Buying a new computer

supreme_ian wrote: ahahahha Pearl.. buy a mac....

Or build a Hackintosh. 8)

pizza wrote: Nice detective work there Sherlock. :roll: New is relative and I am new compared to the people on that forum who have been working with computers for 10-20 years.

You've had two graphics cards your entire life, son, both of them 8-series nvidias - great credibility for someone that has built "many" AMD and Intel computers. Oh wait, wait - lemme guess - you built them all for friends, co-workers, and homeless children?

Without further ado -

WhyFi wrote: [quote=pizza]Nice detective work there Sherlock. :roll: New is relative and I am new compared to the people on that forum who have been working with computers for 10-20 years.

You've had two graphics cards your entire life, son, both of them 8-series nvidias - great credibility for someone that has built "many" AMD and Intel computers. Oh wait, wait - lemme guess - you built them all for friends, co-workers, and homeless children?

Without further ado -

Yeah I did build them for other people. My current PC is my first pc I've built from scratch. Though it's been through some changes since it was first made. Prior to that I've tinkered around but never built the whole thing.

I'm flattered you read through all my posts on the hardforum.

"I'm relatively new to PC gaming but it seems to me like the 8800gt will last me a while." 9/7

Nice job leaving that post out.

I've also got a 6200le I forgot to mention as well as the onboard graphics I've had. :shock:

pizza wrote:
Yeah I did build them for other people. My current PC is my first pc I've built from scratch.

I was going to try that, but I could never get the silicon pure enough on my kitchen stove, and my attempt to retrofit the toaster for photolithography using parts from the DVD player didn't work out at all.

doctorj wrote: [quote=pizza]
Yeah I did build them for other people. My current PC is my first pc I've built from scratch.

I was going to try that, but I could never get the silicon pure enough on my kitchen stove, and my attempt to retrofit the toaster for photolithography using parts from the DVD player didn't work out at all.

You have to use the Microwave. Like this.

This is what you really want:

http://www.hothardware.com/News/Cray--Microsoft-Partner-on-Cheap-Supercomputer/

It's nothing more than a fancy expensive box for 8 blades starting at $25K. 2xquad core blades start around $1500 each, looking at Ebay. These rock -- very compact and efficient way to go if you're doing serious crunching with code that's parallelized (as I am). Actually, I'll probably switch to the equivalent in a workstation for my home machine before long. These guys make nice ones:
http://www.boxxtech.com/Products/3DBOXX/8400_Overview.asp

^^^ would a GPU-based number cruncher (like nvidia's CUDA) work better for your task?

Here is a nice PC building guide for parts that was just updated:

http://forums.slickdeals.net/showthread.php?sduid=285291&t=553826

WhyFi wrote: ^^^ would a GPU-based number cruncher (like nvidia's CUDA) work better for your task?

Many people over the years have tried this sort of thing, but generally I think the answer is no. Unless you're willing / able to do a lot of work to get various codes optimized, and I'm either not willing or not able (closed source, even if this were my specialty). Also, for many applications I use, parallelization is very difficult and is an ongoing area of research; if you get something that scales well to 8 tightly coupled cores on a board for a substantial proportion of the execution, you're happy.