Questions on new system

[Saracen]

I'm spec'ing a new system and would appreciate your thoughts and advice.


The basic spec will be an E6600, probably on a Gigabyte DS3 (LN15070), 2GB of RAM, a couple of 320GB (-ish), drives, graphics card and PSU.

I want to be able to use the system for games, but I'm not a heavy gamer. I considered an 8800GTS card, but to be honest, it's probably overkill given that I'm not a heavy gamer. Other uses will include standard office stuff, web browsing, photo editing (that one is important), web development, but nothing else terribly demanding.

So, the questions :-

1) Given the above, what level of graphics card would you suggest, and are there particularly well-regarded models of that type?

2) Given the above spec, and graphics card, what spec of PSu do I need? I want something good build quality, steady voltages and with some headroom if I add drives, more RAM, etc. I'm not looking for the cheapest PSU, and £10 or £20 either way I don't care about, but I don't want to pay silly money unnecessarily.

3) What spec of memory? I want good quality and am prepared to pay a reasonable premium for it, but again, I don't want to grossly overspecify for the hell of it. I might overclock a bit, but to be honest, it's not a priority. I do want to extract the best legit performance from the E6600, but system stability is FAR more important than a bit of extra performance, so even running at rated speeds is fine is OC'ing would affect stabilty. Somewhere around £200 for 2GB is the top end I'd be prepared to go for.

I was looking at CorsairTwinX XMS2 Dominator,DDR2 PC2-6400 4-4-4-12 (LN16496), as and when it comes into stock.

4) Monitor suggestions. I'm looking for about 19", won't be watching TV on it so am not bothered about widescreen, but AM bothered about image quality and especially about dead pixels. It must be fast enough to support games with blurring, etc, and would consider 20", but image quality is FAR more important to me than the size. I'd pick a colour-accurate 19" over an inaccurate 20" every time.

5) Drive choice. I'm looking for decent performance, NCQ is mandatory and I decent warranty. I'm also looking for quiet drives. It's a general PC not a Home Theatre machine, so whisper quiet isn't mandatory, but I don't want to be constantly conscious of them ..... especially as adding a couple more for RAID 5 is a distinct possibility in the near future. Seagate drives are my current thinking.



Overall, I'm not looking for the fastest machine, but I do look for value for money in the performance stakes. I won't spend extra for performance gains that can only be detected in benchmarks, but I don't want to hold back real world performance for the sake of, for instance, saving £20 (or even £50) on memory. I'm content to pay a little more for quality and performance provided it's detectable, real-world performance, not just a benchmark gain.

All costs I've mentioned here are ex-VAT prices.

Comments, suggestions and advice gratefully received.

Thanks.




EDIT .... It's going in an existing CoolerMaster Ally case, and I have keyboard, mouse, DVD drives, soundcard, etc, already.

[iamtheoneneo]

1) for £130 you can get a asus eax1950 pro or £196 will buy you a radeon x1950xt turbo both amazing cards - if your not playing games just get the cheaper one , it will run apps fine.

2) psus are always tricky , expect to pay over £50 for a decent one and always check the rails, hyperpower type-r's are very popular at the mo and resonably priced, obviously ocz are always a good choice aswell.

3)memory stated seemes fine

4) dunno - arent really into monitors

5) seagate , seagate, seagate - 320gb pick a NCQ (16mb cache , 8.5 seek time) one up for under £64

[Fabula]

1. If you are not particularly into gaming, a 7600GT is a good choice. Further up the scale is the 1950pro or XT. You can get a passivley cooled 7600GT at the moment, and I think passively cooled 1950s are becoming available soon.

2. If you are not putting in a beast of a GPU, then something around 500W should leave plenty headroom. Hiper look, good but any at around ~£50-60 should be very reliable.

3. If you are happy to pay £200 for memory, then the dominator should be very good. But if not overclocking you'll get the same performance with cheaper memory.

4. Monitors have matured and you probably won't have any difficulties if you stick with a reputable name.

5. Seagate. Never had a problem and the current ones are very good. 320gig is the price/capacity point to go for at the moment.

[dave87]

1) Given the above, what level of graphics card would you suggest, and are there particularly well-regarded models of that type?

X1950XT(X) would be a good bet, otherwise perhaps an x1900xtx as they drop in price. ATi are usually seen to have a higher IQ in games, though I think Nvidia cards can with certain options ticked. If you are doing heavy photochopping a decent card would probably help matters

2) Given the above spec, and graphics card, what spec of PSu do I need? I want something good build quality, steady voltages and with some headroom if I add drives, more RAM, etc. I'm not looking for the cheapest PSU, and £10 or £20 either way I don't care about, but I don't want to pay silly money unnecessarily.

I'd always suggest the 500w Seasonic S12, but it seems the Corsair HX520 is cheaper, and still made by Seasonic. As someone else said, you pay for quality. I did have a Hiper TypeR (I blew mine up, rather than anything else) but they have been having build quality issues. If you are going to be spending decent money on components, the least you can do is get a decent powersupply - likely to make your rig more stable, and ultimately, last longer

3) What spec of memory? I want good quality and am prepared to pay a reasonable premium for it, but again, I don't want to grossly overspecify for the hell of it. I might overclock a bit, but to be honest, it's not a priority. I do want to extract the best legit performance from the E6600, but system stability is FAR more important than a bit of extra performance, so even running at rated speeds is fine is OC'ing would affect stabilty. Somewhere around £200 for 2GB is the top end I'd be prepared to go for.

I was looking at CorsairTwinX XMS2 Dominator,DDR2 PC2-6400 4-4-4-12 (LN16496), as and when it comes into stock.


Something like PC-6400 DDR2 should give you a nice OC headroom, without blowing the bank Corsair are reasonably good, so either the Value or XMS2 would make a good choice if you want to order entirely from Scan. Otherwise I've heard good things about Muskin's memory, which is available from other places in the UK. I wouldn't bother with the Dominator ram unless you want really tight timings or a very high overclock XMS2 would be plenty enough for a mild overclock, and reasonable timings

4) Monitor suggestions. I'm looking for about 19", won't be watching TV on it so am not bothered about widescreen, but AM bothered about image quality and especially about dead pixels. It must be fast enough to support games with blurring, etc, and would consider 20", but image quality is FAR more important to me than the size. I'd pick a colour-accurate 19" over an inaccurate 20" every time.

Not sure on your Budget here, but the 2007fpw is nice, otherwise an iiyama might be on the list. Samsung also seem to have a decent reputation, especially with the SM940.

5) Drive choice. I'm looking for decent performance, NCQ is mandatory and I decent warranty. I'm also looking for quiet drives. It's a general PC not a Home Theatre machine, so whisper quiet isn't mandatory, but I don't want to be constantly conscious of them ..... especially as adding a couple more for RAID 5 is a distinct possibility in the near future. Seagate drives are my current thinking.

Seagates are a good choice, the 7200.10 is one of the best drives in its class, though some people have been reporting noisy motors in the most recent drives, so YMMV. I've got a 7200.10 in an external caddy, runs cool with no active cooling, and doesn't make much noise apart from in sustained I/O operations.

Hope this helps,

Dave

[Saracen]

Hope this helps,

Dave

It certainly does, as do the other comments. It narrows my options nicely in some areas, and confirms my own thoughts (like Seagate) in others.

The PSU is one area of concern, and one area where I absolutely won't go for a unit because it's cheap. Reasons :-

1) It can have a significant effect on stability, if voltages aren't stable, especially under load.

2) Cheap unit implies cheap components, and I'd rather have a decent fan in it. A good bearing on the fan will preserve unit life, and keep noise down, and for a few £ extra on the price, it's a no-brainer in my view.

3) If the PSU goes, it can cook lots of other, much more expensive, bits.

Cheap PSUs are a no-no for me.

I've always had good experiences with Enermax, but I'd seen a few comments that made me wonder if they've taken their eyes off the ball. Hence the request for comments, and the above are useful.

8800GTS prices seem to be dropping, but while I play games, I'm not fanatical about it, don't spend lots of time doing it and will get as much enjoyment from it with settings turned down a notch or two as I would from top detail and frame rates. So I want decent gaming, but this is not a gaming machine, and gaming comes fairly low down my priority list, and certainly after overall performance, image quality and noise levels. Passive GPU cooling is an attractive thought.


A couple of points were made in answers about Dominator memory. I will OC moderately if it doesn't hit stabilty, but it wouldn't bother me if I didn't OC at all. What I don't want to do if hold back standard CPU performance by throttling it with slower memory.

The other thing is that all told, this lot will cost a fair bit, and £50 one way or the other doesn't matter. So I don't want to waste money on top class memory if it adds no benefit, but nor do I want to affect performance by being tight over a few quid. My problem is I don't know where that line is. As long as the Value RAM isn't constraining the CPU, I'm happy to go Value. If it was limiting the rest, I'd rather pay the extra for higher speed.

Any OC'ing I do will be limited to simple BIOS changes. I'm not interested in heroic cooling systems, loads of fans, water-cooling or, even, in spending lots of time tweaking and testing. If I can turn it up in a few seconds, and it works or doesn't, great. If it takes time, or threatens stabilty, it isn't of interest.

Many thanks for the answers. Any further comments appreciated.


Oh, and as for buying all from Scan, yes ..... assuming I can. It keeps things simple.

[Mark@SCAN]

With regards to PSU's i generally always reccommend Tagan our part number LN5993 is a really good all round PSU

If your maybe looking for quite a bit of milage out of the system i would suggest you go for an 8800GTS as it supports DX10 which the ATi cards suggested do not and with Windows Vista upon us supporting DX10 you might want to consider this.

Regards

[dave87]

It certainly does, as do the other comments. It narrows my options nicely in some areas, and confirms my own thoughts (like Seagate) in others.

The PSU is one area of concern, and one area where I absolutely won't go for a unit because it's cheap. Reasons :-

1) It can have a significant effect on stability, if voltages aren't stable, especially under load.

2) Cheap unit implies cheap components, and I'd rather have a decent fan in it. A good bearing on the fan will preserve unit life, and keep noise down, and for a few £ extra on the price, it's a no-brainer in my view.

3) If the PSU goes, it can cook lots of other, much more expensive, bits.

Cheap PSUs are a no-no for me.

Indeed - its worth spending the extra fiver one something that is at the centre of a system

I've always had good experiences with Enermax, but I'd seen a few comments that made me wonder if they've taken their eyes off the ball. Hence the request for comments, and the above are useful.

Whilst Enermax are still a respected brand, they haven't gone down hill, more they just haven't kept up with everyone else...

8800GTS prices seem to be dropping, but while I play games, I'm not fanatical about it, don't spend lots of time doing it and will get as much enjoyment from it with settings turned down a notch or two as I would from top detail and frame rates. So I want decent gaming, but this is not a gaming machine, and gaming comes fairly low down my priority list, and certainly after overall performance, image quality and noise levels. Passive GPU cooling is an attractive thought.

On the GPU front, I would be majorly hesitant to suggest the 8800gts atm. Reasoning? Well, with ATi's offering just around the corner, it will either force a price drop, or will offer some greater performance for the same money. Hopefully for consumers, a bit of both.

A couple of points were made in answers about Dominator memory. I will OC moderately if it doesn't hit stabilty, but it wouldn't bother me if I didn't OC at all. What I don't want to do if hold back standard CPU performance by throttling it with slower memory.

Dominator RAM seems to be aimed at the enthusiast, offering tighter timings at each of the speed levels. I personally wouldn't bother, just go for the plain XMS2 stuff, as timings don't make as much as a difference as they did in the days of DDR.

The other thing is that all told, this lot will cost a fair bit, and £50 one way or the other doesn't matter. So I don't want to waste money on top class memory if it adds no benefit, but nor do I want to affect performance by being tight over a few quid. My problem is I don't know where that line is. As long as the Value RAM isn't constraining the CPU, I'm happy to go Value. If it was limiting the rest, I'd rather pay the extra for higher speed.

Personally, I'd save money on RAM by not getting the dominator RAM, but the XMS2, then spending the difference on a decent CPU cooler. Something like the Freezer 7 Pro at the bottom end of the market, to the Scythe offerings at the top end of the market. Whilst they are aimed at the overclocker, they will help to reduce noise levels coming from the PC. Mark @ Scan posted after you suggesting the Tagan PSU - whilst a good quality unit, it suffers from using an 80mm fan, and as such will be noisier under load than something like the Corsair with its 120mm fan. I'd argue that with today's range of coolers/PSUs etc you are no longer limited to extreme performance at high noise levels, or low performance at the cost of performance, you can get a good blend of both

Any OC'ing I do will be limited to simple BIOS changes. I'm not interested in heroic cooling systems, loads of fans, water-cooling or, even, in spending lots of time tweaking and testing. If I can turn it up in a few seconds, and it works or doesn't, great. If it takes time, or threatens stabilty, it isn't of interest.

Many thanks for the answers. Any further comments appreciated.


Oh, and as for buying all from Scan, yes ..... assuming I can. It keeps things simple.

Dave

[Agent]

.

The basic spec will be an E6600, probably on a Gigabyte DS3 (LN15070), 2GB of RAM, a couple of 320GB (-ish), drives, graphics card and PSU.


I want to be able to use the system for games, but I'm not a heavy gamer. I considered an 8800GTS card, but to be honest, it's probably overkill given that I'm not a heavy gamer. Other uses will include standard office stuff, web browsing, photo editing (that one is important), web development, but nothing else terribly demanding.

To be totaly honest, If you can wait for the new 86xx range to hit the market then do. It'll save you money while offering plenty of performace for the odd game.
I picked up a PCIe 6200 for about 9 quid off Ebay for this exact reason. It just depends how urgently you need it

So, the questions :-

1) Given the above, what level of graphics card would you suggest, and are there particularly well-regarded models of that type?

See above. As for models - none have any widespread issues, so its just finding a card within your budget

2) Given the above spec, and graphics card, what spec of PSu do I need? I want something good build quality, steady voltages and with some headroom if I add drives, more RAM, etc. I'm not looking for the cheapest PSU, and £10 or £20 either way I don't care about, but I don't want to pay silly money unnecessarily.

I would also agree with what Mark@SCAN said above. Solid PSU, although I prefer modular versions of them. Also consider a Seasonic

3) What spec of memory? I want good quality and am prepared to pay a reasonable premium for it, but again, I don't want to grossly overspecify for the hell of it. I might overclock a bit, but to be honest, it's not a priority. I do want to extract the best legit performance from the E6600, but system stability is FAR more important than a bit of extra performance, so even running at rated speeds is fine is OC'ing would affect stabilty. Somewhere around £200 for 2GB is the top end I'd be prepared to go for.

I was looking at CorsairTwinX XMS2 Dominator,DDR2 PC2-6400 4-4-4-12 (LN16496), as and when it comes into stock.

Nice RAM, but thats more for overclockers. If you're not going to be doing much overclocking, IMO, its an overkill. Remember that 4200 is all that the chip needs at default.
There is a big difference between some of the 4200 RAM and the one above cost wise. While running at stock speeds, the performace difference will almost be non existant (only timings will effect it, but the difference in the things you've listed just wont be there)
If you are going to spend time trying to get the maximum overclock out of the machine, go for it, otherwise, id come down a notch or two and save some money .

4) Monitor suggestions. I'm looking for about 19", won't be watching TV on it so am not bothered about widescreen, but AM bothered about image quality and especially about dead pixels. It must be fast enough to support games with blurring, etc, and would consider 20", but image quality is FAR more important to me than the size. I'd pick a colour-accurate 19" over an inaccurate 20" every time.

Widescreen isnt just for TV, it does make a huge difference for image editing (belive me, I do a lot of it along with 3D design). having more than one app open is a god send, I honestly couldnt go back now.
If you are going from a CRT to a TFT, no matter which one you choose, you will notice the difference in games. Ive used the top end TFT's on the market, and you can still tell the difference in high motion games.
And dont get me started on colour reproduction on TFT's. Its pretty much the main reason I have a CRT next to my 2405 24" Dell. Colours are lovely on the TFT, but not natural. They are getting better in this regard, but most CRT's win this hands down.


5) Drive choice. I'm looking for decent performance, NCQ is mandatory and I decent warranty. I'm also looking for quiet drives. It's a general PC not a Home Theatre machine, so whisper quiet isn't mandatory, but I don't want to be constantly conscious of them ..... especially as adding a couple more for RAID 5 is a distinct possibility in the near future. Seagate drives are my current thinking.

Why is NCQ mandatory? Bechmarks for NCQ show that its all over the place. In some situations it can offer a small gain, while in others, it can hurt performace. It entirely depends on what the drive is asked to do, but the majority of people prefer to keep it off.

Seagates are a good choice. Samsungs are also one of the current favourites.

It certainly does, as do the other comments. It narrows my options nicely in some areas, and confirms my own thoughts (like Seagate) in others.

The PSU is one area of concern, and one area where I absolutely won't go for a unit because it's cheap. Reasons :-

1) It can have a significant effect on stability, if voltages aren't stable, especially under load.

2) Cheap unit implies cheap components, and I'd rather have a decent fan in it. A good bearing on the fan will preserve unit life, and keep noise down, and for a few £ extra on the price, it's a no-brainer in my view.

3) If the PSU goes, it can cook lots of other, much more expensive, bits.

Cheap PSUs are a no-no for me.

I've always had good experiences with Enermax, but I'd seen a few comments that made me wonder if they've taken their eyes off the ball. Hence the request for comments, and the above are useful.

Nothing really wrong with Enermax, but there are other brands which are regarded as better currently. You wont go wrong with one, you just could get better for your money

8800GTS prices seem to be dropping, but while I play games, I'm not fanatical about it, don't spend lots of time doing it and will get as much enjoyment from it with settings turned down a notch or two as I would from top detail and frame rates. So I want decent gaming, but this is not a gaming machine, and gaming comes fairly low down my priority list, and certainly after overall performance, image quality and noise levels. Passive GPU cooling is an attractive thought.

8800GTS is an overkill for only the odd game. See above. I recomend waiting for the 8600 range, which are due soon.
If not, look at the 7xxx series. Still very powerful for all current games. If you are willing to buy second hand, you will save yourself a bit too


A couple of points were made in answers about Dominator memory. I will OC moderately if it doesn't hit stabilty, but it wouldn't bother me if I didn't OC at all. What I don't want to do if hold back standard CPU performance by throttling it with slower memory.

As previously said, the 6600 only requires 4200 rated memory to run at stock. So by installing high rated RAM like that and not overclocking it, you're starving it of the bandwidth it wants
Given your answer about the RAM, I would'nt spend that much on it. Scan have This Which will give you headroom for overclocking and save you some money.

[Saracen]

Why is NCQ mandatory? Bechmarks for NCQ show that its all over the place. In some situations it can offer a small gain, while in others, it can hurt performace. It entirely depends on what the drive is asked to do, but the majority of people prefer to keep it off.

Because it is likely that I'll add to the initial two drives and go to at least a four-disk RAID 5 array as secondary storage. In a RAID environment, and particularly as applications develop (as seems likely) to support Async IO, NCQ will come into it's own. I agree, at the moment it's marginal (and cuts both ways, because the processing of the queue implies an overhead), but look at it this way .... any detrimental effects are minimal, so if it never gets used (drivers not installed, etc), the downside is minimal. But, on the other hand, if I buy drives without NCQ then to implememt it later means replacing the drives, at considerable expense. I'd rather buy it and not use it, than not buy it and then not be able to enable it if/when I want to.

[Agent]

Because it is likely that I'll add to the initial two drives and go to at least a four-disk RAID 5 array as secondary storage. In a RAID environment, and particularly as applications develop (as seems likely) to support Async IO, NCQ will come into it's own. I agree, at the moment it's marginal (and cuts both ways, because the processing of the queue implies an overhead), but look at it this way .... any detrimental effects are minimal, so if it never gets used (drivers not installed, etc), the downside is minimal. But, on the other hand, if I buy drives without NCQ then to implememt it later means replacing the drives, at considerable expense. I'd rather buy it and not use it, than not buy it and then not be able to enable it if/when I want to.

Didnt realise you were going RAID (my own fault for skiming it over) Different ball-game then, and I fully agree with what you've said

[topgun23]

This months issue of Custom PC has a feature on stable PSU's and testing a few brands there. The Enermax range came out on top, but it depends on what you are looking for as this range comes at a price. Might be worth a look before commiting to one.

[Zak33]

Saracen, dear chap, can I suggest the following on HDD set up.

1 Western Digital Raptor, as large as you can afford, for the boot drive and to run apps off. (minimum 74gig, preferably the newer 150 gig drive)

Raptors are painfully fast.They're not overly noisy, and are the best SATA drive for booting XP and running your applications from.

Dump RAID on it's arse, and forget it unless you really need to drop info onto a striped array at mortifiyng speeds (FRAPS for taking gaming tracks) which I dont think you are. In normal daily life, a Raptor will cream RAID.

Then keep adding Seagate Barracuda's as you need space. The 160 gig drives are very fast because they are single patter drives, light, low intertial cool and very quiet.

I've now tried two RAID arrays, and the synthetic benchmarks looked great....but the single 74 gig Raptor I got second hand from ebay is so much faster for booting, running apps, gaming etc.

Besides, once you have a nice clean install on your Raptor, you can start using the other drives for data, downloads, films, photo's etc, and that leaves very clean, easily defragged drives, that have nice tidy boot times and fast access.

But the primary boot drive...use a raptor, its king.

Using seperate drives for all your massive storage needs is good, they stay seperate, XP can e installed on the Raptor when it gets slower as it chokes up, and the data is safe, you can whip the data drives out and use in other peoples machines for taking large files with you (SATA is dreamily easy for that)

And you can keep adding

[topgun23]

What about raiding 4 x 36gb raptors for the OS and programes then have another seagate for the files/movies/media?

[cotswoldcs]

I have a 150Gb Raptor and it was one of the best investments I made. However, they are louder than standard 7,200rpm drives and generate slightly more heat. Personally 4 x 36Gb Raptors in RAID seems crazy as they will generate LOTS more heat, noise and consume more power than a single 150Gb Raptor. I really don't think you will notice greater performance between a single Raptor and 2+ in RAID. Besides the 150Gb Raptor easily outperforms the 36Gb version.

Personally I would go for a 150Gb Raptor as the main drive and a 500Gb Western Digital RE2 or Hitachi 7K500 for storage. Go for 2+ if you really need 1Tb storage ... Forget RAID IMHO but I'm sure your motherboard will support it so if you decided to buy 2 x 500Gb drives then it's an option.

[Saracen]

Thanks for the pointer at CustomPC, topgun. I'll take a look at it.

If the object of the exercise was primarily speed, Zak, I'd agree with your analysis. But I didn't give the full story on the drive situation, as it was pretty much settled, and the only issue was whether there were better (for my needs, not in absolute terms) drives than the Seagates.

Resilience is the prime motive behind RAID, for me, not speed. I currently have a couple of systems providing data storage on which I cannot afford to risk the data. One is a 4-disk IDE RAID 5 system using an Adaptec 2400, and the other is a Ultra-SCSI system using 6 SCA hot-swap Barracudas, and a Cheetah as a boot drive, on an old Athlon MP system. In both cases, I have a collection of spare components, including a spare Adaptec IDE RAID board, two spare Promise caching RAID boards, spare hard drives and two complete spare SCSI RAID bays.

There's a fairly complex and not entirely coherent backup system supporting that lot, including Tandberg SLR6 tape, DAT tapes, DVD-RAM and a couple of old MO drives. Some data is fairly transient and short-lived, some needs to be long-term (years, at least) archived.

So, some stuff is stored on the IDE RAID, and mirrored on the SCSI, and some the converse. In both cases, much of it is also either archived to DVD-RAM or MO, and in both cases, to a heirarchical tape system. I use tape for backup, and DVD-RAM and MO for archiving, though there's some overlap.

But it's all getting a little long in the tooth, so I'm building towards a replacement that is not only faster, but more structured and coherent. The initial point of this exercise is to build a workhorse PC, but at some point, I'll probably relegate this machine to a server role, by upping it to RAID, and a DAT autoloader, then using components like the graphics card in another workhorse PC.

The Raptor as a boot drive is certainly a possibility, but as it halves the capacity and is between double and triple the price, I'm not entirely convinced it'll give me value for money. But for the main storage, RAID 5 gives me close to a TB of storage (four 320GB disks, three with data, one for parity), decent speed and the resilience that is central to this, and does it at minimum cost.

The same logic applies to disk speed as I've mentioned about CPU/RAM and overclocking. I want the system quick, but only where I get value for money and stablity/durability. The eventual cost isn't the issue, but value for money is. I'm certainly not chasing speed above all else. For instance, that's why I'm limiting the processor to the E6600. That, in my view, gives good value for money, though even the E6400 is a good possibility. But going any higher than that doesn't give me a payoff in terms of speed for the money, even if it is quicker. In other words, the marginal cost is too high for the benefit, for me.

That's why topgun's suggestion of 4 RAIDed Raptors isn't an option. It doesn't provide the capacity I need, and is too expensive for what it does provide. If I RAID 4 36GB drives, I'll get 100GB (ish) of RAID5 storage. I currently have that from 6 18GB Baracudas (one for parity). Part of the logic of this whole exercise is, eventually, to combine the IDE and SCSI RAID systems into one, and to increase the capacity beyond current needs. Oh, and there's no films and very little "media" on this system. It's primarily a home business system and while that certainly includes photo editing and even some video editing, it'll be used for processing such, not as a media server.

Perhaps I should have clarified this earlier, but I figured my opening post was long enough as it was.

Anyway, the Raptor as a boot drive is certainly a possibility, but while RAID isn't part of this build right now, buying with a view to that in a few weeks/months certainly is.

Once again, thanks for everyone's comments. It all helps.

[Zak33]

I find resilience the hardest thing to justify, because I am not sure if a Hard Drive is better being used 24x7 or better being switched off 99% of it's life.

Reason I wonder? Because External Hard Drive enclosures, be they Network Accessed Storage or just hard drive enclosures are quite cheap, and having the hard drive off 6 days of the week and switching it on for 2 hours weekly to back everything up, seems to me sensible

BUT if the hard drives spindles are better spinning to lengthen life, then maybe not! Then RAID mirrored is your friend.

I'd choose Seagate Barracuda either way. 5 year warranty on a drive, and if you've backed it all up either way, RAID or NAS/External, you're safe, and so is your money

And as for the Raptor drive....do it. It's secondary only to the PSU as a good choice tospend proper money on.

Get a cheaper video card....most are so bleedin fast now anyway, and they change in price weekly, if you choose wrong on a vid card, make it a wrong choice on a cheaper card.

PSU,....1st priority.
Raptor ...second

the rest follows

(PS I was SCSI for the last 6 years, managing on 4 18gig drives) I went SATA raid and then raptor. Raptor are good. Period.