Mine says:

CPU: 7.3 (AMD Phenom II X4 3.0 GHz)
RAM: 7.7 (8 GB - 4 x 2 GB DDR2-800, upgraded from 4 GB at some point)
Graphics: 7.5 for both (Radeon HD 6850)
Hard disk: 5.9 (Western Digital Caviar Black 750 GB)

RAM speed doesn't seem to have much to do with the RAM score. (unless my setup is somehow doing something that is making it faster)

Funny. That samsung hd103sj hard drive that you guys are saying is the best mechanical hard drive is the one I have... and to be completely honest I hate it. I'm running starcraft 2 off of it and the hard drive is getting extremely hot... like 120 degrees fareinheit. My bedroom is being heated up by like 20-30 degrees because of the hard drive. Western Digital and OCZ are the brands of hard drive that you want to get. SAMSUNG IS SHIT for hard drives.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Sep 12 2011, 7:51 am by NudeRaider. Reason: bad argument see PM

If you have a case that does not have a fan near the hard drive bay (even running at a low speed), I'd kind of expect that temperature for the hard drives. Sounds like you have poor air circulation in your computer case.

I have 2 80 mm fans in the front blowing the air from the hard drive towards the back. 1 80 mm fan on top sucking air out... and 1 120 mm fan on the back sucking air out... 2 open areas for air on the plexiglass or plastic or w/e it is side panel. 120 fareinheit is around 50 celsius.

Are those fans at the front panel or are they just inside the case behind the hard drives? I'm just curious because I've seen the latter sometimes (though uncommon) and reviews say that they don't do much since they aren't blowing air into the case, only moving the air already in the case.

The difference in RAM speed at ddr2-800 vs ddr3-1600 is almost negligible due to timing. Clearly the ddr3 is faster, but not 100% faster, and certainly not more than 1-2% faster in real world applications.

What's really important in RAM is the total amount, so long as it is 4GB+, you will run everything fine. Now, 8 GB will let you do a few things like file compression/encoding faster, but not really.

As far as the hot HDD, does it feel that hot to the touch? I would be worried about 50 C, but not 40 C. Mine are at 30-35, whereas my cpu is at 26 idle. Doesn't make sense to me that the drive gets that hot, but I'm hearing increased horror stories about the f3. Still better than the 7200.11, and at the price you get the f3, it's just as fast as the rest of the 7200 drives, and generally a little bit cheaper. The 7200.12 is probably better.

The idea that your hard drive increases the temperature in your room more than your cpu or graphics card is absurd.

I remember having HDD temps going as high as yours but that was when I cramped 3 HDDs together so that barely any air could flow around or between them. When I fixed that my temps dropped to ~30 °C and that includes the F3.
So I have to agree with ShadowFlare that there seems to be something wrong with your air flow. Try opening the case and check with your (wet) fingers if you can feel a slight breeze over and under your HDD.

What kind of horror stories? I'm quite happy with my F3. By far the fastest HDD I ever had. Time will show how durable it is, but there's also a lot of luck involved, so yeah...
The only bad thing I can say about it is the amount of noise it's making when working. It didn't bother me at all in my old computer (though I did notice it) but the new one is so quiet (fans all running at <= 1000 RPM) that it does make a difference. It's still tolerable though, so whatever.

Post has been edited 2 time(s), last time on Sep 12 2011, 9:28 am by NudeRaider.

Here're my W7 scores, for comparison:

CPU: 7.1 Processor Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Quad CPU @ 2.40GHz
RAM: 7.1 Memory (RAM) 4.00 GB (2 x 2GB)
GPU: 6.9/6.9 Graphics NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX, Gaming graphics 2527 MB Total available graphics memory
SSD: 7.3 Primary hard disk 18GB Free (60GB Total)

Ram is nothing flash, can't find my receipt and not going to open it up just to see what it is.

Various newegg type reviews saying it's loud and/or RMA took forever or RMA doesn't exist. I think you play the odds with every single product you buy though.

> The fastest mechanical HDD is a velociraptor 10000 RPM drive.

That's a mistaken claim. The fastest mechanical drives available to consumers are SCSI 15k RPM drives. Naturally, almost all current desktops work with SATA or IDE/ATA interfaces and not SCSI, so you wouldn't be able to pick one up easily, and it certainly wouldn't be worth the price, especially considering how easily SSDs outperform mechanical drives. Unless you need massive storage, a mechanical drive really isn't the best option. And if you do, there's little reason not to put the OS on a SSD and whatever giant files you have in your mechanical.

The 2 case fans are right between the front panel and SINGLE hard drive. Depending on my room temperature I get around 26 to 30 somethin degrees while sitting idle without starcraft 2 running. Once I start Starcraft 2 and have it running for a few hours, almost every part in my computer gets up to around 50 celsius. I have a lovely message from moderating saying that the computer can't be making my room 20-30 degrees warmer, but it is. It might not be just from the hard drive getting hot, but also from the other parts that heat up too, but my room turns into an oven. I'll make sure my probes are taped down better and then give a posting on the differences once I get them between running and not running SC2. (not to mention I don't remember exactly what every probe was for... I do know I think 3 of the 5 though) I'm guessing my XFX Radeon HD 5870 can't be helping much with the heating. Really don't think my cpu is getting as hot as it says, because I have a Cooler Master V8 on it. I think the tape probably came loose and it's probably reading the side of my case or the inside of the case itself.

If you're looking for a driver updater try advanced system care 4 from http://www.iobit.com/advancedsystemcareper.html it's a completely free program that I heard about from my computer networking teacher at school. It does many things and is completely free (there are a few things you have to pay for to get, but most of it is free) The driver updater is listed under toolbox and then security.

Post has been edited 2 time(s), last time on Sep 15 2011, 6:07 pm by TheKeyToKilling.

Also, there is no automatic driver software that can do better than you going on the manufacturer's website and getting the drivers yourself.

Yes it's a free program. There are a few features that you can purchase, but they are completely useless... that's what I was getting at. Yes getting the driver directly from the manufacturer is always the best, but a program that does it will be a lot faster.

My regular Windows Update also downloads drivers for me. What's the difference?

I've found Windows 7 automatic driver detection much better than previous instalments.

There was one particular shitty brand (1 small step above 'unbranded') of optical mouse you could get here that would work fine with the default drivers windows XP installed, but if you told it to automatically update them it would install some shitty incompatible ones that would crash your computer immediately after reboot - you'd have to go through safe mode to uninstall the drivers. Being lowly mouse drivers, it was not immediately obvious what the cause of the problem was. IIRC it got even more complicated because Windows XP treats each USB port as a separate device with it's own drivers, so it would install bad drivers on say USB port 1 and if you plugged the mouse into port 2 it would stop crashing until it installed the drivers onto that (which it might automatically do at its next opportunity). Even if you managed to clean up the drivers on USB port 2, if in the future you plugged the mouse back into USB 1 then it might start crashing again. I'm not sure if WinXP SP3 is as susceptible to such shenanigans any more, this was back during SP1-SP2 time.

Windows driver updates are fine - it will usually find the appropriate driver for you to use, but it won't always be the very latest one (and on a very rare occasion it might actually downgrade you). Having said that, I wouldn't install drivers from windows update unless the Info/About indicates it actually solves an issue or adds what looks to be a new useful feature. If it ain't broken, don't fix it, basically.

Upgrade time!

I just installed a Samsumg 830 128GB SSD which is awesome. Do I have to worry about TRIM/Garbage Collection, alignment, or filesystem or anything else? I'm on Win 7 x64 SP1 without updates. I read a lot, but I'm not sure what applies to me.
And a 2nd RAM module, now running at 2x4 GB dual channel @ 1387 MHz. Has anyone ever done a RAM drive for caching frequently used data? I feel like I don't need that much RAM since Windows doesn't ever use it fully (at least 2GB free). But I'm not sure if I even need it now that I have a SSD. And how would I set it up? Are there programs that manage the caching, or let me decide what I want precached?

These upgrades boosted my Windows performance index by a full 1.0 points and also everything feels a lot more responsive.

Too bad the I5's haven't dropped in price, so no new CPU for me. And too bad I can't overclock the CPU so it's currently my bottleneck.
It's still a decent CPU so I'm sure it'll last me for another year until (hopefully) the I5's finally become cheaper.

Overall I'm quite happy with my system (especially after the upgrade) since it offers quite a value for the low price without being a letdown in quality and overall performance.
So at that point I want to thank everyone who helped me find the right parts. A job well done.

Bump.
I refuse to accept nobody has ever had to deal with a SSD and thus can't give me tips regarding this piece of tech that is quite new to me.
Also nobody has experience with RAM drives? Really?

win7 should turn off everything needed, like defrag. Format the drive in NTFS and it should work fine.

I don't have enough ram anymore to make a ram drive, but with my CPU, I don't feel the need. Small programs load so quickly that I feel no need to put them on a ram drive, and large programs would be inefficient to install to ram drives (IMO). Games seem to be installing in so many different places that it's almost pointless to try and install them on a ram drive too. SC2 drops things in program files, program data, and you user profile, and they're not insignificant.