OFcGaming

it's always easy to spend more money but I would recommend the H50 cooler assuming you're going to overclock the i7 930. For £60 you do get top-end cooling capability and it is the temps of my i7 920 (with the H50) which is limiting my oclock to 4GHz (from memory 75 degrees max) so I'm glad I've got the extra cooling. My cpu will clock faster but it gets hotter than I'd like so I eased back a bit, but I'm assuming with the stock cooler I'd have more of a temperature issue to deal with (your mileage may vary...).

Also though, the H50 really is a small/neat installation compared to how big an equivalent air cooler would need to be, which made it easy to install. Now you've got the case you can look inside to see where the mobo is going to be compared to the fan position for the h50 radiator like this - you can choose which way round you want to place the cooler/radiator so the hoses are neatest.


You need a fan header for the radiator fan, plus another fan header for the waterblock that sits on top of the cpu (i.e for the pump), and from memory with my Gigabyte X58-UD3R one of those was a real stetch from the bottom edge of the board...

Bambam

Take Bambam's advice on the cooler. The Corsair H50 is a very cheap way of keeping your CPU very cool, and quiet. However, if he offers you advice on buying a phone, ignore him, and shag fat Shiela in Fort William. The things she can do makes it all worthwhile!

I've ordered the SSD now, ebuyer came up loads cheaper than everywhere else, and I reckon even on one of Scan's "Today Only" offers it won't come anywhere near the price I paid:

Corsair Force 60GB, read and write speeds are loads better than most other SSDs.

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/233258#reviews

lol so all you need now is an actual computer ...

there is so much going on during a windows boot that I'd take the 'woot my computer boots in 0.1 milliseconds' with a pinch of salt. But *some* operations will 'snap' open apparently instantaneously where you were previously used to a slight load up delay and you should get the feeling the computer is, to coin a phrase, 'snappy'.

But if you haven't read about the 'mklink' command now's your chance.

And you might consider [url=http://www.w7forums.com/change-location ... -t338.html] moving your 'My Documents' folder to the hard drive straight away.

Bamz

bambam wrote:And you might consider http://www.w7forums.com/change-location ... -t338.html moving your 'My Documents' folder to the hard drive straight away.

Is there any reason why I couldn't/shouldn't move "everything" from my "username folder" to the HDD?

Is there any reason why I couldn't/shouldn't move "everything" from my "username folder" to the HDD?

I don't think there's any real reason not to, but I preferred a bit of finer control and just linked over specific folders (music, pictures, videos) which covers 99% of the bytes that go in there but leaves other files (config files maybe) defaulting to still being on the SSD. It's no big deal but it means I really won't have to fish around on the hard drive looking to see if I want to move/link stuff *back* to the SSD because by default it's there already.

My basic philosophy has been to *start* with a fast (SSD) default and move stuff if I think that won't slow things down.

Where games can be installed to the hard drive, and I think the game performance is going to be zippy on my machine anyway, then I install straight to the hard drive.

I've got BFBC2 being delivered in the next few days, and have 16GB left on my SSD, and I definitely want the main bits of BFBC2 on the SSD, so this will be a bit of a test case for how well I can shuffle things around...

Bambam

have 16GB left on my SSD

update - yesterday I thought maybe I should pre-prepare more space on the SSD for the imminent arrival of BFBC2 so I went onto the C: (SSD) drive, moved some more stuff over to the E: (hard drive) using mklink, and hey-presto I've now got 31GB free on the SSD. The main pointers are:

FOR INDIVIDUAL LARGE FILES:

(1) create a sensible folder structure on the hard drive to receive the content that you're moving over from the SSD. E.g. I've created a folder E:\games\CSS
that holds anything I've moved over to do with Counter-Strike (steam installed it to the SSD by default so I moved it). Open an explorer window on "Computer" and note how much space you've used on the SSD.

(2) open two Explorer windows, one on the SSD folder (e.g. C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\SteamApps), the other on the hard drive (in my case, E:\games\CSS)

(3) open a 'CMD' window and 'cd' to the SSD folder

(4) In the explorer windows, DRAG any large file from the SSD folder to the hard drive, e.g. "counter strike source shared.gcf" which is 1.7GB. You should now see a copy of the file in the hard drive folder.

(5) DELETE the SSD version of the file (eeek! - to be safer, just rename it if you're unsure but you won't save the space until you delete it)

(6) in the CMD window type (7) at this point you should have an entry in the SSD folder that looks like a shortcut to the file on the hard drive, both with the original name.

(8) start CSS and check you haven't fuxed up

(9) EMPTY the recycle bin (assuming you've deleted the original copy of the file on your SSD)

(10) check space used on "Computer" for the SSD - it should have gone down by 1.7GB, i.e. the size of the moved file.

TO MOVE WHOLE FOLDERS (this is more usually the requirement):

everything is the same as above except you're dealing with a folder, and the mklink command has an additional "/D" parameter.

E.g. the same 'SteamApps' folder has a sub-folder "youremail@emailserver" which has sub-folders for each steam game, e.g. "half-life 2 lostcoast"

(1) drag the SSD "half-life 2 lostcoast" folder over to your hard drive
(2) delete (or rename if you're chicken) the SSD "half-life 2 lostcoast" folder
(3) in the CMD window 'cd' to the SSD folder and type assuming thats the harddrive foldername you used...
(4) Now in explorer you should be able to start at C:\, click through the folders until you get to the folder youremail@emailserver and keep clicking through the 'half-life 2 lostcoast' link as if its a folder without caring about the drive placement. Which is the whole point of the exercise. Try it.

You need to empty the recycle bin to see the saving in space. Another tip to save space is to reduce the size of the recycle bin (right click it).

EDIT: wow, just saved another 5GB by turning hibernate off:
in an administrator's cmd window type Now I've got 39.2GB free of 74.4GB (the formatted capacity of my '80GB' SSD).

BFBC2 is reported on the interweb as installing 6GB so I'm overachieving at the mo.

Bambam

It's all go. Everything left is ordered to arrive tomorrow. So Friday afternoon/night the build will commence. Next week I'm going to busy and stuff moving, and there's someone in tomorrow to sign for the delivery which there won't be next week.

The important bits I've gone for, are:

Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD3R (rev2)
1GB Asus HD 5870, PCI-E 2.0, 4800MHz etc
6GB (3x2GB) Corsair XMS3, 1600
Intel Core i7 930 D0

I'm just going to run stuff at stock at the moment, I'll get a quality aftermarket cooler at some point down the line and do some OCing.

Redddraggon wrote:1GB Asus HD 5870, PCI-E 2.0, 4800MHz etc.

If thats the one you can up the voltage's on then I have that same card! Not had much luck with ocing it myself before I starting getting glitches but its already plenty fast enough at stock.

I got very-difficult-to-reproduce crashes on my 5870 until I *underclocked* the memory from 1200 MHz to 1150MHz (3840x1024 with some AA/AF in L4D2 would crash every other time I played, i.e. every few hours) but in general I don't get the impression there's a lot of overclocking headroom on the cards. Not on mine, anyway... the core could be overclocked a bit but not worth bothering with.

Just trying to get to grips with the symlinks/mklinks

Seems to be working so far

Found this:

http://code.google.com/p/symlinker/

I'm a physical scientist as opposed to a computer scientist, so I'm not really a fan of the command line. It does exactly the same thing, just requires less thinking from me.

yeah I saw that gui utility -does the job if you need it. Still have to copy the files across and delete or rename the original before you can use the tool tho. I've kept note on a piece of paper what explorer has been telling me for free space on the SSD drive so can keep track of what difference I've made. Sounds good so far...

bambam

My SSD is now junk. Installed everything Friday morning and it was OK, booting and installing stuff was really fast.

Once I got everything installed, everything was running like a dream, until Firefox (one of the apps installed on the SSD) seemed to crash (SSD starting to conk out?), after a reboot neither of my drives (SSD + HDD) were showing up in the BIOS, and so wouldn't boot into Windows.

After restarting and playing around with the BIOS, I got windows to boot, only to experience Firefox crashing again, and this time nothing I have done has got windows to boot on the SSD - the BIOS recognises the SSD only intermittently. Since I had another drive with a couple of partitions I installed windows onto that, and everything else works fine. The SSD is sometimes recognised in windows, and I have managed to format the SSD with the intention of installing linux on the SSD to test the SSD out. Alas the drive doesn't stop recognised long enough to even start the linux installation process.

So it's going to have to go back to Scan. Hopefully their customer service is up to the standards they reckon it is.

erk unlucky - not much you can do with shagged hardware... good you found out straight away which new item was actually faulty. So that's another week before you get a working box...

comiserations...

bambam