mrbios Posted June 15, 2011 Posted June 15, 2011 (edited) Hi Everyone, In another thread i mentioned i would let people know how our new PCs go, i've got a test bundle here and i've been playing around with it, here are the specs: Intel Pentium G850 (still waiting on the G620T low power version, taking slightly longer to come in stock) Asus P8H61-I mini ITX motherboard 2 x 2GB OCZ DDR3 40GB Intel 320 SSD Corsair 430w PSU I'll upload pictures this evening when i'm home so i can get the pictures off my phone. Anyone who read my comments in another thread would know that we don't use cases, instead we have false back desks and mount all the components on to an MDF board, previously these have been fairly big boards as the PSU has been glued down, hard drive screwed down and the motherboard screwed down. Now though with the new setup it takes only 2 screws to attack the board, 3 cable ties to keep the PSU in place and because SSDs are so light and aren't affected by a bit of shaking aboutthey're just held on by the cables they're attached by. All in all it takes about 5 minutes to setup a PC, if you were in a hurry you could do it quicker! (time being something alot of people have a problem with regarding building PCs in house) Total cost per bundle: £56.12 for the SSDs £24.04 for the PSUs £28.46 for 2x2GB sticks of memory £46.49 for the CPUs (The G620Ts - the G850 was slightly more expensive) £52.10 for the motherboards Comes to: £207.21 per PC ex VAT Performance: After imaging with our image containing all the school software, from power button to login screen = 13 seconds Logging on as administrator from pressing enter to loading IE9 = 5 seconds Time to Load 32bit photoshop CS5 = 4 seconds Windows experience index scores: Processor 6.7 Memory 5.5 Graphics 5.2 Gaming Graphics 5.8 Hard Drive 7.4 Pretty damn impressed with them. I'll try and get a picture or two soon to show you all but if not then it may have to wait until later today Anything else anyone can suggest i test on them? Edited June 15, 2011 by mrbios Updated WEI scores after driver install 1
Guest Guest Posted June 15, 2011 Posted June 15, 2011 Thats quite nice for a ITX. The HD should be getting a better performance index than that though, or at least I would have expected it to. My SSD, it is a vertex 3 sata3 mind, gets 7.8 and personally I think it would get a 7.9 if the sata controller on the mobo wasn't pants. You have enabled AHCI in the bios haven't you?
mrbios Posted June 15, 2011 Author Posted June 15, 2011 (edited) Thats quite nice for a ITX. The HD should be getting a better performance index than that though, or at least I would have expected it to. My SSD, it is a vertex 3 sata3 mind, gets 7.8 and personally I think it would get a 7.9 if the sata controller on the mobo wasn't pants. You have enabled AHCI in the bios haven't you? Yep, the 320 series aren't resoundingly quick mind you, and it only has 10GB free space after the image is on there, it certainly feels a **** load quicker than a mechanical drive even if the WEI isn't giving it a good result. Must admit though i was surpried it wasn't above a 6 Ah i forgot, while this test bundle inclues an intel 320 40GB drive, the actual drives we've bought for the 91 replacements we're doing are OCZ 40GB Vertex 2s, with a read and write of 270mb/s opposed to the 200mb read / 45mb write of the intel. Scan were kind to use and offered us the OCZ drives for the same cost as the intel drives as they couldn't get the intel stock for about 3-4 weeks. Edited June 15, 2011 by mrbios
mrbios Posted June 15, 2011 Author Posted June 15, 2011 Pictures attached, no idea why i thought i'd have to wait until i got home to get the pictures off my phone, had a bit of a blonde moment i think, i use a windows mobile 7 phone so there's like 4 different ways i could take the pictures off I've taken one comparing new vs old, the size is about 50% difference, weight is around about the same as the better quality PSUs on our new stuff counters the saved weight from the smaller boards, when they're in our cabinets they'll be sat so the PSU is holding it upright, with the motherboard connections pointing upwards towards the holes in the desk surfaces.
Butuz Posted June 15, 2011 Posted June 15, 2011 Very good! All you need to do now is dump the Intel drives as theyre subbish and go OCZ. Should be even faster then! SSDs are defiantly the way forward! Butuz
TechSupp Posted June 15, 2011 Posted June 15, 2011 Can you post pics of where the boards are eventually installed so we can see the setup. Good idea.
Cools Posted June 15, 2011 Posted June 15, 2011 Like Butuz www.scum.co.uk 60GB OCZ Technology Vertex 2E, 2.5" Sandforce SSD, MLC-Flash, Read 285MB/s, Write 275MB/s £75.60 Ex (might as well pay the extra £9) 40GB Intel 320 Series, 2.5" SATA 3Gb/s SSD, MLC-Flash, Read 200MB/s, Write 45MB/s, Retail (Crap Speeds) £66.93 Ex 40GB OCZ Technology Vertex 2E, MLC-Flash, 2.5" SSD, Read 280MB/s Write 270MB/s, Sandforce Controller £57.49 Ex cheaper than in-smell
mrbios Posted June 15, 2011 Author Posted June 15, 2011 (edited) Like Butuz www.scum.co.uk 60GB OCZ Technology Vertex 2E, 2.5" Sandforce SSD, MLC-Flash, Read 285MB/s, Write 275MB/s £75.60 Ex (might as well pay the extra £9) 40GB Intel 320 Series, 2.5" SATA 3Gb/s SSD, MLC-Flash, Read 200MB/s, Write 45MB/s, Retail (Crap Speeds) £66.93 Ex 40GB OCZ Technology Vertex 2E, MLC-Flash, 2.5" SSD, Read 280MB/s Write 270MB/s, Sandforce Controller £57.49 Ex cheaper than in-smell Ah i forgot, while this test bundle inclues an intel 320 40GB drive, the actual drives we've bought for the 91 replacements we're doing are OCZ 40GB Vertex 2s, with a read and write of 270mb/s opposed to the 200mb read / 45mb write of the intel. Scan were kind to use and offered us the OCZ drives for the same cost as the intel drives as they couldn't get the intel stock for about 3-4 weeks. ^^ Already a step ahead of you there. Although intels reliability is far better than any other manufacturer, that alone is worth sticking with intel, only getting the OCZ drives due to a good deal we got offered. It's also worth noting though that raw read and write speeds as stated on websites aren't an accurate representation as to how good the drive is, it's like monitors and the ms ratings, it's all a load of crap really. Can you post pics of where the boards are eventually installed so we can see the setup. Good idea. I'll keep the thread up dated as we do our installations, should have the pallete with the large order on arriving later this week so we'll start getting them built soon. Edited June 15, 2011 by mrbios
Cools Posted June 15, 2011 Posted June 15, 2011 got a mate that reviews ssd hdd and PCIE ssd cards.. i was playing on his PC with a 60GB OCZ Technology Vertex 2E, 2.5" Sandforce SSD, MLC-Flash, Read 285MB/s, Write 275MB/s and he had in to review and a new pcie ssd drive, he was maxing out a 275MB/s on the OCZ read and write the PCIE card was doing 450MB/s read write the card cost 2k for 512GB not out in the shops yet.. i was very impressed as i would have never gone down the ssd route do to reliability be he has had a ssd in he PC for 3 years now and had no problems. but his IBM Deskstars keep failing lol..
Cools Posted June 15, 2011 Posted June 15, 2011 mrbios does that MB fit into a standard case ?? with out any mods.
Cools Posted June 15, 2011 Posted June 15, 2011 to test read write speed on ssd try HD Tune pro trial
mrbios Posted June 15, 2011 Author Posted June 15, 2011 mrbios does that MB fit into a standard case ?? with out any mods. I'll have to test that at some point, might not have time today though. Just noticed not all the drivers had installed for the chipset via WDS (will need to check that ¬_¬) re-run the WEI and scores changed dramatically New scores (also edited the OP): Processor 6.7 Memory 5.5 Graphics 5.2 Gaming Graphics 5.8 Hard Drive 7.4 That sounds a bit more realistic! lol
PeterW Posted June 15, 2011 Posted June 15, 2011 mrbios does that MB fit into a standard case ?? with out any mods. It is Mini ITX so there should be no problem installing it into any of these form factors, Mini ITX, Mini DTX, Micro ATX, ATX etc
mrbios Posted June 15, 2011 Author Posted June 15, 2011 Here's a link for anyone worried about SSD reliability: http://www.behardware.com/articles/831-7/components-returns-rates.html Intel are the stand out team there, reliability is more important than performance in my opinion so i just hope my choice to go with OCZ for this initial batch isn't shooting myself in the foot.
pooley Posted June 15, 2011 Posted June 15, 2011 SSD = Solid State Drive, flash based HDD (No moving parts) Solid-state drive - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
mrbios Posted June 15, 2011 Author Posted June 15, 2011 Blonde moment - what's ssd? ^ What he said, they use less power, create less heat, don't have any moving parts so generally have a practically zero seek time. Only downside being blocks can only be writen over so many times before the blocks are no longer usable, generally though they should last at least 5 years home use, in a school on a student PC with mandatory profiles etc they'll barely be writen to at all so should have a better lasting time than a mechanical drive, but only time will tell on that part
mrbios Posted August 3, 2011 Author Posted August 3, 2011 For anyone interested we now have replaced 62 PCs with these new builds, they're lightening quick, DEAD quiet (and i mean you walk into a room of 30 and think "are they on?!" and best of all generate VERY little heat. Fantastic replacements to the ****y pentium D things we had before, looking forward to seeing them in use in september, might get the two IT teachers for those rooms to get the kids to complete a short questionaire as to there impressions of before and after the summer (might use the Y12 6th form classes for that) Time well tell on reliability of the SSDs now...
mrbios Posted August 3, 2011 Author Posted August 3, 2011 (edited) Just done some testing... Student login times individual PC: 10 seconds bang on from pressing enter to clicking the start menu Loading photoshop CS5: 5 seconds Shutdown: 14 seconds to fan stopping Boot: around 50 seconds mainly due to the loading of computer group policies - boot to the policies loading stage was very very quick though. Student login times when all 31 PCs login at once: 25 seconds for every single one to be on the desktop (Slight draw back in that i'm replicating 300GBs of data over the trunk to the buildin these PCs are in so that could be faster when that's done) Edited August 3, 2011 by mrbios
nicklec Posted August 3, 2011 Posted August 3, 2011 I assume you don't have any warranty on this kit (after a year?) thats only £70 cheaper than a SFF i3 (with a standard HDD), aren't 10% hardare failures going to lose you any savings?
mrbios Posted August 3, 2011 Author Posted August 3, 2011 (edited) I assume you don't have any warranty on this kit (after a year?) thats only £70 cheaper than a SFF i3 (with a standard HDD), aren't 10% hardare failures going to lose you any savings? Each individual component has a warranty... Processors are retail not OEM: 3 years <- never had a processor fail aside from someone dropping one RAM: lifetime warranty with corsair Power supplies: These vary from 2 - 3 years - some do 5 years but these are normally a bit more expensive SSDs: 3 years Motherboards: 2 years <- apart from a bad batch of foxconn tack we've not had a motherboard fail on us. Obviously ideally the warranty would cover it all for 5 years but the most likely time for a component to fail is during the first few months of it's purchase, beyond that it's just unlucky if something fails but from experience of building our own PCs over the past 5 years here we definitely save money by building them ourselves as well as getting much faster machines over buying prebuilt. SSDs are the only part of this setup that i'm not certain on when it comes to reliability though, everything else has a relatively well proven level of reliability (be it manufacturer or particular component). The only components that are ever really an issue is hard drives and power supplies with regards to replacements, but the amount of these we probably replace in the course of 5 years is definitely less than the amount we save from building ourselves. This build we've gone for better power supplies (in the past we have bought the elcheapo £10-15 things but they fail at a rate of knots) by a trusted brand and SSDs which i'm literally just crossing my fingers that they're more reliable than conventional drives. We were going ot get intel 320 SSDs instead of the OCZ vertex 2s but we had a good deal on the OCZ drives, theo nly issue there is it was a gamble given the return rate of OCZ drives when compared to the return rate of intels. Edited August 3, 2011 by mrbios
Ashm Posted August 3, 2011 Posted August 3, 2011 I really like this idea, if we had more time (a lot more time at the moment!) I'd be tempted to give this a go in one of our smaller IT suites. What do the Staff/Students think to them? Do they notice the speed difference?
mac_shinobi Posted August 3, 2011 Posted August 3, 2011 Here's a link for anyone worried about SSD reliability: Components returns rates (page 7: SSDs) - BeHardware Intel are the stand out team there, reliability is more important than performance in my opinion so i just hope my choice to go with OCZ for this initial batch isn't shooting myself in the foot. No mention of OWC
mrbios Posted August 3, 2011 Author Posted August 3, 2011 What do the Staff/Students think to them? Do they notice the speed difference? The two IT teachers that have seen and played around with them so far think they're excellent, i can't believe just how quiet they are, apart from an initial fan spin up even in a room of 31 PCs the only thing you can hear is the teacher PC at the front of the room! Regarding time, they take us literally about 5 minutes if that to build per machine, the longest process of building them is unpackaging the components! Plus every year we have some of the brighter and more enthusiastic 6th formers helping us out throughout the year, perfect jobs for them Barely takes up any of our time to build them anymore
Arthur Posted August 3, 2011 Posted August 3, 2011 We were going to get Intel 320 SSDs instead of the OCZ Vertex 2s but we had a good deal on the OCZ drives The phrase "cheap for a reason" springs to mind. Hopefully your gamble pays off though.
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