prophetik music

alright, here's pictures from the build weekend! my personal system as of friday morning. look at those cobwebs! someone hasn't been taking care of it recently =( after disassembling my entire system and cleaning it, here's what we have. the holy grail of 1156 i7 locked processors: the i7-870 2.93ghz quad core (with HT, meaning 8-core) processor. woot! here's his motherboard assembly. i7-870, 4-heatpipe cpu cooler, 12gb of DDR3 1333 RAM, GTX 260 core 216 graphics card, p55-based motherboard. awesome! here's his system in the case. there's a better picture. look at that awesome cable management! the one straggly red wire on the right side got tucked away later, it's the dvd drive's SATA cable. after that, it was time to work on my system while his got windows, programs, updates, and some benchmarking. here's the (really clever) drive cage for my new rackmount music pc. it actually slides out the front with a minimum of effort, allowing you to swap drives without having to screw with taking the whole (enormous) case out. here's a better top-down view of the rackmount case. that's a full ATX motherboard in that monster. it takes up a LOT of space =) but once it's in a rack, it'll look great. pretty quiet, too. here's my machine (in the same model case as bobby's system). i went a little more lightweight than him - a bit better graphics, less raw power, way less ram. it's sitting at 3.3ghz with no issue currently =) there's my current workspace. the rackmounts in the back between the rightmost and middle monitors, and it services the two monitors over the keyboard. the big monitor and normal keyboard handles the gaming system. lots of space, and it works surprisingly well all told. final specs: bobby's pc: i7-870, 12gb ddr3 1333 RAM, gtx 260 core 216, 2tb of WDC Black storage drives, 80gb SSD primary, dvd-rw drive, W7 x64 music pc: i7-860, 4gb ddr3 1333 RAM, basic discrete gfx card, 1.5tb of storage space, 500gb HDD primary, focusrite saffire pro 40 audio interface, W7 x64 gaming pc: i5-760, 4gb ddr3 2200 RAM, gtx 460, 4tb of WDC Green storage drives, 128gb SSD primary, dvd-rw drive, W7 32-bit

i'm getting my pictures online tonight, hopefully, as long as it isn't too busy at work today. once my wife uploads them from her camera, we'll be all set =)

how about every one that has recording inputs.

fun fact: while i've been buzzed once or twice, i've never been flat-out drunk. ever. i don't drink beer, which is most of the reasoning for that. but i like long island ice teas. two big ones in two hours got me mildly buzzed - enough that colors were brighter, but not enough that i had any trouble standing or playing frisbee at the same time.

holy shit, Man With No Name trilogy? awesome!

got everything set up today. xenon's machine is baking in the corner for the night on a monster Prime 95 8-core stress test for around 12 hours. i got it stable between 3.5 and 3.6ghz with no issues - it loads around 70C under the overclock, but that's not really that bad on air. it jumps almost 30C with an 8-core load, and under a normal load (three cores, 1.5 physical cores utilized) it doesn't go above 65C. so i think it's fine, all told. i actually underclocked the ram slightly to get it stable, but it's humming along pretty solid. averaged 30fps in the Heaven 2.1 benchmark, 2x anti, 4anisotropy, 1920x1200, so i was happy =) the SSD helps with loading a lot as well. never played with one before. my systems are set up as well, although getting w7 64-bit on the music machine - which has no optical drive because i forgot my spare was an IDE - was annoying because i couldn't get a flash drive to boot properly for a while. got it working, and am in the process of transferring like 450gb of data onto the hard drives over a USB connection. going to be a while, i think. i took a ton of pictures that i'll upload this weekend at some point. gotta clean up first, my floor is covered with packing materials!

i would suggest avoiding using TVs if possible for monitors. as nice as it may seem, they don't support computer resolutions (16:9, 60hz) natively, and as a result they often skew screen images slightly. there's also the fact that those screens are meant to be viewed at a distance of 6-8 feet, rather than the normal viewing distance of 18-24 inches for a monitor. you'd be better off getting the 28" monitor i suggested above. at the proper viewing distances and angles, it appears as large as a 52-54" TV, no worries.

today i backed up three of my drives onto the green drive that i picked up, and finished hooking up fans to the rackmount case. i also finished the prelim install stuff on bobby's case. tonight i will drink scotch and possibly start disassembling my personal system. then, tomorrow, i'll start bright and early on the build itself - bobby first, then my music pc, then my gaming system. while bobby's getting an OS install and initial setup, i'll be doing hardware stuff for my systems.

i'd suggest a monitor arm. i use a 27.5" primary (300$ on newegg, Hanns-G is the manufacturer) with a 22" Acer on an ergotech LX monitor arm. ergotech makes a newer one that's cheaper than the 135$ i spent on that one. just make sure that your desk can mount it (you need about 3.5" of lip to hook the thing on, or a place to mount the post for it), and you'll be fine. this might be a dumb question, but do you really need a fan on the desk? is that for you, or for your computer? if it's for your computer, that's an easy fix =)

happy birthday, man. can't wait to sleep with you at magfest

from oxm: no one cares about yet another poker or popcap game, but beyond good and evil hd and torchlight make me happy. the first game, hard corps: uprising, is a contra clone that looks decent too. anyone interested?

it is, it's a snowman. i'll take pictures later =) i did a little work on it tonight - specifically installing the platter drives, optical drive, and SSD. i also found a fan specifically made for a Storm Scout case that i had sitting around, so i'll put that on the side blowing on the graphics card. the SS fans are special because they've got a plug for the fan and a separate plug for the lights ON the fan, allowing them to be controlled by a switch. they're actually pretty expensive for the nature and quality of the fans, so bobby gets an extra gift =) also got a chance to play around with the rackmount case for the music pc. it's a surprisingly well-built for how much i paid for it, complete with a removable fan bar across the middle that consists of three 120mmx25mm fans to keep airflow moving through the case. nice design that keeps the airflow concentrated around the motherboard while providing airflow for the HDDs as well. pictures tomorrow or the next day.

i bought a couch in college for five dollars a week after my friend had it cleaned for 40$ or so. it's still at my college, in deep storage, i think.

it's SOOOOOO comfortable! i lurve it so much. great football watching couch. anyways chth, haet u. you steal from me, you steal from bobby. and he plays pianos.

someone's getting a new system! xenon odyssey (bobby keller) recently contacted me about building a nice big music machine. he wanted something that was long-term viable, with lots of storage space and a lot of RAM, and the ability to play some games. i said to myself, hmmmm - i wonder what we can do? i also ordered some stuff for myself, since the money i got from this build was enough to allow me to overhaul my personal system. he's getting a few used parts, but as a whole he's getting a ton of awesome stuff for pretty darn cheap. now, you'll note that there's several "extra" parts in that picture from what's listed above. that's my stuff =) i'm taking my current system (i7-860, 4gb RAM, aforementioned GFX card, lots of hard drives) and splitting into two system - one specifically for music, in the rackmount case, and one specifically for internet usage and gaming, in the second Storm Scout case. the music PC is getting my old i7-860 with stock cooling, with a cheapo discrete graphics card, 8gb of RAM, and several older hard drives i've got, with my current motherboard (EVGA P55 LE) and audio interface (focusrite saffire pro 40). my gaming system will have a less expensive CPU (i5-760), since games don't need eight cores (and rarely need 4!), which will overclock a lot easier than the i7 1156 processors. it'll have the tranquillo cpu cooler, 4gb of G.SKILL Trident DDR3 2200mhz RAM, another -ud3 motherboard, a 128gb SATA-III SSD from Crucial (275$ just by itself!), two 2tb WDC green drives for backups, and an EVGA 460 graphics card, with the Corsair AX850 power supply. i'll be posting pictures as i start assembly thursday night after work. tonight i'm going to finish backing up everything on my computer and start configuring the cases, and then thursday night and all of friday will be the builds themselves. here's a few more closeups of the components. here's a picture of all the boxes everything came in talk about a ton of spare packaging materials! i'm saving my case boxes for our next move, so i don't have to wrap my computers in a quilt again. let me know what you think! more pictures incoming as i start the builds.

updated up to now, except neko's two posts that i asked him to clean up.

unpossible most graphic cards IDLE at 50C. i'm willing to bet your temp sensors are toast.

i've found that ati cards don't really overclock very well. corruption usually is a result of heat, but it's weird that it's happening no matter what. buy nvidia? i don't know what to tell you. i've only overclocked an ATI once - a 4870, back in the day - and it was terribly difficult to get stable. i was only on one monitor, too. i'd be inclined to point to a secondary monitor as part of the issues - but again, i'm just speculating.

collab? need some akkadia-rising-esque sax that's less noodly and more spacey?

not having to load and leave things in memory will be fixed when there's a real install. they'll be able to dump stuff from chunks that are farther away and not continue to leave them in the memory.

well, you'll get a printed bulletin of events when you sign in, so it's gotta be finalized at some point that week.

powerglove and wave theory are coming?!? awesome! they're probably two of my favorite vg bands to see live. can't wait to nab a wave theory cd this year.

the desktop's processor is faster than the laptop's processor thanks to a better FSB, actually. common misconception. sound card makes no difference. i don't think i've ever actually put a sound card in a PC i built graphics card should help with some acceleration, but as a whole MC is cpu-based, with little gpu acceleration. it uses 500mb of ram because it doesn't have an install - it's gotta load everything it uses into the ram. if/when they build an installer, it'll be much less.