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Advanced System Building Guide
Alan writes "FiringSquad has up an Advanced System Building Guide, detailing how to construct your own rig. The first half deals with hardware selection and even esoteric concepts such as PCI slot placement. The second half is focused on Windows XP, and makes recommendations such as moving the swap file and scratch disk to a separate partition." From the article: "You laugh at the so-called expertise of Best Buy's GeekSquad, and are the one doing the teaching when calling technical support. If this sounds like you, you've come to the right place if you're looking to take your system building skills to the next level."
If this sounds like you, you've come to the right place if you're looking to take your system building skills to the next level."
If this sounds like you then you have almost reached nirvana. Soon, you will learn the advanced knowledge of how to call Dell.
You should always have a dedicated partition for your temp files and swap file. It's tempting to actually put this on a separate physical drive to reduce the wear and tear on the main drive, but the disadvantage is that upgrading to a larger hard drive a more involved process.
Reduce wear and tear? Really? I've heard many reasons why one should do this (improving perfmance & reducing fragmentations which he mentions later), but reducing wear and tear?
Also, I'd love to find a pointer to building an inexpensive (not cheap, there's a difference), reliable machine... much more interesting to me anyway.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
They actually call themselves that? Come on - like any retail store paying their clerks $7 an hour is going to have top notch techies there.
People are stupid. That's how these businesses stay afloat.
Just because your case comes with 60 brass standoffs doesn't mean it's a good idea to use them all!
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
He lost me at "I like Maxtor". Anyone who recommends maxtor hdds is either on the take, or hasn't been building systems for very long. Either case... I'd pass a bestbuy job application his way.
I ate my sig.
Next week on slashdot: "How to get a cooler screensaver."
Professional tip: I try to line my PCI slots up with the case, the cards work better that way.
"...you've come to the right place if you're looking to take your system building skills to the next level."
The next level isn't very good on details, but full of personal opinions put forth by the author. I wouldn't call that the next level whatsoever. I'd call his article "Things you may want to consider when building a machine." YAWN.
If you can reduce the amount of this wear on your OS and data drives by placing swap and temp on a physically seperate drive, you may prevent major data loss.
I would think this would be obvious, but I guess not.
"I'm just here to regulate funkiness."
I have to say, an advanced tweaking guide isn't really news at this point - if you want it, you go google it. (Or microsoft it, on msdn, liek l33t winhax0rze should) This seems more like a plug for someone's website to me.
My little site.
yeah seriously, there was no mention of static damage. i thought it was going to start w/ l33t people build systems n4k3d.
I ate my sig.
Putting a PC system together is fucking easy. And I'm sick of the "Xtreme l337 d00dz0rz" who spout off about the little LCD temp display in their Corsair RAM modules like they're some kind of gods of Comp. Sci.
It's easy. Build your own, I do, it's fun, and cheaper in the long run. But for fuck sakes, stop bragging about it.
Also, anyone who puts their "specs" in their sig line on any forum is a complete knob. Especially the ones who go on to list nonsense shit like "Vantec 80mm exhaust fan" or "OCZ Xtreme RAM coolers" or "Zalman Copper Northbridge Cooler".
If you don't know who I'm talking about, it's probably you.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Here in Oklahoma City (No, I'm not native. I'm from MA), I work on the Geek Squad. I'm the only one with either an A+, N+ or C++ in the whole store, let alone the GS. It turns out that most people, when they think they know what they're talking about, say nothing but buzzwords like Pentium and Windows. They don't know what the difference between 802.11b and g are, and the other blokes on the Geek Squad don't even know that there IS a g. Building a computer isn't anything near as difficult as remembering what FSB freqencies are possible on a socket 370, building a computer is more like a Lego set. Things can go a few certain ways, but there's only one right way. If it doesn't fit, it doesn't belong. If only people knew even the basics about computers, Best Buy's tech bench would go out of business, and I'd move back into my Kenmore vacuum box in the alleyway.
I pity the foo that isn't metasyntactic
Your experience may vary, but I'll stick with seperate drives for temp and swap.
"I'm just here to regulate funkiness."
they want their employees back.
To put it in perspective, all of my systems at home have PC-133 memory in them. The last time I built an entire system from scratch, 80 gig drives were expensive, DDR memory didn't exist, 12x CD-RW drives were getting affordable, and we were just breaking the gigahertz barrier in CPUs.
Now I have sort of been following things, but not enough to know off the top of my head what to grab off the e-shelf to build a system. I have found that this has been the biggest challenge in building new systems.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Not possible for many of us. My system can't support enough RAM for some of the DB stuff I'll do. I had a 7 gig swap file last week as my poor box choked through 25 gigs of data.
What I want are 5-10 gig or larger "drives" that are made up of cheaper 66mhz SDRAM modules, yet have an IDE/SATA/SCSI/(Whatever) interface, and use one of those for swap.
Do they exist? If not, why not?
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
You need to remember that hard drives are NOT solid state devices. They have bearings and mechanical parts. The first rule of thumb when it comes to PCs or any kind of equipment is that "The question is not if the parts will wear out but when the parts will wear out."
That being said, the hard drives will wear out. Period. End of story. Some might die in a few months, some in a few years, and some might never die before you replace them.
Even more important is the conecpt of multiple spindles to do multiple jobs. If you have one drive that suddenly hits swap because you're doing something, not only will your system grind to a halt because the drive head is loaded with contention (it can only do one job at once, obviously) but you're adding that much more wear and tear.
With the swap on a separate drive (and preferably on a separate IDE channel, assuming that that's what you're doing), the main drive can do whatever it needs to do while letting the other drive take care of the swap. So, not only are you greatly increasing potential throughput and system efficiency, you're dramatically reducing wear and tear on the drive head mechanism.
The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.
I'm an experience system builder, so this article is intriguing. However, I feel he does things the long way or is unaware of better ways to do things when building custom advanced systems. For instance, when I'm building a new freelance gig for use at home, I typically click the drop-down list make sure to select exactly what is going into my custom rig. Or if there are multiple color options available (like when I'm rigging up a new custom-built MP3 player), I will click the drop-down list and select which one I want. Sometimes I might even want to put my mark on the thing and type in a custom message to be engraved on the back, just to remind people of the customization work I put into it.
I'm also curious about the PCI slot positioning part of the article, as my custom-built rigs skip that step entirely. Why bother? Often, I store my parts directly in the monitor itself or even without a monitor so I can hook the box up to anything. Then I might carefully select those drop-down lists to hot-rod the box to my liking and really custom-build an advanced freelance system by upping RAM or processor speed via careful direction of the mouse cursor when selecting drop-down lists. My system-building buddy down the street doesn't even bother with upping the RAM via the drop-down lists and just uses a putty knife to up the RAM with a custom-bought chip of his own liking, but that's getting into levels of extraneous advanced system-building that I don't have time for.
I hope my experience in advanced system building is helpful for you all. If you want to read more about my advanced system building skills, I suggest you check this out and take notes.
It means if your job depends on color accuracy, get a Mac and not a Windows or Linux based PC.
As a part time Geek Squad agent (in the summer and during intersession), I kinda resent the author's disdain for us. True, you may run into some who don't know their ass from their elbow. But, in general, the in-store agents have much more expertise than the sales people, many have at least some certification, and the agents who do field work (Double Agents) go through a pretty legitimate training and testing period. Even if you considered Geek Squad members to be useless, the article does not provide a ton of information for individuals who "built dozens of desktop computers on your own and for others and consider yourself a seasoned system builder." The author has a bias towards Maxtor, for example, without providing any empirical evidence beside the fact that he's had good experience with them. Personally, I've had pretty good experiences with Western Digital drives too, but those aren't mentioned. He also arbitrarily comments on things like adjusting the page file, justifying his recommendations by "thinking" they are good settings. Yes, there are many great points in there, but the author has a bit too much confidence with him/herself and not enough data to back up some his more specific recommendations, not to mention some unfounded commentary on Geek Squad representatives.
that aperently people didn't already know most of this or it wouldn't have been worth writing an article about. Imagine! placing hot PCI cards where they are easy to cool? Or perhaps moving the big RFI producers away from the sound card? jeez people. And who'da ever thunk of partitioning a drive? I've been using scratch partitions and/or redundant OS partitions for, literaly, 17 years. Since I got my first Mac with an HD. (SE with a 20 meg External!)... I mean really most of this is about how to setup XP, not how to BUILD a system.
My Karma's getting too good, So I thought I'd bitch a little.
A Call For A New Slashdot Moderation Level!
I don't have the details handy, but running a swap, even if RAM is bountiful and plenty is always a good idea. It's something to the effect of the system really likes seeing the swap there, even if you technically don't need it.
-Jesse
Nothing says "unprofessional job" like wrinkles in your duct tape.
Yeah, what's wrong with XP's color management exactly?
And how is Linux better at "number-crunching", if you have the same CPU. If anything, VStudio will spew out more optimal code than GCC will, since it wasn't designed for every architecture under the sun.
And what does "Linux is better at miscellaneous work" mean?
Then again, I read one of these "I'm a computer hero because I built my own" articles that suggested you get a $1000 liscense for Windows Server 2003, because since it's more expensive and "industrial", it will invariably make your games run faster. The author then proceeded to lambast nVidia and ATI for not keeping 2003 driver sets up to date with the 98/ME/XP set.
Sheesh, just another idiot who thinks sticking components together makes him a PC idiot.
Anyone can install a soundcard, a DVD-R drive, or build a system from scratch.
Oh well, I got some miscellaneous work to do. Time to reboot into Ubuntu!
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Perhaps the only interesting tidbit in the article was the mention of using ferrite bead chokes on the analog lines, which was interesting to me only as far as it's the first time I've seen any mention of ferrite chokes outside of EE circles.
Only after reading that horrid article did I see it was on a gamers website, so that makes sense why they focus so much time on tweaking XP, but even for the hard-core gamers I'm surprised they didn't talk about more hardware options.
Maybe there are some interesting things in the 4 pages of Windows XP stuff, but for me that article was pretty useless.
I'm going to studiously ignore saying anything about the article. If you can benefit from it, that's great. If not, that's fine too. Here's the meat of my post: with prices coming down and package / rebate deals on new boxes all the time, it might be tempting to ask why should I build my own box at all?.
My personal take on this (yes, I build all my boxes) used to be cost-effectiveness and component picking, but now it is simply that I can dictate exactly which components I want in my system for the same price as buying something bundled. There is no longer any real cost savings here, but I do like to maintain control over what I put in my machines (up very very very nearly 24/7 thanks to this, with downtime only to upgrade or blow out dust). So there is still merit in "rolling your own" box, as far as I am concerned.
I wanted to beat the cries of, "why would I build when I can buy for the same price?". ;)
Sure, criticise that he calls the article "advanced" when you're all light-years ahead, but I read the article expected to be a noobie way over my head, and discovered that I was actually an advanced system builder who simply hadn't realised how 1337 I was.
It left me with a warm fuzzy feeling.
On page 4, he talks about optimising IE, changing the cache size and stuff... But what kind of "professional" uses IE? Houston, we have a problem...
If you regularly edit several photos at a time (or do video editing), you can have a GB or two and still hit swap. Or if you use Linux it'll automagically pre-emptively write any inactive pages to swap incase it needs to free them (this is a good thing).
I'm all for bolstering self-confidence in new computer users, but if your technical skills aren't enough to encompass moving the windows swap file, I had better not overhear your asinine arguments with the Best Buy guy when I have to run in and buy something.
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
I did a quite Google of the term and got http://www.bitmicro.com/products_edisk_35_ide.php.
I also found a dicussion on Sharky's forums from back in 2001 about this very issue. I doubt we'll ever see one, but you never know what those crazy people in Hong Kong will hack out next.
1337 people build systems while wearing polarfleece and standing in sockfeet on carpet, petting a cat, and still don't have static damage.
I don't have the details handy, but running a swap, even if RAM is bountiful and plenty is always a good idea. It's something to the effect of the system really likes seeing the swap there, even if you technically don't need it.
It's more that it's good to have it there just in case, because you never know when you will need it (even with 2GB, you can multi-task yourself straight to hell if you're doing image editing, watching videos, and running crap in the background all at the same time), and it doesn't hurt anything to have it enabled. If your system doesn't need it, it just won't use it, so no use disabling it. But that one day when you run out of RAM in a very bad way because you've disabled your swap file could kill you (or at least your data), depending on what you're doing. Windows PC's do not like it when they run out of memory without expecting to.
There's something of a myth that some people believe in that Windows is constantly accessing your swap file even with loads of RAM, and that turning the swap off will force Windows to use your RAM. Well, a) Windows XP is pretty good with memory management, and doesn't use swap when it doesn't have to, and b) even if it did use swap too much, turning it off isn't going to "teach" the OS to use memory properly. It either needs the swap file or it doesn't, and if it doesn't, what do you have to lose by leaving it on?
My understanding was that, excepting certain infamous models (120 GXP "Death Star") made by IBM/Hitachi, all consumer-level hard drives have the same, small, failure rate.
That having been said, there are some brands I wouldn't touch with a bargepole. I wasn't surprised to learn that Fujitsu had left the HDD business after their notorious denial of problems with certain HDDs. Obviously batches of faulty HDDs will happen now and again, but to weasel out of responsibility like that doesn't exactly promote confidence in *anything* they make, does it?
Would you want to buy anything from them after that? I wouldn't.
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To be frank, this article is actually better than the usual. One of the worst I ever read was about four years ago in 2600 magazine, if you can believe that.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Just something invalid: Personal experience. Your personal experience isn't a representitive sample of the actual facts of the matter. Also, even within that, people don't usually consider all the factors.
Like I've had seen more Maxtors fail than any other drive. More unreliably right? No, not so much. Rather they are what are in just about every desktop in the building, many of which are crammed in areas with inadiquate ventelation. The small number of other drives we have are in servers and so on in properly cooled rooms (and some of them fail once and a while).
As for home systems, I think I've had drives from every maker fail on me. Western Digital has the highest rate at 2, but then over 50% of the drives I've owned have come from them.
Until I see some empirical evidence showing a higher rate of Maxtor (or any other drive maker) failures in equal condtions, I'm not putting any stock in what the haters say.
I believe you seek one of these Speed is limited mostly by the PCI bus..
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A separate partition is STILL THE SAME DRIVE. Same platters, same heads. The only benefit is that it's a little cleaner to look at.
If you need better swap performance, the ONLY way to get it is to move the swapfile to a seperate, hopefully faster, drive.
However, if you're looking for ways to improve your swapfile performance, you're a freakin' idiot who needs to stop touching PC's.
Swapfile is a necessary evil, if swapping is degrading your performance YOU NEED MORE RAM, not a faster swapfile. It's not rocket science. That $150 you'd spend on a dedicated swap drive would buy you a gigabyle of RAM and end the problem forever.
I guess anyone can write an article...
" If this sounds like you, you've come to the right place if you're looking to take your system building skills to the next level."
And I would still be using winXP? How is the next level just a few tweaks? If I'm that good shouldn't you teach me really advanced stuff like how to use the serial interface to monitor my computer or access my hardware firmwares to modify them... shouldn't you teach me how to boot several system in one computer, depending on which "startup button" I have pressed (imagine an external keypad, each button labeled with a different OS it boots when pressed). I mean, what if I'm beyond swap file relocation, what if I'm truly advanced but don't have the money to learn computer engineering?
I mean, I have tried MIT online electrical engineering courses but I was lacking a tutor or someone to explain to me some of the concept shown there without explanation...
anyway you get it, this is just another winXP tweak guide, gazillion of them are on the net, none of them actually does something truly usefull..
show me ADVANCED and then we'll talk!
By default Windows XP will place as much memory as possible for any minimised application into swap. Don't believe me? Load up task manager and add the Mem usage column, this shows actual physical ram being used. Now load up a ram hogging program and minimise/unminimise it - see how the Mem usage drops when you minimise it and comes back up with the window is restored, thats windows paging the apps memory to swap file even tho it doesn't actually need to. Windows of course then makes the memory available to other apps and as soon as something overwrites it, to restore the minimised app requires disk thrashing swap reading and noticable delays with a system that has 70% of its memory still available.
Linux may do this the proper way I, I haven't tested it since I don't use a swap file with linux either because its not required for any of the linux boxes I have setup or run (all for home use nothing real serious).
As long as there is enough physical memory for everything required of the system, I cannot see how its possible for a swap file to make a system run faster.
it wants its joke back. ;-)
-Tom
n general I think 1GB is good for 512MB systems, 1.5GB is good for 1GB systems, and 2GB is good for 2GB systems.
There is no frelling way I'm going to set a swap space to 2GB. I'm sorry. I made this mistake with a production server and I've been paying for it ever since.
Sure the general rule used to be double your physical memory but that rule just doesn't fly anymore.
We've got a few RHEL servers that were installed with 2GB of memory. I couldn't bring myself to create a 4GB swap space so I set it to 2GB. It was the single worst choice I've ever made.
There is no way in hell I want to swap out a full 2GB of memory. If my system needs to swap out a full 2GB of something, I've got other issues. There is no way you're going to be able to fit that back in when it wants to go from swap to RAM so something else is going to get paged out and the cycle continues.
I've contented myself to set a max of 768MB no matter how much memory I have. One of my DB2 servers has 16GB of RAM. There is no way I'm creating a 32GB swap vol much less a 16GB one.
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The article is a nice start. For getting the lay of the land, I like the enthusiast sites like Tom's Hardware, AnandTech, and ExtremeTech. Silent PC Review shows some nice components for building silent PCs.
Usually, I buy CPUs that are not the latest (better bang/buck) but couple them with the new motherboards, decent (but not overextravagant) memory, and a nice video/TV card like the ATI All-in-wonder series. It's difficult to get the latest ATI A-I-W card from the stock computer builders. If you don't do excessive gaming, you can opt for slightly less CPU and a lower power ATI A-I-W; that will help you build a more silent computer. Building your own also lets you try out the better cases, so there's less Apple envy. Cool cases can be had from places like Ahanix, Lian Li, and Nexus (check out both the iStyle and Breeze cases).
I'm more worried about the placement of sound cards because of IRQ sharing / dedicated IRQ's depending on the PCI slot. Some cards don't IRQ share well. Simply leaving this small, yet important piece of information out really makes me question his tech knowledge.
Uh, and he contiunes to use IE? My first step with a new XP install is to : go get a better browser. Firefox, Opera, whatever. Well, after I turn off all the lameness that is XP (Color scheme, menu styles / animations, etc)
Oh, and he turns System Restore off. Um, while I don't like XP all that much, if something totally fucking trashes your registry, this is a handy thing to have.
Make that "Nerdvana."
Swap and temp are the most active parts of your disk! The last thing you want is to hammer the same bytes of memory with write after write after write. Regular data on a flash drive, great; swap, stupid.
A witty [sig] proves nothing. --Voltaire
Start it up and it will soon start swapping. No matter how much RAM you have.
...
Since it is going to do it anyway, you'll want a nice, clean, ORGANIZED place for it to do it in.
The problem is that adding a partition usually puts that partition near the spindle which is the SLOWEST portion of the disk. But it will still cut down on fragmentation and crap.
With a Linux system, I put the swap drive down first. It gets the fastest portion of the disk. It should never use it, but just in case
With Windows, if you do that you'll end up installing Windows to D:\, which is fine, but you'll need to make adjustments everytime something wants to install to C:\program files.
I agree. I was screwing with it in university back when it was still "some finnish kid's" toy project. Back when you had to bootstrap by hand.
Noone was impressed with me then, why should I be impressed when some kid sticks a knoppix CD in his xtreme blinking blue led box?
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
at least among ham radio operators. One's transmitter has been referred to as a "rig" since the beginning of the hobby.
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Placing the swap file on a dedicated partition can indeed improve things. Why?
1. You don't have to go through an intermediary filesystem, with associated overhead.
2. You can give the swap partition priority or at least balance in queuing on a single disk.
3. I'm sure there's a third reason that also validates my theory, given that pretty much every linux distro I know of makes a seperate swap partition. We'll call item #3 the "appeal to authority" argument.
I would also like to take this opportunity to point out that you have indirectly insulted the engineers behind the Linux VM improvements. I realize this article was mostly about innane tweaks to windows XP, but the slander is inconsistant with my views of their work.
I Browse at +4 Flamebait
Open Source Sysadmin
Working in the Geek Squad I find that most customers are pretty clueless; they don't know how to set up internet, or if they do, they've got a million popups. Pretty run of the mill.
The other 5% of customers I see are just like this guy. They go to best buy (cause that's where all the pros buy stuff) for some shiny new gadget for their machine, go home and spend all night shoehorning it in, and it doesn't work. Next day they show up at my bench and I've got to fix this idiot's computer and install his new hard drive. $50 well earned.
Most computer professionals can laugh in the face of geek squad all they want. Geek Squad simply isn't for people like us. In other words, if you build cars for a living, you don't go to jiffy lube, and if you build computers for a living, you don't go to geek squad. No need to be dismissive or rude about it; you're simply not the target market. Be pleased that you don't need to spend $120 every couple of months to get your machine de-spywared and move on with your life.
Geek Squad is for the unwashed masses out there. The truely clueless (or even worse, the clueless who think they're clueful). And it does just fine a job at that.
I never thought I'd see the day when a
If you need more RAM, buy it. We have 64-bit x86 systems now, so they can handle as much as you might need. Old PC-133 DIMMs are only nominally cheaper than DDR RAM, and even the newest motherboards can accept the oldest and slowest DDR DIMMs.
So you want to spend obscene ammounts of money on a hardware hack to get 10GBs of RAM (at much, much slower access speeds), rather than spending $300 to upgrade your mobo and proc?
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