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Please give your opinion on this home build. Will it work?

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Hello ;) 


It has been 3 or 4 years since I took the time to research components for a home build and just now finished compiling my parts list. I know a fair amount about computers and how they function, though I want to be 100% sure these components will function properly together before clicking the checkout button. The first time I purchased parts off Newegg I made a few mistakes with compatibility and I hope to do better this time around haha. Several threads in this site greatly aided me when choosing most of these parts so I figured what better place to ask the final big question. This community seems to have quite allot of knowledgably and helpful members. :) 


The big question. :o 

Will all these components work properly together?




- Intel Core i7-2600K Sandy Bridge 3.4GHz
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E168...

- Cooler Master Hyper 212 Plus (with 2X 2000 RPM Fans)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E168...

- Gigabyte GA-P67A-UD7-B3 LGA 1155 Intel Motherboard
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E168...

- G.Skill Ripjaws Series 8GB 240-Pin DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E168...

- 2X Gigabyte 1GD Radeon HD 6850 Graphics Cards (CrossFire)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E168...

- 2X Crucial RealSSD C300 64GB SATA III (RAID 0 Setup)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E168...

- Western Digital Caviar Black WD5002AALX 500GB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" HD
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E168...

- Corsair CMPSU-750TX 750W Power Supply
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E168...

- ASUS CD/DVD Multi Drive
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E168...

- Antec Lanboy Air Computer Case
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E168...


I spent literally hours coming up with this list and hope I have tweaked it to its max potential within my budget (actually ended up way over the original budget.. :??: ). I would greatly appreciate feedback on this setup and if there are any parts I should swap out for better price/performance improvements please don’t hesitate to post a response. As I mentioned above, I have not assembled a parts list like this for a long time and want to be sure I get it right this time.


The work I will be doing consists of editing video and stitching multiple large 18mp pictures into panoramics. I don't play many games, though I may go out and purchase Crysis 2 for the graphics quality. ;)  I will also be running anywhere from 4-8 virtual machines. The VM OS is a VERY dumbed down version of XP SP3 (the entire file is like 285mb haha). On my current machine I can run 4 VMs at once but don’t like to run more than 2 since the Win 7 side begins to slow down too much, at least for me.


Also, I will be attempting to overclock the CPU to 4.5-5.0Ghz (if that’s within reason?) as well as the GPUs and Ram maybe 15-20%.



Thanks :) 

More about : give opinion home build work

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Personally, I'd shoot for an SLI setup rather than crossfire, as I've been to both sides very recently and the driver support for crossfire is just not there (I waited for almost a year for it to get there). Two 570s are really a great combination.

I think the RAID on the SSDs is a bit overkill. I'm thinking you're going to use this for your OS?. I really doubt, once you get that SSD cranking over the SATA III interface, you'd even be able to tell whether it was ever RAIDed or not. It will be fast as a single drive. On the other hand, if you're shooting for high scores in synthetic benchmarks, you'll want the RAID setup. If you don't go with the RAID setup, that will free up some fundage for the 570(s).

Other than that, cool system. Independent of my suggestions, the parts you've listed will work together.

ubercake said:
Personally, I'd shoot for an SLI setup rather than crossfire, as I've been to both sides very recently and the driver support for crossfire is just not there (I waited for almost a year for it to get there). Two 570s are really a great combination.

I think the RAID on the SSDs is a bit overkill. I'm thinking you're going to use this for your OS?. I really doubt, once you get that SSD cranking over the SATA III interface, you'd even be able to tell whether it was ever RAIDed or not. It will be fast as a single drive. On the other hand, if you're shooting for high scores in synthetic benchmarks, you'll want the RAID setup. If you don't go with the RAID setup, that will free up some fundage for the 570(s).

Other than that, cool system. Independent of my suggestions, the parts you've listed will work together.





Trust me when I say I really wanted to go Nvidia over Radeon for the same reasons, not to mention I have 2 Nvidia cards now and have always loved them, however the benchmarks speak for themselves. If you take cards in the same league (price wise) from each company, the Radeon cards scale up and beat out the Nvidia every time by a considerable margin (I believe anywhere from 15-35%, which is pretty big, all while consuming less power). 2 6850s in CF is just a slight tad notch lower than 2 470s in SLI (41 vs 40). Seeing as 1 6850 is 45% cheaper than 1 470, and that the benchmarks are virtually equal, it seems crazy to pay that much more for Nvidia. Unless the drivers are nonexistent for ATI where I won’t be able to use the cards, it just seems better to go with the HD 6850s.

http://www.guru3d.com/article/radeon-hd-6850-6870-cross... << One of my sources


In regards to the SSD your probably right haha. The work I will be doing consists of editing video, and stitching multiple large 18mp pictures into panoramics. The computer is use now was the best of its time 3 years ago, and it’s still sloooow as hell. I can’t stand working on it any longer haha. I guess I figured I wouldn’t take a chance this time around and make this new PC fast as ****. The main thing I was worried about was the write speed. The RA time and write speeds on just one SSD a phenomenal! :p  So if I’m going for all out speed when completing my work, 2 SSDs would not make much of a difference over 1? I know just 1 by itself is night and day difference over a typical platter HD. Would the difference in speed not be noticeable? If anyone else agrees with ubercake I will gladly cancel one of the SSDs. They are damn expensive >.<



Thank you for your input :) 

Mr Vale said:
Thanks for the response. :) 

Trust me when I say I really wanted to go Nvidia over Radeon for the same reasons, not to mention I have 2 Nvidia cards now and have always loved them, however the benchmarks speak for themselves. If you take cards in the same league (price wise) from each company, the Radeon cards scale up and beat out the Nvidia every time by a considerable margin (I believe anywhere from 15-35%, which is pretty big, all while consuming less power). 2 6850s in CF is just a slight tad notch lower than 2 470s in SLI (41 vs 40). Seeing as 1 6850 is 45% cheaper than 1 470, and that the benchmarks are virtually equal, it seems crazy to pay that much more for Nvidia. Unless the drivers are nonexistent for ATI where I won’t be able to use the cards, it just seems better to go with the HD 6850s.

http://www.guru3d.com/article/radeon-hd-6850-6870-cross... << One of my sources


In regards to the SSD your probably right haha. The work I will be doing consists of editing video, and stitching multiple large 18mp pictures into panoramics. The computer is use now was the best of its time 3 years ago, and it’s still sloooow as hell. I can’t stand working on it any longer haha. I guess I figured I wouldn’t take a chance this time around and make this new PC fast as ****. The main thing I was worried about was the write speed. The RA time and write speeds on just one SSD a phenomenal! :p  So if I’m going for all out speed when completing my work, 2 SSDs would not make much of a difference over 1? I know just 1 by itself is night and day difference over a typical platter HD. Would the difference in speed not be noticeable? If anyone else agrees with ubercake I will gladly cancel one of the SSDs. They are damn expensive >.<



Thank you for your input :) 

I can see what you're saying with regard to the framerates, though, more frames that aren't all good frames don't equal better performance. I'm now convinced - as a convert when it comes to multiple gpu systems from AMD to Nvidia - you're paying for the ongoing support and consistently good drivers when you buy Nvidia. This means way more to me than seeing a 140 compared to a 125 in Fraps with all the details on. I like my AMD cards when they're in single GPU setups, just not in crossfire. I wanted to share my experience and I hope you don't become frustrated with it the way I did. My mind could change in the future, but I probably won't take another chance with AMD any time soon.

Also, regarding the SSD in RAID... I didn't realize you'd be doing heavy video edits. So you won't be using this as your OS drive then? If that's the case, you might want to go with bigger drives too as higher capacity SSD drivers would be even faster yet. Just make sure your editing software supports RAID. I have Protools on one of my systems. This is some industrial strength audio recording and production software which relies on fast seek/write times. AVID - the company producing this software - actually advises against using a RAID setup with this software. It didn't make sense to me but they have their own set of disk drivers that install with the software. Apparently the drivers don't play well with RAID setups. What software do you use to edit video?

Additionally, RAM should help you tremendously when it comes to the photo-stitching with the large files. How much RAM do you have on your old system? You might even shoot for 16GB on this new system to help out with that even more? Are you using photoshop to do the stitching?
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ubercake said:
I can see what you're saying with regard to the framerates, though, more frames that aren't all good frames don't equal better performance. I'm now convinced - as a convert when it comes to multiple gpu systems from AMD to Nvidia - you're paying for the ongoing support and consistently good drivers when you buy Nvidia. This means way more to me than seeing a 140 compared to a 125 in Fraps with all the details on. I like my AMD cards when they're in single GPU setups, just not in crossfire. I wanted to share my experience and I hope you don't become frustrated with it the way I did. My mind could change in the future, but I probably won't take another chance with AMD any time soon.

Also, regarding the SSD in RAID... I didn't realize you'd be doing heavy video edits. So you won't be using this as your OS drive then? If that's the case, you might want to go with bigger drives too as higher capacity SSD drivers would be even faster yet. Just make sure your editing software supports RAID. I have Protools on one of my systems. This is some industrial strength audio recording and production software which relies on fast seek/write times. AVID - the company producing this software - actually advises against using a RAID setup with this software. It didn't make sense to me but they have their own set of disk drivers that install with the software. Apparently the drivers don't play well with RAID setups. What software do you use to edit video?

Additionally, RAM should help you tremendously when it comes to the photo-stitching with the large files. How much RAM do you have on your old system? You might even shoot for 16GB on this new system to help out with that even more? Are you using photoshop to do the stitching?


I understand what you mean with NVidia’s driver support, which is also very appealing to me, though I am not seeing too many driver issues with the HD 6850s, or at least in the past 6 months. Most people out there seem quite happy with their 6850s in CF getting a 1.9x scaling rate (which is awesome :D ). Of course I’m sure Nvidia will soon counter with graphics cards better, or at least on the same price/performance scale as Radeon. ;) 

The SSD RAID 0 setup will be for my OS as well as processing the video and picture files. The UD7 Mainboard has 4 x SATA 6Gb/s which should complement the 2 SSDs beautifully. I have seen many bench marks where people are getting well over 500mb/s transfer rates. With video editing, I’m not doing anything too major. The highest resolution I shoot in is 1080p and just use typical consumer software. Picture editing is not much difference. I use CS4 at times for major picture edits, though for panos I just use Autostitch, which mostly only taxes the CPUs. I have 4GBs of ram in my current computer and those rarely fill up.

Here is the main reason I’m buying this computer and I can’t believe I forgot to mention this earlier lol.. I will be running anywhere from 4-8 virtual machines. The OS is a VERY dumbed down version of XP SP3 (the entire OS is like 285mb haha). Currently, I can run 4 VMs but don’t like to run more than 2 because the Win 7 side begins to slow down too much, at least for me. I’m hoping I will be able to run many more on this new system. The processors, ram, and GPUs are all pretty much maxed when I’m running 4 VMs on my current machine so I’m very curious to see how or if the SSDs with affect the new system. Who knows, maybe I could run more than 8. I was seriously considering going with 16gbs, though I’m going to see how the 8 work for me (since that’s double what I have now) and if I need more I can easily bur another 8gb for $100 or less.


Thanks again for your feedback ;) 

Ubercake is right, Crossfire is not nearly as smooth as SLI or a single powerful card. I hope AMD will one day sort their driver issues out cause I'm not going to be buying a new graphic card for at least 18 months, but if things don't turn around, I will be going Nvidia.

jfby said:
Ubercake is right, Crossfire is not nearly as smooth as SLI or a single powerful card. I hope AMD will one day sort their driver issues out cause I'm not going to be buying a new graphic card for at least 18 months, but if things don't turn around, I will be going Nvidia.



Thanks for the warning. I'll definitely look into the driver issue more. It's too bad because the 6850 cards scale so well. :(  If they don't work out I'll return them to new egg. I hope Nvidia eventually adjusts their price performance ratios.

Mr Vale said:
Thanks for the warning. I'll definitely look into the driver issue more. It's too bad because the 6850 cards scale so well. :(  If they don't work out I'll return them to new egg. I hope Nvidia eventually adjusts their price performance ratios.

Totally understandable. I just sold 3 5850s because I was tired of waiting for them to sort things out with the drivers. They also scaled very well. They gave me higher framerates than my 2 580s in MOH (though with 1/4 the AA setting), but the flickering video at the most inopportune times was irritating. I didn't buy the 5850s after the price drop either, so I had some coinage wrapped up in it. When you put that kind of money into it, you don't want to deal with having to wait for next month's drivers to get rid of the last month's driver issues every single month. You want to get what the manufacturer is advertising; not something that's almost there or that might be good with next month's driver release. It was all-around frustrating.

My primary reason for going to Nvidia was the flickering which worsened with more recent driver releases, though there were other issues: Wake from Sleep issue, GPU 2 stays at full load after gaming sessions issue, HDMI/DP Audio driver wouldn't install issue, screen goes black and stays black during driver install issue, etc... With each driver release many issues were ignored, maybe something was fixed, and more issues arrived. I spent a lot of time on the AMD forums looking for answers only to have 3 particular individuals continuously calling everyone in the world with these common problems 'stupid' because their machines always worked just fine.

This is why I don't like crossfire. I waited almost a year and I was just done waiting. AMD cards seem totally capable and even superior to Nvidia cards at the same price point, but if the driver support is not there, they will continue to be the inferior card. This is why they sell for less. I bought a single 580 and was satisfied with the performance, but wondered if SLI worked. After I sold off all the 5850s, I dropped in my second GTX 580, installed the drivers and they just plain work as advertised.

High numbers in FRAPS don't mean anything if all the frames adding to those numbers aren't good frames. I would drop a single AMD card into any system. No problem. More than one? No way. Not after my experience. This could change some day as I am all about maximizing my dollar, but today my dollar does not go to AMD.

Mr Vale said:
Thanks for the warning. I'll definitely look into the driver issue more. It's too bad because the 6850 cards scale so well. :(  If they don't work out I'll return them to new egg. I hope Nvidia eventually adjusts their price performance ratios.


I'm not saying you will have issues; it's not the same for everyone, which is another problem with crossfire because I have one issue, he has another, and you spend a lot of time sorting it out. I had serious issues starting up, but now as long as I restart my system before I play games (only an issue with Star Trek Online) my system runs quite well.

There are still compatibility issues with AMD drivers and certain games (STO is an example in which I have the hardware muscle to max the game out, but certain settings will cause it to crash). A person with a single 570 can make STO look better than I can, even though theoretically I have the power to do better.

On the other hand I have none of the issues Ubercake mentioned with Bad Company 2, and Dragon Age runs ultra smooth now.

Just because others have had problems doesn't mean you will; my advice was meant if you hadn't yet pulled the trigger, but also as a guidline.

Remember: if you do have problems, you have a whole forum waiting to help you out!

Seriously though, let us know how it goes.
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