPU: 3GB GeForce GTX 660ti
Mobo: Gigabyte GA-970A-DS3P ATX AM3+
Case: Cougar ATX Mid Tower
Monitor: Acer 18.5'' (x2)
Keyboard: Corsair Vengeance K60 (Mechanical)
Mouse: Corsair Vengeance M65

She was my first and I learned a lot since then. Next time I'll worry about a higher performance number on my gpu and not the storage and get a freaking Intel cpu next time.

How are you liking the keyboard?

It can handle just about any abuse you throw at it. I have smashed my hands into it multiple times due to fps rage and it endures like a rock. Only complaint is that occasionally the computer will miss a key release event and start spamming a key and you will have to unplug then replug the usb cables but that may be a pc problem rather than a keyboard one. Also the noise level is perfect as long as you are not in a room with someone trying to sleep (#College). 10/10 though next time I will probably swing for backlit keys.

I decided to take my two Core 2 boxes and merge them into one machine:

- Core 2 Duo E8500 @ 3.61GHz (original clock 3.16GHz)
- 8GB DDR2 800MHz RAM @ 760MHz (I haven't gotten all of the ram running together at 800MHz, and I think this has something to do with chipset limitations, along with the 4GB of Kingston DDR2 not being as good as the 4GB of Corsair XMS2 DDR2. I initially reached a wall at just below 750MHz, but I was able to get it to 760MHz with looser timings and a slight voltage bump. Applying this technique, I may be able to get the CPU and RAM running stable at stock speeds, but the allure of overclocking the CPU as well is too great)
- Asus P5B motherboard
- Asus Radeon HD 5770 with 1GB, probably GDDR3 though I don't know for certain
- Seagate 1TB hard drive as primary, 500GB Samsung, Western Digitals, and various laptop drives as secondaries (I own way too many internal hard drives )
- Cooler Master Storm Scout Case
- Enermax 82+ 550W power supply
- An extra 120mm fan sitting in the front 5 1/4" bay area, and an old CPU fan from an Athlon XP system positioned in front of the northbridge heatsink, along with all the fans that come stock with the case
- Xubuntu 14.04 LTS

As much as I like the overclocking capablilities and extra ram slots of the P5B, I miss the "snappier" performance of the other motherboard, as well as its standby USB power feature. I may consider swapping it back in just to do some benchmarks and play around with its limited overclocking features. Having 8GB of ram is not absolutely crucial for me, but being able to run the CPU at 4GHz for Dolphin is. I could possibly consider taking the Kingston memory out, and using it along with my other leftover components to build another rig. I know both brands on their own can handle 800MHz operation, but I'm not sure if the Kingston RAM can take the same sort of overclocking abuse I've seen my Corsair RAM take.

Overclocking, underclocking, overvolting, undervolting... I love being able to mess with those settings.

On a related note, when it comes to RAM speed, what's more important; the clockspeed the memory is being run at, or the timings? I know that the clockspeed of RAM can have a huge impact on system performance (bigger than CPU clockspeed IMO, which is why I don't shy away from RAM overclocking, unlike a lot of people who just try to get high CPU clocks), but how do the RAM's timings relate? Will a slower-clocked stick of RAM with tight timings perform better than a faster-clocked stick with looser timings?

Built myself couple of years ago, got a little bit of age on it but still gets the job done.

CPU: Intel i7 3820 (X79) @ 4.2ghz
CPU Cooling: Coolermaster Hyper212Evo
Ram: QC - 16GB G.Skill 1866mhz
Storage:
- 120GB Kingston SSD
- 500GB WD Caviar Black
- 2TB Seagate Barracuda
GPU: SLI (2X) Factory Oc'd GTX560s
Mainboard: Gigabyte X79-UD3
Case: Antec 902 V3
Monitor(s): 1x 22" Samsung, 1x BenQ 22"
Keyboard: Logitech G510
Mouse: Razer DeathAdder

Panasonic Toughbook/LetsNote CFT-8 Mk4.

This is the one who's hardware specs are quite similar to the Toughbook CF-30 Mk3. The CPU is a Low Voltage Core2 Duo SU9600.

It's not good for gaming, but it works for what I need it to do, it's a bit more powerful than a netbook in a semi-rugged Magnesium case, with shock mounted drive, and water/spill proof keyboard. It came with a 250GB drive, but I installed a 1TB drive. --I've had it almost exactly one week over a year now, and aside from a little corrosion where it sat on the saltwater covered floorboard of a truck last winter, it's been fine for me.