Hi I'm wondering if anyone wouldn't mind giving me some advice on this pc I'm making. Spec: Motherboard: NVIDIA nForce 680i Video Card: Nvidia Geforce 8800GT and/or (depending on funds) NVIDIA Quadro FX 5600 Cpu: QX9650 Ram: 8500 sli or CORSAIR XMS2 2GB Case: Antec 1200 With respect to the hard drives I'd like to put in 4 tb. I don't know whether it's better to have the hard drives split into 4 tb drives or into 8 500gb. I want some to work as RAID. Also with the case I have read quite a few positive reviews but I notice the powersupply is placed at the bottom which doesn't make sense to me as heat rises. Perhaps it's to prevent dust from being airborne in the system? I think the CPU will need watercooling but I'm not sure. Any help would be greatly appreciated! Cheers.
1st of all: get 4gb of ram, even if you are using 32-bit and can only use 3,2 gb. Especially complicated CAD-drawings can benefit from it, and the price is not a real barrier. 2nd: if you use 8 500GB HDDs, make sure the mobo has 8 SATA connections. And for a RAID 5 array onboard chips are no good, though RAID 0 works ok. I think you are best off using 4 1TB disks in RAID 0. Make sure you have an external HDD that makes daily automatic backups of the most important files though, because if one disk in a RAID 0 array fails, you lose everything on all 4 disks. If you want a safe and fast RAID array, you need a good controller like an areca to provide the RAID 5 calculations. They are expensive though. The PSU at the bottom takes in air from the bottom and pushes it out through the back, so the heat never gets inside the rest of the case. Mounting in the bottom makes great sense for cable routing and balance (weight in the bottom!). That CPU is made to be pushed, but it's crazy fast right out of the box. It all depends on how far you want to push it if you need watercooling or not. If you don't absolutely need that last bit of juice, i'd say get a strong-performing aircooler and you'll be fine.
Thanks for the reply! The intention is to run it on 64-bit. Yeah sorry I forgot to mention I'm going to get a minimum of 4 gb ram it's just that corsair was sold in a pair. I'd like to keep the system as quiet as possible so perhaps water cooling would be best? I have just come across this http://corsair.com/products/nautilus500.aspx I know I need a good raid controller but it makes things a bit more complicated for me as I want to have the system running dual boot. Does the PSU come with the case normally? Perhaps I should look at getting another PSU?
