I need some computer building geek help, please.

[backwoods357]

What do you want to host off of the server? Build looks pretty good so far. How many monitors do you currently use?

[Bill86]

Originally Posted by shilala

Bill, I carted a Coolermaster 840. It meets my needs and it's real expandable, plus it supports dual psu's which is perfect.
Thanks for recommending coolermaster, that's what I'm using right now and never thought of it.
I already have a Denon receiver with Klipsch 5.1 surround speakers, so that's good. I just need decent onboard sound.
I already have 3-19" Samsung monitors. I may add one more. In a land of dreams I'd add three more, but it'll never happen. One more is reasonable and it'd be nice if I can match the other 3.
I had the 965 6-core carted already, this is kinda getting scary now.

I carted the Asus M4A88TD-V EVO/USB3 AM3 board. I'm not at all sure it'd got enough options, or if it'll handle the 6 cores. If you have any other ASUS recommendations (or anyone else does), I'd love to take a look.

I'd like to go ATI on the video cards, and I sure don't need nearly that much wee-yoo. I'm thinking 4 monitor support in the $150-200 range for each card? I haven't really looked, but you gave me a good starting point.

I need a memory and psu recommendation, too.

SSD HDD's are out of the question. I'm not gaming, and to waste money on the speed is silly. I make every one of my drives redundant. I'm currently running 3TB with 3TB worth of backup. The drives are 1 for 1, each hdd has a backup hdd. I'll continue that.

I may or may not rape my current system. I may let in run and use it for a media server. My mind isn't made up yet. I'll likely just rape it for the parts and toss the rest to save money. I can serve media from my new rig, right?

Thanks for all the help, brother. Talking to you really has the wheels turning.

oh $hit sorry Scott I use a 1000W BFG PSU. But I hear they are out of business so the wanting of one would be much less. They use to rock a SOLID SOLID warranty. Now obviously there is none. I went with 1000W because it would theoretically "never need replacing". I've gone 4 years on it and I'm nowhere close to maxing it out. I try to buy things that will never need upgrading (cases, PSU's). Things that can really last 5+ years I buy the best of so I don't have to buy more anytime soon.

Memory, honestly what I did was get 4 gigs of the "mid price" ram that was needed for my MoBo. I've never had "bad ram". Although prices are very reasonable for 8gig-12 gig. I just don't find it currently necessary for my needs. However If I was buying new right now I would go 8gigs of the "mid priced ram". You'll get the most out of that.

For an OS I use Windows 7 Ultimate x64. I really like it, I hated vista and Xp was getting a bit old

I don't run an SSD on my gaming computer, however I find the loading speed of high memory windows 7 programs to load up much faster. If you need that sort of thing. You will really notice an improvement. However if you don't care/need it then not running an SSD would save you some coin. I run one on the Media center PC (aka my blu ray player windows 7 media center PC). Cut loading times by like 75%, so it was worth it.

Glad to be of help Scott, good luck with your new PC. Sounds like you'll have a very kick ass rig

[benedic08]

Scott,
I would recommend getting a SSD just for your OS and CAD and other editing programs and use ordinary HDD for storage. From what Bill said i also recommend a 1000watt power supply, corsair produces very good PSU's.

For video card i recommend a workstation card. Here's a good one:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16814133258

Its nice for rendering and you dont have to deal with priority crap you get with two cards. It supports up to 4 monitors.

For Memory I recommend the GSKILL Ripjaws. They work perfectly with the 6cores and come in pairs of 4gb totaling 8gb per pair. Get atleast 8gb or up. You're gonna need a lot of memory for CAD and video editing and its gonna help alot on multi tasking.

Hope this helps and good luck!

[Apoco]

Originally Posted by benedic08

From what Bill said i also recommend a 1000watt power supply, corsair produces very good PSU's.

Quooted for truth. I haven't had to replace mine yet
Posted via Mobile Device

[mosesbotbol]

Avoid the dual boot and use XP as a VM. Dual boot is outdated and not useful as it is one OS at a time.

Maximize the RAM. At the end of life cycle on a PC the RAM is a weak link.

If you have a back drive and routine, I would avoid RAID and spend of faster HDD or better video card.

Do a clean install of Win7 with Ghosting your drive at various build points and you can use Ghost as your back up routine too.

Go for the biggest monitors you can possibly use. Scrolling time and window count add up to a lot of saved time if looked over a week, month or year. Serious time savings.

Originally Posted by benedic08

Scott,
I would recommend getting a SSD just for your OS and CAD and other editing programs and use ordinary HDD for storage. From what Bill said i also recommend a 1000watt power supply, corsair produces very good PSU's.

For video card i recommend a workstation card. Here's a good one:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16814133258

Its nice for rendering and you dont have to deal with priority crap you get with two cards. It supports up to 4 monitors.

For Memory I recommend the GSKILL Ripjaws. They work perfectly with the 6cores and come in pairs of 4gb totaling 8gb per pair. Get atleast 8gb or up. You're gonna need a lot of memory for CAD and video editing and its gonna help alot on multi tasking.

Hope this helps and good luck!

Originally Posted by 357

The hardware looks pretty nice. I would suggest running your disks in RAID 1. It is faster than a stand alone drive or RAID 5. Plus, it does provide a mirror copy of your data for some level of redundancy. You lose 50% of the total capacity you buy, but it's worth the speed and reliability in the long run. The math of RAID 1 is pretty simple. If you need 2 TB, buy two 2 TB drives.

Just my geeky

Very good reccomendations! That looks to be a screaming system
Gonna need your final decision & pictures! Good Luck

[shilala]

This box holds dual psu's. I don't think you guys caught that. I already have an Antec Neo that I can add to this new psu for a total of around 1500 watts.
I'm still not sold on SSD. I don't know how big they get, but I'm guessing "not nearly big enough to hold all my program files".
I'll take a look and see if the ssd's are doable, though.

[mosesbotbol]

Originally Posted by shilala

I'm still not sold on SSD. I don't know how big they get, but I'm guessing "not nearly big enough to hold all my program files".
I'll take a look and see if the ssd's are doable, though.

Nor am I. Who cares if the OS boots a few seconds quicker? Desktop's are rarely shut off. I think there's other areas to spend money on instead.

Go for the round cables instead of ribbon cables inside. The cooling potential is better

[shilala]

Originally Posted by mosesbotbol

Nor am I. Who cares if the OS boots a few seconds quicker? Desktop's are rarely shut off. I think there's other areas to spend money on instead.

Go for the round cables instead of ribbon cables inside. The cooling potential is better

I always use round cables, I thought they did away with ribbon cables.
That case I picked has absolutely badass cooling, I'm very happy with it.
My desktop is on 24/7/365 unless the power goes out. It'd reboot itself but I still have a snag in my boot.ini that thinks I still have windows 7 on a partition and it goes to it first and finds nothing, etc.
I've never taken time to take the hook out. That's how lazy I am.

I just checked and I have 33.5 gigs of program files. That's all cleaned up, and it's still 33.5 gb. I'm not gonna bottleneck my system or make my system a nuisance by being forced to put program files on another partition, etc. It makes no sense.
If I was just playing games all day, it might be worthwhile, but I never even owned any scsi stuff or raptor stuff because I have an extra second a day for things to load.
I did have a buddy that spent all the money for Matrox video cards and scsi, and watched his system performance. When it worked, which wasn't often, it really screamed. He could render video in half the time I could. I was okay with turning it on and going to bed, though. lol

[357]

Originally Posted by mosesbotbol

Avoid the dual boot and use XP as a VM. Dual boot is outdated and not useful as it is one OS at a time.

Maximize the RAM. At the end of life cycle on a PC the RAM is a weak link.

If you have a back drive and routine, I would avoid RAID and spend of faster HDD or better video card.

Do a clean install of Win7 with Ghosting your drive at various build points and you can use Ghost as your back up routine too.

Go for the biggest monitors you can possibly use. Scrolling time and window count add up to a lot of saved time if looked over a week, month or year. Serious time savings.

That parts in bold I agree with. The rest, not so much. Installing Win 7 from a clean disk I agree with. You can sometimes buy an upgrade and pop in a Vista disk as your "source" of your old OS, but just spend the extra $50 and save yourself the headache.

RAID 1 is faster then a stand alone drive regardless what type of drives your're using. Plus if one dies, you lose no data, and won't miss a beat. There is no recovery process, you just replace the failed drive at your lesiure. Hard drives are the bottleneck of almost all computers; desktops, laptops, or servers.

SSD are a neat way to help remove that bottleneck however, they have some serious limitations. Most are limited to the number of writes. While the numbers may sounds large, these are not "File, Save" writes, but writes from say the pagefile or temporary directories. Those add up VERY fast. I would not recommend SSDs for the type of system you're building.

First, Ghost is not free. Yes you can use it to capture images, but it is not a good backup/restore tool. If you want an image of how your PC was before you started using it (aka recovery image), then yes ghost can be handy. It is usually used by desktop techs for deploying large numbers of PCs with the same configuration very quickly. It is NOT a good tool for backing up user data on a regular basis.

CAD files are rather large. With RAID 1, you are protected from simple drive failures. You are not protected from malicious software that could delete/corrupt files, human error, or a miriad of other things. To back up your data on a regular basis can be costly. If you have a high-speed internet connection you may want to consider Mozy or Carbonite. Carbonite offers secure backups of unlimited amounts of data for $59/year. Hard to argue with that. Mozy offers something similar. However, if you don't have a very good internet connection, it could take a while for those files to synch up depending on how much data you have. Barracuda offers a disk appliance (that you keep at your site) you can back data up to. It then replicates that data to two datacenters (owned/operated by Barracuda). One is on the West Coast and the other on the East Coast. You can restore data locally very quickly using the local disk appliance. If you lose the site (fire, flood, etc) you can restore from the remote datacenters. They do this for a small up front cost plus a monthly fee.

What ever way you go, make sure to safeguard your data. The majority of businesses that are forced to try and recover a primary site end up filing chapter 7. Don't be one of them.

[shilala]

Mike, I should probably clear up the CAD thing. I think I said CAD-like earlier.
What I'll be doing is 3d model rendering for items to be made on a carvewright machine. It's basically a cnc device for the woodshop.
I don't think the files will be all that huge.
I use Acronis and do constant incremental backups. I don't generally make .tib files, I like to back up all the files, verbatim, with no compression. That way if one disc fritzes, I can just pick up where I left off. I don't have to stop and go fetch a new hdd, etc. I'm also not bound by having to have equally sized hdd's.
Those things are real problems in small town USA where I used to live. Here, near Cleveland, things are more readily available, but I still simply don't need or want the added limitations that RAID puts on me.
I used it long ago, and ultimately walked away for the reasons I mentioned.
The speed isn't necessary, and I've made really good habit of constantly backing up. Most people don't do that. I've had to learn it, and I don't ever want to lose it.

I will admit that the instantaneous backup that raid 1 offers is very enticing. It even makes good sense. I'll continue to carefully consider it.

If we ever start using our own server, I'll make it redundant and keep one offsite. I'd far rather be in control of my own fate than sending files up to a company who could become insolvent fifteen minutes ago.
I can always back up to a disc and put the data in a firesafe, too. That stuff is all manageable, and I'm not scared. But that's only because I've always backed everything up by hand for so long that it's just second nature. Cripes, I can't even make a long post on a messageboard without copying it before I press the "post reply" button. That's how bad I am.

[357]

I gotcha Scott. I am just trying to help. Sounds like you have a good handle on things.

[shilala]

Originally Posted by 357

I gotcha Scott. I am just trying to help. Sounds like you have a good handle on things.

You are DEFINATELY helping, my brother. You're making me think. You even still have me waffling on the raid. I know I swore it off forever, but it'd be so awesome.
I flat out forget how to do it, even. Makes me wonder if the eco drives can be put in raid. I think they spin down and shut off all the time.
I also remember that way back when, I couldn't even see if a drive had failed. I'm guessing things have come a long way since then.
Do you have a good source where I can go get read up and caught up? That might make my mind up for me if I'm more informed.

[shilala]

Originally Posted by backwoods357

What do you want to host off of the server? Build looks pretty good so far. How many monitors do you currently use?

Nothing yet. It's something we may need in the future.
I use three monitors right now. I think with the 5770 and the onboard graphics, I can have four. That's plenty. I don't even know if I'll ever add a fourth.

[Bill86]

Originally Posted by mosesbotbol

Nor am I. Who cares if the OS boots a few seconds quicker? Desktop's are rarely shut off. I think there's other areas to spend money on instead.

Go for the round cables instead of ribbon cables inside. The cooling potential is better

SSD's don't just help with OS boot times. They also help with everything on the drives boot time. Programs like Windows Media Center with 4 TBs or so takes a long time to load up. With an SSD it takes about 5 seconds. Everything is significantly quicker, on that drive obviously which would be your program drive "windows drive".

If I had a nice video camera I would post up my Media Center PC with a SSD loading 200+ blurays in windows media center(covers, descriptions and all info) in about 6 seconds. Use to take nearly 30 seconds.

Not trying to pimp/sell SSDs just stating the facts. So if they sound like something you could use, get one. If not don't. SSD's are ideal for programs that use a lot of memory and have a lot of files. Slow loading programs, I only use windows media center as an example because mine has about 4 TBs to load with it.

[shilala]

I can see that, Bill. For tv, it'd be a great idea.

[357]

Originally Posted by shilala

You are DEFINATELY helping, my brother. You're making me think. You even still have me waffling on the raid. I know I swore it off forever, but it'd be so awesome.
I flat out forget how to do it, even. Makes me wonder if the eco drives can be put in raid. I think they spin down and shut off all the time.
I also remember that way back when, I couldn't even see if a drive had failed. I'm guessing things have come a long way since then.
Do you have a good source where I can go get read up and caught up? That might make my mind up for me if I'm more informed.

ECO drives as in evironmentally friendly?

I don't think it would be a problem. The RAID is supported by the SATA controller on the motherboard, the drives don't know the difference. Most all of them support RAID 0 and RAID 1. Some also support RAID 5.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID

RAID, an acronym for Redundant Array of Independent Disks (Changed from its original term Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks),

RAID 0 (block-level striping without parity or mirroring) has no (or zero) redundancy. It provides improved performance and additional storage but no fault tolerance. Hence simple stripe sets are normally referred to as RAID 0. Any disk failure destroys the array, and the likelihood of failure increases with more disks in the array... (not what you want)

RAID 1 (mirroring without parity or striping), data is written identically to multiple disks (a "mirrored set"). Although many implementations create sets of 2 disks, sets may contain 3 or more disks. Array provides fault tolerance from disk errors or failures and continues to operate as long as at least one drive in the mirrored set is functioning. With appropriate operating system support, there can be increased read performance, and only a minimal (i.e. almost no) write performance reduction.

It's really simple to setup. When you plug in both drives and boot up you may have to hit a function key to get into the BIOS or Array Configuration, create a new volume/array, add both disks, choose RAID 1 and save your changes. The options and wording may differ slightly, but if you only have two disks, the only options will be RAID 0 or RAID 1. So long as Windows 7 has a driver for your motherboard, you just install Windows as normal. Most of the array controllers will have some kind of notification if a drive fails. Otherwise you won't even notice, since you'll still be up and running. All you do is shutdown, replace bad drive, and boot back up. The array controller should automatically mirror the data onto the new disk. As long as it is the same architecture (SATA) and = or larger than the other disk, it will work. It doesn't have to be exactly the same.

[shilala]

Originally Posted by 357

ECO drives as in evironmentally friendly?

I don't think it would be a problem. The RAID is supported by the SATA controller on the motherboard, the drives don't know the difference. Most all of them support RAID 0 and RAID 1. Some also support RAID 5.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID

RAID, an acronym for Redundant Array of Independent Disks (Changed from its original term Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks),

RAID 0 (block-level striping without parity or mirroring) has no (or zero) redundancy. It provides improved performance and additional storage but no fault tolerance. Hence simple stripe sets are normally referred to as RAID 0. Any disk failure destroys the array, and the likelihood of failure increases with more disks in the array... (not what you want)

RAID 1 (mirroring without parity or striping), data is written identically to multiple disks (a "mirrored set"). Although many implementations create sets of 2 disks, sets may contain 3 or more disks. Array provides fault tolerance from disk errors or failures and continues to operate as long as at least one drive in the mirrored set is functioning. With appropriate operating system support, there can be increased read performance, and only a minimal (i.e. almost no) write performance reduction.

It's really simple to setup. When you plug in both drives and boot up you may have to hit a function key to get into the BIOS or Array Configuration, create a new volume/array, add both disks, choose RAID 1 and save your changes. The options and wording may differ slightly, but if you only have two disks, the only options will be RAID 0 or RAID 1. So long as Windows 7 has a driver for your motherboard, you just install Windows as normal. Most of the array controllers will have some kind of notification if a drive fails. Otherwise you won't even notice, since you'll still be up and running. All you do is shutdown, replace bad drive, and boot back up. The array controller should automatically mirror the data onto the new disk. As long as it is the same architecture (SATA) and = or larger than the other disk, it will work. It doesn't have to be exactly the same.

I'm gonna be firing up six disks when I start up, but I'm with you.
I read the wiki stuff yesterday. I'll find a "how to" later. I think you've done sold me.
I'll be running a 300gb boot disk, a 1.5 tb storage, and a 2tb storage, all redundant.
I'm, thinking that if I get serious about tossing garbage, I won't have all that much to transfer, and it won't be a big deal. I may start that today.
I'm getting pretty itchy about pulling the trigger on the hardware...

[shilala]

I changed up some stuff, mostly based on what you guys have said.
This stuff stayed the same...
Western Digital Caviar Green WD20EARS 2TB SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive -Bare Drive

SAPPHIRE Vapor-X 100283VX-2L Radeon HD 5770 (Juniper XT) 1GB 128-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 2.1 x16 HDCP Ready CrossFireX Support Video Card w/ Eyefinity

ASUS M4A89GTD PRO/USB3 AM3 AMD 890GX SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 HDMI ATX AMD Motherboard

AMD Phenom II X6 1090T Black Edition Thuban 3.2GHz Socket AM3 125W Six-Core Desktop Processor HDT90ZFBGRBOX

CORSAIR XMS 8GB (4 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1333 Desktop Memory Model CMP8GX3M4A1333C9

COOLER MASTER ATCS 840 RC-840-KKN1-GP Black Aluminum ATX Full Tower Computer Case

Here's the new stuff...
Microsoft Windows 7 Professional SP1 64-bit 1-Pack - OEM

Two of these PSU's:
CORSAIR Enthusiast Series CMPSU-650TX 650W ATX12V / EPS12V SLI Ready CrossFire Ready 80 PLUS Certified Active PFC Compatible ...

Being as I've already spent the Gross National Product of most small countries, I'm going to look real hard at a BluRay Player/Burner and some media. Probably gonna get this one...
LG Black Super Multi SATA WH12LS30 LightScribe Support - OEM

[Bill86]

Looks good Scott, I agree with saving the coin on a video card. Especially if you're not gaming. Hope everything works out for you and you enjoy your new machine.