Build Advice First build - $2250 Custom PC! Need YOUR advice on parts!

An 850W PSU will be more than capable of running two 280s (although as docodine recommended, shy away from the 280s). A heavily overclocked i7 965 plus two GTX 295s (roughly equivalent to sticking four GTX 275s in your system - which you can't actually do, by the way) draw about 1000W from the wall with the Corsair HX1000 IIRC (Tom's Hardware stuck it all in a FragBox a couple months back), so you can actually figure that a dual-280 setup will knock at least 300W off of that. If any place had issues with getting a 1000W PSU to run two 280s, the PSU sucked. Thankfully, Corsairs don't suck.

Oh, and docodine - remember how OCZ actually bought PC Power and Cooling? Well, it's starting to show. It's still pretty model-specific, but there are a few OCZ power supplies that are far above average these days.

I think hard drives are somewhere in the ~10-12W range. Nothing big for one drive, but it adds up pretty quickly when you're putting in four or five.


- Diosjenin -

 

Thanks for that Diosjenin, I was wondering how OCZ was managing good reviews with their PSUs all of a sudden... Which models are PCP&C rebrands?

 

The EliteXStream series is direct PP&C internals with a quieter fan setup (finally). I'm not really sure on the others.

EDIT: Something just occurred to me. I'm assuming, Whitesky, that your rendering work is done for professional reasons - so you have a couple of options that could save you some money, and hence allow you to increase your budget. If you work for a company, you might be able to get them to cover at least some of the costs - definitely at least the cost of a good workstation graphics card, if not the whole machine. If you're self-employed, I would bet a limb that you could deduct a ton of money from your federal taxes next year. My dad got to write off a computer desk from IKEA as a job-related expense, so justifying a workstation as the same would be dead simple.


- Diosjenin -

 

Thanks to both for the info, to address several of the things brought up:

Yea I also started looking at the 275's last night, in the case that I upgraded to two new cards later this year with DX11, only then would I not mind just using one card for now. However, won't these new cards coming out be incredibly expensive?

I mean, I figure this isn't a matter of waiting just for them to be released. the 275's been on the market and is about to become obsolete, and it's just managing to go down enough in price for me. If I buy new cards when they drop, I'd have to wait another half a year for those to drop too, meaning I'll have a 275 for the next year, and that doesn't sound very enticing.

Also, I've checked the Quadro and while it's great for workstation computers.. it's simply out of my budget atm. I am self-employed, running a new but successful web design business. I figure if I can get by for another year till I have some big bucks to drop, I'll replace my 2/3x0's a Quadro. And yea, the tax idea is a major point, however it's still just a big investment down to the moment until I'd eventually get it back.

Also, hey does anyone know if that current GIGABYTE board is good?
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128361

I'd be dropping the P6T in favor of this..

 

The motherboard is great, although I'd be shooting for the EX58-UD5 instead. The motherboard itself is the same, it just has a different cooling configuration. The only real reason to justify the extra expense of the EX58-Extreme is if you're liquid cooling it.

Also, I mentioned softmodding consumer cards into workstation cards in your other topic. Here's what I've found: GT200-based cards (like the GTX 275, etc.) are out. For whatever reason, nobody's managed to crack those yet. However, a very dedicated few hackers over on the Guru3D forums are working on softmodding the Radeon 4870 into a FirePro 8700 with a fair amount of success. XP 32-bit seems to be working fairly well already, and XP 64-bit is next up, followed by Windows 7. Interested at all?


- Diosjenin -

 

Hmm, it does actually sound interesting but for one, I'm definitely going with an i7 system, so Radeon is also out for me.

Also, I think if I go with 2 275's in SLI for now (aint too bad in price either), those will more than handle everything I need to do till next year. At that time, I think I'll be at the point of either buying the at-that-point cheaper DX11 cards, or go for a Quadro.

My work, skills and software progressively go up as time goes by, so at the moment having a workstation card would be great but I don't think I'm at the point of utilizing it's true potential till around next year.

Also, many reviews have seemed pleased with that Zalman case, but warn that it has no frontfans and no front/side ventilation. If I go with this case, running 2 275's in SLI, I think I'm gonna need water cooling to be on the safe side, in addition to a few fans.

Currently looking at some water cooling systems, but don't know whats good or not

Does 2 extra 120mm fans, CPU cooler, and watercooling together sound practical?

 

Hey my friend sent me this pic about his current water cooling setup.. I notice it routes to the CPU then the GPU and then back again, will a standard system do this? Or will I need to buy extra parts and accessories?

http://c3.ac-images.myspacecdn.com/images02/64/l_fdbc8a3e4cf14bdf8903540b922eb4a6.jpg

 

There are no conflicts between i7 and ATI, unless I'm misinterpreting what you are saying. You can Crossfire on an x58 board no worries.

 

Oh yea another nooby moment, I was under the impression that you have to get Intel CPU/Nvidia cards or AMD CPU/ATI cards

 

There isn't any non-OCed setup that requires watercooling for normal operation, so I would put that money toward more worthwhile parts of the PC, for sure.. You can just cut a hole for another fan somewhere, or get a better case..

You wouldn't need a normal CPU cooler if you're watercooling, you would need a waterblock, and finding a good one of those is a little more difficult.

The GTX 275s do get warm, but they're dual slot and therefore can exhaust heat pretty by themselves. A front intake fan would be a great addition though, blowing cool air over the cards.

 

Okay, well, here's an idea for the graphics part of the build.

Because the ATI cards can be hacked without modifying the card's BIOS (i.e. all they need is a different driver), you could get two Radeon 4870s and do a dual-boot configuration. Put all your rendering stuff on XP 64-bit, and put all your gaming stuff on Windows 7 RC 64-bit. Then, when the guys at Guru3D hack the XP 64-bit drivers correctly, you can softmod the cards on XP so they show up as FirePro 8700s - but on Windows 7, they'll still show up as Radeon 4870s. Thus, you have maximum rendering power on one OS and maximum gaming power on the other.

4870s are both very cheap and very powerful. You'd be saving a good deal of money over the dual-GTX 275 setup, as well as probably gaining an immense deal of rendering power. And you can always opt for a 4870 with a good aftermarket heat sink, which should help keep things cool and quiet, and also eliminate the need for them to be liquid-cooled.

There is one important caveat to note about this setup, which is that ATI currently does not have CrossFire support for their FirePro (or FireGL) cards. They can apparently work separately with little issue if they're both hooked up to different monitors - so with the setup I described above you could have 3ds Max rendering in one monitor and Maya rendering in another, but you couldn't have both cards working on a single rendering project at the same time.

There does exist, at least on paper, a part called the FirePro 8700 Duo, which is the hardware equivalent of a 4870 X2 - obviously a part that wouldn't work properly without Crossfire support. So that Crossfire support may show up in the near future; it's just not there right this moment. (So in the setup above, Crossfire would still work on Windows 7, where the cards would still be recognized as 4870s).

Thoughts?


- Diosjenin -

 

For the monitors go with the Samsung SyncMaster T240HD or T260HD (T260 is 26", other 24"). I just got two T260 and they're really nice, now I need to replace my other monitors with T240 so they all match (T240 and T260 do 1900x1200).

 

Hey guys back after the weekend, and I've done some thinking n comparing options.

GPU:

While the whole 4870 hacking concept sounds interesting, it seems a lil above my level, considering I was a complete PC novice a few weeks ago. Since this is my first big investment/build, I'd rather go mainstream with plug-n-play solutions. There also seems to be a few complications/limitations to going the 4870 route.

What I've decided is instead of getting SLI 275's NOW, and having to watercool (yes I am planning on doing heavy OC'ing) I'm just going to grab a single EVGA 285, pre-equipped for watercooling. I checked extensive charts and dual 275's ran neck to neck with a single 285.. so I might as well grab one 285 for now and get a second down the line when the price drops. Then I'll worry about buying watercooling. In the end, I'll be getting comparable power now, for less $, upgrade room in the future, and can put the money now into getting better components (RAM, etc).

Also many benchmarks showed the 285 much faster at high resolutions..

I guess the only thing I need to figure out now is the SSD issue, I heard a few people mention I'd have to get an adaptor - is that normal? Or did I pick an unusual SSD where others are plug-n-play?

Also, thnx Kunin I'll check out those monitors. They gotta be 50,000:1 and 2ms response time thou!

There isn't any further lil parts n knickknacks that I'm forgetting is there?

 

The SSD adaptor isn't for the connection between the PC and the SSD, it's all about mounting the SSD in the Case. SSD's are smaller than normal Hard drives, they have the same size as 5400 RPM Laptop Drives. So, unless your case has any 2.5" HDD Slots, which I strongly doubt, you will need a 3.5" to 2.5" converter, these are pretty cheap though.

For the Graphics Cards, I would pick a single 285 like you said, because (I think this was said somewhere int his Thread before) when the new DX11 cards come out, these will experience a huge price drop. I still regret buying my 2x 8800 GTS 512 for 190$, because about a Month after that the GTX cards came out and the price of my cards dropped to like 120$.

Also, a single 285 will run about anything except some extreme stuff on highest resolution/details, so you don't really need to worry about that.

 

Thnx Nova,

I thought I'd share a lil tidbit with you all.

I'm currently running a BestBuy all-in-one setup with an NVidia 8500 GT haha, although still able to produce impressive work on it. Either way this project rolls, It's gonna be a huge step up with massive productivity increases.