Home sweet home PC

[VirtualLarry]

Well, I've strayed, and now I'm coming home.

I built some budget gaming rigs back in 2006, with E2140 CPUs, and Gigabyte P35-DS3R mobos. I upgraded them some time later with Q9300 CPUs from Microcenter that I got for $100 + tax on clearance.

Started out with Radeon 1950Pro cards, then upgraded to HD4850 512MB cards.

Anyways, clocked to 3.0, the Q9300 is a fairly beefy (well, mid-range these days) rig.

But I was really concerned at some point about power consumption, so I bought an E-350 rig. Then another one, because the price was right. Tried using those rigs for some time, but they were just a touch too slow, even with an SSD.

So I invested in a pre-built store-bought computer, a Gateway slimline with a Sandy Bridge G630 Pentium CPU in it. I upgraded the RAM from 4GB to 8GB, added an SSD, and an NV GT430 video card. It was faster than the E-350 rigs, by far, and best yet, it had almost comparable power usage. 42W idle, 65W CPU load, ~94W CPU+GPU load doing distributed computing.

But the other night, I was listening to my internet radio, and it kept skipping, when I was scrolling my web browser. Even scrolling Windows explorer, would cause it to skip. I suspected a video driver problem with the GT430.

So, once again, I'm back to my Q9300 @ 3.0, with my trusty HD4850 card, and 8GB of DDR2-800.

Internet radio doesn't skip (well, very rarely, and not as pronounced as before), even when I'm doing DC on all four CPU cores, and the video card. Even scrolling web pages isn't bad, while I'm using the video card for DC. (I've experienced massive GUI slowdown using lower-end NV cards like the GT430 to do DC. Not that noticeable on my GTX460 though.)

Edit: For a point of discussion, could having 400FSB be better in some way than 100BCLK?

 

[Torn Mind]

Heh, Core 2 Quads certainly reached a level of performance that still hasn't been obsoleted, although that level of performance is now available at a much lower cost at launch, like with Richland and the i3s.

 

[VirtualLarry]

I was contemplating a Richland ITX setup. Only, the other night when I was looking, they only had the dual-core Richland part on Newegg, so I ended up buying a couple of 80GB X25-M SSDs off of TD instead. Was also looking at the ASRock FM2 A85X ITX board, that looks sweet to me, and possibly a Cooler Master Elite 120 ITX case.

I have an A6-3670K LLano @ 3.0 in my HTPC, it's fairly nice.

 

[Cerb]

But the other night, I was listening to my internet radio, and it kept skipping, when I was scrolling my web browser. Even scrolling Windows explorer, would cause it to skip. I suspected a video driver problem with the GT430.

Try uninstalling HDMI audio support (basically, uninstall drivers, then do a custom install of the latest WHQLs, with HDMI unchecked). I never could get smooth audio with it installed (GTX 460, Win7 64-bit).

 

[VirtualLarry]

I discovered something. I have a C-70 Foxconn NanoPC as my HTPC. As you may have guessed, the CPU is a bit...slow. (1.0Ghz Bobcat)

Anyways, I listed to internet radio on that, through HDMI. Sometimes, when I also web browse on it at the same time, the radio skips.

Well, I hadn't done Windows Updates in like a year, and then after I did all of the updates, even scrolling web pages a little bit, caused massive skipping in the internet radio. Even with CPU load not nearly 100% (30-40%). So not a CPU load problem.

Seems like some of the updates caused latency increases, in terms of apps talking to the GPU (IGP in this case).

Because when I disabled hardware acceleration in Waterfox, the problems nearly completely went away.