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New Build

907customs

New Member
Ok, so this will be my first build, so any advice is appriciated. I know there is another current thread that is similar, but I didn't want to hijack it. This computer will be used primarily for Photoshop CS4, and Flexisign 8.5. I'm starting to design wraps, and it's mind numbing waiting for the computer to render these larger files. Here's the main hardware that I'm considering:

Cooler Master 932 full tower
Corsair 850 watt power supply
Intel Core I7 920 processor
Corsair 12gb of DDR3 1600 ram
ASUS P6T6 motherboard
ASUS EN9500GT 512mb video cards (2)
Intel x25-M 80gb SSD (2) in raid 0 to run OS, and programs
Hitachi 1tb 7200rpm HDD for general storage
Windows 7 OS

I didn't mention the add on's such as DVD drive, and extras. So I'm wondering if any of you guru's see any glitches in this parts list, or anyting I'm missing. Also, would I be able to run a triple monitor setup off of the 2 video cards? I'm still a little retarded about the video card(s), SLI end of things...

Thanks!
 

1leonchen

New Member
Hitachi 1tb 7200rpm HDD for general storage


i bought a Hitachi 500 gb 7200rpm HDD for strach dick it was a peice of junk stiill cant get my warranty.
try seagate they bought out maxtor which is the best. i satill have my quantium and will never part wiht it.
 

907customs

New Member
Thanks for the heads up on the HDD, I just chose a cheap one, without any research. Overall cost for build so far is $2200, but that doesn't include the OS.
 

choucove

New Member
Having just upgraded to using SSD drives in RAID 0 on my newest computer for myself, I have to SERIOUSLY suggest heavily researching into the options and information available before you make the move. I'm not saying its a bad move, I'm glad I did it! I just am saying that I researched for several months to learn everything that I could on what it takes to maintain and set up a system on SSD and getting a good deal too!

The Intel SSD drives like you have chosen are an older model, the newer and higher performance being the X25-E models. There are many articles out there about how those older Intel SSD drives suffer from slowing down over time and a huge variance in speed. I would suggest if you are dead set on the Intel drives to check out the newer models as they have the firmware and memory type to solve this problem.

However, I also have to highly suggest that, for the price, you find something other than the Intel drives. Yes, they are considered the king of the mainstream desktop SSD drives, but they really aren't much more faster than the OCZ Vertez drives, which is what I ended up going with. One OCZ 120GB SSD is cheaper than one 32GB Intel SSD.

OCZ also has one of the best support forums for any SSD out there, and I learned multitudes from their site here.

Next, I would highly suggest taking a look at the manufacturer's website for any motherboard that you choose before-hand, and make sure to check the tested or compatible memory module list. While yes, most memory of the right type will work with whatever, DDR3 has been pretty finicky with different systems. If you don't get memory specifically listed as compatible, while it may be recognized just fine, it may have ONE thing different with it and thus it runs at degraded or slower performance than a compatible memory module would run. I just found this out myself with my own computer. Installed 8GB of Crucial Ballistix DDR3 1333 in my computer and it was all recognized and ran fine, but I had some strange stability issues at first. Came to find out the motherboard automatically set the memory voltage to 1.65 volts when the actual memory modules require 1.8 volts.

i bought a Hitachi 500 gb 7200rpm HDD for strach dick it was a peice of junk stiill cant get my warranty.
try seagate they bought out maxtor which is the best. i satill have my quantium and will never part wiht it.

I also have to agree here, I've had no troubles with Seagate ever, and I've purchased numerous hard drives from them. Others lately have had some difficulties with Seagates they say, and yes their higher-capacity drives can have a faulty firmware. However, this firmware can be updated to fix the problem, and many of the drives shipping today already have the problem fixed. All four of the new 1.5 TB Seagate drives I purchased have fixed firmware and running without trouble.

And finally, for video cards, as generally graphic design work isn't incredibly taxing on the GPU itself more than CPU, the 9500GT may work fine for your needs. If you are wanting to run more than dual-display, you would require having two separate cards, as each card has output for two monitors. However, you also cannot put the cards into SLI configuration if you want to use three displays. SLI would basically just make one of the video cards slave to the other for use as processing power, so only the one card would actually do video-out, thus dual-display only.

Researching these kinds of little things can actually save you a bunch of hassle and headache later on, such as when your 30-day refund is up or before you even start ordering parts.
 

Jace161

New Member
That is the exact setup I'm building minus the - case, memory(16GB), HDD(two 300GB w/ RAID), and ATI video card...almost exact lol.
 

Arstron

New Member
I just wanted to add to what Choucove said. I also am getting ready to make the switch to SSD's on my new design computer. I purchased one to test out and put it in my laptop and its made a huge difference. I went with the OCZ Vertex and will stay with them in the future. OCZ has updated their vertex line of firmware several times, they have also released a "wiper" program, which goes thru the drive, deletes any fragmented data and optimizes the drive. This is something that is "supposed" to be added to windows 7 down the road (rumored around the first service pack release).

One other thing to keep in mind, most motherboards will use all drive controllers on one pci express x1 bus, which will give you a total of 300mb/s of transfer speed for all drives. So all three of your drives will have to share that 300 mb/s. It wont be as noticeable with a 2 sdd raid setup (although it will be a bottle neck), but with 3 sdds or more in a raid, I would highly recommend a good raid card (4x or 8x pci express with onboard hardware processing as opposed to software).
 

choucove

New Member
I am a big fan of the western digital raptor drives. I have 2 and they seem lightning fast...

I'm also a fan of the VelociRaptor and Raptor drives from WD and have used them in several systems. If you are not quite ready for the jump into SSD territory because of support or costs reasons, the WD 10,000rpm drives I would highly recommend then.


Arstron said:
One other thing to keep in mind, most motherboards will use all drive controllers on one pci express x1 bus, which will give you a total of 300mb/s of transfer speed for all drives. So all three of your drives will have to share that 300 mb/s. It wont be as noticeable with a 2 sdd raid setup (although it will be a bottle neck), but with 3 sdds or more in a raid, I would highly recommend a good raid card (4x or 8x pci express with onboard hardware processing as opposed to software).

I also agree completely here, I've run into this myself with my own drives. AMD's 700 series southbridge is known for not the greatest RAID performance with SSD drives, so I tried to get an Adapted 5405 controller card to run the drives off of. In the long run, I had way too many issues with the card and SSD drives working together, it is a very well documented occurrance of which there is no fix currently. So I returned it, and can look at a better solution later down the line. Without the controller card I'm still getting good performance, but with the card (while it was working) I was seeing nearly triple the performance.
 

907customs

New Member
I'll have to do some research on the raid controller, and the limitations of my motherboard...that's a good bit of info! I did manage to get the computer put together this weekend, and it's up and running, 64 bit, windows 7, and all. So far, i've got flexi working with my printer, cutter! I'm still having an issue with PS4, but I'll work that out when I have time. I'll post pics, and more details later...
 

Jester1167

Premium Subscriber
Also go to www.tomshardware.com and look at the charts for CPU, Graphics Cards and Hard drives. Some of the charts are out of date but you can see trends on some of the software and hardware.

Not sure about Adobe CS4 but CS3 is more dependant on processor speed than newest genereation of chip. I was looking and thinking about the i7 950 for a balance of speed, cost, and newest technology.

My favorite ram is Mushkin, my friends and I have used them exclusively for years.

I would use 1 good SSD drive as the scratch disk and a Fast 4G USB drive for Ready Boost (I found Ready Boost benifical with big files)

WD Raptors are faster than your typical hard drive and cheaper than SSD for your program files.

2 mirrored hard drives for redundancy and piece of mind. Or, 4 for mirrored and stripped for speed and redundancy.

Most good motherboards will have an additional Raid controler so you can balance out your Hard Drives, SSD, DVD loads between the two.

Unless you are doing 3D rendering a good fast gaming card will work well. I was looking at the SAPPHIRE 100270SR Radeon HD 4850 X2 2GB 512-bit (256-bit x 2) GDDR3 PCI Express 2.0 x16 HDCP Ready CrossFire Supported Video - Retail $249. It has 4 DVI's but I was concerned about some of the negative feedback on the card.

www.newegg.com is a great place to buy and get some feedback from others, but do independant research as well.
 

choucove

New Member
If you are doing non-CAD style design (such as 2D design work) then your graphics hardware is not as big of an issue, as really the load of rendering is based mostly off the CPU. The only major benefit of a dedicated graphics card in the past was really just to get better resolutions and color settings as well as multiple displays.

However, that game is about to change some with the use of GPU acceleration in Adobe CS4. Having the extra power in your GPU can be used to speed up rendering within Photoshop CS4, though honestly I haven't been able to test it myself to tell you of the benefit. Still, don't think that you have to go getting a monstrous video card comprising half the cost of your entire computer, as it is not necessary when you are doing this kind of design work. I've been running the nVidia Quadro FX570 card with wonderful results in several of our design computers.
 

907customs

New Member
I changed a couple of items from the above list for the final build, here's what I used...

CoolerMaster Full size tower
Corsair 850w power supply
Intel I7 920 CPU
CoolerMaster V-8 CPU cooler
ASUS Rampage II extreme motherboard
Corsair Dominator DDR3 ram (12gb)
2 - Envidia 9500GT GPU's
2 - Intel x25m 80 gb SSD's in Raid 0
1 - Western Digital 1tb 7200 rpm drive
2 - DVD rw drives
1 - Multi card reader
1 - 26" monitor
2 - 22" monitors
Windows 7 64 bit (beta)

The build went good, turned out very nice, with clean wiring. The cost went up a little from the initial also...it was $2650 without monitors. This case has massive cooling fans, and tons of room inside. Once I get comfortable with it, we're going to do a little overclocking to see what kind of performance improvements it will make. See attached pics of the build...
Ken
 

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choucove

New Member
Very nice computer setup, I like the monitors too.

I think your pictures led me to an idea of creating a "Post Pictures of your Machine" thread to show off what you are rocking for your main system. Might be a fun thing to share in the general chat.
 

briderx

New Member
You're using this as your business computer? I will probably get flamed for saying this.. I would NOT overclock a computer you use for business.. Gaming, yeah. It doesn't matter if the system crashes during gaming.. I'm just saying..
 

907customs

New Member
I do plan on using this for graphic design, photoshop, flexi work. I'd like to play with the overclocking a bit just for the experience mostly. From what I understand, the I7 920 can be overclocked a reasonable amount without sacraficing reliability...This being said, I'm not dumping my heart and soul into this as my "official" business computer, with the beta Windows 7 64 bit and all, until it's been tested, and working good. Can't be much worse than waiting on the old system to load all 7000 fonts , and multiple photoshop plugins in Flexi, not to mention having it crator every time I try to modify a 250mb file...

First test so far was the time it takes to open Flexisign 8.5, it was 62 seconds on the old Dell with a Quad core processor, and 4 gb ram. it's 10.2 seconds on the new build!
 
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