Planky
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After many years of using laptops, I've started thinking of building a PC. I use to build PCs frequently and was up with the hardware back then. Over time I got sick of lugging large PCs/Monitors around and built a small PC (mATX, Mini Case), and a while after I switched to a laptop and didnt look back.
Why am I looking to build a PC again? I would like more storage with redundancy than what external drives can provide. There are also certain Steam games I can't play due to my laptops hardware.
So this is what Im looking at the moment:
Western Digital Scorpio 320G SATA 7200RPM 16M notebook HDD
Kingmax 8G(2x4G)PC-10600 1333MHZ DDR3
Lian Li PC-T60B ATX/Micro Test Bench Black
AMD Athlon II X4 640 3.0Ghz AM3 95W
Gigabyte GA-870A-UD3 AMD SB785 4xDDR3 8CH Audio GLAN SATA3 RAID USB3,0
Thermaltake TR2 470W PSU
eVGA GTX550 OC 550TI DDR5 1G HDMI
Viewsonic VX2453MH 23.6"W LED 2ms DSUB SPK HDMI
You may ask why the notebook harddrive. The reason is the case I intend on getting. This will run the OS and leave me three bays for 3x2TB harddrives running RAID 5.
Of course RAID is not a backup, so will be looking to use my external drive for that and setting the drives up in a way so I can separate the important-must-backup data and stuff I can replace/redownload/etc.
The GFX card I'm not sure on - as I mentioned I stopped custom building a fair while ago and no longer up with recent developments. As far as I can tell, it will be more than up to the task of running what I want. I'm not concerned about running everything at max, but would like to play with an HD TV from time to time at the native resolution...
Any thoughts?- Show previous comments 33 more
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The problems I had with ATI where the drivers failing to recognise the GFX card (preventing installation) and problems with CCC not allowing me to set up dual monitors properly/crashing/etc. That said, I think each of the problems I encountered were due to the cards being embedded or unique to the manufacturer, who customise said hardware and have to produce their own driver - ones that are not supported by ATIs 'generic' drivers. I've had similar problems with Nvidia, but not as frustrating. If I were to get a decent ATI card I'd likely not have any problems.
On another note, I've installed the 3TB harddrives and configured in an RAID 5 array. I cloned the content of the laptop harddrive to a 1TB harddrive (was originally in an external enclosure) so thats now my primary drive. Unfortunately there has been no improvement in performance (Windows 7 rates at 5.9). Not sure what to do now. Edit: Likely nothing as it seems 5.9 is a cap in that Windows benchmark. -
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