Pretend you have $$$...

[Hoax]

So my dad wants an all-new computer because my old one is finally showing its age after 6yrs of constant use (really it hasn't even been formatted in the last 3-4).  Now I quickly stopped him from buying anything pre-built but I didn't realize how much the landscape has changed in the last few years.  I just dont have time to wrap my mind around everything that is going on in the world of hardware.  He has decided he must order the computer sometime next week.

Money is of little object, he wants something that he can show off and will work perfectly for as long as he needs a computer.  He doesn't run games but he does want to get into doing some movie/picture editing and has been talking about getting a rig that could handle those tasks for awhile.

So here is my basic premise after about 5 hours of trying to read up on 3 years of hardware advancement...   

CPU:  Literally I'm not sure what is going on with Intel's new stuff, I dont want to waste the time to figure it out.  As cpu's are always confusing.  Seems like Intel is back to being the way to go, which is nice as I've still always used them even back when AMD was way better on the $$-results scale.

But do I go with the Core 2 duo e6400 or the Xenon 5050?  I mean wtf is going on, the prices are similar enough per pricewatch to seem irrelevant...

Mobo:  I always figure out the mobo last, when I know exactly what I need to fit in it.  Suggestions are welcome.

RAM:  I love spending money on ram, nothing is more satisfying in my opinion.  DDR-2 is a given, according to some reading I'm thinking top-brand PC2-8000 but I could be talked into something else easily.  Some [H]ardOCP searching should answer this one for me...

Video Card:  GeForce 7900GT the next step didn't seem worth it, BUT!!  I have little to no grasp on what system resources video editing stresses, typically I've found paying bleeding edge prices for video cards is stupid.  The three rigs I've built in my life, all responded more to dumping cash into RAM/CPU.  This is why I've ignored SLI, as it pains me to give him SLI when he does no gaming.  Again, if anyone who has worked on videos on their computer can chime in, that'd kickass.

Hard Drives:  I can't believe that this has its own section but here goes:  I'm looking at a 36GB 15,000rpm Maxtor Atlas II to run the OS.  That was not too hard but here comes the tricky part.

I need him to have a very reliable storage backup, way back when I was last doing this, RAID setups were starting to become more and more talked about.  But back then the jury seemed out where I was reading.  Anyways, I need something that can backup very important data, and be trusted.  So I will take all the suggestions I can get on this front, I have never had this type of need for my rigs so this is totally alien territory for me.

Again money is not a big concern, but really he doesn't need that much power imo.  I'm not sure if he'll ever even do the video editing.  This may be more of an e-peen contest between him and one of his buddies then anything.  So top-shelf but not $30 bucks a shot stuff. 

Thanks in advance to anyone who can help, wish I had more warning to do more of the work myself I feel really clueless right now (more then usual!).

[Bunk]

Well, if he's going to be video editting and you have your sights on a 36GB highspeed drive for the OS, then I assume you plan a seperate much bigger drive for data. My photos alone take up around 80GB of space.

The 7900GT is probably more than enough card in my opinion. The only real reason to go bigger is when you get in to heavy CAD or Modeling, in which case you'd want a workstation card instead, which start around $1200, so yea - stick with the 7900.

RAM - 2 Gigs minimum. I've never really known if the high performance stuff makes any difference.

CPU - probably no real reason to go Xenon.

Backup - lots of options here. Raid 5, disk mirroring, external drive, or plain old DVD backups. I wouldn't personally bother with Tape anymore, since you can dump 8GB on a dvd. Figure out how much data you need to backup, how regularly you need to do it, and remember - if you go RAID, your hdd requirements change a lot.

[schild]

Honestly? I'd buy a Dell XPS. Their high end models are super super nice.

[Yegolev]

I agree.  If you are going to let someone suck money out of you like that, might as well sit on the Dell pipe.  Warranty and such, too.

[Hoax]

a)  I want to build something, its been awhile and I have no money to do anything to my machine right now.

b)  I hate buying pre-built stuff (some kind of gamer pride going on)

c)  My mother, despite my outrage, bought my half-brother and herself a "top-of-the-line"   Alienware from Dell.  When it got to her, there was a power cable sitting loose inside the case (wtf) and beyond that the machine did not actually work (seemed like mobo problems).  Oh and they didn't give her some quiet fans she paid extra for.  So fuck that, I've never bought pre-built and I'm not going to start now.



@Bunk:  Yeah of course there will be additional data storage, I run a 34gig for my OS (only 10,000rpm sigh) with another 160gigs internal for music/anime I'm watching and a 400gig external drive as well.  But I have no clue as to data backup solutions.  I'll ask him today what exactly he needs on that front.  My understanding is he is concerned because he keeps client database, payment info, accounting software info and legal docs on the computer.  Loosing that would be devestating etc.

Thanks for the replies guys.

[sinij]

If he is not heavily into games following would be an OK setup:

Intel Core 2 Duo 2.4 GHz tops
Any Asus dual-channel DDR2, PCIe x16 slot (don't bother about SLI or such, you need only 1 slot) with build-in raid
4 GIGs of DDR2 (2 pairs of matched 1 gig) DUAL CHANNEL PC-6400 should be enough but faster is better
GeForce 7900 GS tops, 7600 probably good enough.

Now here is kicker, something to wow your dad:
2x Western Digital Raptor SATA (WD1500ADFD) 150GB 10,000 RPM hard drives RAID 0

Raptors are freaking fast hard drives for non-SCSI, load times will be significantly reduced for any application. I have this set-up (only with 2 74G) and it is real boon for any non-gaming application.

[Yegolev]

Short and quick.

Intel CoreDuo.  Pick the fast one, I guess.
Matching mobo.  ASUS is good. PCI-E, make sure it takes 8GB RAM.  Don't get the one with integrated GFX.
HD is good.  Get another large SATA other than the boot one.  You'll have six SATA ports, go nuts.  I hear there's a 700GB jobber out there.
I like the GeForce 7 series but if I was Monty Burns I guess I'd get one of the 8 series.
Sound card, I guess get the one that costs the most and/or has the most holes in the back.
Zalman HSF.  Thermal paste too.
I like Crucial RAM, never broken on me.  Get the 1GB sticks, how many up to you.  I'd say four, at least.
Might want to get a LARGE power unit.

[sinij]

Sound card, I guess get the one that costs the most and/or has the most holes in the back.

With optical out. Built-in sound cards are garbage. I assume your dad already has sound system to hook up to his new PC., if not forget PC and get him good set of 5.1 (7.1 is excess IMO) energy speakers and beefy receiver.

[Krakrok]

Video uses CPU, RAM, and HD speed+space. The video card does nothing except maybe speed up playback and reduce artifacts in DVD playback. You can buy seperate encoder cards as well. CPU determines how fast you can transcode video. Depending on the transcoder a second core/cpu may not be used. RAM lets you buffer more video while transcoding (I assume). HD speed lets you read and write the transcoded video faster. Also transcoding from HD A to HD B is faster then from HD A to HD A. Uncompressed video is HUGE (30MB? per second @ 720x480). I have an 180 gig drive full of only ~100 minutes of video in various different formats and sizes. I got 80 gigs back by deleting half of the uncompressed video. Any compressed video is pretty small though.

[Furiously]

Now here is kicker, something to wow your dad:
2x Western Digital Raptor SATA (WD1500ADFD) 150GB 10,000 RPM hard drives RAID 0

I'm not sure raid 0 would make much sense if data integrity is his big concern.

[Bunk]

Raid 0... damn, my MCSE memory is fading - is that mirroring or the other thing? Mirroring is a nice simple redundency solution, but I'm assuming you'd take a performance hit.

Raid 5 is always a wow factor, but it doesn't do much for you if someone steals the whole PC. Personally, were I backing up vital data on a regular basis I'd just be using dvds on a regular schedule. Possibly if I had money to burn I'd use hotswappable drives on a rotation. :)

A few of the guys here know plenty more than I do, since I've been out of IT for over 5 years, but I like talking about this stuff anyways.

[stray]

Raid 0 is striped.

I don't have 10,000 rpm, but pretty good nonetheless.

[Hoax]

Awesome awesome, I'm seeing some consensus here, I'll be back tomorrow at the latest with a list of specific parts.  Gotta do some mobo research...

Raid 0 offers no additional protection, it is basically just a speed/performance increase for gamer/modders which some points of authority debated the validity of back in the day.

I'll talk to him about what he "wants" in terms of backup integrity and post back.

@Krakrok:  Ok good, sounds like I may bring the Geforce down another level even then.  If the cash savings seem good.  I'm thinking I'll want to put 300gigs of internal storage if not more, will depend on where the price-jump happens.  Thanks for that info.

I was thinking of this for sound:  http://www.audiomidi.com/Revolution-7-1-P3409.aspx  because he subscribes to stereophile and at $100 it didn't seem like a big deal.

@Yeg:  I'm with you on Crucial, that and Corsair have always been my favorite.  But anandtech and hardocp people were bringing up all sorts of other brands I've never heard of, I'll figure something out.  I'm also totally with you when it comes to Zalman, I love the giant copper flower of theirs I put on my current rig's cpu.

Anyone have opinions about who makes good power supplies?  I'm thinking 600W might not actually be a retarded thing for this computer and I've never bought one that big but its come to my attention that I should take power supply purchases more seriously then I have in the past.  They've been the first thing to fail on my older machines twice.

[Bunk]

Antec is a currently popular choice for cases and power supplies.

[Trippy]

If he's serious about the editing you are going to want dual monitors so get a video card that has dual DVI, preferably. You'll also want some sort of TV output. If he plans on editing HDV at some point you will need a RAID 0 setup so plan on maybe three internal drives (system drive with apps, no RAID, two RAID 0 drives for editing) plus multiple external drives (eSATA would be fastest) for near term archiving/backup and Blu-ray or dual layer DVD-+RW for long time archiving. You'll also need a Firewire port, preferrably Fireware 800.

[Strazos]

Lian-Li makes some sexy cases.

[Trippy]

CPU:  Literally I'm not sure what is going on with Intel's new stuff, I dont want to waste the time to figure it out.  As cpu's are always confusing.  Seems like Intel is back to being the way to go, which is nice as I've still always used them even back when AMD was way better on the $$-results scale.

But do I go with the Core 2 duo e6400 or the Xenon 5050?  I mean wtf is going on, the prices are similar enough per pricewatch to seem irrelevant...

You don't want a 50XX Xeon -- that's a P4 core. If you want a server CPU you'll want a 51XX Xeon -- those are Core2 cores. The 51XX Xeons are useful you if just can't get enough CPU cores and need to be able to stick multiple physical CPUs in a single motherboard. Otherwise, don't bother.

Video Card:  GeForce 7900GT the next step didn't seem worth it, BUT!!  I have little to no grasp on what system resources video editing stresses, typically I've found paying bleeding edge prices for video cards is stupid.  The three rigs I've built in my life, all responded more to dumping cash into RAM/CPU.  This is why I've ignored SLI, as it pains me to give him SLI when he does no gaming.  Again, if anyone who has worked on videos on their computer can chime in, that'd kickass.

Good editing programs do take advantage good GPUs to accelerate some of the video playback but anything that isn't complete trash from NVIDIA and ATI will work fine. If you've used a software DVD player it's like the "use hardware acceleration" checkbox to lower the the CPU usage during video playback. A bigger question is whether or not you want to cough up the extra bucks for a DX 10 card.

Hard Drives:  I can't believe that this has its own section but here goes:  I'm looking at a 36GB 15,000rpm Maxtor Atlas II to run the OS.  That was not too hard but here comes the tricky part.

I need him to have a very reliable storage backup, way back when I was last doing this, RAID setups were starting to become more and more talked about.  But back then the jury seemed out where I was reading.  Anyways, I need something that can backup very important data, and be trusted.  So I will take all the suggestions I can get on this front, I have never had this type of need for my rigs so this is totally alien territory for me.

I talked about this in my previous reply but as you can tell from the other replies there are lots of options here. Krakrok suggestion about transcoding from one drive to another is an interesting one except that transcoding is CPU bound so if it was a choice between two drives in RAID 0 or two separate drives to facilitate transcoding I would still go with the RAID 0 setup. Now if you wanted to have 4 or 5 internal drives, that's a different story :D.

For backups optical media is fine -- I trust them more than magnetic tapes -- and you can spring for the "long life" types if you are worried the dyes might fade or otherwise get damaged over time. The best strategy if you are really paranoid is to use multiple backup formats including hard copy output (on archival quality paper).

Edit:

Anyone have opinions about who makes good power supplies?  I'm thinking 600W might not actually be a retarded thing for this computer and I've never bought one that big but its come to my attention that I should take power supply purchases more seriously then I have in the past.  They've been the first thing to fail on my older machines twice.

It used to be there were only a handful of really good power supply makers but now everybody and their uncles (including memory manufacturers for gosh sakes) are jumping into the "high end" power supply marketplace. My preference is still SeaSonic though Enermax makes good ones as does Antec with their higher end models.

[Torinak]

RAM - 2 Gigs minimum. I've never really known if the high performance stuff makes any difference.

For the Core 2 Duos, higher-speed RAM doesn't do much.  There are a few experiments that showed a 1-5% performance improvement going from dog-slow to bleeding-fast RAM.  I just built a few E6600-based systems and swapped out RAM in one from PC2-4200 to PC2-6400 (5-5-5-12 for both) and saw about 2% performance improvement.  (of course, benchmarking is a very black art, so there are benchmarks that will show a much nicer boost, but that's rarely reflected in real-world apps)

One thing to watch out for are overly-picky motherboards, especially if higher-end RAM is desired.  Lots of the higher-end RAM seems to run at 2.2v, while a fair number of motherboards will only support 1.8-1.9v, or worse yet, will only be stable with 1.8-1.9v RAM.

CPU - probably no real reason to go Xenon.

The Core 2 Duo E6600 seems to be at the sweet spot for price/performance right now, but the $1K-ish "Extreme" versions may be appropriate if money isn't an object and it's an e-peen thing.  Performance gains from the "Extreme" version are fairly small.  There's always the excessive-overclocking route, as well, if spiffy cooling systems are desirable.  Apparently most of the Core 2 Duos are very OC-friendly if one has the right motherboard and RAM.  Quad-core might be an option if they're available yet, but it's probably massive overkill and there may be operating system license issues.

Hoax, what operating system will the system have?  If it's a 32-bit OS, then 2 GB of RAM is probably appropriate--32-bit XP won't see more than 2.5 GB (I hear), for example.  For Vista (ugh), 2 GB is really the minimum, which will give you around 1.4 GB for apps after it boots, and 4 GB is probably more appropriate.  Plus, with Vista, you'll get help your dad experience the many joys of aggressive DRM, especially if he's going to try to do video editing.

For disks, 750 GB SATA II (or UATA-133) drives are readily available for ~$350 or less.  1 TB drives will be out by the end of Q1 2007, supposedly (but note that's 1 billion bytes, not 2³⁰ bytes).  Most Core 2 Duo-supporting motherboards will have 6-10 SATA ports, plus 1 UATA 33/66/100/133 port for the optical drive(s).

[Trippy]

Hoax, what operating system will the system have?  If it's a 32-bit OS, then 2 GB of RAM is probably appropriate--32-bit XP won't see more than 2.5 GB (I hear), for example.  For Vista (ugh), 2 GB is really the minimum, which will give you around 1.4 GB for apps after it boots, and 4 GB is probably more appropriate.  Plus, with Vista, you'll get help your dad experience the many joys of aggressive DRM, especially if he's going to try to do video editing.

32-bit XP will see 4 GB of RAM (2 ^ 32 = 4 GB) but some apps may only be able to use up to 2 GB, I believe.

[Samwise]

If you have 4G of RAM on Win32, you get 2GB for applications and 2GB for the system.  There's a switch you can flip to let an app use 3GB, but I've had bad experiences with it.

[Torinak]

If you have 4G of RAM on Win32, you get 2GB for applications and 2GB for the system.  There's a switch you can flip to let an app use 3GB, but I've had bad experiences with it.

Ah, I wasn't aware of that switch (the /3GB for boot.ini?); I'd just run across a lot of people complaining about the "2 GB limit" for 32-bit Windows and never dug deeply enough to determine that it was 2 GB per process and not for the system as a whole. Looking at http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/memory/base/memory_limits_for_windows_releases.asp seems to show more variety in memory limits than I was aware of.  Does anyone here run with >2 GB in a 32-bit version of Windows?  Does one end up being able to make good use of the extra memory?

[Morfiend]

Get a C2D chip. e6400 or e6600, price for performance cannot be beat right now. Also, stay away from any 680i motherboard, they are having some serious problems. Some thing like 30% are having to be RMA'd.

In less he is hardcore the 10,000rpm drive is a waste of money, get him a huge SATA2 (or SATA 3.0gb as they are sometimes called) drive for much much less cash.

[Lanei]

If you have 4G of RAM on Win32, you get 2GB for applications and 2GB for the system.  There's a switch you can flip to let an app use 3GB, but I've had bad experiences with it.

Ah, I wasn't aware of that switch (the /3GB for boot.ini?); I'd just run across a lot of people complaining about the "2 GB limit" for 32-bit Windows and never dug deeply enough to determine that it was 2 GB per process and not for the system as a whole. Looking at http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/memory/base/memory_limits_for_windows_releases.asp seems to show more variety in memory limits than I was aware of.  Does anyone here run with >2 GB in a 32-bit version of Windows?  Does one end up being able to make good use of the extra memory?

I ran WinXP (32 bit) when I built this system for a short while.  I primarily switched to XP64 because as far as I could tell, nothing could see more than 2GB, and I often ran into the need to enable a swap file.  Since switchign to XP64, I've not once had the system complain that it needed any swap.  Theres still a couple thigns that don't run, mostly games that are badly programmed, compatibility mode often fixes them.

[sinij]

Now here is kicker, something to wow your dad:
2x Western Digital Raptor SATA (WD1500ADFD) 150GB 10,000 RPM hard drives RAID 0

I'm not sure raid 0 would make much sense if data integrity is his big concern.

Outside of enterprise simple backup is plenty for insuring data integrity.

[sinij]

Antec is a currently popular choice for cases and power supplies.

Get a case with 400W Antec power supply in it.

[Bstaz]

You don't want a 50XX Xeon -- that's a P4 core. If you want a server CPU you'll want a 51XX Xeon -- those are Core2 cores. The 51XX Xeons are useful you if just can't get enough CPU cores and need to be able to stick multiple physical CPUs in a single motherboard. Otherwise, don't bother.

Wait about 30 to 60 more days and get the 53XX line for Quad cores.  The only real difference between the Xeon line and the Consumer line is that the Xeons can have more then one physical cpu socketed into the motherboard and the chipsets usually have raid / ecc memory built in.  If your Dad wants to do a video editing and video editing fast,  a pair of 53XXs  with 2-4GB ram and a pair of 10K or 15K raid drives is going to be something well worth showing off.  But you are probably approaching a $5K price tag.

Hard Drives:  I can't believe that this has its own section but here goes:  I'm looking at a 36GB 15,000rpm Maxtor Atlas II to run the OS.  That was not too hard but here comes the tricky part.

If you are putting in 4GB of ram you probably don't need 15K drives, they will help a bit but you will be hard pressed to push 4GB of ram in most uses today. Even video editing.  The trick in the older days is you want different disk channels and have the OS / apps on one,  data on one, and swap on one.. but with 4GB ram while windows always swaps, you may want to disable your swapfile.

RAM:  I love spending money on ram, nothing is more satisfying in my opinion.  DDR-2 is a given, according to some reading I'm thinking top-brand PC2-8000 but I could be talked into something else easily.  Some [H]ardOCP searching should answer this one for me...

Ram is not where you want to be putting money unless you are going to be over clocking the system. There is zero need to buy faster Ram then the cpu / bus needs.  Get the middle of the road to cheap ram.  You are better off with 4GB of spec'd speed ram then you are with 2GB of primo over speed rated ram.

CPU:  Literally I'm not sure what is going on with Intel's new stuff

.

if Video editing is the thing,  get the Quad core extreme from Intel.  Nothing can touch it today. Otherwise if money is an issue get the 2.6Ghz Core 2 Duo.

[Trippy]

Hard Drives:  I can't believe that this has its own section but here goes:  I'm looking at a 36GB 15,000rpm Maxtor Atlas II to run the OS.  That was not too hard but here comes the tricky part.

If you are putting in 4GB of ram you probably don't need 15K drives, they will help a bit but you will be hard pressed to push 4GB of ram in most uses today. Even video editing.  The trick in the older days is you want different disk channels and have the OS / apps on one,  data on one, and swap on one.. but with 4GB ram while windows always swaps, you may want to disable your swapfile.

15K drives are useful for video editing, especially if you want to edit HD video but putting far cheaper 7.2K drives in a RAID 0 config is a much better way given how much room you'll need to do HD editing. Plus there's the extra cost for a SCSI controller.

RAM:  I love spending money on ram, nothing is more satisfying in my opinion.  DDR-2 is a given, according to some reading I'm thinking top-brand PC2-8000 but I could be talked into something else easily.  Some [H]ardOCP searching should answer this one for me...

Ram is not where you want to be putting money unless you are going to be over clocking the system. There is zero need to buy faster Ram then the cpu / bus needs.  Get the middle of the road to cheap ram.  You are better off with 4GB of spec'd speed ram then you are with 2GB of primo over speed rated ram.

PC2-8000 is not all that interesting. PC2-8500, however, means that you can run your memory bus in sync with your CPU which is intriguing. In the normal configuration the CPU runs at 1067 MHz while the memory runs at 800 MHz. With PC2-8500 they both run in sync at 1067 MHz. However the benchmarks only show a small performance improvement (~5%) and the cost is quite a bit more.

CPU:  Literally I'm not sure what is going on with Intel's new stuff

if Video editing is the thing,  get the Quad core extreme from Intel.  Nothing can touch it today. Otherwise if money is an issue get the 2.6Ghz Core 2 Duo.

That's only if the programs his dad will be using will be able to take advantage of all four cores.

[sinij]

Overkill in all departments, its wasting money on performance that will never be used.

[Engels]

Just curious about motherboards; with Core 2 Duo motherboards, how can you tell if the voltages on the memory slots are going to work with PC 8000 or PC 8500. On New Egg, the ram has voltage ranges listed, but not on their motherboards. Even the Asus site doesn't list this as a spec on their motherboards.

[Trippy]

Just curious about motherboards; with Core 2 Duo motherboards, how can you tell if the voltages on the memory slots are going to work with PC 8000 or PC 8500. On New Egg, the ram has voltage ranges listed, but not on their motherboards. Even the Asus site doesn't list this as a spec on their motherboards.

Download the motherboard manuals and check in there.

[Bunk]

I've learned a few things in this thread. Neato.

I will say though, looking back at the orignal posts, I get the feeling his dad is looking to do more ameteur level video editing than some of what we are getting in to here. Splicing and fancying up home movies, that sort of thing. Plus he mentioned photo editing, which means that if he doesn't want to go the Arrgh! route, you need to set aside $1000+ for CS2.

[Engels]

Download the motherboard manuals and check in there.

Just went through the manual for the Asus P5N32-E SLI and the Intel Intel® Desktop Board D975XBX2, who I consider top competitors for the best Core2Duo boards, and I honestly cannot find a reference to memory voltage limitations. Perhaps its because the issue has been resolved for these two boards in particular. Here are the links

P5N32-E SLI
Intel® Desktop Board D975XBX2

[Trippy]

P5N32-E SLI

Page 4-23.

Intel® Desktop Board D975XBX2

That's not the manual, this is:

http://www.intel.com/support/motherboards/desktop/d975xbx2/sb/CS-023492.htm

However that thing is mostly useless as is typically the case for Intel motherboard manuals.

This one:

http://www.intel.com/support/motherboards/desktop/sb/cs-020304.htm

Is slightly more useful but it's generic for all their desktop motherboards. However it implies that at least for some of them you can manually set the voltage to 1.8 or 1.9.

[Torinak]

As I recently learned, many of the Intel motherboards are very picky about memory voltage; the original set only took 1.8v, but some were upgraded in mid-November to take 1.8v or 1.9v.

According to http://forums.legitreviews.com/about6572.html (as a random message board hit), that specific motherboard does support a broad range of memory voltages, for what it's worth.  http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/mainboards/display/20061129064932.html says that the D975XBX2 is Intel's "enthusiast" motherboard which supports overclocking the CPU as well as a broad range of memory voltages (1.8v-2.8v!).

[Morfiend]

I just ordered that Intel board, the Bad Axe2. It is getting very good user reviews at all the major tech forums. Its being called one of the most stable boards out, and it OCs pretty damn good from what I hear.