After running around with the same hardware for nearly 5 years straight, I finally decided to break down and build a new system. It was not cheap and I'm still not quite finished with it.
$180.00 MSI 990FXA-GD80 AM3+ Mainboard
$150.00 Phenom II X6 1075T 3.0GHz
$100.00 16GB Patriot Sector 5 DDR3 1600MHz Quad Channel Kit
$100.00 Diamond AMD Radeon HD 6670 XOC Edition
xxxxxxx eVGA nVidia GeForce 8800GS
$70.00 32GB Corsair Nova Solid State Drive
xxxxxxx 1TB Western Digital Green Hard Drive
xxxxxxx 750GB Seagate Hard Drive
xxxxxxx LG Blu-ray ReWriter
xxxxxxx Generic Lightscribe DVD Burner
$80.00 Cooler Master GX 750W 80+ PSU
$85.00 NZXT Classic H2
$100.00 Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit
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Estimated total: $865.00
Getting sustained 30 FPS on World of Warcraft in ultra settings: Priceless.
As with any new system, I'm still working out the major bugs. When I first pieced her together, the board would barely POST. I spent about 20 minutes trying different card and RAM slots before realizing it needed a BIOS update. After 3 tries, I was able to get into the BIOS and flash the new version over. Since then, it works fine.
I was a little wary about doing the whole dual graphics cards from different vendors setup, but it actually works perfectly in Windows 7 without a hitch. I'm not doing Eyefinity or any 3D stuff yet, so my secondary monitor is plugged into the nVidia card. I think that bypassed the PhysX lockout that nVidia has in their drivers. Both are running just fine with the current official drivers from AMD and nVidia. CoreAVC has access to all 96 CUDA cores and decodes the entire stream on the card.
Installing Windows 7 Ultimate was easy, too. I've never owned a SSD before, so it's my first time. I've read up on some best practices for SSD performance and longevity. The core operating system is installed to the SSD while the bulk of the programs are on the 1TB drive. Most of the user storage is in that drive, as well. I now have to be wary of installing programs and just flying through with the default settings as I need to think, "Do I need speed for this application?", "Is this too big for the SSD?". Resetting the environment variables to redirect to the 1TB drive was a bit of a pain and consisted of many reboots. Linux makes this shit easy by having you do it at install time. Windows and NTFS are fully capable of that type of setup, but it is almost impossible to reconfigure protected areas of the filesystem using NTFS mount folders. One thing that was not mentioned in any of the forums was the system Hibernation file. It is as big as your RAM capacity; 16GB in my case. That's half of my SSD!. There is no way to move it to the 1TB drive. But, since this is a desktop and will have a dedicated power source, there is no real reason to even use hibernation over standby or the good-old-fashioned shut down.
I will need to replace the stock cooler on the 1075T. While it is efficient enough to keep the CPU running at a nice 31 degrees while idling, it is still really loud. All I have to do is flip the switch on my cases top panel to cut the RPMs to the three case fans and the CPU cooler starts to rev up like a Boeing 747. I bought the case so that she would be virtually silent and that I could sleep without having to listen to the drone of fans all night.
That third hard drive I have is going to be a permanent backup drive. It will keep a current copy of the SSD so that ifwhen that SSD does fail, I'll be able to restore it right onto a new one. The case has a nice slot on the top for putting an internal drive in for temporary storage, but it is not cooled and that 750GB heated up real quick. I'll probably just throw in the tower.
My 30FPS World of Warcraft benchmark is a bit of an exaggeration. I based it on playing a new Blood Elf character leveled to 12 using the highest possible settings in the graphics menu. I did get 30 FPS in many of the areas. Some areas dropped down to 23FPS. I ended up bottlenecking on the graphics card. I guess an HD 6670 doesn't cut it for 60FPS highest-quality gaming. But, I didn't buy the card for that reason. I bought it because it was the cheapest solution for 30-bit color output and has some of the best performance in games. The cheapest 30-bit color card from nVidia is the Quattro 2000(D) which costs about $450 and blows when it comes to games. I'll most likely buy a new nVidia card when they come out and I get my 30-bit monitor. For now, I'll just drop the Anisotropic filtering and multisampling down a few notches since it doesn't look too different but runs at nearly twice the speed.
I haven't tried encoding on it yet, but I have a guess it will go much faster than the Athlon II X4 645 that's in my server right now.
My wish list for Christmas: An AMD Bulldozer 8120 with the most efficient cooler possible.
