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Author Topic: New PC  (Read 2423 times)

VIS

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New PC
« on: November 10, 2008, 01:43:21 am »

I am in the market for a new PC as my 5 year old Dell is in need of an over haul.  I have done a fair amount of studying and have narrowed my choices down to the following.  I am hoping you can provide some guidance in those areas for brands and if you think I should do something different, I would like to hear that as well.  I am getting this primarily for Photo Editing, some video editing and then basic office type stuff and music.  For digital darkroom, I am currently using CS4 and RAW.  

Monitor: 22-30" S-IPS or H-IPS with 8 bit.  One that works very well with color gamut and Luminous.  Still looking at the different brands and model numbers.  NEC MultiSync LCD2690WUXi, NEC MultiSync LCD2490WUXi, Dell UltraSharp 3007WFP-HC.  However, these are very good but a little more than what I would like to spend.  What I have not found much data on is what is in the next level under these?

NVIDA GF9600GT 512MB

CPU: QuadCore Intel Q9450

Hard Drive: one 300GIG for OS, two 1TB or 2TB fast drives with Raid 0, one TB backup drive

Memory: 4gig but thinking of going 6 or 8

Calibrator: Currently have base model of Huey, looking at upgrading to X-rite i1 Display 2

Power Supply: 800W

Case: Cool Case or Capacious

Motherboard: Looking at SI but not sure if that is what I should go with, any recommendations?

I would appreciate any thoughts or recommendations to the above list that you may have.  

Thanks,

VIS
« Last Edit: November 10, 2008, 01:50:18 am by VIS »
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Plekto

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New PC
« Reply #1 on: November 12, 2008, 04:52:43 pm »

A few things:

- The quad core processor is overkill.  Windows won't use more than two cores anyways unless you're doing high end rendering or compiling programs or similar tasks.  Save some money here.

- Windows 32 bit OSes will only use 4GB max, so more is useless unless you also run the 64 bit versions(note - Linux will handle more than 4GB happily)

- 800W power supply is overkill.  Go to silentpc ( http://www.silentpcreview.com/ ) and ask around - you want a highly efficient and lower noise model if you can.  My PC is a high-end two core model and I can hardly hear it when it's on thanks to about $150 in mods and careful component selection to quiet it.  Far better use o money than a quad core CPU.

- Raid is asking for trouble on larger volumes.  The problem is that large volumes exhibit bit errors and timeouts on a scale that results in a large number of dead arrays.  It's a known problem with raid and enormous drives. (the issue is the bock sizes and the buffer timing out)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZFS
This is the only known reliable option for using large drives that I know of in a RAID array.
If this seems to be overkill in terms of technical knowledge required, it is.  Just use them as independent drives.  RAID 0  is asking for trouble anyways.  I have two big storage drives on my machine and so far no problems since I don't hammer them and they are just for data storage and swapping/downloading.

Plus, if the data drives only have data, recovering from a crash is really simple and most data recovery programs will do it quite well.  It's the OS drive that makes you pull your hair out when it goes.(note - get identical drives when buying more than one drive  - often it's the circuit board that dies and you can swap that onto the dead drive and often get it working enough to get the data off)

OTOH, the OS should be Raid 1.  $60-$80 for a second drive is well worth it to have a backup copy of your OS is one drive fails.  In fact, I put mine on two smaller 160GB drives to keep the cost down even more and potential recovery costs.(data recovery is usually based upon the total drive capacity and not the amount recovered).  

As for drives?  Western Digital GP for the main storage drives.  They run cooler and cooler means longer drive life.  The RAID/OS group should be the RE2 models made specifically for RAID.

But the guys over at SlientPC know far more about this than I do.    Check them out.
« Last Edit: November 12, 2008, 04:53:43 pm by Plekto »
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jjj

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New PC
« Reply #2 on: November 12, 2008, 06:34:33 pm »

Samsung Drives are quiet, fast and very reliable. Only make I've not had any die on me and I've tried them all!
An Antec P182 Case is highly recommended for it's design. Cool, quiet and capacious.
http://www.antec.com/usa/productDetails.ph...us&id=81820
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Plekto

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New PC
« Reply #3 on: November 12, 2008, 09:19:19 pm »

Laptop drives also are another way to get the noise and power use down.
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