Sounds like a strange question but is there any extra applications i should download aside from the obvious drivers/windows apps etc for my new build.. I will be doing some movie burning for my mrs business so any program recommendation there would be good. A program maybe that manages backing up of drives from one of my 750gb drives to the other would be good? Anything else really that people use or like to use to make there life easier in running there pc or recommend a program they use that can be obtained for free..main purpose is gaming so steam for one i will be getting, once its up and running stable in the next week i will be playing with the overclocking as well. Any applications used for benchmarking/running tests would be good, nice graphical temp monitors etc that sort of thing. This is the build for some reason my signature is not showing yet that i just wrote. Main rig : I5 2500k // Asus P8P67 Pro // 8 GB 2x4gb Corsair Vengeance 1600 1.5v Ram // Gigabyte GV-N460SO-1GI GeForce GTX 460 1GB superoverclocked edition // OCZ Vertex 2 60gb Sata 2 SSD + 2x 750GB samgsung drives // Coolmaster 700w gold series psu // antec 900 case with 120mm sickleflow fans // NZXT Sentry 2 fan controller // Antec KUHLER H2O 620 CPU Liquid Cooler // Win 7 Home 64 bit
CPU-Z for info about all the innards of your PC (speeds, voltages etc), Unigine Heaven for GFX benchmarking is nice to look at and free. A lot of people use MSI Afterburner for overclocking their GPUs and keeping an eye on temp/voltage, there's some handy guides for that in this month's Custom PC mag actually. Personally I don't bother with the likes of AVG or Avast any more for antivirus either, Microsoft Security Essentials is free, unobtrusive and a really small footprint when running.
Thanks i have norton 360 with quite a few days left on my lappy but i dont think i will move it to my PC anyhow. Its been about 4/5 year since i had a desktop pc so any suggestions are welcome, i have about 6 months of custom pc to go back over to get ideas out of later so will be doing that. Any good benchmarking programs?
7 stack for your taskbar stacking needs http://alastria.com/software/7stacks/ MSI afterburner for overclocking GPU quite a lot of backup programs for managing backup, Sync Toy is a free one by Microsoft, covers most file synchronization needs. http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=c26efa36-98e0-4ee9-a7c5-98d0592d8c52
I use ImgBurn http://www.imgburn.com/ for nearly all my burning (Iso, back ups etc). Its very small and non invasive when being used. 7zip http://www.7-zip.org/ has always been my bog standard for rar files etc. Gimp http://www.gimp.org/ For all my images (photoshop style). Hardware Monitor http://www.cpuid.com/softwares/hwmonitor.html For all my temp checks (often combined with Speed Fan) I also use Microsoft Security Centre for my anti virus and Comodo 3 for my firewall and both seem to do their jobs quietly, effectively and more importantly, for free http://www.comodo.com/home/internet-security/firewall.php
Gpu-z for your graphics card clicky. As well as cpu-z you can get the hardware monitor from the same site clicky. I've found that to be pretty handy. Edit: (ah, I see cpu-z and hwmonitor are duplicates, sorry about that)
For general computing, I use Alcohol 120% (virtual disk drives), OpenOffice, 7zip, GIMP, uTorrent, Scribus and Notepad++. Security is MSE and Malwarebytes. I have found the best defrag to be Power Defragmenter, with Contig. It isn't flashy, but it is fast! Also CCleaner to clear up junk. I have a whole host of benchmarking software, including FluidMark, TessMark and FurMark. Stress testing is done by OCCT with the Linpack test. It stresses my CPU more than Prime95. CPU-Z to keep track of clock speed (and to avoid throttling). Fraps is always useful to have - you can quickly find out frame rates or record some gaming to show off with. You probably already have this, but Firefox for browsing and Thunderbird for emails.
Thanks everyone, i will get started with these recommedations when the build is complete next week and i run it for few days to make sure things are running as they should at normal idle load temp wise before stress testing things..but these apps will help me. Rep to everyone here.
be wary of alchohol120%, if your gaming, as has been know to cause issues with anti piracy software in games
I've had no problems with it so far, if a game needs say, SafeDisk protection, then I will run ACID on the virtual drive after mounting the image. ACID detects and circumvents protection. That is if the game doesn't have a no-cd patch available, in which case I use that instead.
lol yip that with direct x etc...those i know are the minimum things...more aiming my request at things that people have downloaded that is not so standard
Oh, it may not be the type of thing you're looking for but if you're after a media player that plays just about everything get a hold of VLC media player.
Brilliant guys going to spend about a hour downloading all this i can see...may down load most now onto a external drive as a set up folder... + rep to the latest posters.
you might check out rainmeter. it allows you to put monitoring meters to cpu, ram, disks, network, temperatures and some other things on your desktop. the built in temperature monitoring is kind of limited on supported hardware, but there is a speedfan plugin as well. theres all sorts of skins available to make it look however you want, and its not that hard to make your own either. http://rainmeter.net/RainCMS/