Finally a new system

alfhenrik · Post by **alfhenrik** » Sat Mar 03, 2007 3:19 pm

Hey all,

Finally!!

My current PC is 4 years old and up for retirement, so I have ordered my new system (just waiting for all the parts to arrive).

New specs are:

Antec P180B (Rev. 2)
Intel 3.4EE ES (until the new E6420 is released in Q2)
Thermalright Ultra 120 w/ Nexus Real Silent 120mm fan (or Scythe fan) and bolt-through kit (Thanks to SPCR's review)
Gigabyte DS3Pro
Thermalright HR-05 NB Cooler
2GB Corsair TWIN2X2048-6400C4
2x Powercolour X1950Pro Extreme 512MB
1x 160GB Seagate
4x 250GB Western Digitals
Seasonic 650W S12+ (Thanks to SPCR's review)
Scythe Kama bay (Thanks to Chris Thomson article Superquiet Superclocked DIY Core 2 Duo System)
3x Nexus Real Silent fans (We all know what SPCR thinks of these. Replaces the stock Antec TriCool's )

Comments welcome.

Thank you.

ronrem · Post by **ronrem** » Sat Mar 03, 2007 4:29 pm

Do you really need that much PSU? I doubt more than 400-450 w is needed unless you plan on SLI and heavy OC. Likewise adding 3 case fans to a CPU fan + PSU fan. One can have a very potent puter running quiet with a passive CPU and one case fan-one PSU fan. I'd live with the noise,I guess if I was paid for getting "benchmarks" otherwise-----

jackylman · Post by **jackylman** » Sat Mar 03, 2007 4:39 pm

Looks pretty good. My questions -

1. What's with all the HD's?
2. Video card cooling?

alfhenrik · Post by **alfhenrik** » Sat Mar 03, 2007 6:12 pm

ronrem wrote:Do you really need that much PSU?

I will be running 2 Radeon X1950Pro in Crossfire mode.

jackylman wrote: 1. What's with all the HD's?
2. Video card cooling?

1. 1 HDD for my system and applications, 4 HDDs in RAID5 (I know, RAID=BAD) for storing important stuff.
2. These Radeons come with Arctic Cooling X2 installed stock.

Thanks.

EDIT:
BTW I will be overclocking once I get my C2D at the end of April or so. And I may cut down on the amount of fans used in the system as well, depends on the temps I get as it does get pretty hot in my house during summer (Upwards of 35C)

jackylman · Post by **jackylman** » Sat Mar 03, 2007 6:58 pm

I've beome a huge fan of the latest Samsung Spinpoint T166 series. My Samsung 321KJ gives my WD Scorpio(laptop drive) a run for its money.

So I'd recommend the Samsung HD160HJ for your OS drive and 4 321KJ's for your RAID setup. The catch is that they put out a lot of vibration so you would need to suspend them or find some other way to decouple them from the chassis.

EDIT: You should consult SPCR BEFORE you order the parts

alfhenrik · Post by **alfhenrik** » Sat Mar 03, 2007 7:04 pm

jackylman wrote:EDIT: You should consult SPCR BEFORE you order the parts

I've been reading SPCR for 6 months planning this upgrade

plus I already have 3 WDs in my current computer and they haven't made much of a fuss about themselves so I'm pretty satisfied with them.

EDIT: Plus I can't even get those Samsung's here in Australia (I can't find anyone selling them at least)

nzimmers · Post by **nzimmers** » Sat Mar 03, 2007 7:16 pm

Raid (while not a *real* backup solution) is still really good and for many people - the only affordable way to provide some protection for their data - exactly how is anyone supposed to "backup" 1TB of data I have no idea unless you go BlueRay ($$$) or throw in all on DVD's (time consuming and actually kind of dodgy as DVD's are made so cheaply)

what kind of Raid will you be using? 0+1? Raid 5? Raid 10?

my advise would be to move the raid off your main system since I have found that overclocking, playing games, and general messing around can result in system freezes, hangs, and 'Opps did I just hit the power button with my toe?"

leveraging components from your old system to build a storage unit means accessing the files over the lan - but over gigabit ethernet it's not bad

what was yoru old system?

alfhenrik · Post by **alfhenrik** » Sat Mar 03, 2007 7:23 pm

nzimmers wrote:what kind of Raid will you be using? 0+1? Raid 5? Raid 10?

RAID5

nzimmers wrote:what was yoru old system?

P4 2.4Ghz, 2Gb RAM unfortunately no RAID support on that...but that might be an idea as I have some other spare parts (a couple of Intel motherboards with RAID support) laying around...just means spending some more $$$$.

Thanks

vincentfox · Post by **vincentfox** » Sat Mar 03, 2007 7:49 pm

If you want backups these days, the best way is an external hard-drive with USB2 or Fireware or eSATA.

There are many problems with mirroring. It doesn't fix the all-too-common accidental deletions or just plain old silent disk corruption. Due to mirroring, a bad bit of information on one drive, will very soon be mirrored to the other drive. Assumedly one day new filesystems similar to ZFS will solve this problem, but for now backups are your best bet.

By the way, before considering RAID-5 you should read this:

http://baarf.com/

I've seen enough RAID systems go bad in my career that I don't trust any of them any further than I can throw them. One of them was quite expensive and was slowly corrupting the RAID-5 disks until it was much too late. The data couldn't be unscrambled and due to tape rotation at this cheap-o office, there weren't backups older than a month and most of them had different forms of the corrupted files. Eventually and with a lot of work and money 80% of it was recovered and the rest had to be reconstructed or just live without.

My mistrust of RAID goes double for PC-based motherboard heavily software-driven Windows RAID systems.

In most places, RAID-10 will work acceptably and disk is cheap there is no reason for RAID-5 anymore. However this in no way removes the need for a backup strategy if your data, downtime and recovery man-hours matter like in a business use.

pyogenes · Post by **pyogenes** » Sun Mar 04, 2007 1:44 am

nzimmers wrote:exactly how is anyone supposed to "backup" 1TB of data I have no idea unless you go BlueRay ($$$) or throw in all on DVD's (time consuming and actually kind of dodgy as DVD's are made so cheaply)

I question why anybody would have 1 TB of irreplaceable data outside of a business environment.

And for business uses, I'll give the recommendation I do to my clients - backup to hard drives at a remote location.

nzimmers · Post by **nzimmers** » Sun Mar 04, 2007 2:29 am

okay, so 1 TB is hard to imagine anyone having outside of business? really....? It's not hard.

what was it that the CEO of Seagate said....something about how they make products that let people collect pron? I forget the exact syntax

80GB-500GB of storage probably captures 95% of population, but still, even if you have 100GB to backup.... that's 20 DVDs....

I have my personal photo album (including .mov's from my nikon) on 5 seperate DVD rams, I used to moonlight doing some PC repair and I can tell you 99% of people out there have *no* backups, none, zilch, nada

I;m a big proponent of Software raid 5 - it's not a backup solution but it does provide a level of safety against hardware failure.

using a external HD is fine, if you remember to connect it and sync it, not difficult for some people, difficut for others

nzimmers · Post by **nzimmers** » Sun Mar 04, 2007 3:29 am

vincentfox wrote:If you want backups these days, the best way is an external hard-drive with USB2 or Fireware or eSATA.

I agree, it's a good way, but mirroring is probably faster =) a friend of mine has a external drive for backups....I remind him once a week to back up.....he still can't think for himself

vincentfox wrote:I
There are many problems with mirroring. It doesn't fix the all-too-common accidental deletions or just plain old silent disk corruption.

apparently Microsoft is going to fix this for all of us, with windows home server, which will keep multiple backup of different revisions of files ....etc... should be interesting

vincentfox wrote: By the way, before considering RAID-5 you should read this:
http://baarf.com/
I've seen enough RAID systems go bad in my career that I don't trust any of them any further than I can throw them. One of them was quite expensive and was slowly corrupting the RAID-5 disks until it was much too late. The data couldn't be unscrambled and due to tape rotation at this cheap-o office, there weren't backups older than a month and most of them had different forms of the corrupted files. Eventually and with a lot of work and money 80% of it was recovered and the rest had to be reconstructed or just live without.

I am a big proponent of *software* raid 5 - all raid is software it's just a matter of if the cpu is handling it or if a card is doing it.....

most of the stuff at BAARF is from the year 2000. I hate to say this but....kind of a long time ago, and hardware and sofware has improved.

mostly I use raid 5 on windows...... yes it is slow....and yes...as far as I am concerned it is rock solid and bomb proof... would I trust my data to linux or bsd raid 5? I dunno.....I am testing some variants now

raid 5 isn't a backup solution, but it is a great way to introduce a level of redundancy.

I would be in favor of software raid 5 for storage and then backing up the data on an external HDD

the external HDDs get kind of expensive though

My mistrust of RAID goes double for PC-based motherboard heavily software-driven Windows RAID systems.

In most places, RAID-10 will work acceptably and disk is cheap there is no reason for RAID-5 anymore. However this in no way removes the need for a backup strategy if your data, downtime and recovery man-hours matter like in a business use.[/quote]

pyogenes · Post by **pyogenes** » Sun Mar 04, 2007 7:12 am

nzimmers wrote:okay, so 1 TB is hard to imagine anyone having outside of business? really....? It's not hard.

I said irreplaceable data.

porn, downloaded movies, music, etc can easily break 1 TB but they are not irreplaceable. It's extremely annoying to lose all that data, but if losing it ever gets more than just annoying I think the real uderlying problem is psychological (addiction to collecting), not technical.

alfhenrik · Post by **alfhenrik** » Sun Mar 04, 2007 12:08 pm

Hey Guys,

Thanks for all the comments on why/why not to use RAID5.

But the real reason for me to create this thread was to get comments on my system...

Sorry to sound like a nagging housewife.

Cheers

alfhenrik · Post by **alfhenrik** » Sun Mar 04, 2007 11:17 pm

YAY!

Finally received my last parts (almost, except for my second gfx card), so now I can finally start building this system for real...

Wohoo!

alfhenrik · Post by **alfhenrik** » Mon Mar 05, 2007 5:36 am

well I put my system together only to find that my 3.4EE was *broken* to put it nicely...so now I need some advice on which CPU should I get now as I can't wait 'til end of April...I've been tossing up between the E4300/E6400 but might stretch the budget to the E6600 if the performance gain is worth the extra $$$...

So any comments/feedback would be greatly appreciated as always.

Thanks all.

Finally a new system

Finally a new system

What is your old system?

Re: What is your old system?

legitamate or not

Re: legitamate or not