So much power, don't know what to do with it

Se7ven

Se7ven

Se7ven

Associate
Joined
7 Nov 2009
Posts
1,472
Hello Oc'ers

I recently upgraded from my Dell XPS M1730 laptop to a Ultimate Panther from OcUK, so pretty much a huge upgrade.

The thing is im one of those guys who buys high end stuff just because I don't like thinking i settled for less :rolleyes: which is kinda sad i guess.

but now that i have all this power (overclcoked to 4 Ghz, 6gig ram and all sorts of fancy stuff) I dont even know what to do with it? I can't get the memory/cpu meter above 30% lol

So what are these machines really built for anyway? i cant imagine no matter how much i run getting the machine to use abot 50% of its power.

Should I take something up like graphics design? I feel like this machine should be making me money or something

sorry im kinda rambling here
 
Yeah, I know the feeling. I ran a VM the other day and watched my RAM usage rise to 5gb. I'd never seen it that high before!! :D

I'm presuming you're running an i7; the Nehalem chips are really targeted at servers and high-end enterprise workstations where multithreading is important. That means where the i7s shine is anything like video encoding, running VMs, rendering - that kind of thing. So if you've got anything really intensive you need to run, whack it on the beast and see how it goes.

Graphic design is a pretty good use - I can run all of CS4 quite comfortably as well as a load of others apps with no slow-down. Photoshop especially uses multicores quite well as well.
 
Yes it's an i7 :)

I'm glad im not the only one in this position :P

at least I know the comp will last me a good few years (i hope)
 
Crysis? 8 player supreme commander?

I dont really understand why people need superfast computers unless doing lots of either work related stuff that requires lots of memory, is a server or encoding and the like

could try some demanding old games through dosbox in high res?
 
Guest2 said:
I dont really understand why people need superfast computers unless doing lots of either work related stuff that requires lots of memory, is a server or encoding and the like

could try some demanding old games through dosbox in high res?
Click to expand...

it's nice to think theres nothing out there (yet) that will require your computer to have more power, you're covered for everything
 
Basically the reason i sold my pc and now im looking for a laptop.

Built it for games, but never play any on it anymore. No point in having the power of a decent PC when its being used!
 
Nymins said:
Basically the reason i sold my pc and now im looking for a laptop.

Built it for games, but never play any on it anymore. No point in having the power of a decent PC when its being used!
Click to expand...

I'm considering heading down this route too. Browsing the internet using a E8400 system seems overkill.
 
Se7ven said:
...but now that i have all this power (overclcoked to 4 Ghz, 6gig ram and all sorts of fancy stuff) I dont even know what to do with it? I can't get the memory/cpu meter above 30% lol

So what are these machines really built for anyway? i cant imagine no matter how much i run getting the machine to use abot 50% of its power.

Should I take something up like graphics design? I feel like this machine should be making me money or something
Click to expand...

You know something, your computer as it sits there today is more powerful that the most powerful, US DoD, computer in the world just some 16 years ago. You can do almost anything you want with it... don't just play games.
 
If you fancy converting your DVD's to x264 files, that's one of the few activities that uses full CPU power for significant periods and will be pretty damn fast on your system. Video encoding almost scales linerarly with both CPU frequency and number of cores i.e. 4ghz quad core is nearly 4 times faster than 2ghz dual core.

I can't seems to find anything that uses all my memory though. I'm on a P55 system so I had a choice of 4 or 8GB - I went for 8 to be on the safe side but TBH nothing gets anywhere near that.

What you have to remember though is that by having a high-end system you are giving youself a degree of furtureproofing (or as near as you can get with a PC).
 
Folding at home will eat up to 5gb of ram and every single clock cycle you can spare. Virtual machines swiftly consume ram and hit processors fairly hard. Low quality (student) mechanical cad work puts an i7 through its paces too, I suspect finite element analysis and rendering will similarly crucify it.

I highly recommend distributed computing, graphic design is much more difficult.
 
Anyone recommend a decent program that will convert my dvd's? One that will use the power of the i7?
 
Se7ven said:
Hello Oc'ers

I recently upgraded from my Dell XPS M1730 laptop to a Ultimate Panther from OcUK, so pretty much a huge upgrade.

The thing is im one of those guys who buys high end stuff just because I don't like thinking i settled for less :rolleyes: which is kinda sad i guess.

but now that i have all this power (overclcoked to 4 Ghz, 6gig ram and all sorts of fancy stuff) I dont even know what to do with it? I can't get the memory/cpu meter above 30% lol

So what are these machines really built for anyway? i cant imagine no matter how much i run getting the machine to use abot 50% of its power.

Should I take something up like graphics design? I feel like this machine should be making me money or something

sorry im kinda rambling here
Click to expand...

so, after that rant, does your epeen feel any bigger? :)
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom