Railworks America

Hey Hawk, can we have a sticky for geek talk? :) It's nice to go off topic a bit sometimes.

So, I wanted to get away from the 1156 socket and into Sandy Bridge land. So today with the cash I sucked in from working insane overtime finally plunked down to make the transition.

The goodie bag.



And installed! (excuse my 1/2 hearted wire hiding.. That's another project amongst itself)



4.1ghz stable o/c.. These 2600k's can do 4.8 4.9 (from a base 3.4).

I'm by no means rich.. Besides Railworks, geeking out to new computer hardware is my other sick addiction, it's the only thing I dump any money into. Next toy is to replace those 5870's with a 6990.

My heart just stopped...

Very NICE!

That rig is going to run RW3 VERY nicely.

This would run ANYTHING very nicely... A stock 2600k holds up very nicely even to Sandy Bridge-E in most circumstances. Wish I had the money to drop into a much better computer... still on LGA775, limited to 4GiB of DDR2.

Obama likes your overtime.

I'm waiting for Bulldozer. Yep, I'm an AMD (CPU) guy. Looks like it's gonna be a nice rig, Bill. Congrats!

arizonachris wrote:Obama likes your overtime.

I'm waiting for Bulldozer. Yep, I'm an AMD (CPU) guy. Looks like it's gonna be a nice rig, Bill. Congrats!

I'm an AMD & Nvidia guy myself.

harryadkins wrote:My heart just stopped...

ditto...

I used to be all about AMD. Not sure about their current product line but I was always disappointed with their performance. I always felt their CPUs felt outdated as soon as I bought them. I stopped buying AMD cpu's around the Althon series. I hear nothing but good things about their current product line though, but I'm a diehard Intel man, they've done me good. I do however stick with them for GPU's. :) Now that I have a 3rd 16x PCI-E and the power to do so I'll be tossing my 9800GT that's collecting dust in this rig eventually to use as a dedicated physx card.

styckx wrote:I used to be all about AMD. Not sure about their current product line but I was always disappointed with their performance. I always felt their CPUs felt outdated as soon as I bought them. I stopped buying AMD cpu's around the Althon series. I hear nothing but good things about their current product line though, but I'm a diehard Intel man, they've done me good. I do however stick with them for GPU's. :) Now that I have a 3rd 16x PCI-E and the power to do so I'll be tossing my 9800GT that's collecting dust in this rig eventually to use as a dedicated physx card.

I had AMD in two machines now, and I haven't had any problem with either one. My old machine, the only thing that gave out was the hard drive (twice), the PSU, and the video card. That tends to happen when you buy a machine in 2006 and keep it until 2011 . However, I never had a problem with the AMD CPU. I don't really expect to encounter any problem with the AMD CPU in the new machine either. It has a AMD Phenom II X4.

styckx wrote:I used to be all about AMD. Not sure about their current product line but I was always disappointed with their performance. I always felt their CPUs felt outdated as soon as I bought them. I stopped buying AMD cpu's around the Althon series. I hear nothing but good things about their current product line though, but I'm a diehard Intel man, they've done me good. I do however stick with them for GPU's. :) Now that I have a 3rd 16x PCI-E and the power to do so I'll be tossing my 9800GT that's collecting dust in this rig eventually to use as a dedicated physx card.

Until Intel finally buried the abomination that was the Pentium 4, the AMDs were actually faster. The Core series processors did turn that around though.

Speaking of AMD processors, the Opteron (server class) Bulldozer processors just started to ship, so we should see the desktop version shortly.

My gaming rig is a bullet proof Phenom II 940 with an EVGA GTX470 SSC and 4Gb 1066 RAM. My other two boxes that only run Folding @ Home are Phenom I's. All my PC's run 24/7. Bill, I have had issues with the cooling fan in the Cooler Master PSU's. Running 24/7, I have to take the fan out and lube it once a year. I finally just got a couple of fans from Panasonic with the liquid bearings. They are a treat and work just fine.

Elite Marksman wrote:Speaking of AMD processors, the Opteron (server class) Bulldozer processors just started to ship, so we should see the desktop version shortly.

Bulldozer reaches 8.43 Ghz on LH for a new WR ... be nice to replace some of my Xeons with a handful of these @5 on air

g_nash wrote: Bulldozer reaches 8.43 Ghz on LH for a new WR ... be nice to replace some of my Xeons with a handful of these @5 on air

Aye, I saw that earlier. Though when Ivy Bridge hits the die shrink to 22nm plus the increased efficiency of tri-gates should bump that record up quite a bit.

1200 Watts? Dude, I hope you live near a substation!

I think with RW 3 coming, we all got upgrade fever!

Ware-wise, IMHO, you can't go wrong with an Asus motherboard and Intel Procs. I was going through the mothers quit frequently until I hit on an Asus, it's never given me problems and has infinite upgrades. I actually liked the Pentium 4 processor. It kept my room nice and toasty in the winter and gave me a great excuse to install and elaborate water cooling system.

I notice you've got a Corsair radiator, and that reminds me to tell you folks to beware of Corsair memory. Usually I stick (pun intended) with Kingston, but Fry's was having a good deal on Corsair XMS2's, so I bought 8 gig. 1 stick was dead out of the box. Sent it back, got a replacement - also dead. Finally got one that worked, and all is fine now, but it still didn't make a very good impression.

I've always liked Asus myself, until one production series turned out to be a black sheep of the family (M2N2-SLI Deluxe, naturally it was the one I bought), so I started using Gigabyte.
I know one bad series doesn't a brand name make, but like Jerry's experience with the Corsair RAM, sometimes that's all it takes.

I'm a Kingston fan myself.

Unfortunately, due to a slight financial embarrassment, I'll not be able to enjoy RW3 as it should be enjoyed. It's going to be quite a while before upgrading my PC is an option.