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Hello all...
I have a proposition for you all; one which you might find interesting.
I am a college student, attending school roughly 500 miles from home. As such, the time I spend here is spent on study and work (the type you pay for), and the time at home (about 4-5 months) is spent doing more work (the type you get paid for). Obviously, this leaves precious little time for my hobby of computers. This really doesn't work out very well for the family, since I wind up playing tech support over the phone more often than not. Our current PC (we're an Apple family) consists of the following:
Sony Vaio
-2.52 Ghz Processor (Unknown Model, some kind of Pentium)
-1 GB Generic RAM
-Radeon 9800 Pro
-A myriad of fairly random, largely incompatible Hard Drives that my dad has added over the years.
Suffice to say, it's a mess, takes me hours to pull into some kind of shape when I go home for break, and is basically on its last legs from what I hear. Guess what! That means it's time to upgrade! Now, my Dad likes stock, and I'm betting he'll get a Mac Pro as a replacement, rounding out our collection of Apple products. That means I get my greedy little paws on the Vaio. So, here's where you all come in. Due to the fact that I have neither the time nor funds to build a really good gaming rig like I want, my dream machine is going to be built incrementally over a long period of time. This has a few advantages. Because I'll only be getting one or two notable components at a time, I can go all out on them, and get the absolute best on the market. These will replace the Vaio components, which will have been transferred to a new case, possibly a Lian-Li TJ07 or 09. Eventually, everything will be replaced, leaving me with a completely top of the line computer that won't have utterly broken the bank. There's also a few challenges to face down.
I want the computer to be future proof, since really I only get to update it in the future from my perspective (until it's at a level of completion that justifies taking it to school), but given the speed things change in the industry, that will involve some very canny purchasing. Buying a graphics card now will do me no good if I don't have the processor to do it any good, or the time to make it worthwhile. Likewise, the fastest processor in the world is still just an incredible chip with a Radeon 9800 Pro bogging it's pixel pushing power down. So the central components will be one big purchase at the end of the road. That leaves me with peripherals. Space on the beastie wont really be a premium. My 120GB HD is working just fine on my MacBook Pro, even with a sizeable Windows partition carrying 50GB worth of games, and 5000 songs, plus movies, pictures and documents on the Apple side. That means I can go with speed over room.
Now, I know I want RAID, but I've been hitting a few snags in my research for it. Is it physically possible to use four identical Hard Drives in RAID 0, or something comparable, while striping the operating system across the whole lot of them? Would this give me the boost I think it would? Say, four 150GB Raptors.
I know I want to go with a pretty intensive watercooling solution, partly as a proof of concept to see how much fluid I can put through the rig (CPU, GPU(s), possibly Hard Drives, depending on how much heat four high-speed drives would put out).
What sparked this obsession with speed? Well, I may be getting 7.1 surround sound speakers for christmas, and it seemed a shame to cripple them with a dying PC. (A sound card is my first purchase if my mom comes through). The new sound card led to one thing, which led to another, and before I knew it, I had a list of components totalling $7000, and decided I probably needed to scale things down a bit. stretching things out will let me get powerful components for less money than they'd be at first release, while still pushing my computer to a crack addict level of speed.
So, main question, two parts:
1. What order should I get components in to ensure the maximum degree of future-proof philosophy?
2. Assuming a starting point of Summer '07, and with (almost) no limit on price, what component do I start with? I have a few ideas, but mine are all book smarts. I know the statistics, and I've read the reviews, but I'd be interested in hearing some other opinions.
Well, if I've missed anything, just let me know, and I'll inform. The other benefit of building the thing over an extended period of time it that it gives me plenty of time to think about modding the case and picking the right content. I look forward to the assistance I've seen elsewhere on this forum, and shall now go work on chemistry!
Note: Whatever I decide to go with will probably be considerably less powerful than it is on paper- this is a little side project to keep myself sane and one foot in the real world during finals. Still, you know what they say, shoot for the moon!
I have a proposition for you all; one which you might find interesting.
I am a college student, attending school roughly 500 miles from home. As such, the time I spend here is spent on study and work (the type you pay for), and the time at home (about 4-5 months) is spent doing more work (the type you get paid for). Obviously, this leaves precious little time for my hobby of computers. This really doesn't work out very well for the family, since I wind up playing tech support over the phone more often than not. Our current PC (we're an Apple family) consists of the following:
Sony Vaio
-2.52 Ghz Processor (Unknown Model, some kind of Pentium)
-1 GB Generic RAM
-Radeon 9800 Pro
-A myriad of fairly random, largely incompatible Hard Drives that my dad has added over the years.
Suffice to say, it's a mess, takes me hours to pull into some kind of shape when I go home for break, and is basically on its last legs from what I hear. Guess what! That means it's time to upgrade! Now, my Dad likes stock, and I'm betting he'll get a Mac Pro as a replacement, rounding out our collection of Apple products. That means I get my greedy little paws on the Vaio. So, here's where you all come in. Due to the fact that I have neither the time nor funds to build a really good gaming rig like I want, my dream machine is going to be built incrementally over a long period of time. This has a few advantages. Because I'll only be getting one or two notable components at a time, I can go all out on them, and get the absolute best on the market. These will replace the Vaio components, which will have been transferred to a new case, possibly a Lian-Li TJ07 or 09. Eventually, everything will be replaced, leaving me with a completely top of the line computer that won't have utterly broken the bank. There's also a few challenges to face down.
I want the computer to be future proof, since really I only get to update it in the future from my perspective (until it's at a level of completion that justifies taking it to school), but given the speed things change in the industry, that will involve some very canny purchasing. Buying a graphics card now will do me no good if I don't have the processor to do it any good, or the time to make it worthwhile. Likewise, the fastest processor in the world is still just an incredible chip with a Radeon 9800 Pro bogging it's pixel pushing power down. So the central components will be one big purchase at the end of the road. That leaves me with peripherals. Space on the beastie wont really be a premium. My 120GB HD is working just fine on my MacBook Pro, even with a sizeable Windows partition carrying 50GB worth of games, and 5000 songs, plus movies, pictures and documents on the Apple side. That means I can go with speed over room.
Now, I know I want RAID, but I've been hitting a few snags in my research for it. Is it physically possible to use four identical Hard Drives in RAID 0, or something comparable, while striping the operating system across the whole lot of them? Would this give me the boost I think it would? Say, four 150GB Raptors.
I know I want to go with a pretty intensive watercooling solution, partly as a proof of concept to see how much fluid I can put through the rig (CPU, GPU(s), possibly Hard Drives, depending on how much heat four high-speed drives would put out).
What sparked this obsession with speed? Well, I may be getting 7.1 surround sound speakers for christmas, and it seemed a shame to cripple them with a dying PC. (A sound card is my first purchase if my mom comes through). The new sound card led to one thing, which led to another, and before I knew it, I had a list of components totalling $7000, and decided I probably needed to scale things down a bit. stretching things out will let me get powerful components for less money than they'd be at first release, while still pushing my computer to a crack addict level of speed.
So, main question, two parts:
1. What order should I get components in to ensure the maximum degree of future-proof philosophy?
2. Assuming a starting point of Summer '07, and with (almost) no limit on price, what component do I start with? I have a few ideas, but mine are all book smarts. I know the statistics, and I've read the reviews, but I'd be interested in hearing some other opinions.
Well, if I've missed anything, just let me know, and I'll inform. The other benefit of building the thing over an extended period of time it that it gives me plenty of time to think about modding the case and picking the right content. I look forward to the assistance I've seen elsewhere on this forum, and shall now go work on chemistry!
Note: Whatever I decide to go with will probably be considerably less powerful than it is on paper- this is a little side project to keep myself sane and one foot in the real world during finals. Still, you know what they say, shoot for the moon!