LancerChronics on 17/8/2009 at 15:43
About four months ago, I posted a thread about building a computer. Bikerdude was a big help. After four months though, I been looking around and considering making a few modifications before making the final purchase. Job is done too, and I made more than I planned, so I kicked the budget back up to $1600 (which does not need to include the monito, keyboard, or mouse). So, back to the construction phase, tell me what you think.
The monitor will be: (
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16824005125) This lovely piece of work.
On August 13th, AMD released a new processor so that got thrown in too.
Its the AMD Phenom II X4 965 BE. It's 3.4 Ghz and the fastest AMD yet. Not overclocking. Period.
Sticking with the ZOTAC GTX 285 (hope its not sold out, if it is, other suggestions would be nice).
PCP&C Silencer, Was gonna stick with the 750, but with the increased wattage on the new AMD and a higher budget, I'm considering the 910.
Hard-drive: 3x Seagate Barracudas 320gb, still thinking raid 0...still need to learn how. Solid State would be nice but too expensive... Do I need a RAID card?
Kingston HyperX T1 series, 4gb
GIGABYTE GA-MA790X-UP4P, will this still work with the adjustments?
Coolmaster RC-690...Newegg still doesn't support the Xilence fans, so unsure what to do here.
Windows 7, 64 bit I think....Gonna use the RC1 initially.
Still need to select (a) drive/s......
I'm building all of this from scratch, cause I have nothing to salvage from. Am I missing anything to make a full working computer? And can someone let me know how difficult it would be to set up raid, or how?
bikerdude on 17/8/2009 at 22:24
Quote Posted by LancerChronics
I'm building all of this from scratch, cause I have nothing to salvage from. Am I missing anything to make a full working computer? And can someone let me know how difficult it would be to set up raid, or how?
Whats your budget and requirements.
LancerChronics on 17/8/2009 at 22:59
Since I made more than I initially planned, budget had gone up to $1600, and that's still being frugal.
Requirements: I am a gamer, and I want it to play Fallout 3, SWTOR, Force Unleashed: Ultimate Sith Edition...max settings. Would be nice if FPS was greater than 50 for all of the above. I am on my last year in college, and the dorms love to do overage charges, so energy economy is a benefit. Not to mention my major makes me look at "Green" technology. I surf the net, download mods, rarely download music. I prefer buying cd's or recording the music via an auxillary input device. May need to utilize ArcGIS one day, based on career path. I also like to be prepared for future developments in technology.
The monitor will be a birthday present, and the keyboard and mouse are *usually* cheap.
jay pettitt on 17/8/2009 at 23:06
Quote Posted by "Newegg.com"
The screen doesn't have a great viewing angle when you move side to side or up to down (the colors fade pretty severely), but that is to be expected from this type of panel.
I normally won't have any truck with the Thief needs a CRT crowd, but screens with poor viewing angles aren't best if Thief is your thing. Poor viewing angles also suck for (even basic) colour work.
If I were you I'd cut back on some of the internals - the processor is probably the least important component in a PC for example; you're unlikely to notice any difference between the 965 and the 955 but could save your self 25%, (you've also specified memory that's about twice the going rate and I'm not sure your hard-drive choice is wise) - and then spend the extra upgrading the bits you actually physically use, like the screen, keyboard and mouse, to something that'll last and is going to make your PC a pleasure to use, rather than a pain in the bum.
Chasing numbers is a zero-game.
Bjossi on 17/8/2009 at 23:13
Quote Posted by LancerChronics
Hard-drive: 3x Seagate Barracudas 320gb, still thinking raid 0...still need to learn how.
This may work good for games or other data that you can afford to lose, but keeping sensitive, important and/or hard-to-recreate data in a RAID 0 array is screaming for trouble. If you want speed you'd be better off going solid state despite the higher price, not only are they outrageously fast but they're far less likely to fail since there are no moving parts.
My advice? Give Windows its own drive (not partition,
drive ;)), use a secondary drive(s) for everything else (games, music, porn, etc.) and manually maintain an offline drive(s) for storing 2nd copies of the most important data. Linking the fate of three drives together for a speed gain is not worth it in my opinion.
jay pettitt on 17/8/2009 at 23:31
The other thing with RAID, is that to get a performance boost you really need a dedicated hardware controller (expensive) rather than your motherboard doing it - you also need to be doing a lot of read/writes to see the benefit. If I might be so bold, RAID has a cool name, but outside mission critical applications and data servers where redundancy is useful or you're doing a lot of read/writes, its benefits are pretty limited.
LancerChronics on 17/8/2009 at 23:38
Quote Posted by Bjossi
This may work good for games or other data that you can afford to lose, but keeping sensitive, important and/or hard-to-recreate data in a RAID 0 array is screaming for trouble. If you want speed you'd be better off going solid state despite the higher price, not only are they outrageously fast but they're far less likely to fail since there are no moving parts.
My advice? Give Windows its own drive (not partition,
drive ;)), use a secondary drive(s) for everything else (games, music, porn, etc.) and manually maintain an offline drive(s) for storing 2nd copies of the most important data. Linking the fate of three drives together for a speed gain is not worth it in my opinion.
Interesting, is it possible to operate two drives at once? For instance, can I boot windows off one drive, then load a game through windows from another drive? Will this have an effect of the speed? I don't really keep critical files on my comp, rather I print hard copies.
As for the suggestion on the monitor from jay, i can't find a better viewing angle, and other reviews for it state the angle is very good. Slight bleed in the dark colors when you sit too close, but... its a 50000:1 contrast ratio.
Bjossi on 18/8/2009 at 00:25
Quote Posted by LancerChronics
Interesting, is it possible to operate two drives at once? For instance, can I boot windows off one drive, then load a game through windows from another drive? Will this have an effect of the speed? I don't really keep critical files on my comp, rather I print hard copies.
Not really sure what you're asking there but Windows can be on C:\ and a game on D:\ and work just fine. If I'm not mistaken this setup would offer a speed gain in itself if you make each drive write a page file, that is of course assuming Windows is able to effectively distribute the work between the two drives (two drives taking care of one assignment should in theory be faster than one drive doing all the work). This is pretty much exactly what RAID 0 does, sharing workload to speed things up, except the drives in the array share the storage itself as well as the workload, meaning that if one drive fails the data on the remaining ones will be lost. Although my idea isn't quite as speedy, it does avoid complete data loss if one of the non-OS drives fails.
The setup I suggested has another trade-off by the way; minimal data loss if the OS craps out. Though thanks to registry & Documents and Settings/Users abuse by software and game developers, the little data you do lose is actually what you'd want to keep, such as savegames or settings (even if a game is installed on D:\, in most cases settings and savegames are put into the OS drive, specifically D & S/Users). Nowadays games and software are so integrated into the OS once installed that I can't help but think of Matthew Kane's stroggification for comparison. :erg:
Well, one can move Documents and Settings/Users to the secondary drive, but I'm not really sure what side-effects that would have, if any.
LancerChronics on 18/8/2009 at 02:30
Might work, maybe I could get the 300gb velociraptor for my gaming drive, then a smaller drive for the OS/music/etc. That would cost me $400 just for the memory though. (
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136313) This got great reviews. "This drive is FASTER than my old WD Raptor WD1500ADFD and has the benchmark numbers from HD Tune 3.10 to prove it." (review from the 640 gig version)
My current laptop has 80gb...I'm only using 50, but games like Age of Conan (80gb alone) make me worry about how much space I'll need for next gen games.
Do I need a sound card? Speaker suggestions (the LG does not have integrated)? I'm also wondering if its possible to equip a desktop pc with wireless. Like a little device you can install and hide in the case.
