For work & play.

[knightsilver]

System will be used for Photshop, After Effects and non-FPS games.
Budget is 1K.
Light OC'ing
Im just fine with three Raptors(OS/Raptor1,OS2/Raptor2 and Scratch/Raptor3) & WD Black or RE3 for backup? Dont need RAID at my current level.
Im running NEC 2490(24" at 1920x1200) and a 19" Samsung(will replace with another NEC 2490 sometime soon)
I will not be using SLI or dual(x2) GPU cards.

Specs:

Vista Biz. 64bit
Intel Q9550
Gigabyte GA-EP43-UD3L
G.Skill 2x2GB DDR2 1000
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231145
XIGMATEK HDT-S1283 w/
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835233019
Scythe S-Flex SFF21E for the HDT.
Arctic Silver 5
Sony DVD+RW sata
PCP&C 750W PSU
CoolerMaster 690 case
EVGA GTX 260
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814130370
RaptorX(have)
And a few of these:
http://www.svc.com/gc36akm.html

END:

Later will add two more Raptors(for a 2nd OS and a scratch) and (RE3 or Black?) for Backup.

I dont need an i7, I need quality and Ill just wait till 8core come out. To get more than a C2D.

Did I forget anything?

thanks,
shane c.

 

[Dangman]

Get this slightly faster but similarily priced and with free shipping GTX260:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814130372

Ditch that Xigamtek HSF and bracket combo for this Xigmatek HSF instead (Comes with the bracket):
Xigmatek Dark Knight-S1283V 120mm HSF - $40

For backup, just go for the cheapest 1TB drive backed by a reputable company you trust. That's pretty much the only major requirement for backup drives: Sheer amounts of storage at a cheap price

Other than that, looks good to me. Oh if you do upgrade to 8GB of RAM, look into RAMDisks:

In other words, as I said, the cost of the devices + the cost of populating them becomes absolutely ridiculous. Grab two Velociraptors and have fun... or even a handful of SSD drives and RAID 'em together. The overall price-to-performance ratio will blow these iRAM devices clear off the planet surface...

Sad, really, because I've been a proponent of actual RAMdisks for decades now. Hell, I used to boot my Amiga 500 off a RAMdisk, so I've seen pretty much every attempt at making such devices as the iRAM that have appeared, and they all suck, period. They just can't do the job adequately and keep the price-to-performance ratio anywhere near a reasonable level.

I built a RAID 0 box for a small image studio 2 weeks ago, a new startup here in Vegas that is making waves. They wanted a "demo" workstation to see what's possible for processing as they don't want to create a massive server-type situation in the office, but 3-4 workstations that are equal in performance and then just using simple file sharing as required. Very simple setup in terms of the network, but the workstation I built used 2 300GB Velociraptors (tried to sell 'em on SSD but the amount of data they're dealing with wouldn't be practical - again, a price-to-performance and ROI issue).

The hard part was getting them to spring for 16GB of RAM because of the cost, but a few weeks ago I saw that sale for 4 4GB sticks of RAM for about $450 and made a few phone calls and snagged a similar deal.

I set up Photoshop CS3 for 'em (their legit retail copy) on Vista Business x64. They started messing around with it, loading some rather large TIFF files in excess of 150MB a pop, several at a time, performing some basic scripted actions on 'em, blurs, filters, etc. Using the Velociraptors in RAID 0 meant very snappy and consistent performance, as well as having 16GB of RAM too. Also, it's a Q6600 based machine running rock solid at 3 GHz.

They were very pleased with the performance at that point, but I had a surprise for 'em.

I asked if I could have 20 mins 'alone' with the workstation to "rewire it" as Tim Allen might say. That consisted of grabbing a trial version of SuperSpeed Software's RamDisk Plus 9 and installing it, doing the simple configuration, and then creating a 10GB RAMdisk and told Photoshop "Ok, you want a scratch disk? Here, try this on for size."

After I did some tests of my own using the same scripts they'd done earlier, boy... I tell ya. You haven't lived till you see 225MB TIFF files literally snap onscreen in the blink of an eye, multiple huge TIFFs with resolutions like 5000x5000 and even higher. That's what's possible with RAMdisks, because even Velociraptors in RAID 0 pumping out something like 280MB/s sustained pales to the close to 5GB a second in bandwidth of that RAMdisk.

I told 'em to come back in and rerun their test scripts.

Jaws hit the floor, folks. Well, not quite but figuratively speaking, at least.

They asked what I'd done, I told them I put the scratch disk in RAM where it should be if you have the RAM to make it happen, and they bought 4 licenses of RamDisk Plus 10 mins later, and I got a signed contract to construct 3 more workstations identical to that one top to bottom and also be their "geek" if any issues come up.

It was a very good week...

 

[knightsilver]

I will use the Dark Knight then.

Will the OC GTX 260 play nice with Adobe?

thanks for the memory and the mobo suggestion in a previous POST Danny.

thanks,
shane c.

 

[Dangman]

I will use the Dark Knight then.

Will the OC GTX 260 play nice with Adobe?

thanks for the memory and the mobo suggestion in a previous POST Danny.

thanks,
shane c.

You're welcome

The GTX 260 should work well with Adobe PS.

 

[knightsilver]

Does Ramdisk work like 3GB memory switch like in XP?

Hey, Danny what do you do for a living and can I get your email(PM'ed to me)?

thanks,
shane c.

 

[Dangman]

Does Ramdisk work like 3GB memory switch like in XP?

Hey, Danny what do you do for a living and can I get your email(PM'ed to me)?

Ummm, no Ramdisk does not work like the 3GB XP memory switch, which I should note does not work well at all. Are you asking whether or not RAMDisk software can take advantage of the extra and unusable RAM if you were using in a 32bit OS environment? So say like you have 8GB of RAM but you have a 32bit OS which means that you'll only be able to use about 3.5GB of that RAM. Some RAMDisk software can use that extra RAM as a RAM disk. So you can have a 5.5GB RAMDisk in a 32bit OS AFAIK.

I'm a college student and you can find my AIM S/N in my profile. That'll be better way to contact me.

 

[knightsilver]

Did ya have a link to a RamDisk?

Both this New system and my Quadro system have Vista Biz. 64bit.

thanks,
shane c.