My Win 7 PC is nice, how do I tstop it from constant HD access.?

And why did you?

I really like the Intel I7-2600K based machines (quad core w/ hyperthreading). I've built up a number of machines with Asrock motherboards.

If you want to spend really big bucks, the I7 comes in a 6-core version for a bit over $1k.

Then, there are the xeons and "PC"s like the HP DL 360

A dual xeon that can handle two banks of 72GB RAM

The Atom CPUs are based on the xeon too. Pretty fast, even though dumbed down.

Does the quad core help PSpice at all? ...Jim Thompson

When I was using PSpice back 8 years ago, it was a single threaded program. Thus, multiple cores didn't help in my tests. I also remember memory speed didn't do much for PSpice either. The I7 2600K will clock up to 3.8 GHz (no overclocking). PSpice improvements are mainly through clock speed.

LTspice makes use of multicore setups. Some projects get a boost, others not so much in my experience. LTspice expends a lot of energy for the graphing, thus, one core is eatten up by the graphing routine. Pretty amazing that Mike E. was able to multithread LTspice.

Another nice thing about the I7-2600K is power management. Idling, my computer eats 65W. At full bore, around 150W (minimal graphics processing).

talking of I7's My system here came with 12G of memory. I have a friend that recently also got a I7 system from a computer show, he started with 8G's. Then I found out last week, he had to be one up on me. He now has 16G of memory.. I wonder if W7 can actually use all of that and suffers from the issues as did win32? If so, I too, will have 16G in the box soon :)

Jamie

Only if it is written to take advantage of multiple threaded operation.

It will be slightly faster as the machine's background processes have it much easier, making whatever foreground processes a light bit faster due to getting more time slices.

If it was actually written for multi core operation, it will then blaze under such a machine.

Just so you know though, pspice is not a very cpu intensive engine to run in nearly all cases.

If you have W7 64-bit, yes, it can use all that memory. If you have

ok. The reason I question this is with Vista for example, you can have 4G in the machine but only get to use 3G of it. With special controls and what ever, I guess the OS can be set up to use that extra 1G left over.

I just thought that maybe W7 had the same structure problem but, apparently it does not.

We'll have to get on board and order a 4G stick, bring her up to a full 16G map.

Jamie

This ng has some of the most foolishly obnoxious posters that I've seen anywhere on usenet. It's odd, the EEs I met at university didn't seem such creeps. Maybe it's the economy.

You just need to work out who's who, there are some brilliantly bright shiny people here. The dullards are needed so to keep the balance ;)

Grant.

I recently bought a nice 16-core AMD machine from Supermicro, with an Adaptec hardware RAID controller and 32 gig of memory. It runs CentOS

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

te:

It's a famously active group. Not all the people who are active have useful stuff to offer, but one of our most obnoxious posters - Phil Alison - is very well-informed in a couple of areas.

"Hellequin" who trades under any number of aliases, as his service providers cancel his access, is merely obnoxious. The regular posters refer to him as AlwaysWrong.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

It must have been a while since you had it, or a new machine.

Those elements are from the MAKER of the MACHINE, not the OS.

If you buy a new machine, a family of trials gets included, depending on the Hdw vendor.

If you buy a raw copy of Windows, you do not see it. That further proves the source being the Hdw guys.

That, you get points for.

I installed everything from the bare metal upwards--the only part that was fiddly was getting Linux to boot from the RAID 5 array, which took an hour or so to figure out.

Windows is in everybody's cross hairs, so relying on it for security is most unwise.

Virtualization is wonderful, especially on a machine that powerful.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

I never said you should rely on it for security. I said you should rely on your firewall for security.

It, BTW, is probably running Linux.

i am jealous, this box will only handle 16G, cause it only as 4 slots.

what is the maximum physical mapping of that processor? Sounds drooly ;)

Jamie

It's a dual Magny Cours, AMD Opteron 6128. It can take 256 gig, IIRC. This is from the quote. I went with four 1T drives in RAID 5.

Nice machine, came fully configured from Alvio for about $3500. I bought it to do electromagnetic simulations on, but it also runs all my engineering apps and is my main storage server. Nice box.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

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PC 1 SERVER SYSTEM EAACC-3C0-3C13685 1 Supermicro Chassis 733TQ EAACC-3C0-3C13685 1 SUPERMICRO H8DGI EAACC-3C0-3C13685 2 AMD OPTERON 6128 8-CORE