Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion The Water Cooler Computer Upgrades

I felt that my computer was starting to lack a bit, so I just ordered two more upgrades.

Pioneer Quad-layer Blu-ray buner
OCZ 240 GB PCIe SSD

That BD burner will be sweet, once I can actually get QL discs.
If you look at the specs page for the SSD, find the 240 GB model, and see why I settled on that one.

So now I have 12 cores from dual Six Core AMD Opterons, 32 GB of ECC DDR2 PC2-5300.

I think next I'll upgrade my video card.

Chris, I wish I could speak your language.

I thought I was keeping it simple. I didn't say anything about using Linux to dd my current boot drive to the new SSD. Or theorize about any of the option ROM problems I may face trying to get the PCIe card to boot.

I am a little disappointed that the card actually has a PCI-X to PCIe bridge behind which is a 4 port SilImage SATA RAID controller. There are four 60 GB SSDs that are striped together to present the full 240 GB to the operating system.

Oh, my current boot drive is a RAID1 mirror (the striping I mentioned above is RAID0) of two 136 GB, 15k RPM, SAS drives. It's pretty fast, but this SSD should be almost an order of magnitude faster.

Isn't that noisy and hot?

Isn't that crazy and insane?

That RevoDrive is very slick, Chris.

Geektastic, m'lord.

12 cores! are they used all the time? maybe folding?

i did fold with my GTX280 for some time, but the card would break after 2 months, and it would take 2 months for me to get a replacement under warranty.
when i got my third card, i stopped folding with it and now i only do it with the cpu.

You go to hell. You go to hell and you die! </Mr. Garrison>

This is typical usage for my machine. But when I ask it to do something, it's ready to go! The main work I request of it is processing raw photos, and encoding video.

The video card I'm thinking about is a GeForce GTX 570. The raw processing software and video encoder I use is CUDA aware. Right now I just have a 8800 GT 512, nice but showing its age.

I've been thinking that one of the things I'd like to do, if I ever lost my job, is sit at home and trade stocks. I've spent about 10 years or so, buying and reading books on the subject, and trading with a small account. Because of the job, I've really never had the time to make this work for me. I usually end up loosing more money than I make. The job always seems to interfere. (Yeah, blame it on the job.) Anyway, at least, I've lost most of the fear and greed factor that cause beginner traders to lose money. At least, that's one plus. I just need to master a technique, which none of the books are very good about teaching. I know how easy it is for a day trader to blow out and fail, but I've never been one to quit just because it's too hard.

There's one on-line help that, to me, seems to be worth a good look. He goes by the name of DayTraderRockStar, with a lot of youtube videos and a website called daytradingradio.com. This seems to be a good set of instruction so far.

So, that leaves me with wanting to start refurbishing one of my spare bedrooms as a trading room, so when the inevitable happens, I'll be ready. The first thing I need to do is empty it. It's been a store room of junk and good stuff. Craig's list and the trash ought to take care of most of that. Then rip out some built in shelves and drawers, because I want some built in shelves in walnut, not some blond drawers and a mirror. After that, some tables/desks and some fairly cheep computers with some decent sized multiple monitors each. I don't think I need much horsepower just for some charting and trading software. The biggest expense would probably be the monitors.

Anybody have any experience in the minimum (read cheapest) usable equipment needed for a trading room?

Just looking on Newegg today, I found this video card that has 4 display ports and 2 dvi. I'm assuming that this will support 6 monitors running at the same time. Does this sound right?

Perhaps this would be a better card? Here's a youtube discription of it.

Nice stuff, Chris! I've certainly splurged on my computer hardware considering how little I take advantage of it. I wish I actually knew stuff so I could justify spending more. Ha ha.

Well, dd'n the disk image from the old drive to the SSD didn't work--would just Blue Screen after the Windows logo. So I did a fresh install of 7. I'm typing from it now, got Firefox installed at least. Still have a lot of stuff to rebuild tomorrow.

Yeah, the SSD is fast. But it's not so much faster than my old 15k drive that I'd call it night and day. Windows doesn't boot that much quicker. The only thing I really notice is launching programs. That's gone from a few seconds to nearly instant.

Don't know if I'd recommend this drive yet. Perhaps at half the price. So give it 18 more months.

I need a new SSD at some point so I can move my current one into my PS3. I'll take the opportunity to do a fresh install of 7, myself, when that time comes.

That's not promising. When I started up my computer today it said that Windows had not shut down properly. A scandisk found a few corrupt entries. I'll have to keep a close eye on this. A little speed isn't worth losing data.

I've not had any more disk corruption, but I've also purposely not pushed my luck, logging out of Windows and letting the machine sit idle on the log in screen for a couple minutes before shutting down from there. Turns out a lot of motherboards cut the power to the expansion slots early. That keeps a PCIe based drive from being able to completely flush its buffers.

I got my BD XL burner. It did come with a 100 GB QL disc, don't know what I'll use that for yet, as they're hard to come by.

Also got my new video card. I settled on the nVidia GeForce GTX 560 Ti. Seemed the best price:performance ratio, and it is their newest (although not fastest) chip. Since the GPU compute instructions are more important to me than raw polygon pushing ability, I figured the newest chip with the highest compute version would be best suited.

Seems it pair well with my CPUs...

Screw the Windows Experience Index.

How about the Jimi Hendrix Experience Index?

Chris, do you have Heaven Benchmark? I'd love to see your score.

Overclock that GPU, buddy!

I'm not much for benchmarks, but I downloaded and ran that one. I don't know it is a good score or not.

The card is a factory OC, Zotac Amp! edition, so I don't think I'd be able to get much more out of it. I don't like stressing my computer gear too much either.

Color me jealous as well, 12 cores? That's all our VM hosts have at work.

Nice. I'm still at 7.3, held back by my Intel SSD. 7.6, 7.8, 7.6, 7.6, 7.3. I have GTX 460.

The incredible thing is that this machine is based around a motherboard that was released at the end of 2007.

http://www.tyan.com/product_board_detail.aspx?pid=541

I'm finally completing my workstation desk that I started buying parts for in 2004.



Once I get the shelves on which I'll be placing my near-field monitor speakers, I'll post good pic taken with my SLR of the whole setup.

Oh, I ordered a new chair too, because I feel like a little kid in this ancient one, as it doesn't have a height adjust.

I also ordered a copy of Reason 5 by Propellerhead Software. So I might finally start making music again. I haven't really done any work like that since 1996. Even though I've always had that in back of my head when assembling my computer workstations.

Really old pics (my previous computer, taken with 2 cell phones ago):