sutton050

Its that time, I have been maxing out my machine repeatedly, I had two options upgrade or build new. Money determined that an upgrade is all I can afford, between the server rebuild earlier in the year, building myself a new rack-mount table and just generally being skint my budget was low, super low, like £200. Lets go over what the machine is.... I'm running an Intel Core i7 950 3.0ghz.  This is a four core (eight thread) chip, it cost the earth when I bought it as an early adopter of the newly released Core i7 series.  My upgrade comes in the form of an Intel Xeon X5670, clocked slightly slower I do plan to overclock the chip, but it lifts me to 6 cores (12 threads).  There's also a whopping increase in L3 cache, I see this as the last and only upgrade path for this machine. The motherboard hosting this is a very trusty Asus P6X58-e, I've loved every minute of this board, and hope that applying the overclock will be as easy as everything else working with it. As I am o...

I recently ordered a new WD Blue disk, it duly arrived and had the strangest problem I've seen in many a long year, no matter what I did the disk showed as 64MB total and it lost all data upon power cycling. I puzzled over this briefly, until I pulled the disk back out the caddy and saw it had exactly 64MB of cache, yes, no platter space was being shown, just the cache showing up as disk space.  I have never ever seen this before, cache has always been a transparent intermediary for me in production and so to suddenly have the cache being the only exposed space was odd. However, dead on arrival hard disk, a quick RMA and a new one winged its way into my hands, they actually gave me a slight upgrade as I got a WD Black by return of post. Tonight I planned an hour to fit the new disk and add it to my workstation.... This machine has no cable management, and its a nightmare to add drives, there are six built in 3.5" bays but they have a set latch and screw mechanism, which forces...