Help (very much) needed with new system...

T

Tango76

n00b
Joined
Sep 24, 2009
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Hello folks. Please be patient with a noob looking into building a system for the second time in his life.

1) What will you be doing with this PC? Gaming? Photoshop? Web browsing? etc
Photoshop with quite heavy files (>20Mpix).
Video Editing (Premiere, After-effects).
HTPC (audio via digital out to receiver), including HD video playback.
Stocks trading (must be rock solid!)
Girlfriend might be doing some gaming.
General office use, web browsing, etc...

Will probably install OsX in a different drive (hackintosh), but this is not critical.

System must be as silent as possible without using exotic solutions.

2) What's your budget? Are tax and shipping included?
It's quite flexible, but I don't like to waste money on marginal improvements. Let's say ~1200/1500$ not including the parts I already bought. More if performance gains would be significant.

3) Where do you live?
New York City.

4) What exact parts do you need for that budget? CPU, RAM, case, etc. Please be very specific.
Everything not listed below, in answer 5.

I am not sure if I'll keep all the disks. Some of them are a few years old and I am starting to feel nervous about their reliability.

I'd want a solid state drive for OS.

5) If reusing any parts, what parts will you be reusing? Please be especially specific about the power supply. List make and model.
Parts from previous system:
24" Dell Monitor
1 x 150Gb Raptor
1 x 500Gb WD
1 x 250Gb WD
X-Fi music sound card (I probably won't be using it)
Keyboard, Mouse, etc...

New Parts I already have:
Intel i7 920
1 x 1T WD Black Caviar

6) Will you be overclocking?
Why not... however I am not an expert and the overclock will probably be mild.

7) What size monitor do you have and/or plan to have?
Currently 24". In the future I might add a 30".
The computer will also be running a 42" LCD-TV (1080)

8) When do you plan on building/buying the PC?
Very soon.

9) What features do you need in a motherboard? RAID? Firewire? Crossfire or SLI support? etc.
Firewire and Raid should be there. I don't need SLI or Crossfire. Many SATA ports would be useful, as I might be running quite a lot of drives in the future.

10) Do you already have a legit and reusable/transferable OS key/license?
Currently running Vista, will install Windows 7 on this.

Main questions:

1) Memory: I tried. I failed. No matter how hard I try, I cannot make sense of the multitude of possibilities. 12 Gb vs. 6 Gb? How fast should it be? I read reviews saying that faster memory is not worth the money... is it true? How does memory affect overclocking? The timings?

2) Cooling: I am looking into the Corsair h50. It seems comparable to many high-end air coolers that weight 2 pounds and really look scary. It also look quite silent (which is important to me). Case fans? I am liking Gentle Typhoons. Should I bother with a fan controller?

3) Hard drives/optical drives: I am considering the Intel G2 80gb and the OCZs. Don't know what to do with the drives i currently use in my system (Raptor 150 and WD 250 and 500). I bought a WD 1T black caviar and might add another one. RAID?

I am also considering turning the old system (Opteron 170) into a home file server, which might change things about storage.

I will need a blue ray disk drive/DVD-RW. Any one better than the rest?

4) Case: considering Corsair 800d and ABS Black Pearl. Big difference in price.

5) Video card: I don't have a clue.

6) PSU: how many watts? Brands? I would really like a modular one, as would make building the computer much easier for a noob like me...

I know... lots of questions...
 
Let's start with an initial build -- asterisks (*) denote items with free ground shipping:

$100 - ABS Black Pearl ATX full tower case
$105 - Antec TruePower New TP-750 Blue 750W PSU*
$75 - Corsair H50 CPU cooler*
$210 - Asus P6T SE X58 ATX motherboard*
$270 - Two sets of G.Skill 3x2GB DDR3 1600 CL9 tri-channel RAM (@ $135 each)
$380 - Sapphire Radeon HD 5870 PCI-E 2.0 video card
$160 - LG WH08LS20K Blu-ray burner*
=====
$1300 - Subtotal (not including shipping, taxes, or rebates)

The above build doesn't take into account the cost of buying a software RamDisk program (recommended for creating a "scratch disk" with one 6GB RAM set) or picking up an SSD or two (for RAID 0). Frankly, I can't really recommend any SSD due to my comparative lack of knowledge on the subject (but enginurd, who played with a few of them, should be coming along soon enough).

Without flooding your head with more data than I can really remember, the parts that I've chosen will be fine for a light overclocking session (to around 3.2GHz to 3.5GHz). Then again, you can obtain similar OC performance using cheaper air coolers like the Cogage TRUE Spirit.

While cases are a matter of personal taste, I personally believe that the Corsair 800D is too expensive. Since you want (near-) silent operation, one of the best cases around is the Antec P183. Likewise, if you're considering SSDs to use as your OS drive(s), I recommend keeping the 1TB WD Black HDD that you've just purchased and selling your old drives to recoup some of your costs (and/or to make room in your budget for the SSDs).

The HD5870 is the latest video card that has entered the market, and it can handle most games well at the native resolution of your monitor (1920x1200). However, depending of the games that you and/or your girlfriend plays, even that may be a bit overkill. (A quick primer: If you play a lot of graphically intense games like Crysis, then you may want the HD5870. WoW is not graphically intensive, nor are the majority of games made prior to 2008.) A better bang-for-your-buck video card is the Radeon HD 4890. Switching to the HD4890 would also allow you to acquire everything -- the parts listed above (minus the HD5870), the RamDisk program, and an SSD or two -- for under/around your $1500 budget.

I've chosen the TP-750 Blue since it's on sale right now for $105 shipped; in reality, however, a good 500-650 watt PSU with at least 40A on the 12V rail(s) would be more than enough for your build. (However, most quality 500-650 watt power supplies only cost a bit less than the TP-750 Blue.) From the pictures -- it was released recently -- it appears to be a "half-modular" PSU with the majority of the cables that you'd need connected directly to the PSU. With a large case like the one you're considering, however, you shouldn't have any problems with basic cable management.

I really don't know what to tell you about buying "quiet" case fans, as noise is a largely subjective matter. I recommend that you check out Silent PC Review if you're really concerned about the overall noise level coming from the majority of the products mentioned here.
 
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1) For just gaming, 4 to 6GB of RAM will be more than enough. For heavy Photoshop and video editing use, 12GB of RAM would be a good idea. That extra amount of RAM allows you to use and create a RAM disk for sratch use:
Joe Average said:
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... ;)
Click to expand...

2) See Tiraides' answer.

3) I'd keep the old drives to use as storage drives for the server. As for Blu-RAy drives, they're pertty much the same AFAIK.

4) As Tiraides said, cases are mostly purchases of personal taste. Personally, I love the design of the Corsair 800D but it's too much money for me. If only it didn't come with the hot-swap bay, it would be around $180, a more reasonable price for a high quality case.

5 and 6) See Tiraides' answeres.
 
As tiraides mentioned, SSDs are still pricey. If you don't mind the price, and want to see a nice boost in performance, get two and put them in RAID0. The 120GB Indilinx-based drives are 15% faster than their smaller brethren. Since Intel's are quite pricey, I'd recommend at least two 120GB indilinx-based drives (OCZ Vertex, SuperTalent UltraDrive ME, Patriot TorqX, G.Skill Falcon).

enginurd said:
If you want more details on the tech behind an SSD, read the Anandtech SSD Anthology.

[Anandtech] The SSD Anthology: Understanding SSDs and New Drives from OCZ
[Anandtech] The SSD Update: Vertex Gets Faster, New Indilinx Drives and Intel/MacBook Problems Resolved
[Anandtech] The SSD Relapse: Understanding and Choosing the Best SSD
[Hard|OCP] SSD RAID scaling under Windows 7

Personally, I went from a 'cuda.10 to a Raptor150 and did not think the performance difference was worth the price premium and space sacrifice. Then I went from a caviar.black640 to a VRaptor300 and again, did not think the performance difference was worth the price premium and space sacrifice. Next I went from a VRaptor300 to an OCZ Vertex 30GB, and yet again, was underwhelmed. Then I picked up a 2nd Vertex 30GB and threw them in RAID0... WOW... I must say, the performance difference is VERY noticeable, but again, the price was pretty steep ($180 total AR in June). Regardless, it was a much bigger performance improvement than any of the Raptors ever were, for even less money than the raptors cost.

I believe the single Vertex was underwhelming because of the slow small random write speeds. As you can see from many tests online, these speeds increase greatly when in RAID0. Since RAID0 is simply striping data across two difference drives, there really isn't any major processing being done, so onboard RAID0 works perfectly fine for up to 650MB/s (around 3 vertex 120GB drives). Here are my screenshots:
http://www.alphaq.org/enginurd/hdd/ocz_vertex.html

As you'll learn from those anandtech articles, the TorqX has a 10yr warranty, and the garbage collection on the most recent firmware is good enough to maintain proper speeds while TRIM support is being worked on.

The Intel X25-M SSDs have fast small random write speeds, but have slower sequential speeds. Conversely, the Indilinx based drives have faster sequential speeds, but slower small random write speeds. When you RAID0 the Indilinx drives, the small random write speeds increase to the levels of the Intel X25-M. For single SSD usage, the Intel is a better choice because of this. One thing to note is that the Indilinx based drives are still faster than mechanical drives, so even in a single drive config, it's still a fast solution (great for laptops/netbooks, IMO).
Click to expand...

I also agree with tiraides, sell all drives older than the Caviar Black, or put them in your server if you decide on that task for the opty. Don't bother with RAID if you get another Caviar Black. Though, for fast storage, you'll want one of the newer drives that use 500GB-platters, like the Samsung F3 500GB/1TB and/or the Seagate 7200.12 500GB/1TB, as they're faster than the 333GB-platter drives.
 
First of all I'd like to thank all those who are helping... it's very appreciated.

Tiraides: the parts you chose look good. I have a feeling I would not fully use the Radeon 5870. Would buying a card of the previous generation (like a 4870) be silly at this point? What about a 5850?

Motherboard: is there anything comparable from Gigabyte? Asus did not treat me well in the past (I know, it's silly...)...

Can I really sell used HD? It seems weird to me that considering the low price of new drives somebody would be interested in them...

PSU: is the Antec comparable to the Corsair h750? I see it's very popular here on the forum and it's not much more expensive I think...

Danny Bui: thanks for the info about Ramdisk. I did not know anything about this, but I'll definitely look into that.

Enginurd: About the SSDs: I was considering either a single Intel or a couple of Vertex 60Gb. Are these solutions not worth it?

Again, thanks for your patience...
 
Wouldn't be silly picking up the $145 XFX HD4870 1GB video card at this point if you don't need that much GPU power. The 5850 is also a good choice.

As far as comparable Gigabyte motherboards go, not really. The GA-EX58-UD3R only has 4 RAM slots (compared to the Asus' six RAM slots) and the GA-EX58-UD5 costs ~$70 more than the Asus P6T SE. So basically, Gigabyte is not a good choice if you're going for a Core i7 build nowadays. Hurts me to say that considering that I'm a Gigabyte fan but it's the truth.

Yes you can sell used hard drives. Just sell them on Craigslist.

Yes, Antec is comparable to Corsair in general. Specifically, the Truepower New 750 is of slightly better quality than the 750HX while being significantly cheaper.
 
The GA-EX58-UD4P was around $120, but it seems it has been discontinued. :(

Use DBAN to wipe the drives before selling them. ;)

I'd go for the 2x60GB in RAID0 over a single Intel. It doesn't have to be a Vertex. All the Indilinx drives perform similarly, so any of the brand/models I listed above would be good alternatives to the Vertex.
 
Bump for update.

I got the case (ABS Black Pearl) and an Intel 80Gb (Newegg deal). I might add another 80Gb if prices go down a little...

PSU: are the two new Seasonic X series worth the money? The 650W is around 150$, the 750W can only be found at Newegg for ~200$. It's a lot of money, but it seems to be very silent... is it worth the difference with the Antec?
 
Tango76 said:
PSU: are the two new Seasonic X series worth the money? The 650W is around 150$, the 750W can only be found at Newegg for ~200$. It's a lot of money, but it seems to be very silent... is it worth the difference with the Antec?
Click to expand...

Nope/
 
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