Blimey...


$4000? I hope you are kidding. You can build a top-end system for not a dollar over $2000 that will run every PC game at its maximum settings properly. That was definitely a waste of money. A PC that exceeds the graphical capability and processing capability (not to mention storage) of the PS3 is $800-$1000 with the right part selection. With some creativity, it could be managed at $600 too. Maybe lower with a slower CPU-- the PS3's CPU is so poorly suited to games, its real-world performance equivalent would probably be a low-end Pentium 4. :p
 
I think azalin is full of shit, but it's my word against his. therefore my opinion doesnt matter, does it?

I was going to buy a voodoo gaming rig before I figured a 42 inch hi def lcd TV was a better investment for me. And the whole thing would have costed around 3400, so for 4k you must have it clad in gold ;)
 
I exaggerated, a common tendancy when one is trying to get dcgm to shut up without making oneself seem stupid (which i apparently failed). The final price was around $2000-2500 including shipping for all the parts (assembling it myself). Keep in mind, however, this price is in canadian dollars, which are basicly worthless, resulting in the high price :( Also, DX10 video cards are not exactly cheap these days, nor is intels new CPU...
 
I remember reading about these liquid-alcohol cooled monster machines with WinXP installed on a flash chip of some sort. The OS was done booting before the monitor refreshed. :lol: They started at ~$5000
 
I remember reading about these liquid-alcohol cooled monster machines with WinXP installed on a flash chip of some sort. The OS was done booting before the monitor refreshed. :lol: They started at ~$5000
I don't see why liquid ALCOHOL is better than say, water. I use a nonconductive coolant for safety in my machine's cooling system. It's quite beefy, with dual-core Athlon 64 X2 4200+ processor overclocked from 2.2 to 2.9 GHz (roughly the performance of 2 5 GHz Pentium 4s, if they existed), 1024mb of DDR400 RAM, 2 160GB and 1 80GB Samsung Spinpoint HDDs, an NEC ND3540A DVD+/-RW burner (double layer), a fanless Antec Phantom 350w PSU, an Antec Super Lanboy Mini-ATX case, and a Biostar T-Force 6100 939 board (with onboard GeForce 6-series video, nForce 430 chipset. The video card burned out.) It had a 6600gt prior to the video card dying, but came in just a tiny bit over the $1,000 mark at the time, and this is when the processor cost $585. :) I wish I waited til AMD's enormous price drops to build it, but oh well.

Another thought on the 'liquid alcohol' bit, a heatpipe CPU cooler does use a vaporizing liquid in its tubes to transfer heat from the block to the heatsink. I seem to recall alcohol is common to use for that. It's very common, though, in notebook PCs, high end PC CPU coolers and it's employed in the XB360 and PS3 cooling units. Also the Dreamcast's, IIRC. It wouldn't enable any significant speed increase without overclocking the CPU it cooled, though. A CPU is just as fast at 80C as at -40C.

As for running XP off flash, it wouldn't be nearly that fast. Faster than a mechanical hard disk but not that fast. It would be enormously snappier off a good RAMdisk though; Gigabyte is selling RAMdisk cards that look like a hard disk to the BIOS via the SATA bus and a bridge chip. But it wouldn't load before the monitor 'refreshed' (1/60th of a second or less), maybe you mean before the monitor had time to power on and display a coherent image?
 
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I seem to remember reading something about a guy who built a computer in a tub of oil,as an experiment to see if a total emersion computer would get any benefits coolant-wise. I'll see if i can dig up the link.
 
I seem to remember reading something about a guy who built a computer in a tub of oil,as an experiment to see if a total emersion computer would get any benefits coolant-wise. I'll see if i can dig up the link.
It's been done many times with a tub of vegetable oil. Tom's Hardware even made a video about it after many people tried it. It works reasonably well but it's not going to produce astounding overclocking results and it will still perform the same at the same clock speed regardless of cooling methodology. The advantage here is that there is no noise from active cooling methods. A PC immersed in oil won't run terribly cool.

A more professional experiment was done by Leo Laporte and Patrick Norton (among others) on the US tv show "The Screen Savers" using a nonconductive supercomputer coolant made by Xerox, called HFE (HydroFlouroEther), kept chilled with alcohol and dry ice in a separate partition than the computer components resided in. It worked remarkably well, although when the temperature got below -40 degrees fahrenheit the machine didn't boot anymore. This probably had something to do with the fact that as temperature decreases, resistance to electron flow INcreases, and vice versa. Hotter components readily promote higher current flow. (This is actually why short circuits produce loads of heat. Short = More Current = More Heat = More Current = More Heat until component failure/destruction. Conversely, at a cold enough temperature, a transistor-based integrated circuit could easily fail due to the increased resistance.
 
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I remember reading about these liquid-alcohol cooled monster machines with WinXP installed on a flash chip of some sort. The OS was done booting before the monitor refreshed. :lol: They started at ~$5000
As for running XP off flash, it wouldn't be nearly that fast. Faster than a mechanical hard disk but not that fast. It would be enormously snappier off a good RAMdisk though; Gigabyte is selling RAMdisk cards that look like a hard disk to the BIOS via the SATA bus and a bridge chip. But it wouldn't load before the monitor 'refreshed' (1/60th of a second or less), maybe you mean before the monitor had time to power on and display a coherent image?

Yes, of course that's what I meant ... I'm not so goodly with the word thngies ... :p
 
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