Want to clarify some things

[esaglik]

here is the current set up ive got listed :

Initial System build
Motherboard: GIGABYTE GA-790XTA-UD4 £115.20
CPU: AMD Phenom II X4 955 £109.24
CPU Cooler: COOLER MASTER Hyper 212 Plus £18.58
Graphics: Radeon HD 5850 £180.14 Link
RAM: G.Skill 4Gb DDR3 1600 (2x2Gb) Ripjaws Dual-Chan Kit £90.42
HDD: Samsung EcoGreen F2 1TB £56.99
DVD: Sony Optiarc X2 £18.82
Case: Coolermaster HAF 922 £69.00
Screens: AOC F22 X3 (Native Resolutions of 1920 X 1080) £300.00
PSU: Antec EarthWatts 750 - power supply - 750 Watt £74.09
Wireless card: Intel WiFi Link 5300 £25.16
Total £1,057.64




Pre planned later expansion.
Item Name Price Source Comments
Graphics: Radeon HD 5850 £180.14 Linked For X-Fire
RAM: G.Skill 4Gb DDR3 1600 (2x2Gb) Ripjaws Dual-Chan Kit £90.42 Link second kit to make 8 GB
HDD: Samsung EcoGreen F2 1TB X3 £170.97 Link to make two TB in raid 0+1
Total: £441.53
Grand Total After All Further Upgrades: £1,499.17

Possibility of water cooling much later for silent computer and for better heat removal.
Second set of upgrades will be in the order listed.

can anyone see anything wrong with this set up? Ill mainly be using it for gaming with games like cod 4 / 6 up to crysis warhead (obv with triple screens cant run at full settings for decent frame rate but im not that bothered by it, racing simulation (with my G25 racewheel), flight sim and a fair amount of CAD (autodesk 2010)

 

[MadAdmiral]

The extra set of RAM is unnecessary unless you're doing some rendering or other heavy computational work.

You realize that to setup a RAID after using a drive you'll need to wipe everything on your HDD already, right? I would suggest wating a while longer and picking up a SSD when they become cheaper and adding only one more HDD. Use this setup to have a super fast boot/app drive (replaces the need for RAID 0) and place the two standard HDDs in RAID 1.

 

[shortstuff_mt]

The build looks good. The only problem I see is the hard drive. You don't want to use a slow "EcoGreen" drive as your main system drive. I would look for a fast 7200RPM 500GB/platter drive as the main drive. The Samsung F3 500GB and Seagate 7200.12 500GB are both good options.

 

[esaglik]

i deffinately wanna keep at least a 1tb drive but thanks for the heads up on the slow times, ill get a higher rpm drive, yo uhave any suggestions for roughly the same price?

and mad i forgot to mention i would be doing rendering too which is exactly why i wanted that extra ram, also the ssd what sort of capacity would you reccomend for the os and a fair no of games and cad software?

 

[MadAdmiral]

The Samsung Spinpoint F3 1 TB are good.

I would want at least a 128 GB SSD, but wait for them to be down around the prices of the 80 GB ones right now.

 

[esaglik]

what about this 1TB HDD? http://www.computerwebstore.co.uk/productinfo.asp?ProductID=148189&Referrer=Froogle

 

[MadAdmiral]

That's just as fast as the Spinpoint F3, but it's going to be more expensive.

 

[esaglik]

this look right to you? > http://www.eselleruk.com/products/Samsung_1TB_Spinpoint_SATAII_3_5_7200_Internal_HDD_hd103sj-396-0.html

 

[esaglik]

im looking as some 128gb SSD drive now to compare performance, and there really is barely any difference? :S wherever i look reveiws are saying the ssd's are just around about 100MB per second load times but thats also the times quoted for the spinpoint F3 :S

 

[MadAdmiral]

That second link is the right one.

There is a huge difference between SSDs and HDDs. Are you sure you're looking at the right product? The lowest read speeds of the ones I'm looking at is around 200 MBps, with write speeds of as low as 150 MBps. The F3 has about half of that.

Here's an older review of the F3: http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/storage/2009/10/06/samsung-spinpoint-f3-1tb-review/3 . Note that the F3 gets about half the speeds of the SSDs tested. Newer SSDs are even faster.

 

[esaglik]

well hing searched through a few tens of SSD's im realising more and more quickly that im rather lost, what would you personally use for your main os and software disk?

 

[MadAdmiral]

Right now? A Spinpoint F3. I think SSDs are too expensive and don't offer a whole lot.

However, once prices fall, I'd pick up a SSD from Intel, Crucial or Corsair.

 

[esaglik]

i meant specifically assuming that all the prices fell by the same amount? cuz it seems like a totally different market.

 

[MadAdmiral]

I'm not quite sure what you mean. SSDs are going to fall by a lot more (both actual monetary amount and percentage of current cost) than standard drives simply because they're new technology.

So assuming you just mean both HDDs and SSDs fall according to their typical market trends and that nothing new comes out that makes current SSDs obsolete, I would grab an Intel, Corsair or Crucial 80 GB to 128 GB model. Considering that there are basically one model per company in almost every size, I don't see how I can narrow it down further for you...

 

[esaglik]

ok, but so far have there been any clearly superior brnds amongst those, IE is say for example intel widely considered the most reliable or anything like that?

 

[MadAdmiral]

There's a couple of article on the front page (or in the Articles section) where they benchmarked the various brands of SSDs. Check it out for details.

I do know that Intel is by far the best, but they units are really expensive.