Thinking of building this computer, thoughts???

[pparks1]

Well, after a solid week or so of troubleshooting, I ended up swapping out the beloved Seagate 7200.12 hard drive. It was very fast in reading and writing...but for some unknown and strange reason, it's performance in the access time area on "this particular computer" was abysmal. Seriously, it was anywhere from 25-40ms. However, on my other computer, it's running right at 15.1...which is what I expected with this 7200.12 since they made it so quiet.

So, now I am using a 1TB Western Digital Caviar Black. The drive is noticeably warmer and a very small bit louder...it's transfer time is a bit slower (about 90MB/s versus 98MB/s), but the access time is a solid 14ms or so...which just provides more performance across the board.

So, just as a point of reference, I am using all of the parts that I started out with except for the hard drive. I think I am going to just move this hard drive over to another computer in my house. My Linux box could always use more drive space...although the current 320GB drive is nowhere near full capacity.

[Arisen Dragon]

Oh wow parks, well at least you got something that works now.

[pparks1]

It wasn't that the other drive didn't work. To the naked eye, things seemed just fine. I had been raving about the performance until I stumbled upon this one benchmark that seemed a bit out of whack.

In the end, had it been a significant amount of money to replace the hard drive...I probably wouldn't have bothered. But since I could replace it for an easy $100 and could continue to use the other hard drive on another computer in my house, it seemed like a wise move.

I still need a second drive to use for my OSX drive when I put in the "hackintosh" parts. Trying to decide if I am going to use this 1TB drive, or if I am going to put the 1TB into my Linux machine and then move the 320GB from the Linux machine over to be the OSX drive. I'm kinda leaning towards the latter, since I am just going to use the "hackintosh" to screw around and get used to OSX...so 320GB is plenty there. I can actually use my Linux machine to perform network backups and such.

[Arisen Dragon]

Oh ok nice. Still haven't decided on pc parts too busy now a days.

[011191]

Originally Posted by pparks1

It wasn't that the other drive didn't work. To the naked eye, things seemed just fine. I had been raving about the performance until I stumbled upon this one benchmark that seemed a bit out of whack.

In the end, had it been a significant amount of money to replace the hard drive...I probably wouldn't have bothered. But since I could replace it for an easy $100 and could continue to use the other hard drive on another computer in my house, it seemed like a wise move.

I still need a second drive to use for my OSX drive when I put in the "hackintosh" parts. Trying to decide if I am going to use this 1TB drive, or if I am going to put the 1TB into my Linux machine and then move the 320GB from the Linux machine over to be the OSX drive. I'm kinda leaning towards the latter, since I am just going to use the "hackintosh" to screw around and get used to OSX...so 320GB is plenty there. I can actually use my Linux machine to perform network backups and such.

*mental note*

Contact pparks for further computer building / Linux related questions.

[blazedbishop]

Anyone know of a good place to buy some northbridge heatsink for my MSI X58 pro. from what I've read online MSI put some really cheap thermal past on their heatsinks that basically turns into cement and doesn't work very well. I have northbridge temps at around 100 celsius. I had to put an antec spot cool fan blowing on the chipset constantly just to keep it around 75 to 80. I read an article about a guy that replaced his with some aftermarket heatsinks and new thermal compound and his temps are around 35 to 40 I believe. That is my only beef with this motherboard Any suggestions?

[vermillion]

Originally Posted by blazedbishop

Anyone know of a good place to buy some northbridge heatsink for my MSI X58 pro. from what I've read online MSI put some really cheap thermal past on their heatsinks that basically turns into cement and doesn't work very well. I have northbridge temps at around 100 celsius. I had to put an antec spot cool fan blowing on the chipset constantly just to keep it around 75 to 80. I read an article about a guy that replaced his with some aftermarket heatsinks and new thermal compound and his temps are around 35 to 40 I believe. That is my only beef with this motherboard Any suggestions?

Well i would just take it off, clean the old thermal paste of with some isopropyl alcohol. Then pick up some Arctic Silver 5, reapply, and then you should be go to go.

[blazedbishop]

Originally Posted by vermillion

Well i would just take it off, clean the old thermal paste of with some isopropyl alcohol. Then pick up some Arctic Silver 5, reapply, and then you should be go to go.

Well that would all be well and good except I don't think the compund they use comes off very well. the how to I read the guy actually had to turn his heatsink upside down and use a different part of it. It looked weird but he said it worked fine and fit the same? I would just rather have nicer looking aftermarket one than to do that. He mentioned some aftermarkets ones I jsut can't remember what they were!

[011191]

Originally Posted by blazedbishop

Well that would all be well and good except I don't think the compund they use comes off very well. the how to I read the guy actually had to turn his heatsink upside down and use a different part of it. It looked weird but he said it worked fine and fit the same? I would just rather have nicer looking aftermarket one than to do that. He mentioned some aftermarkets ones I jsut can't remember what they were!

You might as well try and reuse your heatsink.

If you buy an aftermarket heatsink, you'll need thermal paste anyways.