Looking for suggestions on building a 'dream' computer

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

Aha they talk about these two standards in the thread just above/after your
thread here in alt.comp.periphs.videocards.nvidia

Onideus Mad Hatter wrote:

On Tue, 24 Aug 2004 08:53:32 GMT, "Brad" wrote:

http://mentalhelp.net/

http://www.backwater-productions.net...es/dumbass.jpg

http://www.plonk

--

Onideus Mad Hatter
mhm ¹ x ¹
http://www.backwater-productions.net

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

Miss Perspicacia Tick wrote:

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.

Oh joy, a grammar flame.

plonk


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

On Tue, 24 Aug 2004 12:57:33 -0400, "J. Clarke" wrote:

Onideus Mad Hatter wrote:

On Tue, 24 Aug 2004 08:53:32 GMT, "Brad" wrote:

http://mentalhelp.net/

http://www.backwater-productions.net...es/dumbass.jpg

http://www.plonk

Make sure you've got your blinders on nice and tight, we wouldn't want your stupid ass reading
something you're not supposed to be, that's why we have filters to think for you. ^_^

--

Onideus Mad Hatter
mhm ¹ x ¹
http://www.backwater-productions.net

On Tue, 24 Aug 2004 13:49:56 GMT, "Scotter" wrote:

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.

It's Xeon, not Zeon.

~ $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)

If he's doing a lot of video editing work and rendering he'd be much better off with a couple 3Ghz
Xeons (which would cost about HALF of what those Opteron go for). And any MORON knows not to not to
buy the "latest and greatest" processor right when it comes out cause the price will drop by about
50% in less than 3 months. He'd be an absolute fool to waste his money on Opteron 250s at this
point.

~$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!

Why go with a dual Opteron board? Most applications that even make use of dual processors are
graphics rendering proggies and they work FAR better with Xeon processors than Opterons. If you're
just doing gaming you're not gonna see much difference at all between single and dual processors.

~$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.

Now that is just blatantly stupid right there. For his needs he would only need ONE 74GB 15000rpm
SCSI drive for his OS, primary applications and scratch space, it wouldn't cost more than $550.
THEN, for storage space ( for storing music, movies, tv shows, pictures, etc, etc) he should get
himself a few mobile rack removable drives, something in the range of like 250GB, 7200rpm at about
$130 bucks per (plus $10 to $60 per mobile rack).

It makes absolutely no ****ing sense whatsoever to have a 15000rpm drive that you're using for
****ing STORAGE SPACE. o_O

Now if you're talking about setting up a big 'ol server with hundreds if not thousands of people
constantly accessing data off of it...then yeah, your idea might make a lil more sense.

~$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.

4 gigs of ECC PC3200's for $1,600?! What the **** crack are you smoking? 4 gigs of Infineon,
PC3200 ECC registered memory shouldn't cost you more than $450, $650 at the most (if you want 2
sticks instead of 4).

~$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.

Or you could just skip the doofy $500 graphics card and get yourself a PS2, cause other than gaming,
yeah the graphics card is mostly a moot point. Most rendering applications all rely on your system
processor(s) to do their work and just skip right on over any functionality the graphics card is
capable of.

And BTW, if you're going to be blowing $500 on a graphics card boy it had better have some pretty
decent video capturing capabilities.

~$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.

The Lian Li cases are just about the most boring style wise of any of the well known case
manufacturers.

~$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.)

Um, if he plans on getting a dual Xeon board he'll need an Antec True550.

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.

You're making the ASSumption that this guy even has the knowledge and understanding to build his own
system, from what I've read out of his posts so far...I'm doubting it. If you have to ASK other
people what you should be building for yourself...yeah, you probably shouldn't be building it
yourself.

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.

Except for the fact that most computer repair shops will try and screw you up the ass 8 ways to last
week, that's why he's better off just going down to Staples and buying himself a Dell or a Compaq.

--

Onideus Mad Hatter
mhm ¹ x ¹
http://www.backwater-productions.net