Third Tier System 1/3rd complete w/ pictures

Well liquid cooling seems a bit excessive. If you drop the multiplier to 8 and fb up to 400mhz you get a nice syn with your ram 3.2ghz processor and it will run on a decent air cooler without any problems.

The HDD i would look at the new samsung drives(F1)... they are very very fast.

Rams a good pick. as for graphics the new GT200 based chips are coming out soon so blowing money on 2 8800gt's may be an unwise choice. nothing plays crysis well at the moment, and i would suggest maybe 1 8800gt until summer then look into the new series of gfx cards then. the 8800gt may be coming to the end of its product life soon. so might not be worth investing in. also worth a note that not all games use Sli aswell as others! Also for photoshopping faster drives are very very useful, so the idea of the 100rpm drive may not be so bad. WD have recently released the velociraptor drive which is damn fine.

I'd LOVE to get my hands on "Window's XP Ultimate".       I know a certain group of people would label them that or something else like it's anything new, but I'd rather not mention them in here.      

Sure the setup is ideal for your needs/wants. You don't have to overclock the cpu which is plenty for what you do. If you want the option to o/c the cpu, pick up an xigmatek hdt-s1283 heatsink that should get you to 3-3.2ghz stable.

Maybe 2x500GB drives in RAID 0? Might speed up your photo and video editing applications...or even 2x320gb...

Good choice on video cards; if you don't want to wait until summer and/or don't plan on upgrading for a couple years, those would do you well.

Liquid cooling isn't excessive if you personally think it isn't. I have been on water cooling for 5 years and have enjoyed it. Yes, its more expensive than aftermarket air, but also keeps your temps a little lower...plus, there is that DIY factor that is nice to be proud of.  

I took that into consideration when I was searching for cards. The plan was to set one at SLI and have the other card running normal, I mean, this is what ive seen on other people's forum posts, I dont know too much about SLI as a whole but I know what your talking about.; people buying SLI cards and expect the ultimate, but find out that it sits on idle for a lot of their games and is sluggish.. I wanted to get two cards also because of the ability to you two monitors on one desktop, I forgot to ad that in there too..

P.S. Unless something comes out in the summer that is next generation, I don't plan on buying top of the line cards not older than maybe 4 months because of price. I'd be happy getting a little older 2x 8800 gt's than a new card and watch the price drop after its initial release.



Yeah that's what a few other people are saying here now, thanks for the tip.

To have SLI you must use both cards. If you're not 3D gaming the SLI video cards run other programs "normal"
Any single video card is able to use two monitors. By two monitors on one desktop - do you mean extending one desktop across two monitors?
If so - you only need one video card to do that task. What size monitors will you be using? What resolutions?

The 8800GT you liked is a great card at a good price $220 plus $30 rebate each. But you could get MSI 8800GTS (G92) 512 OC $225 plus $30 rebate (because you can only get 1 rebate for 2 video cards the GTS would cost $40 more)

I currently have a NEC Multisync 90GX2 21" @ 1280x1024 and some other flat screen VGA's in the garage. I hope to either replace this monitor in the future with 1 wide screen mounted to my wall or this setup:

I want to accomplish this:


(Crappy example but you get the idea)

And possibly having the option to stretch the desktop across 3 monitors if I choose to have a setup similar to this mounted:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=ri69u5b0FoQ&feature=related

You may want to revisit the Q6600 CPU choice. Right now the Q6600 and Q9300 are very close in performance. But Q6600 doesnt have support for SSE4
The newer Penryn Quads have support for SSE4 and when SSE4 versions of codecs & software start showing up the Q9300 will have a potential advantage.

The Flickr example is just individual windows each on its on monitor. The youtube example is an extended desktop.
Each video card can handle two monitors. With 2 video cards you could run 4 monitors as in the Flickr example.
You don't necessarily have to have identical cards for a four monitor setup - but you couldnt do SLI gaming that way.

For extended desktop gaming across 3 monitors you'd want a specialized piece of hardware Matrox TripleHead2Go Digital

I do a lot of video work with Premiere Pro CS3, and I have a system very similar to yours. I have a couple recommendations:

1) This may sound crazy, but since DDR2 is so cheap these days, why not consider 8GB RAM? Adobe programs are happy to use RAM, as is Vista, and the hardware requirements for future programs and games will only go higher.

2) Get 2 hard drives, and have a RAID 1 mirror. It sucks to lose your data, and an external backup drive is a pain in the ass. RAID 0 will give you faster disk performance, but it stripes your data across both drives, so if one drive dies, all your data is toast.

Also, I prefer Seagate drives to WD, but that's just personal preference.

3) Have you considered a video card? By video card, I don't mean GeForce or Radeon; I mean a card which does realtime hardware rendering of video in Premiere. These cards are invaluable (in my opinion); they process all the video effects in Premiere (or equivalent program), so there's no lag when you're watching the realtime video preview. Also, these cards do realtime hardware rendering to MPEG, which is a hell of a lot faster than CPU rendering.

Unfortunately, I don't know a great deal about this type of card (although I'm actually looking to purchase one); for that you should go to a dedicated digital video forum.

I also don't know if any consumer GeForce or Radeon cards support hardware rendering to MPEG and other formats, but I know that there are special video editions of the nVidia Quadro workstaion GPU which support MPEG rendering and have an attached breakout box. However, these workstation cards are optimized for workstation apps, like CAD and the like, and perform poorly on games.

4) Get 2 high-resolution (read: large) LCD monitors. For your photo and video work, you may want to get high-end panels (Dell UltraSharp and the like; read reviews). The high-end panels are quite expensive, though, especially in this age of $350 24" in LCDs. You might be better served by two cheaper 22-24" panels.

Damn, that was a long post. I wish you the best of luck, and sincerely hope I've helped you in some way...

bump

Hi again, the problem with SLi is that once enabled you are limited to one monitor. its bloody annoying having to go back and forth to change to and from SLi mode. i had a script to do it but that was buggy and screwed up everynow and again.

I recently got rid of my 3 monitor setup in favour of a 24" and a 20" monitor. i would suggest one reasonable 24" monitor and a crappy little one. the crappy one comes in useful for all of your toolbars etc...

I myself am a photoshopper and Based on the recommendations in here, RAID 1 is a nice idea but the added overhead does actually decrease speed slightly. to be honest if you can get a motherboard that supports raid 5 i believe you can set up 3 drives... if you have 3 500gb, 2 will act as a striped kind of array and the 3rd is for parity. i believe thats right. that would give you speed and data security and would cost similar to a dedicated data drive and a new raptor. I recommend the new samsung drives!

If you want 2 monitors, one card will suffice. If you want 3 monitors, buy a cheap crappy card just for the extra monitor... You wouldn't be using the gaming aspects of it so why bother spending a fortune?

The other thing to bare in mind, your screen res is low so a 2 high end GFx cards are pointless unless you go to large screen gaming (1920x1200+) and as mentioned the new series of cards are expected to be the next leap in performance. Anyone who went from 5 series geforce to a 6 series will remember how much of a jump that was and how annoying it was to see games fly along on other peoples machine who spent just a little extra.

As for processor, the Q6600 is best bang for buck in current apps, it outperforms the 9300 clock for clock... however, as people have mentioned as software takes advantage of SSE4.1, performance will increase.. the problem is at that point even the 9300 could be old technology. I'm not 100% sure how long it will take for it to become the norm, could try asking adobe if they implement it or plan on doing so soon?

Anyway I'm rambling now. Hopefully amonst all of this you've picked out some useful bits

Even with its smaller L2 cache, tiny 100Mhz speed advantage (4% faster then Q6600 2400Mhz) and 1333FSB the Q9300 still leans in front of the Q6600 in overall performance. For overclocked performance check the article over @ XbitLabs

I took your advice and am looking into the q9300, they didn't have it in stock at Compusa however so I didn't get it today..besides, it lets me take the time to read some more benchmarks against the q6600 and maybe if its worth waiting to see if there is a price drop in an Xtreme chip during the summer..idk yet

I wouldn't recommend q9300. The low 7.5x multiplier doesn't look good for oc. At 1600mhz fsb, it's only 3.0ghz, compared to 3.6ghz at 9x(q6600, e8400). E8500 use 9.5x multiplier, and q6700 use 10x. One of the main reasons those "Extreme" version cpus can overclock so high is due to their unlocked multipliers.

Then, there's q9300's lower l2 cache, which is smaller than 65nm generation chips.

It's better to either get q6600/6700 on the cheap, or jump to the q9450 for performance. Skip q9300. It was meant as an economy quad of the 45nm Yorkfield generation. It's better to get the best of the previous generation, rather than the worst of the latest one. If you have the money, jump to the q9450 instead for some real performance gain.

Welp, looks like im getting into the q9450 now =p thanks for that, the benchmarks speak for themselves.