To be continued as I get more stuff sorted:

Originally planned as: AMD Phenom II X4 965 with a GTX285 on an 780a NForce Board.

Ultimately came out as Intel i7-860 with a HD4890 on a Asus Board with P55 chipset.

4GB DDR3, a Patriot Torqx 128GB SSD, Antec 902 case, Enermax 620W PSU.

Lessons learned:

1) Neither HD5870 or GTX285 can be found anywhere currently. HD4890 is the most powerful card you can reliable order, likely until December.

2) AMD Chipsets (790GX/750SB) are throttling the performance of SSDs beyond what is acceptable. NForce Chipsets too. Their SATA controllers can not reliable pull the 200+ MB/s, Intel Chipsets can do that just fine. Ultimately means if you want to fully enjoy the damn expensive SSD you can not run an AMD.

3) Intel is catching up in the Price/Performance game. The new i5 750 and i7 860 are not considerable more expensive than the top AMD, but depending on application can go "Turbo" and outperform the Phenom nicely. The i7-860 regularly beats the i7-920, for 240EUR, and the boards are comparable cheap too.

4) Another reason to ultimately go Intel was that I wanted a chipset driver independent from my GFX driver. Both AMD and Nvidia chipsets run on Catalyst and Forceware drivers, so if you are swapping GFX card to a different brand later on, you might have complications with conflicting driver sets. The Intel driver is "neutral".

5) The SSD Experience: I'll have some concrete loading time comparisons later, for now I can already say that it does NOT make everything load 4x as fast (even though the tested read speed is that much faster over a conventional disk). Even though CPU and RAM are plenty and W7 is already damn fast on it's own, there are seemingly other bottlenecks at boot and when games load files which are not purely HDD related.

OTOH, it sure as hell loads applications fast. Outlook 2003 comes up as quickly as if it had been minimized in the task bar. No kidding. And while copying files to the drive from an external (by design much slower) USB Disk, the drive has plenty performance reserves to keep you working normally, while on a mechanical HD I found that when moving large files, you can not really do anything else meanwhile. The whole thing just feels super-responsive... "task not responding" while too much HDD activity takes place is a thing of the past.

6) Antec simple makes good towers. I now have a CPU 5°C above ambient room temperature at idle, and even if a game momentarily heats up the components, the temperature-dependent fans (CPU and GPU) come down instantly when the game load is reduced. On my old system, even low-graphic games would ultimately heat up the air inside the case to a point where all fans went on full drive, you couldn't avoid "thermal builtup." With the 902 and it's large top fan (as well as front and back fan) you have so much air circulation that cool-down is instantly when load goes down. And even under heavy load, the noisy high RPM CPU and GPU cans can go slower since the low-noise low RPM case fans do most of the job.

7) Win7: By and large awesome, but needs some getting used too, especially the start menu (my biggest hangup right now). To avoid early headache, I disabled UAC, Windows Defender and the Firewall for now (behind a router anyway). Contrary to Vista nothing then bothers you doing your stuff or installing drivers. I will re-enable these security features once I know everything works. What I really like is the Complete PC Backup option which seems destined to replace my Acronis. What I don't like is the fact that contrary to previous rumours, Win7 did not set itself correctly for SSD (Auto-Defrag, Indexing, Superfetch should be disabled but weren't).

Note of interest: ATI's Flat-Panel scaling option right now does not work in W7, at least I have it grayed out and I found a lot of people with the same problem but no solution.

8) Some rough first performance impressions: IMHO, everyone who goes for a SLI Setup or overclocked i7-960 or the likes must be nuts or simple has too much money. This box, at a reasonable 1400EUR (1570 if you include the Ultimate license) runs Armed Assault on "High Settings" with full Aniso and 4xFSAA, 1920x1200, even inside urban areas and fire fights with 100s of soldiers in it. WARFARE mode, which previously crunched my CPU at 17FPS, now goes over 34FPS.
Older games can't even compete - Thirdwire's First Eagles now gives me a constant maximum 60FPS at highest settings with 20 AI aircraft all around me. Mount & Blade also maxes out at my screen refresh rate even in a castle siege. Next in trial will be Stalker CS: in DX10.1, but I expect to run it at highest settings on the same resolution.

9) 620W is plenty for a single-card system, even if everyone seems hell-bent on rather selling low-quality 750W or higher PSUs.

10) So far, with my Office Apps and the first three games, Zero Problems with 64bit.

I'll keep adding games and apps the next days, and report back some measured loading times to give an idea of what the SSD can do.

You'll start noticing performance issues when you'll start trying more modern games (by modern I mean last years). Especialy the Stalker series you mentioned has huge performance issues in those resolutions, at the highest settings.

The i7-860 is a very good cpu for the money, but the i7-920 has the advantage of unlocked multipliers, which of course is a plus only if you would bother overclocking it. If not, yeah, 860 is a much more logical purchase.

W7 not recognizing an SSD and auto-adjusting its settings sounds retarded, yes.

I beg to differ for now... Stalker:CS already ran nice (in full dynamic lighting) on my 9600GT with 512MB. I might not be able to pull out all the stops in DX10.1, but I bet DX9 Enhanced will run very well with all details maxed - and the only thing you lose from DX10 is wet surfaces and volumetric smoke.

We'll know in a few hours

I never overclock, I wanted a package that is stable and simple to maintain. More to the point, I don't believe there's gonna be a game in the next two years that will max out this CPU.

I think Win7 bases it's SSD optimizations also on a minimum average transfer rate, somewhere above 70MB/s. I can't see why it shouldn't have kicked in.

The article here talks about how it was meant to be:
http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/archive/2009/05/05/support-and-q-a-for-solid-state-drives-and.aspx

I can only say that this is not the behaviour I saw, despite my SSD making a 7.3 in Win Performance Rating which is rather good according to that article.

I am interested since I ordered a 128 GB SSD on my new system.

If you were to do it again, would you still have gone with the SSD ?

Yes - given the initial first impressions, yes, although the difference is not as huge as I expected in actual load times, it makes up for the price by the overall smoothness and responsibility.

And in addition I get no noise and no heat (an average HD runs at 40°C easily, so I'm sure the cool SSD is partly responsible for the great low temperatures I'm getting).

If the controller doesn't go south - which can happen on any drive, but is unlikely with an Indilinx or Samsung - then there's also little to no risk of lost data, since the wost that can happen is running out of write cycles on the MLC Flash, which gives you a read-only storage.

Of course, for me it's easy since I'm not a digital pack rat. I had a 250GB drive in my previous system, but only ever used 80B (also for reasons of fast full system backup). If you are into collecting tons of movies, MP3s and other stuff, or if you want to install 20 of the latest games each with a 15GB footprint, you want a secondary drive for these and then the benefits IMHO are reduced.

But for me, I can run everything from a single drive, and it's all faster and smoother.

Nice summary. Keep it coming

Okay, some data for the SSD. Obviously the comparison is not entirely valid, since I'm comparing my previous system (5000+ AMD, 9600GT), with XP SP2, against this new system with Win7, these factors alone are playing a role.

But, for what it's worth, here are the old and new numbers in seconds:

Boot to Desktop visible: 58/30
Boot to open Google Chrome: 81/34
Opening Photoshop: 15/4
Loading a mission in First Eagles: 17/10
Loading Chenarus in the Arma2 Editor: 37/12

It's interesting that there's no clear ratio between these numbers (it's not a set factor X faster) but it's a very favorable improvement all across the board. Boot times suffer a bit (not factored in the test) since the Asus board or Antec case (not sure what's the culprit here) do a fan test first before actually powering up the Bios and display. I counted boot time as time from actual signal to screen.

Like I said, I think the biggest "feelable" improvement is with Outlook 2003. Since in W7 you now "pin" programs to the task bar instead of a quick launch icon, it really feels as if OL2003 has been minimized down there waiting for me. On the old system I always got to see the splash screen for a while before the program actually responded to input.

Just put TrackIR on, and it's running flawless - no W7 problems.

Nice real-world indicator of SSD-based performance. Thanks for breaking out the stopwatch, RSC.

Okay, some more numbers.

Stalker:CS (after much troubles, which are described in the separate thread) runs at about 30 to 40 avg. using DX10.1, 1920x1200, 2xFSAA, settings max. or one notch down from max.

I haven't yet had a scene with the sun rays in it (all my savegames are at night right now) so I have to check shadow performance once the sun comes up, but on the old system it did not change much the average framerate.

Really not bad for a sub-200 USD card given that this is the most demanding game on my system right now.

DX10 drives the load times up, but DX9 tests also show basically instant (5 seconds) level loading (both the faster CPU and SSD play a part here) compared to the about 15 seconds on the old system.

Notable is that streaming new landscape (when the little floppy-icon comes up as you walk around) still can cause framerate drops, even with the SSD. I thought this would be gone.

ATI definitely has some stuff left to fix for W7x64 since Vsync doesn't work in that game, so that's Flat Panel Scaling and Vsync both problematic in the drivers (9.10).

So my lesson from yesterday evening is that the 4890 is an acceptable fast card, the only one you can get easily right now, but I'd still rather have had the GTX285 with less driver worries and more convenience setting up game profiles.
Second lesson is that TIR4Pro has zero issues in W7x64 and runs great, in fact the software is much more stable than on my old system.

Tonight I plan to put Fallout3 on and some productive apps. I hope for no surprises and expect F3 to run like crap trough a goose.

Nice reading, thanks. Will consider a few of your points for my new system. By the way what exactly is a Solid State Drive?

A bunch of flash storage chips (like in your digital camera or iPod) with a SATA connector that behaves like a conventional hard drive, only five times as fast, half as hot, and with no noise. So in other words, in my new system there is no spinning hard disk anymore, at all.

But it's expensive storage - 300EUR for 128GB in my case, whereas a normal mechanical drive would be 70EUR for 500GB, or at worst 200EUR for 300GB (a WD Velociraptor, fastest mechanical drive).

IMHO right now, if you can get it without compromising on other parts of the build, it's worth it. In my case I managed a nice balance between GFX Power, CPU Power and HD Power - but if you had to sacrifice CPU or GPU for the SSD, it's not a good deal.

Okay, small update:

Fallout3 runs like butter and without any troubles. 60 steady FPS at super ultra max settings certainly brought a smile to my face. No Quad-Core bugs either, as Allen warned me.

Most of my productive software works, even though it's older. Macromedia Flash 8 disables Aero when loaded, not compatible. Macromedia Dreamweaver 4 - ancient version - runs just fine.

Nero 6 or 7 OEM will not work, but I found a bunch of free apps I need to test.

But so far, transition to W7 and 64bit is pretty pain free, outside of the Stalker troubles.

Love the feature of pinning program icons to the task bar (the new "quicklaunch" bar). Especially the right-click added features on these pinned icons are awesome.

Any more updates ?

My system is arriving Friday. Any useful tips on configuring Win7 ?

Here is my system
-------------------------------

Coolmaster Storm Sniper mid tower (appropriate since I did some time as a sniper in the US Army)
800 watt power supply
i7-920 with minimum 10% overcocking
Asetek LCLC 240 Liquid Cooling system w/ 240MM Radiator and Dual Fans (Extreme Overclocking Performance + Extreme Silent at 20dBA)
Asus P6T Intel X58 Chipset SLI/CrossFireX Mainboard Triple-Channel DDR3/1600 SATA RAID w/ eSATA,GbLAN,USB2.0,IEEE1394a,&7.1Audio (3-Way SLI Support)(Venom Boost Extreme OC Certified)
6 GB Corsair Dominator RAM(All Venom OC Levels Certified)
ATI Radeon HD 5870 PCI-E 16X 1GB DDR5 Video Card
128 GB Kingston 2.5 inch SATA Gaming MLC Solid State Disk (Nearly Instant Data Access Technology)
Two 22X DVD±R/±RW + CD-R/RW Dual Layer Drives
NZXT Sentry-2 Fan Touch Screen Fan Control & Temperature Display
All-in-One External USB 2.0 Card Reader
Microsoft® Windows® 7 Home Premium (64-bit Edition)
Not worth listing all the USB, Firewire, Lan,mouse, keyboard, etc stuff


Total $1,829 incl ship (that is with the $83.90 coupon discount)

Nero 7 works great on Win 7 Pro 32bit. You have to download the newest version from their website though. Don't bother installing the one on the CD because you will just have to uninstall it. The version I have is 7.11.10.

Okay, the last few things I discovered

Vsync with ATI is also not working for BoBII. Generally the thing seems to be that for applications that not nativley offer Vsync, ATI can't force it at least not on Win7 x64. You definitely want the D3DOverrider application that comes with the latest Rivatuner downloads. You can discard Rivatuner (for me, that is too detailed to play around with it) but the D3DOverrider is a separate application, installs no drivers, you just open it when playing a game and it keeps Vsnyc.

Flat Panel Scaling: I think it's the same with Nvidia as with ATI: On the Win7 drivers, the Flat Panel Scaling (GPU Scaling in ATI Terms) options are by default grayed out on the windows desktop. I used this option in XP to get BoBII menus (which are 1024x768) up to 1920x1200 so my screen would not constantly switch resolutions around between menu and 3d part of the game. But on W7, these were gray and unable to be selected.

The fix is to lower the desktop resolution BELOW your native LCD resolution, for example to 1920x1080, then the grey options become selectable. Once you set a scaling option, you can then return the desktop to full resolution, and the option will again be grayed out, but stick with what you selected. I read the same about NVidia, so it's likely something within W7.

TrackIR: I had installed v4 of the Software (for my TIR4Pro) and it was working fine with Thirdwire sims, but failed to recognize FS2004. I was tearing my hair out, v5 of the Software however worked fine. At the NP support forum we then discovered that you have to install the software using rightclick "run as administrator" on the setup. Then it recognized FS2004.

So, that's another important lesson: When you are installing applications in W7, even if you have admin rights, it never hurts to use "run as administrator" especially if the software is also adding drivers. Obviously TIR v4 did a very weird "partial working" install because some rights weren't given when I ran it as normal user in the administrator group.

For Burning Software, I now use Ashampoo Burning Studio 2010 (Free Version) which does everything including Blu Ray and Lightscripe. You get a free full version key from the Ashampoo website, which is yours forever. Nero has a Version 9 Lite also for free download from the website, but it lacks burning of iso images to disk.

I installed the VPN Software from my company network which is a pretty deep system-level app, using the Vista x64 download, and that one also works. So far Win7 really has not refused any program I threw at it.

Start menu weirdness: I like to sort my programs in my "All programs" menu by hand, so that I find what I need often at the top of the pack. Very early I had already disabled "Sort alphabetically" for the W7 menu (all these options are under taskbar-rightclick-properties-start menu).

Yet still, after a day or two, my apps would again be sorted by name. Until I figured out that there's another option "highlight latest installed programs" which also has to be disabled, otherwise everytime you add a new software, the whole non-alphabetical order goes to hell.

For mobile devices, I was pleasantly surprised: My HTC Touch with Windows Mobile 6.0 was instantly recognized when I plugged the USB Cable in, Windows Update downloaded the drivers and software, and it was synching with my Outlook in no time. For XP, it always was a bother since ActiveSync was not freely available as download, and it didn't always recognize the connected device either. Of course also no problems with iTunes and the iPod.

I finished setting up everything on sunday and did a full image backup to VHD on an external drive. This built-in W7 backup is slightly slower than Acronis (doesn't use as much compression on the files, so more to write) but works okay. I also test-started a recovery booting from the Win7 DVD, and that works - it loads a mini-windows where you can point to the external USB drive and apply the backup image to your hard drive, bringing the entire system to the state you last did a backup. Highly recommended if you have a small system/applications drive with lots of custom settings.

Performance-wise, the i7-860 continues to impress. Going by benchmarks, the Phenom X4 965 would have beaten my previous AMD 5000+ by max about 180% (for example in Armed Assault from 17 to 25 FPS), but the i7 seems to do triple the amount of work (Arma at 30+ FPS), and with very little heat.


So in summary: I totally changed hardware, I changed GFX brand, I changed OS and I went 64bit. By any common logic, that was pure madness switching so much in a single move. But the biggest issues actually came from the GFX driver, which I could have avoided by going with Nvidia. So the conclusion seems to be that switching from 32bit XP to 64bit Win7 is actually less painful than switching from Nvidia to ATI - and that says something about the usability of the new OS. And ZERO problems with x64, too.