P79xx updating

I ahve decided to keep the P79xx a bit longer. The newer CPU's would give me about 50% more power but I no where near use the power I have now. Yes on occasion I do flood the CPU with batch proccesses but this is rare. In the end the 1920x1200 is worth more than the added power.

Now to keep the system a bit more current I am upgrading a bit. So I have ordered;

1.) Mushkin 480GB DX Chronos SSD. I an going to now use it for all files including user. It is great now that SSD's are under $1/GB.

2.) USB3/eSATA dock for archiving files.

3.) Seagate 1TB 5400 RPM drive to archive too.

I intend to keep a 500GB internal to create nightly c:\ images too and burn archived files to DVD as well. I have a flush mount USB 3.0 pci express card but most likely will use the eSATA for the doc.

My hope here is for at least 1 if not 2 more years from the system. That and since the SSD is SATA III it can be used in the next system.......

 

Sounds like a good plan!

I got my FX back when it first came out, specifically for the gpu+1920x1200 screen.

I was debating on a new laptop, but I'd have to spend $1000+ to get the same quality, so I went with the new ssd/ram/cpu and spent a total of $280, and now the FX is faster then ever.

I play Tera Online right now, on max settings, with no lag issues at all, averaging around 25 fps.

Can't beat it, I love it to death, and will continue to use it until I literally can't for some reason.

Couldn't have asked for a better laptop, gateway nailed it with this one.

 

I would love to have the cash for a P-79, but my P-7805u works juuuuust fine

Its stock except the new Mini PCIe Half size Intel 6235 WiFi+Bluetooth, 8GB of Kingston HyperX ram, and the P-79 series GPU cooling fan (and of course my thermal paste/pad re-do)


I have the Targus higher wattage adapter, but the damn thing is WAY too lose for me, if there was a way to modify it so it fit more like the stock 120w adapter, id be all over it! but I move the laptop from desk to my chair way to often, and it just feels so flimsy and I feel like im going to break it!*


*I can do basic rewiring like red to red and black, but I never wanted to mess with laptop adapter cables, otherwise, id neuter the stock 120w adapter of its end and reattach it to the universal adapters cable... but Im pretty sure as a universal its got more then 2 wires... (or at least that was my experience with my last Targus... it has like 4-5!)

EDIT: My Idle Temps, keep in mind im running .23 firmware not .17, so the fans on the GPU/CPU arent running at all...

 

with 9c.17.00 I see 120F on the GPU, this is with powermizer off but the old GPU HS. The cpu is about 42C per core. Right now it is not idle, doing a backup, so I can't see th registered normal F temps. As always the big thing fo me is the 1920x1200. If it were the 1440x900 it would have been gone long ago.................

 

Items are now shipped. I feel like a kid on christmass eve, can't wait till the next day when they're here.................

 

Wow thats nuts, I wonder what youll get when you install the P-79 GPU HS/Fan! Its kinda funny that you get 120F and I get 133F when idle... your fan is running, mine isn't! har har I know, well see once you get the new HS/Fan assembly... er um assembled


TBQH, 1440x900 isnt that bad... Its actually one of my preferred resolutions, 1440x900 - 1680x1050 - 1920x1200 and pretty much anything higher that is a 16:10 aspect ratio... IE NOT NARROW...

 

So far I have tried out the DOC and 1TB drive. I am impressed by the performance of the flush USB express card. The eSATA only works with the drive in the first slot so it is not a multi port. Both slots work with the USB 3.0 addapter.

 

Whats the IOPS like?


Link to the express card?

 

it is a 1 TB hd so I am sure IOPS stink. I'll look into it in a bit though. The card is the AKE flush mount, got mine off Fleabay they are pretty cheap. I tried both aa 500 GB WD and the 1TB seagate and both were there under USB 3.0 but not eSATA. Right now I am fighting with a stupid trojan and getting a full backup done.

Edit; The thread regarding the AKE addapter.........

http://forum.notebookreview.com/har...503730-flush-usb-3-0-expresscard-adapter.html

Edit 2; I have the 840GB ssd in the primary bay. Am still getting all the user files over and index setup etc. I appears the drive is slightly slower than the 120GB at 4k R/Wbtu large files, especailly uncompressible real world files, saturate the SATA II bus. This is just what I was looking for..............

 

First bench so far of the SSD.........



Edit; did the original SSD in the doc under USB 3.0. I should state under eSATA it ran full speed and with ATTO that is around 250+ MB/s.

Edit #2; I rebooted with the Doc plugged into the eSATA. In bios it lists the HDD as a bootable device.. I haven't tried it as of yet but this does open some other options as well..............

 

Ok some further information. First though I need to go over som not covered here. Natively we only have USB 2.0 ports. To have USB 3.0 a card is needed. The card added to achive this is a flush mount AKE pci express 54mm card. there are a few things that are needed to be known of this card and our systems.

1.) the pci-express port on our systems only runs a 2.5 Gbs. That is 2.5 gigabit per second or slightly less than 1/2 of what a true USB 3.0 port can provide. While this is still faster than most drives it is a limitation.

2.) the express port of our systems only provides at 5v 0.860 Amps. This is also substantially lower than the 1.5 Amp standard of USB 3.0 per port. Especially considering we have to share this between the two USB 3.0 ports of the card. Also the card will use some of that 860ma up as well.

With that information the Vantech 2 drive doc under USB 3.0 is severly under powered. Now the Doc system is provided with a power supply this does not seem to cover laptop drives under USB 3.0. The power supply is rated as 12v at 3000ma. Under USB 3.0 this should cover two desktop 3.5" drives but not laptop drives as they are pulling port power. I also suspect since the 12v rail seems to be provided by the brick that a combo of 3.5" and 2.5" drives should be ok as well, this is yet untested as is the two 3.5 drives as well.

Now with USB 3.0 a WD 500GB and Seagate 1.0TB do initialize but will not copy data from one drive to another as the connection of the drives keeps getting lost. The power is not there as the 500GB is rated 5v @ 550 ma and the 1TB is 5v @ 800ma. The AKE card does supply a power plug to add power from a USB 2.0 port to the express card and I will try that later to see if two drives could be powered that way. Even then though 2x 800ma drives may just never happen.

As far as eSATA the port of the computer itself is not powered. The doc then provides the 5v power for both drives but our port is not of the multi variety. This means while two drives will spin up only the front drive is recognized by the system. The advantage here though is the drive is recognized by the DMI. This means bios level support for backups etc. as a native SATA drive.

On the reviews at NewEgg one person mentioned issues with "some" SSDs. I do not have alot to test with but can attest to one situation. I used Windows 7 imaging to get my new 480GB SSD in the system and now that it is in the old drive in the doc gives a drive identity conflict. This is as the new SSD is mirrored with the old drives ID etc. so the hardware is recongnized but until I redo the drive I can't see or use it in with explorer.

The 1TB drive is wonderfull for what it is. If you are just archiving data it is more than fast enough even though only 5,400 rpm. The outer tracks yeild 108 MBs and the inner 50 MBs. If you tend to archive alot of small files though you may want to go with a 7,200 RPM drive as the access time will be much quicker. I will be archiving 9-10 MB raw camera files and much larger video files. Since this then becomes mostly streamed data the slower drive is fine. I want to get a couple of desktop drives to test out the docs multi drive capability though under USB 3.0 but that will be at a much later point.

The 480GB SSD is yet another story. I had a 120GB Mushkin Callisto DX that this replaced. My installation and workflow, before the 480GB, were the SSD for programs and a Seagate 500GB XT for data (user files) and nightly c:\ drive images. Since the files again I work on are mainly large this worked quite well. The one issue is the nightly image did not include the user files as the backup was done to the second drive. All of my daily work was at some risk.

This is the reason for the larger SSD. With all files now included to the SSD I am at 238 GB free of 447 available. This is without archiving any files, and I have at least 38.6 GB of download files I can remove from the SSD. So I can now do nightly images to the second 500GB drive and have a safety net for my daily work. Also since all user files are now on the SSD everything loads up lickety split, when you look at a folder wih alot of JPG's etc. the thumbnails load up much faster. Workflow speed is slightly increased as this drive is much faster than a HDD for streaming.

In the end though the 480GB is slightly slower on 4K file access and IOPS so the speed benefits seem to ballance themselves out but so seem a bit more consistent, XT not having to reset the cache. IMHO unless for workflow/space reasons, and you already have a SSD, then just do not bother with the upgrade. While the size is nice there is no night and day difference like moving from a HDD to a SSD.

I should note with the SSD on SATA II bus that for streaming data with large files this drive will flood the bus. The 120GB would do so as well with highly compressible files but the new drive will do so even with real world files. For workflow then you just are never hampered by the drives performance, the knowledge of this just makes my smile slightly larger. I also no longer have that nagging "what if" crawling in the back of my head.

Edit; if the Doc is powered, without a drive in the first slot, while plugged into the eSATA port it will hang the bios post while doing drive detection.

Edit #2; When I rebooted with the drive powered on the eSATA in bios the Doc drive becomes a bootable drive. While I have not tried it yet this does open some options.



Doc Link: Newegg.com - VANTEC NexStar NST-D400SU3 Plastic 2.5" & 3.5" USB3.0 & eSATA Dual Bay SuperSpeed Hard Drive Dock
Drive Link: Newegg.com - Seagate Momentus LP STBD1000100 1TB 5400 RPM 2.5" SATA Internal Hard Drive
SSD Link: Newegg.com - Mushkin Enhanced Chronos MKNSSDCR480GB-DX 2.5" 480GB SATA III MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD)

 

I have decided to upgrade the last component I can. That is, even though I may never use it, I have ordered a BD writer. Could not resist as the price is low enough now.

Amazon.com: Panasonic UJ240 6x Blu-ray Burner BD-RE/8x DVD±RW DL SATA Drive (Black): Computers & Accessories

 

hey tan is there a way to get a 7200 rpm 1 tb HDD?

 

Wow those have really taken a plunge in price over the years. It is good to see that. I can remember when they were 200+.

 

Our systems need 2.5 drives with a 9.5mm height. Unfortunately there are no 1TB 7200 RPM drives at that height yet. I did see one at 15mm but out optical drive is 12.7mm. If you could find a 12.77 drive maybe it could go to the optical drive bay?

Yeah, at that price there was no way. Also then it was only 2x BD/R speed. Now it is much cheaper and 6x BD/R so I had to jump in......

 

Ya done did the right thing. Who knows maybe, just maybe one day you might even throw a blu ray in there and watch a movie.

 

Not happy with Amazon at the moment. I ordered the BD on 7/29 and it has yet to ship. four days seems a bit much.................

 

Well it took them the week but supposedly it was shipped today......................

 

Got the drive, apparently fedex delivers on Saturday. Came with a trial of Cyberlink v11 btu I am not sure what I will end up with.......................

 

The BR is in and it works fine. I have for data burnt a BR SL and a couple of normal DVD's. DVD's are 8x burn so no faster than before but BR burn was fast, at least the data rates. Now time for one more upgrade.

Since I am at 8GB already and we are limited at 1066 buss the only memory upgrade available is better timings. I had with the C2D tried the original 4GB at cas6 but am afraid to atempt this on the current memory. So I have ordered 8GB of DDR 1600 cas9 memory. These sticks are known to run cas 6 at 1066 but not too sure how happy they are at 1T. I'll update once in but I am expecting no miracles.

The 4GB on the P9600 only reaped 1-2% advantage. My hope here is with the faster C2Q it will be just a bit more though. The faster clock and added cores should make for better optimization of faster timings. Still though I will probably only see 2-3% improvement and only in a few areas.

Newegg.com - Kingston HyperX 8GB (2 x 4GB) 204-Pin DDR3 SO-DIMM DDR3 1600 HyperX Plug n Play Laptop Memory Model KHX1600C9S3P1K2/8G

 

If you do that keep us posted. I might even consider buying your old ram if you planned to get rid of it.

 

Already shipped, just awaiting the arrival. The C2D got little from the Cas6 on 4GB, I am not expecting much here either. I do know the desktop felt more snappy with Cas6 and there was a 1-2% improvement but that was so small it was statistcally insignificant. I am hoping for, but not expecting, a 2-3% improvement in optimized multithreaded high memory load apps. Such as with converting large RAW files to Large JPEG's in a batch proccess.

In actuallity I would probably have bennefited more if still running HDD's, especially in raid0. HDDs speed and access times are greatly masked by windows by the cache. The PM45 with raid0 is also dependent on CPU cycles and ram in striping the data. The SSD is much less dependent on cache speed. Also utilization of cache means higher real world memory loads. Again under most casual situations this would not even be noticable but under sever loads can make a difference................