Yay new hardware!

[Pilchard123]

So yeah, my summer job ended yesterday. I won't miss having to get up in the mornings, but I would have liked to have stayed on longer. Swings and roundabouts, and all that.

Anyway, the company I worked for (in the IT dept, incidentally), sells their old PCs when they retire them. I was going to buy one - £50 for an Optiplex 755 is quite a good deal when you still run on DDR2 at home. I also asked if I  could buy the old RAM in the PCs that were too old to even be sold, and were to be scrapped, also DDR2. Then I decided not to, and get a totally new setup. Today, about an hour before I left, my supervisor left a retired PC on my desk, and said I could have it, and the old RAM for free!

Long story short - I got a free PC. And indigestion from a pizza-eating contest.

The old RAM is to slow to run in the Optiplex, but will run in my Vista box, which is good, since I was on 512MB x 512MB. Now it has 1GBx1GB + 1GBx1GB. Yay! The Optiplex is 512X512 + 1GBx1GB, so that's fairly good too.

Related: - is there any way to allocate RAM to a graphics card? I have an ATI Radeon HD2350.

[annikk.exe]

Only if the gpu is designed for it. You see that feature in some low-powered laptops and netbooks, but rarely anywhere else.

[Alex]

I think I'm running DDR2 here... I have an Athlon 64 x2 at 2.6GHz per processor, and a GeForce 8800 GTS! Time for an upgrade maybe!

[Pilchard123]

This is a bit of a wierd question, but...

I have two (fairly good) machines now, and I'm thinking of networking them and using one as a data store and the other as an OS-only utility. Bearing in mind that one is Vista Home Premium, and the other XP Pro, is this a good idea?

If I were to network them, and I wanted to use it for gaming, would you recommend sticking with the Vista one for everything, or using the XP and running the games from the Vista box? Could I use one as a semi-external hard drive?

Is there any way of using both processors at once? Both RAM sets? All of the hardware?

Vista box:
225GB SATA HDD
4GB DDR2 4-4-4-12 RAM     -Too slow for the XP mobo
32-bit Vista Home Premium
2.1 GHz Dual-core Athlon 64 X2
ATI Radeon HD2350 w/ 64MB DDR


XP Pro box:
80GB SATA HDD
3GB DDR2 5-5-5-12 RAM
32-bit XP Pro
2.4 GHz processor, can't remember what exactly
Don't know what the GPU is, not even if it's integrated or dedicated.

[annikk.exe]

Nope, you wouldn't be able to slave one to the other to increase your performance in games and whatnot.

There are some programs such as Sony Vegas, 3D Mark, etc, which allow you to share rendering work out to a bunch of different slave machines, but that is only possible because that feature has specifically been implemented in those programs.  The approach is completely unsuitable for just about everything except large scale batch processing where rendering on a single machine would take too long (hours, days).


The ideal solution is to just buy parts to build yourself a powerful machine, and install Windows 7 on it.  :>  But, if financial constraints mean that is not possible, I would use whichever machine is fastest as your general PC, and use the other for server/network-attached-storage purposes.

[Pilchard123]

Yeah, that's what I thought. Oh well.

Just realised that the Optiplex needs a sound card bought for it. -_-

[Pilchard123]

Sooo...partly taking Annikk's advice and partly just because I can, I'm thinking of building myself a new rig. so my question - probably the first of many - is this:

Is it generally better to have a single large RAM module, or two smaller ones? My thinking is that the smaller ones would be better, since that's two modules that could be written/read at once; also the single large serves as an expensive point-of-failure. Am I right, or am I barking up the wrong tree entirely?

[Orion63]

Actually, the time it is needed to 'control' data across all rams, has a slight performance disadvantage, but it's barely noticeable in most uses you may have to your computer(I am assuming you're not using it to control a nuclear power plant).
The best choice is the one that has the future into account. You can buy a big one, to put another one the same size, later, whenever they're cheaper/common, or you can buy two, to be on the safe side: If one stops working, you will still be able to work(I have only have seen a ram break down, a couple of times. It will much faster be outdated, so...).
Your choice ;-).

PS: If you have idle computers, consider donating CPU cycles to science :http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Open_Infrastructure_for_Network_Computing

[Aino]

I use 2 DDR2 2gb chips, works like a charm...

(click to show/hide)

Just eager to share

OS: Microsoft Windows Vista
Processor: AMD Phenom II X4 945, 3GHz.
RAM: 4GB
Hard Disk Drive Space: 1TB
Graphics: ATI Radeon HD 5700

My system is pretty new though

[Pilchard123]

Why would you be eager to tell people you run Vista? It's awful!

Other than that, pretty nice.

[dragoonreas]

PS: If you have idle computers, consider donating CPU cycles to science :http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Open_Infrastructure_for_Network_Computing

Sorry, but I'm already donating my free CPU cycles to art : Electric Sheep

[Orion63]

PS: If you have idle computers, consider donating CPU cycles to science :http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Open_Infrastructure_for_Network_Computing

Sorry, but I'm already donating my free CPU cycles to art : Electric Sheep

Ahaha, nice. Already had heard of it, back when I went berserk when I heard of genetic algorithm. Run it for a few weeks, but I found it's lack of goal, sad...
The fact that evolution excels at adapting, and therefor it would be an awesome project to try to connect personalities and cultures to subjective views(In this case, the appreciation of art), having different genes pools, allowing sometimes fractals jump between them, and having a good archive to store top fractals by gene pool, time.

This is just a conjecture, but I believe that people emotions would be visible in the fractal choice, and if the emotion was shared across the gene pool, you could perhaps derive their feeling from the current fractal.

i.e. If there was a gene pool per country(a culture frontier already well established), I imagine that before/during Egypt revolution there would be a lot of red hues with a lot of saturation, or maybe a lot of white...

I am going to stop now...Pretty sure I am offtopic ^^

Also, I think Aino, is just eager to show his hardware... It pretty much doubles all my components... I guess I built my computer 18 months earlier :-P.

[freddyhard]

Why would you be eager to tell people you run Vista? It's awful!

Other than that, pretty nice.

as far as i can see everyone loves windows vista/7. i personally think it's a pot of *ock.

PS: If you have idle computers, consider donating CPU cycles to science :http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Open_Infrastructure_for_Network_Computing

Sorry, but I'm already donating my free CPU cycles to art : Electric Sheep

What - should they not be left to rest in peace in silicon heaven?

...I am going to stop now...Pretty sure I am offtopic ^^ ...

and by off topic you mean 'out of it'

[Aino]

Well, vista isn't that bad, since I use it, I don't hate it... I'd rather have 7, but I'm quite limited...

[dragoonreas]

PS: If you have idle computers, consider donating CPU cycles to science :http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Open_Infrastructure_for_Network_Computing

Sorry, but I'm already donating my free CPU cycles to art : Electric Sheep

What - should they not be left to rest in peace in silicon heaven?

Nope, I actually make them work double time both playing the fractals and rendering individual frames while the screensaver's active. I keep the frames it renders and set a random DVD quality one as my desktop picture each time I login.