Looking for suggestions on building a 'dream' computer

http://mentalhelp.net/

http://mentalhelp.net/

OK..bit of a lengthy reply and purely my own view on this. Others may have
opposing viewpoints but this based on being in the corporate world.

I would suggest something that I have not seen posted yet. Consider
something like a Dell, IBM, etc. (I hear the sighs already) since service
and support would be high on your companies list. If the system goes down
and it is a local or self built system, they may not be too happy if you
cannot get proper support. And in that context also consider an extended
warranty. Corporations are big on not having to pay for service for the
longest possible time. I would not push your companies "generous" nature
myself. If an employee doing a similar job as yourself can do a very nice
job with a system costing a couple of grand less, you may raise an eyebrow
or two with overkill.

That said go for lots of RAM since video work is a priority. Also as fast a
processor as is available. I lean toward Intel but to each his/her own. Grab
one of the very newest video cards by ATI or NVIDIA with 256 MB of RAM or
more again with video work being a priority. A SATA hard drive and as large
a capacity as is available since video files can really chew up space. Also
a decent monitor at least 19" and possibly 21 or so. Needless to say if it
whips through serious video work like a charm, it should run gaming software
without a hitch. Check around and see what others in the company are using
and ask a lot of quotations from your computer supplier of choice to be sure
that the system will live up to it's intended use. Also see if your company
deals with a particular manufacturer. This may mean a discount and you can
get an even more powerful system or upgrades as opposed to hunting down a
system on your own.

Regards,
John O.

"Brad" wrote in message
news:N9DWc.204051$gE.103129@pd7tw3no...
What are you doing with this system? 6000 is a nice gaming rig, but you
aren't going to get anything astronomical for that price.

Im doing a fair amount of video work and compiling from my office in my
home
( in the home hence to why i want to add onto it to make it an excellent
gamer system). The computer is to be paid by the company as a business
expense, and Im able to acquire whatever system I feel is necessary. Any
overkill is just a nice extra bonus seeing that it wont cost me anything.


Fastest 64 bit AMD, good motherboard with whatever hookups you want on
it, a case, a cooling solution (water or whatever), 2 gigs of ram, a few
Western Digital 10000 rpm raptor drives, a few 250-300 gig backup
drives, 16x dual layer dvd burner, whichever vidcard you are attached to
(uber6800 or uberx800... both of which have dual outputs you can run
monitors from), an audigy 2 if you hate onboard audio, a set of digital
speakers (logitech or klipsch), an ati or pinnacle capture card for your
cable, and a few LCD monitors... Those would actually break your budget.

But that's what a normal 6000 system looks like.

Brad wrote:
http://mentalhelp.net/


Bradley, I suggest you take your own advice. Oh and some remedial English
classes whilst you're at it, as you don't appear to know the difference
between 'you're' and 'your' 'it's and its'.Let me explain in words a
retarded 13-year-old such as yourself might understand.

Let's start with 'you're and 'your' and take the latter first. 'Your' is a
possessive adjective - 'your hat' 'your coat' 'your attitude' or it can be
used to indicate direction 'mine is the third house on your right'.

You're, on the other hand, is a contraction (that's what the apostrophe -
that little curly thing - indicates. a missing letter, in this instance an
'a'. So when you said to Onideus "you figure your someone special..." it
makes no sense, what you should have said was "you figure /you're/ someone
special..."

OK, now let's move on to 'its' and 'it's' shall we? 'Its' (no apostrophe) is
possessive 'the dog eats its dinner'. With an apostrophe, it's a contraction
for 'it is' - if you write ' the dog eats it's dinner' what you're really
saying is 'the dog eats it is dinner' which makes no sense whatsoever.

In fact, you appear to need a new keyboard, as yours doesn't appear to have
an apostrophe - if it does, you don't use it. 'words' like I'm (a
contraction of I am) don't (do not) won't (will not) and they're (they are)
require apostrophes. If you don't use an apostrophe in 'won't' it changes
the meaning entirely - 'wont' (no apostrophe) means 'apt, accustomed to'.

Your lack of knowledge of your native tongue makes you look an even bigger
moron that you already are.

--
My great-grandfather was born and raised in Elgin - did he eventually
lose his marbles?

www.grammarnazi.com

Hey Brad -

I sympathize with you. It sucks when you post an innocent question asking
for information and your question really does make sense and you are not
asking for anything crazy or stupid and some people feel the need to attack
you. You mentioned a budget of $6,000. In my opinion, that is a nice, large
budget to build a powerful PC. The system I laid out for you would not break
that budget and I doubt many of us here have a machine worth even $4,000.
I'm going to re-post the specs I recommend, with slight changes, since I see
you do video editing:

DUAL processor solution HIGHLY recommended. Believe it or not, going from a
dual 1800 to a single FX-51, I'm finding sometimes my dual 1800 was faster
and that is because I often have something running while I'm trying to work.
If you are doing video editing and related activities, you really should go
dual. Why Opteron instead of Zeon? Please go out there on Google and find
benchmarks and you will see very good reasons.

~ $1350 - Opteron 248's oem price = $675 each
(if you get a larger budget go for the Dual Opteron 250's - newegg $895 * 2
= ~ $1800)

~$554 - Motherboard Must be a dual socket 940 board, of course. Your budget
is large. Get the mack daddy. I see the board I've been using is still in
the running if you look at Motherboards-Server at newegg. It only runs $220.
I am VERY happy with this board even though I'm only using one of the CPU
slots. I plan on trading my FX-51 plus some moolah for an Opteron 250 and
buying another Opteron to build something like your dream machine. It looks
like Tyan has a high-end 940-pin board on newegg called the Tyan Thunder
K8SR running $554. It even supports RAID 10 (striping & mirroring) on the
board for SATA drives. Dual channel gigabyte LAN. If you go SCSI you'll need
to get a SCSI RAID card and hey with $6,000 budget you can probably afford
that! The Tyan even has one of those new PCI-E slots which will come in
handy for your shiny new Nvidia 6800 Ultra OC!

~$354 - Two 250 gig SATA drives mirrored so you data safety. Hitachi makes a
nice & fast 250 gig SATA drive with a fast for this group seek time of 8.5
ms. Nice price, too, at NewEgg @ $177 each right now. Increase to RAID 10
(mirroring AND striping) if you get more money freed up. Means 4 drives
instead.

JUST ADDED EVERYTHING UP AND SEEING SCSI IS TOO EXPENSIVE FOR YOUR BUDGET
~$2160 AND I would go ahead and get four SCSI drives, striped and mirrored
(RAID 10 again). Seagate seems to be the king right now over at NewEgg for
these drives. I'm looking at the 73 gig 15,000 RPM drives with seek of 3.6
ms (drool)! Because they are so small, you'll need your SATA drives. If you
are needing to save a bit of money, reduce your SATA array above to two
drives and just mirror and use your SATA array for the slower stuff. Put
what you want to access fast on the SCSI array.
~$629 for Adaptec's 64-bit PCI to SCSI RAID controller card: I see the 2200S
is the best one over at NewEgg.

~$1600 (2 x 2 gig sticks @ $765 each) FOUR gig (video editing means you
never can have too much RAM! I would recommend 8 gig here but only if you
have more money. Get fast dual channel ECC/registered (ECC/registered needed
for dual boards) DDR2 400 (PC3200) RAM your motherboard supports. Corsair
makes some good RAM and so does Mushkin and others.

~$500 - BFG's 6800 Ultra OC - someone here said the XT800 is faster or
something.
They are mostly wrong. The XT800 is not much more than a souped up ATi 9800;
The 6800 line is new technology and much more advanced. I won't go into
details but you can research this and find your truth. Most modern cards
will support two monitors simultaneously.

~$190 - Lian Li PC-70 case. Get whichever one you want. I just recommend
this brand for
cases. Research and see why. They rock. Depending on how many drives you end
up wanting to go with, choose your case.

~$88 - Antec true 480 (or if you get rich: I see I-Star makes a 500w x 500w
"Real Dual AC Mini Redundant Power Supply.)

~ $154 - DVD/CD burner: Plextor 12x

Didn't put little things like CD drive, keyboard, and mouse. Assuming you
may have already. And if you need to, your DVD drive can double as a CD
reader.

Not sure if you said you needed monitors or have them already. Assuming you
want to get monitors so I did some tweaking of the above stuff, as you can
see, to get the price lower. Got it all down to $4,790 so you would have
some left for monitors. IF you already have monitors or you have a larger
budget, I recommend changing out the following items in this priority:
(a) move up from opteron 248's to 250's. I would not skimp on that
motherboard, btw.
(b) power supply
(c) two more SATA drives
(d) more RAM
(e) SCSI


I heard someone mention going with Dell or IBM or some other name brand to
build it for you. I don't recommend that route. You'll pay more that way for
less. Those *are* great companies but I doubt you can get the perfect
combination of components if you go that route. I recommend going with a
local computer shop or building it yourself. At least with a local computer
shop you may be able to bring them the parts you ordered and ask them to
assemble and "burn in" the system. Good luck with your purchase.

Sincerely,
Scotter

Jesus Christ! Are you and Mad Hatter in bed with each other or something?
Lay off the dude for god sakes. Does it make you feel good to team up and
badger someone with pompous rhetoric designed solely to instigate? The
purpose of posting a response to Brad's questions should be to provide
technical information on the subject. Instead you have both provided nothing
but reasons to be added to the good old kill-file.

What a waste of space you both are.

Tony

Brad wrote:


My suggestion is don't get a PC, get a server.

...huh?

How would a "server" NOT be a PC? Well I suppose if you setup a Mac as a
server...

PC is 'Personal Computer'. A server is typically meant to be used by many
and not 'personal' usage.

Sometimes the terminology can cause a bit of misunderstanding

Server can be defined by use and by architecture, but generally speaking a
machine which is providing a service to multiple users or client-machines
is a "server" regardless of the architecture. You can set up a Mac as a
server or an RS/6000, or a Sparc, or an iSeries or a zSeries or one of the
older architectures such as AS/400, S/390, Alpha, or VAX, or a PC, or an
Intel-based box purpose-made as a server.

There's a notion that a server is somehow more "heavy-duty" than a desktop
machine, but that isn't always so.

For the stated requirements, "get a server" is not good advice in any
case--"get a workstation" would be better. If you look at the specs on
purpose-made servers you'll find that they typically have built-in video
with no AGP slot for openers--for a server high-performance video is a
waste, so the resources that would be devoted to the AGP slot are instead
diverted to 64-bit or 66 MHz or PCI-X (not PCI Express) slots. That means
that using "the best video gaming card" is out. Further, some servers are
pretty wimpy machines--they're made to fit a space and provide a minimum
level of performance necessary for a task--look at the 1U rack-optimized
servers for example--while some of them have fast processors and can take a
large amount of RAM the expansion capabilities without adding an external
case are very limited.

While the trend is changing, for most of the history of the Intel-based
machines an Intel-based server was considered to be a "PC". IBM even sold
them as "PC Servers". With the complexity of machines increasing (a loaded
PC can have as many transistors as the human brain has neurons) and
allowing higher degrees of optimization, the architectural distinction
between a PC and a server is becoming more significant, but generally
speaking until you get into the 4- or more processor machines a server is
for most practical purposes a PC and can be used as such, subject to the
limitations imposed by its optimizations.

For high performance graphics use the type of machine generally chosen is
called a "workstation" and there are purpose-made workstation boards
made--if you go over to the Intel site you'll see some examples of
purpose-made server and workstation boards and can get an idea of the
features to expect on either.

For an example from the AMD world, compare a Tyan Thunder K8S Pro with a
Thunder K8W.

--
--John
Reply to jclarke at ae tee tee global dot net
(was jclarke at eye bee em dot net)

Thanks Scotter, I had not expected such detail.

Im liking the dual Opteron idea. Hadn't expected them to be $900 each...I
guess that means i may not be able to go quad opteron's but you never know.
heh

I definately agree on going all out for a motherboard. I saw a review site
and the one i looked at that supports the Opteron's has 2 agp slots. That
could open up some new perspective in my options.

Aside from not being as up to speed on the current best video card, I think
I would concur with everything youve recommended. If going with the scsi
drives goes over $6000, I may add them in anyways... but that will probably
be considered when the final bill is totaled up.

I think the only think left if to see what type of monitors I'll be wanting.
I shall print this list and go to the distributors and see whats in stock.

Thanks again

Hey Brad -

I sympathize with you. It sucks when you post an innocent question asking
for information and your question really does make sense and you are not
asking for anything crazy or stupid and some people feel the need to
attack
you. You mentioned a budget of $6,000. In my opinion, that is a nice,
large
budget to build a powerful PC. The system I laid out for you would not
break
that budget and I doubt many of us here have a machine worth even $4,000.
I'm going to re-post the specs I recommend, with slight changes, since I
see
you do video editing:

DUAL processor solution HIGHLY recommended. Believe it or not, going from
a
dual 1800 to a single FX-51, I'm finding sometimes my dual 1800 was faster
and that is because I often have something running while I'm trying to
work.
If you are doing video editing and related activities, you really should
go
dual. Why Opteron instead of Zeon? Please go out there on Google and find
benchmarks and you will see very good reasons.

~ $1350 - Opteron 248's oem price = $675 each
(if you get a larger budget go for the Dual Opteron 250's - newegg $895 *
2
= ~ $1800)

~$554 - Motherboard Must be a dual socket 940 board, of course. Your
budget
is large. Get the mack daddy. I see the board I've been using is still in
the running if you look at Motherboards-Server at newegg. It only runs
$220.
I am VERY happy with this board even though I'm only using one of the CPU
slots. I plan on trading my FX-51 plus some moolah for an Opteron 250 and
buying another Opteron to build something like your dream machine. It
looks
like Tyan has a high-end 940-pin board on newegg called the Tyan Thunder
K8SR running $554. It even supports RAID 10 (striping & mirroring) on the
board for SATA drives. Dual channel gigabyte LAN. If you go SCSI you'll
need
to get a SCSI RAID card and hey with $6,000 budget you can probably afford
that! The Tyan even has one of those new PCI-E slots which will come in
handy for your shiny new Nvidia 6800 Ultra OC!

~$354 - Two 250 gig SATA drives mirrored so you data safety. Hitachi makes
a
nice & fast 250 gig SATA drive with a fast for this group seek time of 8.5
ms. Nice price, too, at NewEgg @ $177 each right now. Increase to RAID 10
(mirroring AND striping) if you get more money freed up. Means 4 drives
instead.

JUST ADDED EVERYTHING UP AND SEEING SCSI IS TOO EXPENSIVE FOR YOUR BUDGET
~$2160 AND I would go ahead and get four SCSI drives, striped and mirrored
(RAID 10 again). Seagate seems to be the king right now over at NewEgg for
these drives. I'm looking at the 73 gig 15,000 RPM drives with seek of 3.6
ms (drool)! Because they are so small, you'll need your SATA drives. If
you
are needing to save a bit of money, reduce your SATA array above to two
drives and just mirror and use your SATA array for the slower stuff. Put
what you want to access fast on the SCSI array.
~$629 for Adaptec's 64-bit PCI to SCSI RAID controller card: I see the
2200S
is the best one over at NewEgg.

~$1600 (2 x 2 gig sticks @ $765 each) FOUR gig (video editing means you
never can have too much RAM! I would recommend 8 gig here but only if you
have more money. Get fast dual channel ECC/registered (ECC/registered
needed
for dual boards) DDR2 400 (PC3200) RAM your motherboard supports. Corsair
makes some good RAM and so does Mushkin and others.

~$500 - BFG's 6800 Ultra OC - someone here said the XT800 is faster or
something.
They are mostly wrong. The XT800 is not much more than a souped up ATi
9800;
The 6800 line is new technology and much more advanced. I won't go into
details but you can research this and find your truth. Most modern cards
will support two monitors simultaneously.

~$190 - Lian Li PC-70 case. Get whichever one you want. I just recommend
this brand for
cases. Research and see why. They rock. Depending on how many drives you
end
up wanting to go with, choose your case.

~$88 - Antec true 480 (or if you get rich: I see I-Star makes a 500w x
500w
"Real Dual AC Mini Redundant Power Supply.)

~ $154 - DVD/CD burner: Plextor 12x

Didn't put little things like CD drive, keyboard, and mouse. Assuming you
may have already. And if you need to, your DVD drive can double as a CD
reader.

Not sure if you said you needed monitors or have them already. Assuming
you
want to get monitors so I did some tweaking of the above stuff, as you can
see, to get the price lower. Got it all down to $4,790 so you would have
some left for monitors. IF you already have monitors or you have a larger
budget, I recommend changing out the following items in this priority:
(a) move up from opteron 248's to 250's. I would not skimp on that
motherboard, btw.
(b) power supply
(c) two more SATA drives
(d) more RAM
(e) SCSI


I heard someone mention going with Dell or IBM or some other name brand to
build it for you. I don't recommend that route. You'll pay more that way
for
less. Those *are* great companies but I doubt you can get the perfect
combination of components if you go that route. I recommend going with a
local computer shop or building it yourself. At least with a local
computer
shop you may be able to bring them the parts you ordered and ask them to
assemble and "burn in" the system. Good luck with your purchase.

Sincerely,
Scotter

Hey Brad -

I'm very very pleased to hear you got some use from my suggestions! By the
way, for your situation I don't think you would notice much (if any)
difference between dual and quad Opterons and while I guess you can find a
motherboard to support quad Opterons, I don't know where they are or how
much they cost. If you have extra money to burn, I'd put it into SCSI drives
and RAM. Video is sooo large and the difference between keeping part of a
file on the hard drive or in memory is a huge speed difference. Oh and dual
AGP I don't see as being useful at all for your purposes. Especially since
AGP seems to be phasing out in favor of that new PC-X or PC-express -
research that, please. I know the motherboard I recommended has one of those
slots but not sure if it is the same one that the new crop of vid cards
support. Good luck! I envy you in a good way, heh!


"Brad" wrote in message
newsPIWc.205534$J06.95851@pd7tw2no...

Thanks Scotter, I had not expected such detail.

Im liking the dual Opteron idea. Hadn't expected them to be $900 each...I
guess that means i may not be able to go quad opteron's but you never
know.
heh

I definately agree on going all out for a motherboard. I saw a review site
and the one i looked at that supports the Opteron's has 2 agp slots. That
could open up some new perspective in my options.

Aside from not being as up to speed on the current best video card, I
think
I would concur with everything youve recommended. If going with the scsi
drives goes over $6000, I may add them in anyways... but that will
probably
be considered when the final bill is totaled up.

I think the only think left if to see what type of monitors I'll be
wanting.
I shall print this list and go to the distributors and see whats in stock.

Thanks again

Hey Brad -

I sympathize with you. It sucks when you post an innocent question
asking
for information and your question really does make sense and you are not
asking for anything crazy or stupid and some people feel the need to
attack
you. You mentioned a budget of $6,000. In my opinion, that is a nice,
large
budget to build a powerful PC. The system I laid out for you would not
break
that budget and I doubt many of us here have a machine worth even
$4,000.
I'm going to re-post the specs I recommend, with slight changes, since I
see
you do video editing:

DUAL processor solution HIGHLY recommended. Believe it or not, going
from
a
dual 1800 to a single FX-51, I'm finding sometimes my dual 1800 was
faster
and that is because I often have something running while I'm trying to
work.
If you are doing video editing and related activities, you really should
go
dual. Why Opteron instead of Zeon? Please go out there on Google and
find
benchmarks and you will see very good reasons.

~ $1350 - Opteron 248's oem price = $675 each
(if you get a larger budget go for the Dual Opteron 250's - newegg $895
*
2
= ~ $1800)

~$554 - Motherboard Must be a dual socket 940 board, of course. Your
budget
is large. Get the mack daddy. I see the board I've been using is still
in
the running if you look at Motherboards-Server at newegg. It only runs
$220.
I am VERY happy with this board even though I'm only using one of the
CPU
slots. I plan on trading my FX-51 plus some moolah for an Opteron 250
and
buying another Opteron to build something like your dream machine. It
looks
like Tyan has a high-end 940-pin board on newegg called the Tyan Thunder
K8SR running $554. It even supports RAID 10 (striping & mirroring) on
the
board for SATA drives. Dual channel gigabyte LAN. If you go SCSI you'll
need
to get a SCSI RAID card and hey with $6,000 budget you can probably
afford
that! The Tyan even has one of those new PCI-E slots which will come in
handy for your shiny new Nvidia 6800 Ultra OC!

~$354 - Two 250 gig SATA drives mirrored so you data safety. Hitachi
makes
a
nice & fast 250 gig SATA drive with a fast for this group seek time of
8.5
ms. Nice price, too, at NewEgg @ $177 each right now. Increase to RAID
10
(mirroring AND striping) if you get more money freed up. Means 4 drives
instead.

JUST ADDED EVERYTHING UP AND SEEING SCSI IS TOO EXPENSIVE FOR YOUR
BUDGET
~$2160 AND I would go ahead and get four SCSI drives, striped and
mirrored
(RAID 10 again). Seagate seems to be the king right now over at NewEgg
for
these drives. I'm looking at the 73 gig 15,000 RPM drives with seek of
3.6
ms (drool)! Because they are so small, you'll need your SATA drives. If
you
are needing to save a bit of money, reduce your SATA array above to two
drives and just mirror and use your SATA array for the slower stuff. Put
what you want to access fast on the SCSI array.
~$629 for Adaptec's 64-bit PCI to SCSI RAID controller card: I see the
2200S
is the best one over at NewEgg.

~$1600 (2 x 2 gig sticks @ $765 each) FOUR gig (video editing means you
never can have too much RAM! I would recommend 8 gig here but only if
you
have more money. Get fast dual channel ECC/registered (ECC/registered
needed
for dual boards) DDR2 400 (PC3200) RAM your motherboard supports.
Corsair
makes some good RAM and so does Mushkin and others.

~$500 - BFG's 6800 Ultra OC - someone here said the XT800 is faster or
something.
They are mostly wrong. The XT800 is not much more than a souped up ATi
9800;
The 6800 line is new technology and much more advanced. I won't go into
details but you can research this and find your truth. Most modern cards
will support two monitors simultaneously.

~$190 - Lian Li PC-70 case. Get whichever one you want. I just recommend
this brand for
cases. Research and see why. They rock. Depending on how many drives you
end
up wanting to go with, choose your case.

~$88 - Antec true 480 (or if you get rich: I see I-Star makes a 500w x
500w
"Real Dual AC Mini Redundant Power Supply.)

~ $154 - DVD/CD burner: Plextor 12x

Didn't put little things like CD drive, keyboard, and mouse. Assuming
you
may have already. And if you need to, your DVD drive can double as a CD
reader.

Not sure if you said you needed monitors or have them already. Assuming
you
want to get monitors so I did some tweaking of the above stuff, as you
can
see, to get the price lower. Got it all down to $4,790 so you would have
some left for monitors. IF you already have monitors or you have a
larger
budget, I recommend changing out the following items in this priority:
(a) move up from opteron 248's to 250's. I would not skimp on that
motherboard, btw.
(b) power supply
(c) two more SATA drives
(d) more RAM
(e) SCSI


I heard someone mention going with Dell or IBM or some other name brand
to
build it for you. I don't recommend that route. You'll pay more that way
for
less. Those *are* great companies but I doubt you can get the perfect
combination of components if you go that route. I recommend going with a
local computer shop or building it yourself. At least with a local
computer
shop you may be able to bring them the parts you ordered and ask them to
assemble and "burn in" the system. Good luck with your purchase.

Sincerely,
Scotter