Alright, well my brother will be back from Iraq in May (2008) and is wanting to put 2500 towards a new computer, so that means new keyboard, mouse, monitor, case and inards. ive done some research on my own and have talked with him about it for a couple of days straight on the whole thing and we have come to a solutions on some parts, i was wondering what you guys could offer basing your suggestions around this set up first: 1. ATX Full Tower Case, with PSU on bottom.............the case we think he want = http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811129025 2. 3 HDD - WD raptor 150g.....................................the HDD we know he wants = http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136012 3. AMD Phenom 9600.............................................the CPU we know he wants = http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819103225 *FYI* The 3 HDD's will be set up in a RAID format if there are any problems with the stuff we have selected, such as over heating, or if there is better please tell. the rig will prolly be for gaming. 2500 169.99- HDD 169.99- HDD 169.99- HDD 224.99- CPU 1765.04
Hey there. I don't really see anything wrong with the selections, other than the fact that the tower you selected is a mid-tower not a 'full tower' like you stated (may have been a mistype or something). The HDD selected is fine, if he's a gamer and he has the cash to blow. The CPU....well, you could get a C2D that would be way more efficient and probably a higher clock speed than that Phenom for the price. But again, this could be personal preference. Just my $.02. Good luck!
that must be a typo on newegg's part cause i have the same tower, except in black and its massive, ill check out that C2D CPU and send it to him and see what he thinks. P.S. i wanna see what you would go with if you had 2500 to blow on a new Computer
I must say, this looks like a perfect time to "wait to buy" - if he won't be using this PC for another 3 months hardware will change in that amount of time. But as far as a useful recommendation to the hardware - if I was spending that much $$$ I would want more storage space. The raptors may be fast, but they are not exactly good GB/$. I think you should add in a 500GB hard-drive or two in there as well.
If money were no object, and I had a 2500 buck budget? Hell. Hm....going through NewEgg for 5 mins, I compiled this. And this is just full-on splurge mode. Case: SILVERSTONE TJ07 Video Card: EVGA 768-P2-N831-AR GeForce 8800GTX PSU: PC Power & Cooling Turbo-Cool 1000W RAM: Patriot Viper 4GB(2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 Mobo: ASUS MAXIMUS FORMULA CPU: Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 HDD 1: Western Digital Raptor 150GB HDD 2: Seagate 400GB 7200 RPM 32MB cache That comes in @ below $2,000 at this point. After fans/misc. bits, etc. you'd still be below the target price. You need a monitor too? Mind, this is just a REAL quick run-through without any research/etc. I'd go with DDR2-based board because the RAM is dirt-cheap right now. That would save some cash. I'd also get an 8800GTS instead...a lot cheaper. But that's a given. Also, RAIDing the HDD's will give you no discernible benefit (if you're doing a stripe array). RAID is worthless unless you're doing it for data-backup-security.
i thought by running them as a RAID it would operate everythign more effectively, such as if you got the 8800 GTX and a 4 gig of ram, running a game on a 7200 RPM HDD would defeat the purpose of the high end gear, or am i wrong? and having 480 gigs myself, i have way too much room but going with 650 gigs is a little much isnt it?
Running the OS on the Raptor, it's faster yes. Running RAID 0 isn't. I'd only use RAID if I had 3 or 4 same or similar drives that I can't use elsewhere and I want one or two large partitions; or see them as one large HDD. Other than that, it's worthless. Check out this very informative column regarding RAID that B-T did themselves. I'd run the Raptor as the OS disc and run the games on it too. I'd get one or two other large 7200rpm HDD's in whatever size you'd need. Prices are cheap per GB on HDD's if you look around. The other discs won't matter to the speed of the system itself.
Ok what I would do, for that kind of money Start off you want an Intel system because it's just going to be better performing. Personally I'm a fan on Intel chipset motherboards and Abit, but equally if you want an nvidia SLI machine you're going to be looking at Nvidia chipsets. Start off with X38 chipset, in a good strong Abit board: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813127033 IX38 Quad GT - $229.99 CPU, I think for gaming performance (single thread) vs. heat e8500 is the winner but if you want quad the q9450 should be out soon. (Newegg doesn't seem to have them??) http://www.google.com/products?hl=en&rlz=&q=e8500&um=1&ie=UTF-8 - $300 GPU, this is a slightly contentious part, with all the new developments. I'd say get a new GTS 512mb http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814143119 - $309.99 or actually, if you were considering getting another card in the future for crossfire (see recent reviews on bit-tech) with the x38 motherboard you could get a HD3870 - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814125086 - $219.99 Memory - go for 4 GB of DDR2 PC with a fast speed for lots of overclocking http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231145 - $114.99 PSU - possibly overkill, but it's got all the amps on a single rail so your graphics card will love you: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817139006 - $169.99 Hard disks - don't bother with raptors, they're a 2 year old design now and in tech terms that's a long time. High density disks have closed the gap so that a 500gb disk now that's much cheaper performs about the same for usual tasks. For server applications they'll still perform faster, but then for a serious server you want SCSI drives. They've kind of been squeezed out of the market. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136073&Tpk=WD5000AAKS - $104.99 - won't find anyone complaining about the WD5000AAKS Now for RAID you can use Intel's onboard ICH9R chipset, it's pretty good so feel free to (I use it on my PC). I would set it up to stripe the first 100GB of each disk, then RAID5 the remaining 400 or so bits left over. You'll end up with: 300GB very very fast hard disk for installing applications on. 800GB hard drive with redundancy for films etc. Possibly invest in a RAID card if you're serious about the performance, but I find the ICH9R does well. The main criticism is that it relies on your CPU to power it, but with the e8500 that's not going to be a prob. Case: that's up to you. I had the P180 which is nearly exactly the same as the P182 except for a few revisions, it's a mid tower although massive - it's to do with the total dimensions. A mid tower is approximately 50cm high (P180 55 IIRC), a full tower is 70cm high. I loved it because it was quiet, but hated it because routing wires is a PITA, the SATA cables in the bottom compartment hit the fan, because you have to plug the cables in before you put the tray in, and so can't organise them nicely. Also it's weight. I really did like the case though, just was fiddly because I was always in and out of my system, and because it weighed so so much. Optical drives etc. is the usual, just get one which does the job. Some are quieter than others and some burn slightly faster but there's not a load of difference unless you're manufacturing disks. Mouse - personal preference, some are better for multitasking with lots of buttons, some are better for sensitive movements i.e. illustration or FPS games. Keyboard - I'm a keen gamer and love the saitek eclipse II. Again, personal preference, my keyboard has volume controls and can change colour, so not in the league of programmable keyboards but at a good price point. Monitor - since your budget stretches to it I'd get a nice 24" monitor (if it will fit in your space) such as the Dell 2407 http://accessories.us.dell.com/sna/...etail.aspx?c=us&l=en&s=dhs&cs=19&sku=320-5647 - $599.99 That comes to: Essentials $229.99 - Motherboard (Abit IX38 Quad GT) $300.00 - CPU (Intel E8500) $219.99 - GPU (HD3870) $114.99 - Memory (G.SKILL 4GB(2 x 2GB) rated to 1000mhz) $169.99 - PSU (Corsair TX750) $314.97 - Hard Disks (3x WD5000AAKS) $89.99 - Case (Antec P182) $30.00 - Optical Drive $1469.92 Peripherals $599.99 - Monitor (Dell 2507WFP-HD) $49.99 - Keyboard (Saitek Eclipse II) $49.99 - Mouse (Logitech G5) $699.97 Total: $2169.89 P.s. contrary to the above poster using raid in the right configuration for the right purpose does increase aspects of application and gaming speed. If you consider that the fastest parts of a hard disk are at the outside of a platter, if your operating system uses 30GB and you have a partition just for it in the first sector striped across 3 high density disks, so at all times the head is moving at maximum speed trust me Windows will be very fast. If you wanted smaller drives the samsung t133 is a single platter drive so the high density for increased performance is there. Depends on your needs. edit: you also need your CPU cooler, you could either go water cooling for awesome factor (and may well be able to afford it ) or high performance air cooling i.e. Thermal right Ultra Extreme 120
No real-world advantages in speed. At least none that would be discernible to an end-user. Benchmarks, perhaps. But again, not worth the money spent on it. Check out the previously-linked write-up. Very informative.
I do a lot of playing with large files and the constant read/write is nearly double... Also I think the write-up although informative is journalistic i.e. a lot of it is observed and it really depends from what perspective you're arguing. I notice almost instant (max 4-5 seconds) level loading times in all games (although on steam it still gets stuck on 'sending client info' for about 10 seconds). Playing BF2 on my old PC took around 30 seconds to load a level. Much of this is from the way I've partitioned my disk, having the games towards the edge of the disk platters increases seek and read time, but so does having a raid0 configuration. I have gone without it when linux destroyed my bootloader and it's one of those things you might not notice day to day, but when it's gone suddenly your computer slows down all the time to read from the hard disk. If you think the speed of everything in the PC now is almost instant - except hard disks since they rely on mechanical interfaces. It won't give you higher frame rates of course, that's what I meant about "increase aspects of operating system and gaming performance". It does come down to trade offs, I think with SSD raid0 will eventually become obsolete, but atm at least for me it is a measurable difference. Another example would be memory and dual core: day to day it might not make a massive difference, but when you go from having lots of ram and a multi processor cpu to not, suddenly when you load an application everything goes slow because all your cycles are being used and you've got none left for the GUI.
take a look here: http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/2008/01/17/amd_phenom_9600_black_edition/4 and see where the 9600 compares to the rest of the pack. or even look at the next page in that review and you will notice that it sits at the bottom in terms of game performance. I'm not a fanboy for amd or intel. but intel is a much better way to go.
Okay. I'm glad it works for you. That's what counts, right? Believe me, I know. My switch to dual core was a socket 939 up to an X2 4400 when they came out. I haven't used a single core since. There IS a difference. It feels...I dunno...snappier.
Sorry, all I meant to say was that at the very least for me there is a significant impact in OS use, and a noticeable increase in loading times when starting up applications and games. Like I said, it won't improve speeds in game when it's loaded to memory but few people are sat around waiting in the middle of a game, the only 'slow' parts of my PC were all the loading stages i.e. windows / applications / games / levels. Increasing the rate at which you can pull the bits off your hard disk and into the RAM is the only way to reduce that, and depending on the configuration of the bits (contiguous data i.e. all in the same place like game levels) they can receive a significant boost from a striped set up. Random access isn't going to improve massively because it's the speed the head can get from one part of the disk to the other, but for overall performance on balance the high density disks now do beat the Raptors. SSDs will rewrite the playing field somewhat with near instant random access, since there are no moving parts at all.
No, no reason to apologize man! If it works for you, that's what counts. In my experiences with it, it's pointless. There were slightly enhanced loadtimes on games at first, but like any partition is gets fragmented quickly. SSD's are definitely going to change the way we see HDDs, that's for sure. Not just the faster loads, but the dB's too!
Repeat after me; RAID is not backup. Sure it does give you some security, but you should always backup to another storage medium.
Repeat after me: bad term for a quick post. I meant, to use the right term, 'fault tolerance' as in a mirror. Redundancy. What have you. Sorry for the confusion!
i agree with (most) everything dreaming said. with that kind of budget, go for q6600 or if you can find it, q9450. just get a single 500gb hard drive, if you are worried about your data grab a second one, put it in an external enclosure, and back up onto that. HD3870 is enough for most games now, but you could go for a GTX for a little better performance.
Thanx alot guys, ill send him this URL and let him get some ideas of what others think, other then just me. When he gets back he only has 2 weeks of leave before he has to go back to Ft. Brag so he's gonna order the supplies a month early so that I will have them and get everything ready so when he gets back we'll be able to put it all together ill start another thread in a couple of months for stuff such as Cable Management and other cool stuff like that
