We want to put together an office P.C. around a Core Duo E6850 that will do normal word processing in several different business programs, crunch some fairly large pdf files, internet video. No games. It's business. There is a fair amount of multiasking and we reboot about 5 times a day.
We would like to optimize this for speed which means fast boots and everything popping instantly or as fast as the technology allows. e.g. when we load Firefox we want to avoid the 3 second loading wait that we have with our present AMD X2 4800 with 10000 RPM Raptors in Raid 0.
Just to clarify, instead of building a computer that "will do the job", we want the fastest computer that we can put together for this purpose. While we hardly want to flush money down the toilet, save $75 to get a cheaper part is other than what we're about here.
and, we want it QUIET.
Any suggestions on what components to put around this processor. We're newbies!
C2D E6850 System Advice?
Moderators: NeilBlanchard, Ralf Hutter, sthayashi, Lawrence Lee
You can't do anything about the multiple seconds Firefox takes to load, unless you're willing to build it yourself, static (IMO, bad idea). It' has to do with how Firefox is designed. My E6750 starts it up only slightly faster than the Athlon XP before it. many apps will be the same way. Your best bet is to put commonly used apps in the startup folder, so they can be loading at the same time, just adding a few seconds to your total login time.
I'm happy with my GA-P35-DS3R. A bit overkill, though (unless you're going with software RAID). It takes twelve seconds to go from power on to GRUB starting. Not bad, but my favorite business nVidia board is even quicker. Alas, nothing to compare to the C2D CPUs over there in AMD land, yet. There are several good boards out there. The overclocker-friendly boards also happen to be designed pretty well, so are good for stock use, too.
Most of Gigabyte, Asus, Abit, and MSI boards out now using the P35 should do very well (don't count out Biostar, either). Not being an OC-friendly, MSI's will have less info about the web on them, whereas Abit and Gigabyte, tweaker-friendly as can be, have tons. Do some searching on cold boots with any board that looks good to you. Some boards still have problems with that (where it POSTs twice from a cold start).
Generally, I don't think you'll get the actual boot process too fast. Eight to fifteen seconds is a normal range. One thing to try, though, is once you get one running, disable everything in the BIOS that you don't need, and see how much faster it starts up.
For a case, I guess it depends on how big you want. Obviously, choice #1 is going to be the P182. Then, replace the fans it comes with Scythe Slipstream fans, 800 or 500 RPM. The 800 RPM are good replacements for the Nexus.
You've got several excellent cooler options:
Scythe Ninja: proven, works without a fan attached for many, and is annoying to mount, no matter how you do it. Some people have trouble with the push-pin mounts.
Thermalright Ultra 120 Extreme: thinner, not hard to mount, not as sure if it can go without a fan.
Thermalright SI-128 SE: beats just about anything...with a fan attached. Gives air flow to motherboard components underneath. It doesn't look hard to mount, but I haven't had to one to try.
Arctic Cooling Freezer Pro something: cheap, easy, decent, fan included and mounted. Not the performance of the real nice ones, but no fuss.
Check out Zalman's coolers, too; but I'd go for one of Thermalrights to build a few business PCs that need to be quiet. They are designed so that they are pretty easy to install.
The Scythe and Thermalright coolers require you do apply your own heatsink paste. If you go with one of them, don't use what's in the package. Get a tube of Arctic Silver Ceramique. It's non-conductive, non-capacitive, thick, easy to spread, and performs pretty close to the best out there. Basically, you can be a little sloppy with it, and everything will still work out great. Get the 22g tube, too. It will last you forever (I'm going on 2.5 years with 1/3 of one left).
If you go with a video card, not IGP (which you probably will, going Intel), I would recommend looking for one with what looks like it has hefty cooling for what it is. I got Gigabyte's passive 7300GT, which has a decent little heatpipe cooler (here's a page with a pic). The super-cheap cards have heatsinks that tend to rely on plenty of case air flow, and may be a liability in a low air flow system. ATi tends to be worse about it, but the nVidia's with those low-surface-area--and-low-mass jobs can have problems over the long term, as well. Don't take my choice of card as a great one for you, just notice the cooling. I'd have a few pics to compare, but Newegg is being slow (Black Friday DoS, I guess).
I'll let someone else get into PSU choice, HDD quieting, and so forth.
I'm happy with my GA-P35-DS3R. A bit overkill, though (unless you're going with software RAID). It takes twelve seconds to go from power on to GRUB starting. Not bad, but my favorite business nVidia board is even quicker. Alas, nothing to compare to the C2D CPUs over there in AMD land, yet. There are several good boards out there. The overclocker-friendly boards also happen to be designed pretty well, so are good for stock use, too.
Most of Gigabyte, Asus, Abit, and MSI boards out now using the P35 should do very well (don't count out Biostar, either). Not being an OC-friendly, MSI's will have less info about the web on them, whereas Abit and Gigabyte, tweaker-friendly as can be, have tons. Do some searching on cold boots with any board that looks good to you. Some boards still have problems with that (where it POSTs twice from a cold start).
Generally, I don't think you'll get the actual boot process too fast. Eight to fifteen seconds is a normal range. One thing to try, though, is once you get one running, disable everything in the BIOS that you don't need, and see how much faster it starts up.
For a case, I guess it depends on how big you want. Obviously, choice #1 is going to be the P182. Then, replace the fans it comes with Scythe Slipstream fans, 800 or 500 RPM. The 800 RPM are good replacements for the Nexus.
You've got several excellent cooler options:
Scythe Ninja: proven, works without a fan attached for many, and is annoying to mount, no matter how you do it. Some people have trouble with the push-pin mounts.
Thermalright Ultra 120 Extreme: thinner, not hard to mount, not as sure if it can go without a fan.
Thermalright SI-128 SE: beats just about anything...with a fan attached. Gives air flow to motherboard components underneath. It doesn't look hard to mount, but I haven't had to one to try.
Arctic Cooling Freezer Pro something: cheap, easy, decent, fan included and mounted. Not the performance of the real nice ones, but no fuss.
Check out Zalman's coolers, too; but I'd go for one of Thermalrights to build a few business PCs that need to be quiet. They are designed so that they are pretty easy to install.
The Scythe and Thermalright coolers require you do apply your own heatsink paste. If you go with one of them, don't use what's in the package. Get a tube of Arctic Silver Ceramique. It's non-conductive, non-capacitive, thick, easy to spread, and performs pretty close to the best out there. Basically, you can be a little sloppy with it, and everything will still work out great. Get the 22g tube, too. It will last you forever (I'm going on 2.5 years with 1/3 of one left).
If you go with a video card, not IGP (which you probably will, going Intel), I would recommend looking for one with what looks like it has hefty cooling for what it is. I got Gigabyte's passive 7300GT, which has a decent little heatpipe cooler (here's a page with a pic). The super-cheap cards have heatsinks that tend to rely on plenty of case air flow, and may be a liability in a low air flow system. ATi tends to be worse about it, but the nVidia's with those low-surface-area--and-low-mass jobs can have problems over the long term, as well. Don't take my choice of card as a great one for you, just notice the cooling. I'd have a few pics to compare, but Newegg is being slow (Black Friday DoS, I guess).
I'll let someone else get into PSU choice, HDD quieting, and so forth.
I can't make any recommendations from the HW point of view as far as speed is concerned, but I can share my experience from the SW side.
I was confronted with a similar situation and resorted to Diskeeper, a defragmentation program that is superior to Windows fragmentation in my opinion. I chose the Pro Premier version which has an additional feature called I-FAAST which allows the most frequently accessed programs/files to open faster.
Here is quote from the help file to give you an idea:
"This feature is only available for NTFS volumes. FAT volumes are not supported. Intelligent File Access Acceleration Sequencing Technology (I-FAAST) improves file access and creation on NTFS volumes by up to 80% (average 10%-20%) above and beyond the improvement provided by defragmentation alone. This is the first industry implementation of “Disk Performance Calibrationâ€
I was confronted with a similar situation and resorted to Diskeeper, a defragmentation program that is superior to Windows fragmentation in my opinion. I chose the Pro Premier version which has an additional feature called I-FAAST which allows the most frequently accessed programs/files to open faster.
Here is quote from the help file to give you an idea:
"This feature is only available for NTFS volumes. FAT volumes are not supported. Intelligent File Access Acceleration Sequencing Technology (I-FAAST) improves file access and creation on NTFS volumes by up to 80% (average 10%-20%) above and beyond the improvement provided by defragmentation alone. This is the first industry implementation of “Disk Performance Calibrationâ€
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txs for the tips! nice build Cerb! based on the installation difficulties and my own meager abilities i'm shying away from the Ninja. presuming Ninja mini has same installation problems. Though I'll say that my present Scythe Katana was a very easy install and keeps the x4800 at about 38-42 degrees. I'm actually thinking of going with that, and wonder why the Katana gets so little pub for non-overclockers with an airy case.
the Diskeeper is as good as bought. Txs very much for that tip Sun! really making me reconsider the whole project as I've read a number of posts indicating only slightly faster real world performance pops with the Core Duos in office. Now, if I'd only waited to take this x4800 apart
(I'm on a Pentium 4 D820 and it's struggling...).
a little reading since my post. questionable time for a new system, perhaps! looks as if we may see in short order to new MBs to support faster DDR3 speeds.
the Diskeeper is as good as bought. Txs very much for that tip Sun! really making me reconsider the whole project as I've read a number of posts indicating only slightly faster real world performance pops with the Core Duos in office. Now, if I'd only waited to take this x4800 apart
(I'm on a Pentium 4 D820 and it's struggling...).a little reading since my post. questionable time for a new system, perhaps! looks as if we may see in short order to new MBs to support faster DDR3 speeds.
For something easy to go in, my recommendation is still one of Thermalright's. The Ultra 120 Extreme will be easier to mount than the SI-128 SE, but while they may look intimidating, just have a little patience and they'll go on like clockwork.
The Katana doesn't get the super cool temps other heatsinks do, so is passed on, not being among the best. With the best being cheaper than every other part of a midrange PC except the DVD burner, it's not hard to justify the costs.
I can get a Ninja + bolt-through, a Ultra-120 Extreme, or a SI-128 SE for as cheap or cheaper than I can get RAM, a PSU, HDD, or case for a nice system. In the big picture (the whole cart at Newegg), it's a small expense.
The Katana doesn't get the super cool temps other heatsinks do, so is passed on, not being among the best. With the best being cheaper than every other part of a midrange PC except the DVD burner, it's not hard to justify the costs.
I can get a Ninja + bolt-through, a Ultra-120 Extreme, or a SI-128 SE for as cheap or cheaper than I can get RAM, a PSU, HDD, or case for a nice system. In the big picture (the whole cart at Newegg), it's a small expense.
The mentioned parts should be fast enough, no need to worry too much about ddr3 memory either, as intel`s architecture can work with slower memory quiet efficiently. Actually I think it`s an excellent time for buying a new system.
The main bottleneck seems to be hard disk performance as you experienced with the dual raptors. The only thing faster would be a pair of flash memory drives rated at 60mb/s minimum but they are not worth the cost imo. That clever diskeeper program seems very interesting and is probably the most cost effective way of reducing load times.
Talking about software, I think some other optimizations would be able to further reduce loading times and improve responsiveness. I was able to reduce my boot times by a few seconds by disabling some built in functionality in windows xp. How much functionality you can afford to loose depends on your needs but you can certainly improve on the stock configuration without too much effort.
http://www.speedguide.net/index.php
http://www.sanx.org/tips.asp
The main bottleneck seems to be hard disk performance as you experienced with the dual raptors. The only thing faster would be a pair of flash memory drives rated at 60mb/s minimum but they are not worth the cost imo. That clever diskeeper program seems very interesting and is probably the most cost effective way of reducing load times.
Talking about software, I think some other optimizations would be able to further reduce loading times and improve responsiveness. I was able to reduce my boot times by a few seconds by disabling some built in functionality in windows xp. How much functionality you can afford to loose depends on your needs but you can certainly improve on the stock configuration without too much effort.
http://www.speedguide.net/index.php
http://www.sanx.org/tips.asp