Hardware Questions

[seductive_words]

Okay, so I'm getting ready to set up a kick ass system specifically for running 3 instances of EQ on one box and several applications(multiple web browsers open, ventrilo, limewire, streaming music etc..) in the back ground and had a few questions.

First off will start with processor. I have always been a fan of AMD but it seems they have fallen behind as of late. I was looking at the Quad Core Intells. Can you assign specific instances of EQ to each core? If so is it easy and effective? Would it be faster if I went with a dual core processor? If so what type of dual core is recommended? Will I need an after market processor fan for it?

Next is RAM. I was looking at getting 3 gigs of DDR2 RAM. I heard windows XP can only run a maximum of 3 gigs is this verified to be true?

Next is Video cards, I have always been an ATI fan, they have little issues and last for a long ass time and the drivers seem to have less issues than NVIDIA. Not sure if that's true but it's been my experience. I'm looking at running dual video cards. What type of video cards are recommended for this?

Next is hard drives. I'm looking at getting a raptor hard drive as they have high RPMs and find information extremely quickly. Can you set up a RAID with raptor drives? or is it best just to get a decent sized raptor drive to run my programs off of and just use a big SATA2 hard drive for my media file storage?

Last is cooling system. I was looking in to getting a liquid cooled system. Are they effective? Do they require a lot of maintenance? Is it better just to have several high quality fans?

The rest I can figure out for my self, mobo will be an asus, power supply doesn't really matter just a high quality high wattage.

Feed back on this and links would be much appreciated.

 

[clopchops]

First off will start with processor. I have always been a fan of AMD but it seems they have fallen behind as of late. I was looking at the Quad Core Intells. Can you assign specific instances of EQ to each core? If so is it easy and effective? Would it be faster if I went with a dual core processor? If so what type of dual core is recommended? Will I need an after market processor fan for it?

Yes you can assign EQ to each core, I think EQ does that for you, at least for dual core, if not, you can do it yourself with proper permissions. Its easy on vista, XP you gotta run taskmgr.exe through a program... forgot its name. 4 Cores > 2 Cores. I'd go with AM2+ quad core, wont need new fan unless you plan to OC.

Next is RAM. I was looking at getting 3 gigs of DDR2 RAM. I heard windows XP can only run a maximum of 3 gigs is this verified to be true?

Windows XP pro can support up to 4 gigs. I suggest you get dual kit of x2 2gig sticks.

Next is Video cards, I have always been an ATI fan, they have little issues and last for a long ass time and the drivers seem to have less issues than NVIDIA. Not sure if that's true but it's been my experience. I'm looking at running dual video cards. What type of video cards are recommended for this?

Personally, I love my 8800. Now a days its cheaper then ever, can run most game on high, esp EQ.

Next is hard drives. I'm looking at getting a raptor hard drive as they have high RPMs and find information extremely quickly. Can you set up a RAID with raptor drives? or is it best just to get a decent sized raptor drive to run my programs off of and just use a big SATA2 hard drive for my media file storage?

I run 2 10k RPM raptors on RAID 0, then I have 500 gig sata for storage. They make alot of noise btw =)

Last is cooling system. I was looking in to getting a liquid cooled system. Are they effective? Do they require a lot of maintenance? Is it better just to have several high quality fans?

Since I don't wanna spend couple hundred on cooling, I use stock fans and stock speeds, everything still runs great. Unless your an avid gamer that has to have the best. Could always go with fanless ones, those make no sound at all.

 

[EvenLessSpam]

From the reviews I've read I'd still go for Intel rather than AMD. AMD's quadcore still have issues.

As for whether to use quad or dual I've heard people mentioning issues with quad under XP. Personally I'd rather save a few bucks and go dual core (which I have now) since from what I can understand the performance gain is negligible compared to the cost.

Windows XP 32-bit (regular) can handle up to 4 GB by using PAE (Pentium Address Extensions) which XP should activate automatically during install, at least it has for me. However, XP will only report 3.4-6 GB of available system memory which, as far as I understand, has something to do with allocating the rest for the PCI devices. Using Windows XP 64-bit should make it report all 4 GB.

Running multiple applications, including multiple EQ clients, are really memory intensive (depending on the programs ofcourse) so I'd recommend getting at least 4 GB since RAM is dirt cheap these days.

Harddrives.. I don't really have much of an opinion. I don't belive that you'll notice much of a difference setting them in raid, and I really loathe RAID 0 because you're so fucked if one of the drives are lost then you loose the data on both drives. Raptor discs are too noisy and again I don't believe I'd notice/care about the slight increase in performance to bother.

If it's for storing media (music and movies) I'd have RAID 5. Planning to building a dedicated storage server with (I'm a cheap bastard) 8x500GB drives. Although I'm kinda waiting for the 1TB drives to get to a reasonable price and then going 8x1TB instead. This means 7 goes for data and the last goes to parity. Then I get the most out of my space while still having some sort of security net if one of the drives should fail.

I've always preferred nVidia simply because they've always had better drivers than ATI (now AMD) and they've usually delivered more "bang for the buck" than AMD. But I guess it's really a matter of taste. This often ends up in a war of "religions"

Stock cooling is fine unless you're going to overclock or are concerned about noise. For my desktop machine I prefer silent. Server I don't really care since it's in another room than me.


Currently I have the following setup (still planning that storage server):
Gigabyte GA-P35-DQ6
Intel Core 2 Duo E6750 2.67GHz
4x 1GB Corsair TWIN2X 6400C4 DDR2
MSI GeForce 7900GTO (not many were made and only MSI made these, performance is somewhere between 7900GT and 7950GT).
Corsair Powersupply 520W
1x80, 1x250, 1x320, 2x500 GB discs, where the 80 is dedicated to the operating system and programs. The 250 is dedicated to games (hence only EverQuest will run from it when playing that). Rest are just storage.

System easily runs 3-4 EQ clients (1 in high quality rest in low) along with mIRC, Miranda-IM, Thunderbird, Firefox, µTorrent and often a Media Player Classic (watching some serie or other). With 4 EQ clients I can feel it's becoming annoyingly slow to zone but with just 3 I often zone faster than several other people.

 

[dulak]

I'm running a gigabyte mobo with an amd athlon 64 3300+, 3 gb of ram, an ati radeon x1650 512mb vid card, 320 sata2 HD and a 500gb external HD. I can 3 box EQ, run winamp, all the messengers I use, firefox and mirc with no lag stuff anywhere. I'm also running xp home sp2 atm. Dunno if I really wanna upgrade to Vista Ultimate yet. I have a copy, just not sure if I wanna use it lol

 

[htw]

Ok, figured I'd throw in my 2 cents here...

First off will start with processor. I have always been a fan of AMD but it seems they have fallen behind as of late. I was looking at the Quad Core Intells. Can you assign specific instances of EQ to each core? If so is it easy and effective? Would it be faster if I went with a dual core processor? If so what type of dual core is recommended? Will I need an after market processor fan for it?

Go read some reviews from some reputable sites. If you want performance, go with a quad core Intel, regardless of extreme series. If you don't mind giving up some performance, lower your costs and go with AMD. (This is one of those subjects where every person who owns an asshole, has an opinion. It's like politics, religion, etc.)

Next is RAM. I was looking at getting 3 gigs of DDR2 RAM. I heard windows XP can only run a maximum of 3 gigs is this verified to be true?

Any 32-bit OS (XP, Linux, whatever) will be limited to 4 gigs of addressable memory space: 2^32 = 4,294,967,296, 4,294,967,296/(1024x1024) = 4096. However, not all of that will be available for use by the OS. Memory-mapped devices (video, add-in roms, APIC, etc.) will use up some of the 4g address space. Depending on what kind of hardware you have, you should see anywhere from 3.0 to 3.6g of memory available to your 32-bit OS. As far as PAE (which is 36-bit btw, not 32) + AWE, it's bitchy and probably not gonna do you much good. If you want more than 3.0/3.6'ish, go with a 64-bit OS.

Next is Video cards, I have always been an ATI fan, they have little issues and last for a long ass time and the drivers seem to have less issues than NVIDIA. Not sure if that's true but it's been my experience. I'm looking at running dual video cards. What type of video cards are recommended for this?

Well, I personally prefer Nvidia, but this is like arguing religion. Go look up some reviews, e.g. www.tomshardware.com, and make your choice.

Next is hard drives. I'm looking at getting a raptor hard drive as they have high RPMs and find information extremely quickly. Can you set up a RAID with raptor drives? or is it best just to get a decent sized raptor drive to run my programs off of and just use a big SATA2 hard drive for my media file storage?

Yes, Raptor drives are a tad noisy, but if you notice them, you gotta be one picky SOB. For storage I use a 1 TB fast SATA2, which benches raw I/O over a wide range of I/O block sizes, approx 54M/sec transfer. Using primary 2 x WD Raptor 150's in Raid 0, 149M/sec. As far as not using raid since if you lose a drive, you lose all your data... well guess what, if you are using 1 drive, and it goes, you lose all your data too. That's what backups are for.

Last is cooling system. I was looking in to getting a liquid cooled system. Are they effective? Do they require a lot of maintenance? Is it better just to have several high quality fans?

Fans should be fine for you if you get an Intel Q series quad, or core 2 duo. Their power consumption is low, hence low heat. If you get extreme series, definitely go high quality fans (Zalman, etc.) and be running in a room with decent temp control. Otherwise, go water cooled. If you plan on overclocking, go water cooled.

htw

 

[eqisdead]

I'll chime in here also as on three of my four pcs I can run 12 eq sessions at a time each. I have el cheapo video cards (ati x1600 in one, ati x1650 in another and my best one has an ati 3870 which runs very well heh) so it sometimes lags out and I doubt it would near as much with better video hardware. I dual boot with windows xp 64 bit and 32 bit but absolutely love 64 bit windows xp. I have 8gb of ram in each of the three pcs but the thing I love most is virtual ram is actually taken care of decently in 64 bit edition. If I load up 9 to 12 sessions of eq it puts my ram at about 20% (9 sessions) to 2% (12 sessions). Invariably sometime in the next hour windows will say it's low on memory and kick eq out of at least 300mb of ram each session without affecting me (bogs down while it does that but I'll gladly live with that) and before I know it I have 60% plus of my memory free again.

My hard drives are just standard hard drives I didn't have the money to go hog wild with stuff or I would have gotten two raptors for each system (probably just the 73 or whatever gb ones) to run in raid 0 and a 500+ gb drive for storage. The three processors I have are e6600 core 2 duo, e6750 core 2 duo, and q6600 quad core. I really don't notice much of a difference between the three of them to be honest. If you're only focusing on running three, I think you'll be fine with anything you're just going to want a good video card. The power supplies I have (two I built, one I bought from hp for $500-the quad core), are two seasonic 600w and then I think the hp has a 300w in it maybe? I honestly haven't looked as I've never had any trouble but that's where I have the x1600 so it doesn't require extra power.

If you have any extra questions feel free to keep asking. There's a ton of us that come here throughout the day to see what's up. I know htw for sure has a lot of hardware experience as I've seen him make some really good comments in other threads and I know there's a lot of us other users here that have a lot of experience as well. Computers are what I do for a living (network admin) and I also dabble with them when I have free time which isn't much anymore I have to admit. We're happy to help though. As htw said one of the best things to do is go to some hardware review sites (www.tomshardware.com, www.anandtech.com, etc and look over some best bang for your buck systems as well as individual pieces. In terms of fans my hp has stock and I bought tuniq 120 for the 2 core 2 duos and everything is running great temp wise, don't know that you'd need a water-cooled system unless you want to majorly oc or want bragging rights heh.

eqisdead

 

[Blujahz]

Similar to the original poster, I have a 10K raptor drive that I am using as my C: drive (for swap file since I only have 2GB RAM atm). I have a fast SATA drive as my D: drive that I run EQ from.

Is this the most optimal setup? Would I get better performance using the raptor as my E: drive to speed EQ loads at the cost of a slower swap file? Alternatively, I could run EQ from the C: drive as well, but then E: drive would be wasted.

Any advice is appreciated.

 

[Anthrax]

Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 Wolfdale 3.0GHz 6MB L2 Cache LGA 775 65W Dual-Core Processor

Great processor here, overclocks very well. Only mentioning it because Newegg just restocked them and I got an email this morning.

 

[seductive_words]

From talking to some people I think I'm going to go with a quad core processor, with 4 gigs of RAM, dual video cards, 1 Raptor drive, one storage drive.

Not really sure which of the Intell quad cores to go with though.

 

[kukmuk]

If you are going to go with SLI, make sure you don't want multiple monitors in the future, you might want to do a little research.

 

[Goober32]

My current setup, runs 4 to 5 on each system w/o issue

First off will start with processor. I have always been a fan of AMD but it seems they have fallen behind as of late. I was looking at the Quad Core Intel's. Can you assign specific instances of EQ to each core? If so is it easy and effective? Would it be faster if I went with a dual core processor? If so what type of dual core is recommended? Will I need an after market processor fan for it?

Drop the AMD, I used to be a fan also until the dual / quad core issues flared up. Some swear by it, but given there is a choice I went with Intel x 2 Quad Cored 6600's (one in each system).

Next is RAM. I was looking at getting 3 gigs of DDR2 RAM. I heard windows XP can only run a maximum of 3 gigs is this verified to be true?

Yes it's true, unless you have a 64 bit version, running vista in 32 isn't enough still has the same limitations. Put in 4gb, with the price of ram these days it's better to have it an not need it, than need it and not have it. (I'm running XP Pro as all the video driver wizardry hasn't yet made it to vista).

Next is Video cards, I have always been an ATI fan, they have little issues and last for a long ass time and the drivers seem to have less issues than NVIDIA. Not sure if that's true but it's been my experience. I'm looking at running dual video cards. What type of video cards are recommended for this?

NVIDIA - I'm sorry to all those ATI fans, but from personal experience I've had 5 out of 5 NVIDIA's work and last well beyond the MTBF -- Can't say the same for ATI's. No OCing either..

Next is hard drives. I'm looking at getting a raptor hard drive as they have high RPMs and find information extremely quickly. Can you set up a RAID with raptor drives? or is it best just to get a decent sized raptor drive to run my programs off of and just use a big SATA2 hard drive for my media file storage?

The book is open, but for multi read and write actions you would be slightly better off with a raid 0, but you are exposing yourself to a higher possibility of a DR problem (get an external USB HDD and back up every month, what I do).

Back to the HD's - I'm using 2 x 500G drives in Raid 0 - works great no issues, very speedy.

Last is cooling system. I was looking in to getting a liquid cooled system. Are they effective? Do they require a lot of maintenance? Is it better just to have several high quality fans?

How long is a piece of string? Don't go nuts here, why would you want water running through your case. Sure there is the "bling" factor with neon lights and so forth, but really, do you spend time staring at your magical rainbow colour bling tower with side view window and multi purpose water fountain bird feeder or do you find yourself looking at your monitor more often..? I'd go for stock cooling, toss in some fans in front back and top (noise goes up) to have positive pressure in the case to push dust and hot air out.

PC components aren't cheap, especially if you are sniffing around the higher end of town for a power rig. Spending unnecessary $$ (if you are rich by all means ignore this) will ramp up the system cost quickly, and remember lights don't make the thing run faster.

The rest I can figure out for my self, mobo will be an asus, power supply doesn't really matter just a high quality high wattage.

PS does matter, get an Antec or something that has some grunt to it, with at least 50% more juice than you need to cover expansions, more HDD's or a bird feeder if you install one later.

Feed back on this and links would be much appreciated.

Not sure what country you are in, but you can try Google.. Link below.

www.google.com

 

[pullzem]

Even if you don't buy specific parts from Newegg, it's hard to beat them for any type of reviewing process. First off, you can see easily if something is rated 4 or 5 out of 5...read many reviews from customers to find out what is so good about it or to see why a few weren't happy.

Next, you can click several views of the items which is super helpful for anything from visualizing it at your home, to being sure it has the correct connectors or the screwholes line up. Try buying a powersupply from anyone else when you need to be sure the screwholes match your PC and they win handsdown with their multiple pictures.

Pricewise, its near impossible to beat them and even though I've never had a DoA purchase, they seem to take care of you properly, according to reviews. My other favorite price site is ZipZoomFly.com but they don't have the great reviews and multiple views to help make your choices, so they're good for comparison once you've decided on which items as they sometimes beat Newegg.

After making my choice of which item, I always run it through Pricegrabber.com with the model number to quickly see who has the best price, anywhere. It's usually always Newegg or ZipZoomFly and occassionally PC Mall, TigerDirect or Wal-Mart. Don't dismiss Wal-Mart as their return policy is the absolute best...90 days for full refund for any reason