Help spec'ing a new system...

[54warrior]

I discussed my issues/concerns in a thread last week about what type of new system to build/buy/etc. in this thread: http://signs101.com/forums/showthread.php?t=58896

I've made some decisions after reading some reviews in that thread, so let's try this again...

I have decided that building a new desktop from scratch is the best choice for me. So who wants to help me spec out the parts for the system? It will be used mostly for Photoshop/Corel Draw X3/Dreamweaver use, along with a ton of internet time. Might do some gaming on it as well. My roommate just purchased a 55" LCD Samsung and I thought adding a BluRay to my new computer would be a nice bonus for viewing on the new TV--is this even possible (I'm sure that a special video card is probably required?)

Budget: $800-$1000

Apps I will be using

• Adobe CS3 Il, Ps, Dw, Fl, etc.
• Corel Draw X3
• 3D Studio Max 8

Other items of interest:

• 22" AOC monitor (existing)
• keyboard, mouse, and speakers (existing)
• cable internet connection
• Case location will be in 72 degrees F, located on floor under open desk(aesthetics of case unimportant)

Hardware required(?):

• Processor (love AMD/like Intel)
• Mother Board
• Video card (love Nvidia)
• Hard disk drive
• Optical drive - Blu Ray would be nice
• Sound card
• SD Card reader/Firewire port?
• Cooling?
• Case (more quiet than pretty)
• Power supply (500w ?)
• operating system will be Windows 7 but which version?
• What am i forgetting?

This will be my first time building one, so any advice is appreciated!


What I'm looking for is basically a shopping list from newegg.

 

[cgsigns_jamie]

I just built a new gaming computer last week... I think you can trim a few things down to meet your budget. My goal was a QUIET but fast computer.

• Processor: Intel Core i7 920, 2.67GHz ($280)
• Mother Board: Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD5 ($270)
• Video card: Nvidia GTX 285 w/ 1Gb of VRAM ($400)
• Hard disk drive: 1TB Seagate 7200 RPM ($90) ... RAID array coming soon.
• Optical drive: LG WH08LS20K BluRay Burner ($130)
• Sound card: Kept the onboard sound from the MoBo (Dolby Digital Output)
• SD Card reader/Firewire port: Firewire 800 card ($?)
• Cooling: NEXUS|FLC-3000 ($55)
• Case: NEXUS Cloudius ($55)
• Power supply: NEXUS 850w ($150)
• operating system: Windows 7 Ultimate ($175), Pro will be fine if this is for work
• What am i forgetting: RAM, I went with 12Gb of Kingston DDR3 ($420)

I bought everything but the Case and Firewire card at NewEgg.com ... bought the case from EndPCNoise.com and I already had the FW card.

 

[choucove]

Jamie mentions a pretty good setup listed above.

With your budget, you really have to decides which is going to be a higher priority on this system: Design work or gaming performance. This can make a difference in which type of video card you wish to get. If the vast majority of the computer use will be for design (especially with applications like 3D Studio Max) and any design applications that can utilize GPGPU acceleration, then I would suggest you look into the nVidia Quadro FX line of workstation graphics cards. These are designed specifically for this kind of work. However, they will not offer as good of performance with multimedia or gaming applications.

If you are planning to do a fair amount of entertainment use from this computer as well (such as playing more recent games, watching Blu-ray films in full high-def) then you would be better off getting one of the newer nVidia GeForce GTX2xx series of cards. Within your budget you could probably squeeze a GTX250 or GTX260 which will handle most recent games at a fair resolution and settings.

Processors: I've been a fan of AMD processors as well for a long time - great bang for your buck. Again, however, this is highly dependent upon the main focus of your computer. If you are doing the majority of your work as design work, I would lean more towards a Core i5-750 ($200) or possibly even squeeze a Core i7-860 ($290). The performance difference between a Core i7-920 and a Core i7-860 is identical and costs the same, but the motherboards for the Core i5 and i7-860 are half the cost often as a matching motherboard for the Core i7-920 processors. The Intel processor will probably offer slightly better performance in design applications than what you get through AMD.

HOWEVER, if you are doing a fair amount of gaming and entertainment use with this computer, then AMD is a very good choice as well. An article on Toms Hardware recently concluded that you can get just as good of gaming performance with a decent AMD processor system by putting the extra money you save into better graphics cards. With doing design work as well, I would still suggest getting a top-of-the-line AMD Phenom II X4 (I use the Phenom II X4 955 in my desktop and love it.) The money you save on an AMD processor and motherboard can be used either to bump up your graphics performance, add more memory, add a dedicated sound card, a better CPU fan (to keep things running very quiet and cool I use the Cooler Master V8).

 

[cgsigns_jamie]

The reason I went with the i7 920 over the 860 is because it uses the new LGA 1366 socket for the CPU, as well as the Intel QPI (QuickPath Interconnect) instead of the old Front Side Bus. This will allow me to upgrade my processor in the future without having to replace the mother board.

Also, I agree 100% about the Quadro FX cards. I've been using those in my graphics work stations for a while and have been very pleased with the performance.

 

[Letterbox Mike]

I agree with choucove, I'd go with the Intel i7 860. Since you're building a computer from scratch, I'd throw at least 8gb of RAM in there, and go with Windows 7 64 bit. 32 bit OS and programs will be fading away soon, take advantage of new and much better technology now. You'll be limited with future upgradability with the 860 because it's a soon to be obsolete 1156 socket, but it's a solid processor that allows for significant overclocking if you chose to go that route in the future.

Get a decent Motherboard that will allow for significant upgrades in the future, should a better processor come out in a few years or shoudl you want to add additional RAM beyond 8gb. Plan for expandability. A $1000 budget is decent, but it doesn't allow for a top of the line decked out machine, but if you plan right you can build a budget computer now that can fairly cost effectively be upgraded and expanded in the future instead of having to build a new machine from scratch.

You could upgrade Photoshop to CS4 64bit and see an ENORMOUS improvement in performance going this route.

If you're computer is a design station, I'd skip the bluray player and put the extra money into better harddrives. If you can swing it, go for two Western Digital Raptors, one for the OS and storage and one for a Photoshop scratch disk. If you can swing a few hundred extra bucks, go for a couple solid state drives, it'll scream then. Even regular old 7200 RPM drives will work though and it'll still be a speedy machine and that will save you alot of cash.

If you're not planning on overclocking the CPU, I don't think you need to go to any major extremes with cooling and a fairly basic power supply should work just fine, you're not building a monster computer.

I don't do anything with animation or gaming, but I have a QuadroFX card and am very happy with it. It's a little choppy with video but Photoshop seems better with it than my old GeForce card, but maybe that's just subliminal marketing sneaking into my subconscious.

 

[javila]

I would spend no more than $150 on a video card for a production computer that won't be involved primarily for 3d graphics.

 

[choucove]

The strong point that the Core i7-860 has in my mind over the i7-920 is not just in price: They are the same cost after all. While the i7-920 is LGA1366 targeted for the highest performance, the LGA1156 still offers the QPI and integrates the PCI-express lanes directly to the processor, even though there are less overall lanes than on the LGA1366 board. If you are planning to run two video cards or more, then yes I would suggest looking into the Core i7-920 and LGA1366 platform especially for gaming. However, because of the budget and the intended use, a single decent graphics card should be fine which means an LGA1156 motherboard is still more than adequate.

Where the i7-860 really shines is in its Turbo Mode capabilities, that does not exist on the i7-920. This means the processor can shut down cores that aren't in use and throttle up the ones that are in use to a faster clock rate within the same thermal and power envelope. So the 2.8 Ghz processor can shut down three of its cores temporarily if a program is not multi-threaded capable, and ramp up its clock speed to 3.46 Ghz which will outperform the Core i7-920 in single-threaded and dual-threaded applications.

I know that's getting a little detailed, I apologize if it was a little more info than needed, but just showing why I am suggesting one over the other.

As Insignia suggested above, increasing the speed performance of your hard drives (though expensive) is going to net you a noticeable performance increase on programs loading, file access, and more. The cheapest way of doing this is using two good 7200rpm standard SATA hard drives in RAID 0 (remember however that RAID 0 offers no fault tolerance if a hard drive fails so back up all your information!) A slightly more expensive but faster option is to use two Western Digital velociRaptor hard drives in RAID 0. These hard drives come in lower capacities (150 GB and 300GB) but have a speed of 10,000rpm. If you really want the speed and are ready to break the bank, then you can opt for a solid state disk. These are again in a range of lower capacities (from around 30 GB to around 256 GB) but offer unbeatable performance.

In my desktop I have two OCZ Vertex 120 GB drives in RAID 0 and have faster drive performance than up to ten standard 7200rpm hard drives in RAID 0. However, the cost is pretty outstanding at about $500 per solid state disk.

And finally, invest in a good quality, top brand power supply. I can't tell you how many times a wonderful, powerful, system was crippled by a poor quality power supply that had issues or simply failed within a few months of purchase. The brands that I have had good luck with are Thermaltake and Corsair. There are a few other good name brand power supplies out there as well, but I have not personally used them yet. Again, for future upgrades, be sure you get a power supply now that offers more than enough power for your needs and any additions you may want to make in the future (additional hard drives, additional video card, additional CD/DVD/Blu-Ray drive, etc.)

 

[cgsigns_jamie]

Question: are you sure about no turbo mode on the 920? I was postive it has it, it's listed in the BIOS as well as the specs on the processor. Not arguing, just an honest question.

 

[choucove]

Question: are you sure about no turbo mode on the 920? I was postive it has it, it's listed in the BIOS as well as the specs on the processor. Not arguing, just an honest question.

No you are correct, the LGA1366 Core i7 processors do have turbo boost as well, but from my understanding their turbo boost is not as efficient or optimized as that used within the LGA1156 Core i5 and Core i7 processors. I've seen some scores of the Core i7-860 out-performing the Core i7-920 in application tests when running on one or two cores. On three or four cores the performance between the two processors is identical.

 

[54warrior]

Thank you all for the absolute ton of information! I am still trying to digest it all, as most of it is greek to me....

I posted similar thread on another forum and got similar opinions. One person also posted this information:

... I built a RAID 0 box for a small image studio 2 weeks ago, a new startup here in Vegas that is making waves. They wanted a "demo" workstation to see what's possible for processing as they don't want to create a massive server-type situation in the office, but 3-4 workstations that are equal in performance and then just using simple file sharing as required. Very simple setup in terms of the network, but the workstation I built used 2 300GB Velociraptors (tried to sell 'em on SSD but the amount of data they're dealing with wouldn't be practical - again, a price-to-performance and ROI issue).

The hard part was getting them to spring for 16GB of RAM because of the cost, but a few weeks ago I saw that sale for 4 4GB sticks of RAM for about $450 and made a few phone calls and snagged a similar deal.

I set up Photoshop CS3 for 'em (their legit retail copy) on Vista Business x64. They started messing around with it, loading some rather large TIFF files in excess of 150MB a pop, several at a time, performing some basic scripted actions on 'em, blurs, filters, etc. Using the Velociraptors in RAID 0 meant very snappy and consistent performance, as well as having 16GB of RAM too. Also, it's a Q6600 based machine running rock solid at 3 GHz.

They were very pleased with the performance at that point, but I had a surprise for 'em.

I asked if I could have 20 mins 'alone' with the workstation to "rewire it" as Tim Allen might say. That consisted of grabbing a trial version of SuperSpeed Software's RamDisk Plus 9 and installing it, doing the simple configuration, and then creating a 10GB RAMdisk and told Photoshop "Ok, you want a scratch disk? Here, try this on for size."

After I did some tests of my own using the same scripts they'd done earlier, boy... I tell ya. You haven't lived till you see 225MB TIFF files literally snap onscreen in the blink of an eye, multiple huge TIFFs with resolutions like 5000x5000 and even higher. That's what's possible with RAMdisks, because even Velociraptors in RAID 0 pumping out something like 280MB/s sustained pales to the close to 5GB a second in bandwidth of that RAMdisk.

I told 'em to come back in and rerun their test scripts.

Jaws hit the floor, folks. Well, not quite but figuratively speaking, at least.

They asked what I'd done, I told them I put the scratch disk in RAM where it should be if you have the RAM to make it happen, and they bought 4 licenses of RamDisk Plus 10 mins later, and I got a signed contract to construct 3 more workstations identical to that one top to bottom and also be their "geek" if any issues come up.

It was a very good week...

Is this similar to what insignia stated up above???

 

[Letterbox Mike]

Not really, they're actually sectioning off part of their RAM for the scratch disk. I suggested having a seperate standalone (well internal) harddrive for nothing but scratch disk space for Photoshop. Using the RAM for scratch space will indeed be leaps and bounds faster, but you have to have a huge chunk of RAM to make it happen, because you're taking RAM away from the rest of the computer permanently and basically turning it into a solid state harddrive. You will see very similar results by just purchasing a small (30 or so GB) SSD and using it for your scratch disk, it will be alot less money than having 16+ GB of RAM installed. Cheaper still is going with a Raptor drive and you still will have a scratch disk that is super fast. The cheapest option is going with a traditional 7200 rpm drive, even that will suffice for 95% of design work. But the key is, no matter how you do it, be it RAMdisk, SSD, or a cheap old drive, a seperate scratch disk for photoshop will give you a big return.

 

[54warrior]

Well I'm really struggling with this. It appears I can just go and buy a comparable system from HP for about what it would cost me from Newegg... plus I get a new keyboard and mouse....

I can save about 250-300 on the HP's if I go with a single 720GB hard drive>>>

Option 1

• Operating system Genuine Windows 7 Professional 64-bit
• Processor Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-860 processor [2.8GHz, 1MB L2 + 8MB shared L3 cache]
• Memory 8GB DDR3-1333MHz SDRAM [4 DIMMs]
• Hard drive 300GB 10K rpm & 640GB 7200 rpm SATA 3Gb/s - two hard drives
  [*]Graphics card 1GB NVIDIA GeForce GT 220 [DVI, HDMI, VGA]
  [*]Primary optical drive Blu-ray player & Lightscribe SuperMulti DVD burner
  [*]Networking Integrated 10/100/1000 (Gigabit) Ethernet, No wireless LAN
  [*]Front Productivity Ports 15-in-1 memory card reader, 1 USB, 1394, audio
  [*]Sound Card Integrated 7.1 channel sound with front audio ports
  [*]Keyboard and Mouse HP multimedia keyboard and HP optical mouse
  

Price: $1547 Total including shipping & $250 rebate thru my employer

Option 2

• 
  [*]Operating system Genuine Windows 7 Professional 64-bi
• Processor Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-920 processor [2.66GHz, 1MB L2 + 8MB shared L3 cache]
• Memory 8GB DDR3-1066MHz SDRAM [4 DIMMs]
• Hard drive 300GB 10K rpm & 640GB 7200 rpm SATA 3Gb/s - two hard drives
• Graphics card 1GB NVIDIA GeForce GT 220 [DVI, HDMI, VGA]
• Primary optical drive Blu-ray player & Lightscribe SuperMulti DVD burner
• Networking Integrated 10/100/1000 (Gigabit) Ethernet, No wireless LAN
• Front Productivity Ports 15-in-1 memory card reader, 1 USB, 1394, audio
• Sound Card Integrated 7.1 channel sound with front audio ports
• Keyboard and Mouse HP multimedia keyboard and HP optical mouse

Price: $1514 Total including shipping & $300 rebate thru my employer

Option 3: attached pdf.... please review for compatibility of items
Price: $1355 including shipping

 

[Letterbox Mike]

Option 2 isn't bad but your home built one is better. If you get an off-the-shelf they're usually made with low-end components and usually the motherboard is proprietary so most of the bios settings will be locked, meaning if you ever wanted to overclock you can't. Plus if you buy an off the shelf machine it's probably going to be loaded down with a bunch of crap trial programs you don't want, which can slow the machine down and which can be time consuming to remove.

You might want to add some sort of cooler for the CPU, you can get a good one for about $40 or so.

I'd say go with the system you built on New Egg, it's cheaper and alot better when you factor in the quality of the components.

But no matter what you do, you definitely will want the two hard drives if you plan on using any program that uses a scratch disk.

 

[54warrior]

You might want to add some sort of cooler for the CPU, you can get a good one for about $40 or so.

I'd say go with the system you built on New Egg, it's cheaper and alot better when you factor in the quality of the components.

But no matter what you do, you definitely will want the two hard drives if you plan on using any program that uses a scratch disk.

Thank you so, so, so much for your help with this. I just added two case fans and a fan/heatsink for the CPU and my total is under $1400. Decisions, decisions!

 

[Letterbox Mike]

It's still a good deal. I know on paper the pre built ones look awesome because they have alot of bells and whistles, but to give you those bells and whistles, they cut corners on the internal components like the mother board, RAM, fans, coolers, etc.. And then like I said, the bios is usually locked out so any future tweaking you may want to get into is impossible. They usually have a limit to the amount of RAM the motherboard will support as well. Quality over quantity. As-is your home built machine will be every bit as fast if not more so than any of the off the shelf ones. You could easily and safely overclock that CPU to 3.2 ghz or more and run circles around those machines and have a beast of a computer for very little money. 3 or 4 years ago to get anywhere near the level of performance you're looking at would have cost two or three times that amount and it wouldn't have been a very stable system either.

Doooooooo iiiiiit!

 

[choucove]

While the pre-built options offer the base specs on paper that look very good, often times the quality is not as good as what you can do for yourself. I've run into this with some companies that ordered pre-built systems and then were disappointed at their limited options, base limited speed, or even the frequency of failure.

I noticed on Option #2 that they are using a Core i7-920 processor, but have 8 GB (4 x 2 GB) of DDR3 1066 memory. First off, the i7-920 platform uses triple channel memory. This means they should be using either 3, 6, or 12 GB of memory to make most efficient use of the triple channel memory controller. That they aren't using this kind of configuration kinda just shows they are more into making the label look better. After all, 8 GB looks better than 6 GB of memory! Second, it's been shown that many times DDR3 1066 memory due to latency actually runs slower than DDR2 800 memory even though it is technically a faster clocked memory. 90% of pre-built systems will run the absolute slowest possible memory on the platform as a way of saving money. For about the same cost, though, you could have custom built with much faster DDR3 1600 speed memory.

With your Option #3 the configuration seems pretty good, but there are some places that you could save on your budget to get a better overall system performance.

As you only are running a single graphics card on this system, and additionally have chosen the Core i7-860 for your processor, the ASUS supercomputer motherboard that you have selected is a bit overkill. You can find an ASUS, MSI, or Gigabyte motherboard around $50 to $80 cheaper that still offers plenty of features for future upgrades (such as if you decide to do SLI or Crossfire in the future). You could take that money and apply it to other things, such as trading one 500 GB Caviar drive for a Western Digital VelociRaptor 10,000rpm hard drive, or a higher watt power supply.

One additional item that you should order if you are going to custom build is thermal paste. A single tube of Arctic Silver 5 thermal compound is cheap, but works so much better than the stuff that comes standard with your processor or CPU cooler!

 

[SignBurst PCs]

I noticed on Option #2 that they are using a Core i7-920 processor, but have 8 GB (4 x 2 GB) of DDR3 1066 memory. First off, the i7-920 platform uses triple channel memory. This means they should be using either 3, 6, or 12 GB of memory to make most efficient use of the triple channel memory controller. That they aren't using this kind of configuration kinda just shows they are more into making the label look better. After all, 8 GB looks better than 6 GB of memory!

While I usually agree with you Choucove, I have to disagree with the above statement.

Although the i7 (1366 Socket) platform is capable of triple-channel, we have tested Photoshop performance with 6GB DDR3 (triple channel mode) and 8GB DDR3 (dual channel mode). At first, my thinking was in line with yours. After testing different configurations, we found that 8GB DDR3 in dual-channel was indeed faster than 6GB in triple-channel by a good margin. This may not be the same on all systems, but in our i7 system (http://signburst.com/inferno.html), the 8GB won out over the 6GB.

 

[choucove]

While I usually agree with you Choucove, I have to disagree with the above statement.

Although the i7 (1366 Socket) platform is capable of triple-channel, we have tested Photoshop performance with 6GB DDR3 (triple channel mode) and 8GB DDR3 (dual channel mode). At first, my thinking was in line with yours. After testing different configurations, we found that 8GB DDR3 in dual-channel was indeed faster than 6GB in triple-channel by a good margin. This may not be the same on all systems, but in our i7 system (http://signburst.com/inferno.html), the 8GB won out over the 6GB.

Really that is interesting to hear. I know that the possible throughput of the triple channel memory is pretty ridiculously enormous for most needs so dual-channel would offer still more than enough performance throughput between the RAM and CPU, but I would not expect that dual-channel would outperform triple-channel. Of course, though, it is more understandable as you are comparing running a RAM-intensive application on 6 GB of RAM versus 8 GB of RAM. It would be interesting as well to see how a 32-bit application would run between the two since the actual maximum amount of memory wouldn't matter to the program and it would just be testing dual-channel versus triple-channel.

 

[SignBurst PCs]

Really that is interesting to hear. I know that the possible throughput of the triple channel memory is pretty ridiculously enormous for most needs so dual-channel would offer still more than enough performance throughput between the RAM and CPU, but I would not expect that dual-channel would outperform triple-channel.

I don't think that dual-channel outperforms triple-channel at all.

I believe that it is the capacity more than anything. The extra 2GB looks to be enough of a buffer to cover and exceed the potential gain offered by the triple-channel.

6GB in triple-channel would most likely out perform 6GB in dual-channel (not a common config, but you get the idea).

Does that make sense to you?

 

[choucove]

I don't think that dual-channel outperforms triple-channel at all.

I believe that it is the capacity more than anything. The extra 2GB looks to be enough of a buffer to cover and exceed the potential gain offered by the triple-channel.

6GB in triple-channel would most likely out perform 6GB in dual-channel (not a common config, but you get the idea).

Does that make sense to you?

Yes exactly what I was trying to say. This answers one of my questions I had before as well on the Core i7-920 vs. Core i7-860 platform. One of the big selling points for the Core i7-920 in this field is its ability to do triple-channel memory configurations, but in the end it's pretty much just the same cost but more effective to go the Core i7-860 route and get 8 GB of RAM instead of the 6 GB of RAM with the 920. Performance-wise in most all benchmarks that I have seen (I have not been able to physically compare the two side by side myself) the 920 and 860 are pretty much identical unless you are doing overclocking, or are running multiple graphics cards. That is where the 920 can pull into the lead slightly.