New hardware needed

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2-3month failures? wha? I mean. Thats impressive, you guys should stress test for manufacturers SSD wise my recommendation is based on the end users experience of it feeling fast. We can go theoretical all day long. Eg: what in gods name was AMD doing when they came up with bulldozer and why intel does what it does... (this links with the final point...)

I can definitely agree ATI drivers aren't the best in that going in with a wrecking ball and leaving that as is might be an improvment in some cases... But credit where its due - ATI drivers are very compatible... I recall using some nvidia code for a GTX card on my 5750 to get some experimental stuff working with OpenCL. I mean seriously - nvidia GTX drivers for an ATI card. Well played Though I'm impressed that it doesn't affect ATI users more than just knowing what each checkbox does and whatnot.

Didn't mean to be agressive, sort of skim read your reply as I'd just got home and caught onto ATI, Driver, glitches, intel, intel, i7 and... Yeah. Rule of thumb - FX series tend to be innovative and new. With that comes rather a lot of 'stuff' that we simply can't quite get our heads around. Eg. why they use less power run a little hotter and deliver less power in some scenarios and much more in others with no relation. Personally I'm avoiding intel anything - since the AMD switch was my revelation that 60C stock is NOT acceptable compared to 40C on an unlocked and OCed chip with stock coolers. As for graphics, I like ATIs value though I'm a harsh customer when it comes to drivers...

My bias towards AMD is more of a 'okay intel does everything you will ever do for 20 years at 500 frames/sec at double the cost'. Okay. But why? You really wont notice the 440frames that dont get displayed on your monitor. But I'll notice the $200 alright XD And to top it off, intel have had VERY aggressive marketing in the UK and people buy intel because its 'cool' and has 'HD graphics' with 'enhanced yadida' and so on. Then theres the ultrabook bribery and whatnot which tends to use the market to attain a monopoly. I have a similar attitude on the sainsburys vs tesco wars. Of course I wont sustain that a Phenom ii x6 or top of the line AMD is the best for everybody - I recognise intels' xeons trump opteron, i7 trump phenoms and etcetera. I however dont agree with intel promoting cpu power alone and using marketing to convince everybody it is fact. If intel have their way - developers can take the cyanide pill: they only just got OpenGL 3.1 more or less right and their latest support for anything is not quite up to what I call an ATI driver kludge.

Though on the heat issue, its worth noting: ATI heatsinks while gaming. No touching. Ever

[SilverWarior]

2-3month failures? wha? I mean. Thats impressive, you guys should stress test for manufacturers SSD wise my recommendation is based on the end users experience of it feeling fast.

From what I read around the web the biggest killers for SSD-s are:
1. Windows Defrag which does a lot of data moving back and forth. Fragmentation barely slows down SSD drives especialy those with TRIM support so defragmenting files on them is almost pointles. And Windows XP has disk defragmentation enabled on all drives by default. Windows Vista does have defragmentation enabled on all drives by default if the computer has atleast one standard HDD (might have been fixed with SP1). Windows 7 is suposingly smart enough to keep defragmentation active only for normal HDD-s.
2. Windows Indexing service which is part of Windows Serch 4 can also cause quite some stress on SSD-s due to frequent reading of varios files which are being indexed especially when there is indepth indexing enabled (indexing contents of supported files).
3. Windows tends to constantly acces lots of log files, writing whole bunch of data in them. Not to mention how often it does reads from varios system files. Download process monitor to see how much disk activity there is even when Windows is idle. You will be surpized.
You can get Proces Monitor from: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/s...rnals/bb896645
4. Using uTorrent with SSD can also be a real killer. The reason for this is the fact that uTorrent always operates with small chunks of files. Not to mention the fact that it rapidly reads and writes data from his Chache folder. And if this folder is on SSD it will cause quite a lot of stress on it.

I can definitely agree ATI drivers aren't the best in that going in with a wrecking ball and leaving that as is might be an improvment in some cases... But credit where its due - ATI drivers are very compatible... I recall using some nvidia code for a GTX card on my 5750 to get some experimental stuff working with OpenCL. I mean seriously - nvidia GTX drivers for an ATI card.

Probably it all worked becouse ATI graphics cards have very good support for OpenCL while there are still some newer nVidia graphics cad which don't support OpenCL.
And NO nVidia Cuda is not the same as OpenCL. OpenCL is the emerging standard which tries to unify approach for using varios technologies like nVidia Cuda, AMD Stream or now caled APP, etc.

[LP]

2-3month failures? wha? I mean. Thats impressive, you guys should stress test for manufacturers SSD wise my recommendation is based on the end users experience of it feeling fast.

We purchased SSDs exactly to speed up compilation process, which improved 30 minute compilation time to 20 minutes when doing full rebuild of 20 Gb project. This would typically involve processing (reads, some writes) of more than 100,000 files. If there is a bug in SSD logic chip, this will make it fail rather quickly. I agree that it's not a typical end-user usage scenario, but honestly for me it doesn't matter if it will fail now or at some random point later - I would rather use hardware that I know is quite reliable, in which case it is HDD (I just stay away from Hitachi and Samsung/Seagate brands).

Didn't mean to be agressive, sort of skim read your reply as I'd just got home and caught onto ATI, Driver, glitches, intel, intel, i7 and... Yeah. Rule of thumb - FX series tend to be innovative and new. With that comes rather a lot of 'stuff' that we simply can't quite get our heads around. Eg. why they use less power run a little hotter and deliver less power in some scenarios and much more in others with no relation.

Well, despite online reviews, AMD FX 8-core series are pretty powerful, at least for us where we use them for work and not necessarily multi-threaded. Yes, in our rigs Core i7 2600K beats AMD FX 8150 in single-threaded applications, but when things become multithreaded, they both work very well.

Personally I'm avoiding intel anything - since the AMD switch was my revelation that 60C stock is NOT acceptable compared to 40C on an unlocked and OCed chip with stock coolers.

That is because AMD's stock coolers at least have some cooper in them, while Intel's coolers are made of some poor quality aluminum mixed with sawdust. I once tried to cut off piece of aluminum from Intel's cooler (to make a gasket as a replacement for laptop's deep thermal pillow) only to see it crumble into pieces under pressure.

they only just got OpenGL 3.1 more or less right and their latest support for anything is not quite up to what I call an ATI driver kludge.

On that note, I was wondering. Does Apple ever update their graphics drivers on OS X? Because Intel HD 3000/4000 with latest Windows drivers handles OpenGL 3 on Windows very well, while on Mac OS its OpenGL 3 support is buggy and detrimal.

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Hmm... Thats true about the windows part now I think about it: I have a few GiB of ram and never use more than 25% of it and linux uses that as cache for files. I haven't truly used windows as a primary os in a while though I always get roped into helping people out with it. Though I'm surpised to hear you say that there is no gaping difference between the 2600k against the fx8150 - I'll have to take that onboard since I've only heard negatives and my only experience was a bit of demo testing on a shop PC (an FX-6 something if I recall) and found that it coped like my OC'ed athlon. Guess its not a true comparison as I hear the FX chips can OC something impressive...

That is because AMD's stock coolers at least have some cooper in them

I'm so checking this out when I next do an upgrade... Mine is an old grey deal that feels sort of flimsy and I thought it was rather awful (though I suppose I was OCing...). For instance, when I first got my machine and wanted to see how far I could push it before things got unstable I had my hand on the cooler and it was still cool but while running prime95 the actual temperature was around 60C+ so I came to the 'crummy aluminium' conclusion about mine too

As for drivers I have no clue as to OS X's drivers - though I gather driver updates are primarily released with new versions of OS X. However I dont think that issue lies only with OS X... I've read some horror stories and been asked to get some games running on them... Its a miracle I haven't jumped off something tall in desperation yet . Though to be fair - the llano and APU drivers, although coming a long way in a short time, don't leave much to be desired either. On any platform. I guess the one nice thing about intel graphics is that out of the box experience.

At any rate Cybermonkey - if its 64 bit linux you need and don't mind not having all that good directx speed the open source Radeon drivers are excellent for all the 'pure' linux needs. If you need directx for wine gaming and whatnot then just grab a copy of fglrx from AMD, as much as people moan theres very few issues as of right now and although its not a laptop, the fglrx drivers are (in my experience) quite a bit more power efficient. Though given the radeon drivers' development pace I wont be reading these words and nodding in the near future And as for CPU I guess that if a PGD i7 user can say they can stack up then thats good enough for me though you'd have to assess your usage pattern as to whether its worth it. Great thing about AMD: Its all AM3+ (bar the APUs but hey, thats not what we're here for) so you can have any CPU you fancy So long you dont need the most cutting edge stuff. Performance wise. Theres some trippy stuff in Piledriver