Saturday 25 November 2006

Inner geek is gratified

I got tasked by church to spec a PC for video editing and image processing so I thought I would do one up by meself instead of getting the PC shop assemble it. Went down to Montgallet to pick up the parts on Thursday, the shop guy insisted on plugging in the cpu chip (E6400 Duo Core 2) onto the motherboard coz I didn't look l33t enough.


So I came back, did what XR (Thank you man!) taught me to do when he came to fix up my PC last year. I laid out the components on the floor, setup up the motherboard with the video card, power supply, keyboard, hard disk, DVD writer, LCD and did a XP installation. He told me that in case the parts are faulty, it's not so leh-cheh to take the part for exchange.


As you can see, the vga and cpu cooler+fans look very weak, so we upsized them. And added blue heatsinks to the ram on the video card.


Changed both to Zalman coolers, the cpu cooler is hugemongous man. Pure 100% copper.


After that, I got the motherboard installed into the casing (Coolermaster Centurion), did a wee bit of cable management to make sure the fans got unrestricted airflow and voila it was done! I was also curious about how it would compare to my 1 year old AMD x2 4400+. So I installed CaptureOne Pro 3.7 in the new machine and did a test run of RAW to 8bit file processing for 6 x 11MP 1Ds files. The machines were fresh booted so the files were not cached in memory, I started the timer when the batch process button was clicked and stopped when the process timer bar finished. Both machines have >2Gb ram. Also bear in mind that the ram on the Intel motherboard was PC5300 ram (faster than 939socket ram on the AMD). Here are the results:

2.08.11min - 6 files with AMD 4400+ 250GB Seagate SATA II = 21.35sec/file
1.33.00min - 6 files with Intel Duo Core 6400 320GB Seagate SATA II = 16.5sec/file


The new machine is approx 30% faster. Envious siah. Translating that data for big projects (1000+ files), time saved would be fantastic. That's my highlight of the week. I will do another short picture post of our trip to Nantes last weekend. :-)

Wes

10 comments:

wahj said...

Very geek. Very l33t. = )

Anonymous said...

I have 3 words - "gong si mi"? Hahahaa... :)

kat

Anonymous said...

6400 should be pretty good for overclocking. seeing you've gotten yourself so much more cooling than stock cooling, you should be able to take the fsb up about 15-20%. That should make C1 go even faster heh.

Wes & Jo said...

lol!!

wahj: if you want l33t pc next year. i can helpch to zng your pc ok? neon lights in any kar-ror also can.

sheldon said...

duo core is very nice... i'm falling in love all over again...

wahj said...

Heh: thanks, but I'm getting a Macbook Pro, so no need to zhng it

(unless you want to help me add racing stripes down the side? ;)

btw, your blog is on the blogger beta, izzit? How is it? And how did you transfer across?

soliloquy said...

hey there, been following your blog now that the semester is over in melb =) sounds like sim lim 101. btw, I think the XR you're referring to was my sec sch classmate.

Anonymous said...

wynnie > Yeah! He's the guy from Fairfield. And we do call him XR. :-)

wahj > not much difference except for the folding list and publishing is a a wee bit more straightforward. can change header via WYSIWYG interface, no need for HTML. But no new designs. Only problem I had was "br" tag in 'Links' section, it wouldn't recognize that. btw, I can zhng the harddisk to >100GB on the new Macbook! lol!

wes

Anonymous said...

I've previously came across the Monster Bride website that mentioned your collaboration with XR, so yeh that has got to be him. Small world yeh.

Wynn

beeker said...

you are such a geek, and it looks like you are loving every minute of it :) looking forward to seeing you guys over cny!