Rig Building Advice

Hey! Putting together a new rig now that I've come into some money, and I'd like a bit of advice on the components I've chosen, whether they're good decisions or not.

List is here: http://www.rchan.us/omake/other/index.html

Anything on there suck or might present a problem? This is my first time building a rig from parts.

First, your power supply costs way too much, likely due to all the buzzwords in its description. You can get something of equal power for less.

Second you may want to to replace that expensive 1TB drive with several smaller ones. They have 500GB Seagates for $60. I'd rather have a couple of those then one $210 drive.

I'd also suggest not going cheap on the motherboard.

Edit: You also need a CPU fan/heatsink.

Scet said:

First, your power supply costs way too much, likely due to all the buzzwords in its description. You can get something of equal power for less.

It's also possible to get "generic noname 600W" PSUs, but those crap out under intensive load. There's a reason why a quality e.g. Zalman PSU with "just" 400 W can often outperform many noname "500 W" ones, and yet cost 3x-4x as much. That being said, $160 is indeed a bit too much. You likely don't even need a 650 W PSU, a good quality 500 W will do (around $100).

Scet said:

Second you may want to to replace that expensive 1TB drive with several smaller ones. They have 500GB Seagates for $60. I'd rather have a couple of those then one $210 drive.

I hope you don't mean these ones. Otherwise, it's a good idea to split drives (not just partition): increased reliability, halved wear, and double the speed of file transfers between the two. Multiple drives are also pretty much a must for video processing and other copy-intensive processes.

Oh, and stay away from "RAID" solutions: unless you have a multi-$100 dedicated hardware controller that can provide real-time, OS-transparent, 100% hardware-backed RAID, it's not worth it. Those "fake RAID" or "software RAID" solutions will just increase CPU use as well as the risk of data corruption during crashes, and make the data unrecoverable/unreadable on a different type of controller.

Scet said:

I'd also suggest not going cheap on the motherboard.

You also need a CPU fan/heatsink.

QFT on the motherboard, but nowadays CPUs run cooler than ever (except maybe if compared to the Athlon 64 ;-) and usually come with a boxed cooling solution, which is usually enough if you're not going to overclock.

Maes said:

Oh, and stay away from "RAID" solutions: unless you have a multi-$100 dedicated hardware controller that can provide real-time, OS-transparent, 100% hardware-backed RAID, it's not worth it. Those "fake RAID" or "software RAID" solutions will just increase CPU use as well as the risk of data corruption during crashes, and make the data unrecoverable/unreadable on a different type of controller.

OS-transparent RAID is pretty much impossible (what happens when you need to recover data?), and software RAID isn't really all that intensive on the CPU unless you're reconstructing an array... heh. But anyway, if you're just going use traditional backup techniques anyway, regular LVM would work fine and be easier to use than RAID0 (hey, it even has some RAID1-like features).

Actually, I even use LVM on my single-disk laptop. The volume management benefits over the primitive DOS techniques are worth it IMO.

I don't plan to use RAID. I don't see the appeal. I plan to use one HDD for Linux and one HDD for Windaz and gaming.

Anyway, I've updated the list, and I'll edit this post when I have the new list up.

EDIT: http://www.rchan.us/omake/other/index2.html

I recommend going for a 790 chipset mobo if you're getting a Phenom 2.

Although the Signature series are among the best PSU's in the business, I too believe they are way overpriced. For almost the same level of quality, you can save some quid and buy this instead:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817371021


Secondly, I'd recommend getting rid of that overpriced, "3 generation old tech with a new name slapped onto it" graphics card and get this instead:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814143140

Also, unless you are overclocking, you don't need memory that fast. And if you are overclocking, then you're going to need a aftermarket CPU cooler.

MikeRS said:

OS-transparent RAID is pretty much impossible

On the contrary, it's very possible, but only found on high-end products, like these (some are external racks, but there are internal cards that have this):

http://www.promise.com/product/product_detail_eng.asp?product_id=206

http://www.scsi4me.com/enhanceraid-r4-cr1000-1u-rackmount-raid-array-4x-3-5-sata-hdds-esata-usb2-0-firewire800-host.html

http://www.e-shop.gr/show_per.phtml?id=PER.801213

http://www.e-shop.gr/show_per.phtml?id=PER.801024

http://www.kudzuworld.com/blogs/tech/2006_08_13_C.el.aspx

Essentially, the card reports the array of disks as a single one to the OS and automatically marshalls the calls in hardware. The OS sees a normal SATA/SCSI/IDE/whatever controller with just as many "disks" as arrays, and the better quality ones are entirely driverless too. You can spot hardware RAID solutions by their having a much wider range of OS support, and by wide I mean that it can range from anything like MS-DOS to the most hardcore server-only Unix or Sun OS.

Recovering data from a disk used in one of those cards (in redundant configurations like RAID 1) is actually easier than with those nasty VIA, Intel and JMicron ones, because they make an actual clone of the disk, and not some proprietary encoded nastiness.

Granted, such cards cost over $500 and are overkill for desktop use (unless you're Stallman or something and you absolutely can't stand software-based, close source, OS-bound anything)

Antec EarthWatts (as well as their NeoPower and TruePower series) are great PSUs, they'll easily perform up to 100W over their rated spec and stay cool as a cucumber. You don't need 650W to power that, it'll be drawing 400W max.

The TruePower series have a 120mm fan, which could potentially be quieter than the 80mm in the EarthWatts and NeoPower. But if you're running stock heatsink/fan then you're not worried about noise anyway. If you want a quiet cooler, Thermaltake Big Typhoon or Noctua U12P are among the best, they are pretty huge tho.

I think nVidia cards suck but that's just me. A 2Gb HD4870 with beat a 1Gb GTS250 and GTS260 in 3DMark and probably cost the same or slightly cheaper.

Those Western Digital Green Powers are good gear, I have two of them and they benchmark faster than my old Seagate 500Gb 7200rpm drive. A newer model Seagate 1Tb would be marginally faster, but probably not very noticeable.

Like Maes said, hardware RAID is the only way to go. But you don't want software RAID so that's fine.

DDR2 is less latent so it performs well at lower speeds, but DDR3 has higher transfer rate which overcomes its' larger latency at higher speeds. If your CPU runs at 800MHz bus speed or above, DDR3 is the way to go. Any slower then DDR2 is still your friend.

There's a lot of things that I need to correct in your shopping list, starting with the processor itself. After the release of the i5, AMD Phenom II X4s are no longer the biggest bang for your buck.

Read This and reconsider your CPU/Mobo purchase.

Before you go out and spend ~$150 on that GTS250: don't do it!

It's a shitty 3-gen old rebranded card, don't drink the Nvidia kool aid, they are a bunch cocksuckers for fooling the normal consumer in this manner.

If you're going bang for the buck, walk past the Nvidia cards, they are overpriced and overpriced. 3D marks means nothing, it is proven through real gaming benchmark time and again that 3D marks is not relevant to real gaming performance.

NOTE: 3D Marks also is heavily biased in favor of Nvidia cards since they feature PhysX, a middleware not popular for gaming that often increases PhysX-featuring cards by 2,000-10,000 points.

I also recently upgraded my PC, and did months of research into every single component beforehand. For $144 shipped you can get the Radeon 4870 which is many fold more powerful than the card on your list.

There's a lot of things to be said about computer component purchase and I don't want to overwhelm you with info. The important thing to remember is to do SERIOUS RESEARCH before you go out and buy stuff; computer components are a considerable investment in your money and you don't want to be paying a few extra hundred bucks that would have otherwise gotten ya better parts.

http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/high_end_gpus.html

Extremely well said.

Thanks for your advice, everyone! I've just put in the order. Everything should be arriving in a few days.

Wish me luck!

The funny thing about video cards nowadays, is that it's hard to find something in the low/medium range that will actually outperform older mid/high range cards where it matters.

Point in case, my trusty Ati Radeon 9600 XT (AGP). I briefly considered changing it for a better late AGP card, but benchmarks suggest that the "new" Ati 3xx0, 4xx0 cards, at least in the -200 and -400 series, wouldn't be able to beat it at DirectX 8.0 and 9.0 benchmarks (3DMark03): for one, they are stuck with a 64-bit memory bus, while frequencies aren't that hot either (9600 has 128-bit). GTexels/sec and GPixels/sec are also identical, so apart from maybe a bit better support for some later DirectX 9.0 effects, I'd probably downgrade.
"Unified shaders" my ass.

The sad thing is that most AGP cards today are either low-end Ati 32xx or 34xx affairs, or even worse nVidia 6200 shit. An oldschool AGP 6600 would be super-cool, but good luck finding one of those new.

I have a 3850 AGP, it does OK :P

Super Jamie said:

I have a 3850 AGP, it does OK :P

Yeah, any -600 or -800 series card within two successive generations is another matter altogether, but the -200 and -400 ones may be 2-4 generations behind, performance wise. Sadly, my choices are much more limited, or I erroneously though that you could get an older's generation -600 or -800 class card with around Eur/$ 50. For that amount of money however, you only get 6200 and 3450 shit.

Well...there's that 3650-class card, but the power requirements are wtf. The sad thing is that ATI cards, even top of the line ones, are not CUDA enabled so you can't get any PhysX acceleration out of them, which is exactly what I'd need...and there aren't any nVidia 8xxx series cards in AGP, either :-(

DoomCup said:

Thanks for your advice, everyone! I've just put in the order. Everything should be arriving in a few days.

Wish me luck!

What did you buy?