My new toy.

[hobbit709]

AMD Phenom 955 Black Edition-overclocked to 4GHz currently
4Gb(2x2Gb) Kingston DDR3 1600 RAM
Corsair CH50 Water cooling
MSI 890 GXM-G65 motherboard
Antec case
2 LG 24X DVD-RW
3 500Gb SATA hard drives

plus assorted other goodies.
Running real stable even at 4GHz-even with prime 95 running, temps are staying between 95-105°F.

Once it finishes burn-in, I haven't decided what OS to put on it. Since it has a swappable SATA slot on the case, I may run XP X64, Windows 7 X64 Ultimate, and Ubuntu 10.04 when it's released next week.

[Fumesucker]

1. Sounds nice..

So, what do you do with it?

[hobbit709]

2. Little bit of everything.

Audio and video conversion, DU, research, folding@home, etc.

[RoyGBiv]

3. Nice toy ...

I'd be interested in some benchmarks once you have it settled in if you wouldn't mind. I'd like to compare.

I ended up getting the Athlon II X3 440, which is sort of a mid-range of the high-end processors. I have a different motherboard, but other specs are similar. Passmark has your processor with a score about 1500 pts. higher than mine. I'm wondering how that translates into practical tasks, e.g. encrypt/decrypt, unzip, etc.

Phoronix puts out a nice suite of benchmark tools I'm planning to use once I get this machine settled, which won't be until after Ubuntu 10.04 is released. In the mean time, I've been playing around with different distros and put Windows 7 on it to play with.

What's your graphics card/chip?

[hobbit709]

4. Damn dupe

[hobbit709]

5. ATI Radeon HD4290

The only thing I checked it on so far was "Windows Experience" which gave it a 4.8 overall(gaming graphics being the low score) but gave the processor a 7.5 out of 7.9. Since I don't do any gaming, I doubt I'll upgrade the onboard video with a card.

I have the parts to put another one together with a 435 X3.

My other desktops have a Phenom 8750 B.E. running at 3.0GHz, An Athlon X2 at 2.9GHz and a Phenom II X2 550 B.E. that I left at standard 3.1GHz since the memory in it won't OC without starting to flake.

I got one of my older computers sold later today, so I can shuffle things around.

[RoyGBiv]

6. Awesome ...

I currently only have three working desktops that are put together. I think I could get a couple more if I cannibalized a some memory and spread it around, but I'm not interested in that much obsession.

My three working machines when put side by side look kinda like one of those "three generations" family pics. One has an old Athlon Barton core in it (the one that it suddenly became hard to get for some reason), which was high-end when I bought it. I forget all its specs. It overclocked really well, so well that I was spoiled by it when I built my next machine and had to be gentler. That thing screamed for its day. Kinda sad that it just works as a lowly file server and firewall these days. :)

The next one has the Athlon X2 4400 with the 1 meg L2 cache, which, again, became hard to get for some reason shortly after it came out and was also high-end when I bought it.

I didn't go high-end this time for various reasons, one of which is that I'm going to rebuild in six months or so and give this one to my daughter. She would have no use for nor appreciation of a processor like that. I'm not going to switch to Intel, so I'm curious to hear personal experiences with AMD's current top-of-the-line models. Real reviews for AMD CPUs that don't attempt to do an Intel comparison are hard to find lately. I *know* Intel is faster; I just don't want it.

Anyway ...

Do you have favorite motherboards? I've always used Asus for my personal machines in the past, so far back that I the first full build I did with a DX266 CPU had an Asus board. But, I went with a Biostar board that came highly recommended and has worked well so far but had a horrible design flaw that might have turned me off if I'd realized it beforehand; made cabling a bit of a chore. It's got an AMI Bios in it, which I'm not accustomed to. Has weird things in it that I guess are there for hardcore overclockers and tweakers but which are totally new to me. I haven't gotten that deep into it yet.

[hobbit709]

7. Those Barton cores were practically indestructible.

I had one that went through 3 motherboards-one literally smoked-pulled it out and put cpu on new mb and ran just fine. It's on its fourth board and last I heard was still running fine in South Texas.

Yeah, Intels are "faster" but in all practical applications the 3 times the price for about 10% speed improvement ain't worth it.

Lately most of my boards have been Biostar or MSI. Had fairly good luck with ECS. Had 2 Gigabytes that crapped within 3 days. I usually buy what's on sale at Fry's if I'm building one for someone since most of my customers aren't swimming in cash. So I build them a middle end box with fairly good specs that will last at least 5 years for a decent price.

[struggle4progress]

8. Self built?

[hobbit709]

9. Is there any other kind?

[struggle4progress]

10. I've never built one but I've priced parts extensively. I pretty much decided

that I'd stay away from liquid cooling, because there are plenty of stories out there saying "I built this machine, and the water pump died, and now I'm the proud owner of a brick." I'd certainly welcome any comments/advice from you on the subject

[hobbit709]

11. Got the water cooling setup because that processor runs hot.

It was idling at 50°C with the AMD heatsink at it's rated 3.2GHz speed. Now it idles at 35° and hasn't gone over 40° even when working the hell out of it at 4GHz.

This is my first water cooled system.

[hobbit709]

12. Just loaded Ubuntu 10.04 RC X64

Found all the hardware,downloaded and installed ATI driver, works fine. From Post screen to desktop is 18 seconds. Definitely faster than previous versions and I like the new color scheme.