Building my new PC

[SiliconAngel]

I'm (finally) in the process of assembling my new PC, it's been a long time in the planning and budgeting, but I had to get it together before the end of the year to qualify for the Govt's 50% tax deduction small business incentive scheme. I know there will probably only be a couple of you who will be even slightly interested, but hey I'm excited so I wanted to share

Specs:
Core i7 860
Thermalright IFX-14 aircooled HSF
Gigabyte GA-P55A-UD5 (UD6 isn’t available ‘til mid Jan)
2x Corsair CMD4GX3M2B1600C8 4GB DDR3 RAM kits (ie 8GB RAM)
Gigabyte HD5850 graphics card
Corsair HX620W PSU
Samsung SH-B083A Blu-ray drive
SuperTalent UltraDrive GX 128GB 2.5" MLC SSD
Areca ARC-1220 8 port SATA RAID controller
5x Samsung F3 1TB HDDs in RAID 5
3x Samsung F3 500GB HDDs in RAID 0 (media editing)
SNT-2131SS HDD Rack 3 x SAS/SATA in 2 x 5.25" bay
Zalman MS1000 case (had a P183 but dropped it in favour of this ‘cause I wanted 9 hot-swap HDD bays)
Zalman ZM-MFC2 Fan Controller
3x Noctua NF-S12 fans case cooling
2x Noctua NF-P12 CPU cooling
Razer Lycosa keyboard
Razer Mamba mouse
Running Windows 7 64-bit of course ;-)

Still waiting on half the RAM, the GPU, hotswap drive bay and the SSD, but got started on building last night. Trying to hide that many SATA cables behind the mobo backing plate is... interesting - the side of the case has an obvious bulge to it Just as well it will hide down the side of my desk!

And yes, I probably should have a hot-spare in that RAID5 array, but I'm out of space and TBH it's on a line-interactive UPS and I'll be sitting in front of it 90% of the time it's running, so if one of those drives goes down I'll be able to shut it down within a minute or so. I have a couple of 2TB external drives I back up to periodically anyway, so I'm not concerned about data loss.

 

[pu-11-me]

Holy crap! What do you intend to do on it? Run NASA?

 

[OVR444]

So your now outsourcing your home computer as a off site data center for your work? Awesome specs mate.... looks to be about 4K of machine?

 

[gorgath]

Want to Manage Services on that hardware? Lets talk! Hehehe

 

[Peter_D]

But is all that processing power really needed to read posts on the forum and watch porn!

 

[SiliconAngel]

Primary office computer with a lot of critical data on it, hence the redundancy. Do a bit of audio and video editing, hence the three RAID 0 drives. Will also be running some SolidWorks simulation examples at varying CPU speeds to demonstrate workstation performance under different operating variables, I've been in discussion with some clients and the Australian vendor and they're interested in seeing some performance numbers. So if it works the way I expect it to, some of this will probably be replicated for client builds.

A little under $5k, and that's at wholesale prices... The RAID controller on it's own is nearly a grand! >.<

 

[fieldy107]

Awsome machine! the only bits I dont like are the samsung drives, it might just be my badluck but Ive had a horrible run with samsung hard drives and disc drives...

 

[SiliconAngel]

I had some early issues a couple of years ago, but haven't had a single drive fail in over 18 months (probably 30+ drives still under warranty in various installations). Have a bit of a read on the Spinpoint F3's - they're the fastest, quietest and cheapest 7200 drives in their class, hence why I went with them. Don't worry, if I see any major issues I'll just replace the whole set with another brand, but for now they make the most sense

 

[bradc]

We've been using a lot of 7200.12's at work and I'm impressed with them. Much better than the .11's that first of all had to be flashed, then the bastards just developed bad sectors or stopped working completely!

Samsungs can be hard to get at times over here but at the moment I've got 14x 750gb's from them (older models, 3x 250gb platters) and I'm happy with them.


The system looks great Trev, you still haven't outpaced me though!

 

[SiliconAngel]

Not trying to beat anyone, Bradbrad It's the right system for me at the moment, that's all that's important. After building a couple of Dual Xeon 5500 series boxes recently I looked at that as an option, but I just couldn't justify the cost for what I need.

Oh and for anyone who's worked with SolidWorks, yes I know I should have a Quadro, but I'm A) not actually doing any rendering and B) SolidWorks actually isn't that graphics intensive, unless you're concerned about high FPS rendering multi-million polygon objects in real-time, but 4 or 5 FPS is usually more than adequate.

 

[king_panther]

But is all that processing power really needed to read posts on the forum and watch porn!

Yes if it is ultra-high-definition porn !!!

I find write speeds on SSDs are very poor. Well with the netbook we have it is. Read speed is great. Write speed is pathetic.

Mate, where are you putting the VLB Creative 3D Blaster though ??

 

[bradc]

The SSD you have on your netbook will be completely different to what Trev is buying here.

Trev, did you not consider the X58 platform that has 6 ram slots? Cheaper to go up to 12gb.

 

[SiliconAngel]

Haha 'course I did Brad, but I had a number of considerations:

A) I had to have this ordered prior to 31st Dec to qualify for the Govt Small Business Investment Incentive, where you get a bonus 50% tax rebate on depreciable items over the value of $1,000 (slightly more complicated than that, but that's the basic gist). So essentially for this limited time you can claim 150% depreciation for qualifying assets.

After the release of Lynnfield, X58 boards were practically discontinued. They're starting to make a reappearance, but they're very thin on the ground. Add to that it will be a little while before X58A boards are available (Gigabyte's SATA3.0 6GB/s, USB3 supporting boards) and Q2 before the new 900 series processors will be released, I didn't have the time to wait.

B) The 800 series Core i7's are around 95% the performance of the 900 series platform for around 60% of the price (including mainboard and RAM price differences). The current 800 series (Lynnfield) also has a number of feature improvements over the 900's (Nehalem), including vastly improved power efficiency, dynamic throttling and turbo modes. The only potential clock-for-clock advantage of Nehalem is in high-end multimedia processing and encoding, and the advantage is minor. Throw the overclocking potential of Lynnfield into the mix and any noticeable performance difference of the current 900 platform is mitigated.

So yes, the X58 and 900 series are certainly a good option, but Lynnfield and P55 makes more sense for me right now (and there will always be trade-offs in computer hardware; no matter when you buy it or what platform you choose, there will always be something better released a few weeks later).

I also could have gone for the UD6 (which I originally ordered), which has 6 RAM slots and 24 phase power, but as I said they won't be in stock until mid January so I dropped down to the UD5.

KP as Bradbrad said, you can't take the performance of one model and extrapolate that as indicative of an entire product segment. It's like taking a Kia Rio for a drive and saying 'the acceleration of cars today is extremely disappointing.' Early SSD's (particularly with the JMicron controller) DID have severe bottlenecks in a number of areas, and you can still buy some fairly disappointing ones. Like anything, you have to do a bit of research and ensure you're getting something good

 

[mookers]

Geez... between cars and computers, how many terabytes of info do you think Trevor and Bradbrad have stored in their brains? lol

 

[fieldy107]

50? just a guess

 

[Tom]

Computer to match the car huh nice set up!

 

[bradc]

Over here there has been a great reduction in X58 motherboards available but there is still a variety available. I guess there is little reason for the X58's now though unless you want SLI or do really need the extra ram capacity.

I prefer the UD5 over the UD6, the extra power phases are just marketing fud and the extra ram slots are largely pointless as you can only use the extra slots with single sided memory which at the moment is 1gb sticks only!

If I didn't have an i7 975 system and was building a system right now, I'd have the same motherboard, cpu and the same ram! I'd get another Silverstone case though, probably a TJ-10 to match my TJ-03 and I still maintain that their TJ-07 case is the most amazing piece of case design ever

I'm a big fan of Areca raid cards, I would have them but I get Intel raid cards for free (from the same person I got my i7 975) so I've got a stack of Intel ones here

One piece of advice I would give you for both the Raid 5 and Raid 0 array is to be EXTREMELY careful with running power splitters. Your SNT backplane is fine because all of the bays have crosslinked power from the inputs. However the Zalman bays aren't, you run an individual power cable to each set of 3 bays. That is fine, but if one bay very briefly loses power your array will be gone! I know you're smart, but just be careful, I've only been bitten by this once and it sucked arse!

 

[Bennoz]

Good lord man, buy a bloody server!

 

[bradc]

A typical server from a major manufacturer isn't very flexible at all and will cost a ton more.

Find me a server that can handle anything near what my case has, 14x 750gb, 2x 80gb, 1x 1TB, 1x DVD-RW, and that has a motherboard with 3x PCIe 16x slots.

 

[king_panther]

..... & I have to tolerate being called a nerd ?