New build... Thanks!

[-ChEM-]

if you get the 1900xtx theres no way to upgrade without ditching it, with a 7900gtx you can just buy another one later... although it would probably need another psu

[nvening]

OK, the memory is now 2GB and the PPU has been ditched.

The retail HSF for the CPU is apparently quite good as well as there currently being nothing else for AM2, and im just finding out about the warrenty he is getting with it to make sure me changing the gpu HSF is ok, i think it is.

He chose the 24" over the 30" as the 30" is supposively harder to use, ie its just so huge.

And it is two raptors in RAID 0 and a 320Gb storage drive.

[Zak33]

And it is two raptors in RAID 0 and a 320Gb storage drive.

if you're deadly serious about getting it to run fast, then I'd suggest one Raptor and no RAID.

Why?

Because unless you're buying a separate RAID controller (which you don't seem to be), you'll find that one 150 Raptor in theory should be so damn fast he won't know what to do with the boot speed anyway

Raptors are famous for being fast because (from memory) they always use just two platters, and having 2 platters with 150 gig on, means that the information is stored in a more compact form on the platters,making it quicker to unload. Plus the 150gig model has 16mb cache.

Hold on...I'll find a detailed review

[Zak33]

ok....read it ALL...not just scan through it

http://www.storagereview.com/article...500ADFD_1.html

[Woodchuck2000]

I'd be tempted to suggest getting 4x400Gb hard drives and sticking them in a RAID 0+1 configuration for that kind of money - you get performance approaching that of a Raptor, one big chunk of storage, and redundany to boot - for probably less than the cost of a 750Gb drive and a Raptor...

I'd also tend to go for the 7900GTX, just because you get an SLi option down the line and mixing ATi and nVidia has never felt right to me (although that may be irrational prejudice!)

Also, speakers and sound card? I strongly recommend you buy an add-in sound card - on-board has come a long way but it's still not great...

And whatever you do about the RAM, make sure you get an even number of identical sticks for best compatibility - 2Gb is fine for now, but get either 2Gb or 4Gb, never 3.

[Woodchuck2000]

Oh, and go for Windows MCE - it's cheaper than Pro, has all the functionality (other than domain membership and certain administrative functions) and the media centre would be good on a 24" widescreen display!

[nvening]

Gah, these hard drives are doing my head in.

One raptor or two?

Oh and he wants to sort the sound card and speakers out himself, he does alot of sound recording apparently.

[5lab]

why not just get a absolute top-end dell? something like this http://configure.euro.dell.com/dells...c=dimen_xps600

can be configured to pretty-much the same performance level, but with full warentee etc.

[schmunk]

TBH, at this price level, I'd be tempted to wait the couple of months until Conroe is launched...

And if he does a lot of sound recording, £1-200 invested in low-noise coolers and fans would make a lot of difference (or possibly w/cooling, e.g. Zalman Reserator)

[nvening]

The PC does come with a full 2 year warrenty from an insurance company.

Would a proper RAID card make a difference to the speed in RAID 0 and how much does a good one cost?

Price isnt really an issue but i convinced him not to waste money on the fx62 as its a rip off.

Also he does not do much audio recording, its just that he has an external sound card and stuff he wants to use.

[nvening]

I asked him about the seperate raid cards and he said "ye, get one of those bad boys"

http://www.xfxforce.com/web/product/...rationId=20320

thats a good one ye?

EDIT: Im not really sure what preformance boost this would give me over a) on board b) one drive?

[-ChEM-]

DONT BUY THAT ITS CRAP, if you get that you will be putting everything on the pci bus with 133MB/s max transfer rate... thats already low but with a physics controller or something on there too youll have a crippled system

if you had a server board you would have a pci-e x8 slot for a controller and also 64bit pci slots for something like that xfx card to work at a decent rate... the reason they dont have the right slots on desktop board is that theyre pointless to the user, the only exception being the sound-recording thing which as its not the top priority will be more than catered for with non-raid raptors

either use the nf5 raid controller (afaik they are quite good with 2x 3-port controllers) or get a pci-e x1 controller card... the other option is x4 or x8 pci-e raid cards but there wont be any room for them except in the x16 gpu slot so no sli/xfire later which is a waste of a good feature

they both wont be great in terms of cpu usage etc so its really just a question of how many sata ports you need, if 6 from the mobo is enough dont bother or wait til later

when you have a raid you will increase access times and make reading small files slower which isnt good for any system, the bonus of it is that you will can read big chunks faster with striping which makes sense for video editting (maybe in his case with the sound editting) but i dont think it will be worth it here as it will slow things down for small files and take up cpu time... neither of those matter too much (10k drive access are low enough to still be fast when in raid and the dual core cpu will handle the load) so if there will be a lot of large files being processed then consider it but... nah

but i would consider getting 2 raptors and just run them together with one handling the OS and one handling temp/swapfiles/program installations, as he'll be doing sound processing stuff the extra space will probably be needed too for uncompressed audio

you can run both drives together, one reads system drive, one reads programs or writes to swapfiles... that gives you a boost in performance without the slowdowns of raid and you have a bigger space to put stuff that you are working on (i.e sound files)... if you do this, partition off the first 10gb of the first drive for the OS and use the rest for processing files and you will get the lowest access times for the OS, then youve got a nice clean 130gb or so of nice fast hdd space that will be plenty for sound recording and editting

while youre at it you may aswell spend the money on an extra 400gb drive, that makes 2x150gb + 2x400gb which puts you over the penile-unit-comparing 1 terabyte mark and means he wont need more space for next gen optical stuff like blu-ray

and if youre buying from scan id recommend the silverstone st60f psu for not much more, its as solid as pcp&c parts and can take 2 7900gtx cards in SLI (they need to be on separate rails so read the manual first) which may be what he wants next, and it should cost a lot more than it does on scan right now (look at foreign prices)

[nvening]

Silverstone PSUs are quite noisey but stable i agree, but a tagan pwns the them (all be it the non modular version) Im quite happy with the PSU

Ok ill have no raid (you finally won me over lol).

So i have programs on one and windows on the other but what about the pagefile, on which one?

Ok i have talked to him and now he wants two 7900GTXs in SLI and to forget about the raid, do you think i should up the psu to play it safe or what?

EDIT: i think ill get a 600w seasonic as now i think about it ill be using most of the cables anyway which kinda removes the point of the modular feature anyway!!

[-ChEM-]

i take it youre going for a quiet build then... be warned those nf5 boards take a fair bit more power than nf4s so id still double check everything will be comfortable, with a 2-rail psu youll be putting everything heavy on the 2nd rail and just a stock AM2 on rail 1... so twist the pots if the psu has them

i'd strip everything you can from the OS drive and put it on the second, there will always be OS access but not always access from the 2nd drive so thats the place to dump it, keep the 1st partition small on the OS drive and you'll reduce the access times a bit as long as theres nothing else that needs to be accessed further out (hence its good to use that space for editting and leave it for normal use)

[nvening]

So create a small OS partition so it uses just that section for the OS and thus the lowering seek time. Then put the programs on the other disk so when a program needs to be accessed thats seperate from what the OS is doing. And put the page file on the programs drive as the OS is always being used but the programs are not so it would improve the speed of the page file, and im guessing its best to have a seperate partition for the page file to improve seek time? And for the left over space on the OS drive and programs drive just put normal data on there if needed, ill set my documents as the 320Gb drive so it will simply be for data.

What do you mean twist the pots? Do u mean combine the rails if it gives the option, im sure the 600w seasonic can easily take the load. Also for SLI you are meant to have ]dual rails anyway right?

[-ChEM-]

the partioning thing only works because youre effectively saying youre only going to use the first Xgb of the drive and never use the rest so that the heads are confined to the inner part... if the rest of the drive will just be used as a processing space thats true most of the time and youll get a bit of an increase in access... but on the other drive the heads will be going all over to access program files, swap file etc and as you shouldnt be short of ram, you wont need the swap file enough for it to be that important anyway

pots = potentiometers, on my elite silverstone st60f you can twist a pair of screws to change the relative ampage of rail1 and rail4... the reasoning i think is that rail3 is supposed to take both cards in SLI/Xfire but if theyre bigguns you can put one onto rail4 and up the ampage at the expense of rail1 (cpu) or vice versa if you want a big OC perhaps, it started with the pcp&c 510 so most should have them now