Future project - Skys the limit...

Mr. Smith

New member
I haven't put this in projects as it isn't going to happen for a little while.

I'm thinking about getting a really nice new rig together to the tune of maybe £3K. I don't need a monitor and I don't like flash cases so a lili for £1-200 will suffice.

I know it's a waste of money but I'm at a point where it doesn't really matter, so why not?

So I'm thinking...

CPU: i7 965 Extreme

Mobo: w/e nice X58/chipset is about... Maybe sli...

GPU: Hmmm. I kinda want one/pair GT212 as long as it is better than a 295/2 x 295 (see pic)

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RAM: w/e tripple blah blah

SSD: 2/3 in raid

HDD: 4 300gb veloci's

PSU: 1kw or something quality

Water: usual high qulity stuff

Soundcard etc...

So... yeah... Woo. I can't really do anything until Q2 09!

Input?
 
ASUS Rampage II Extreme,

Corsair DDR3 CL8 1600MHz XMS3 Dominator 6GB Kit,

I think you should get a i7 920 and overclock but hey, your in the mood of wasting monies...
 
u shud defo get the i7 920 coz read in so many places that it has a big margin in performance when overclock3d compared to the other i7s

as for money, you can do whatever you like.....:D
 
Completely agree see my overclock an extreme won't do much better if at all unless useing ln2/phase or something

I recommend.

Rampage X58 (exellent board stable lots of bios updates and support)

i7 920 no question about it you really are burning money for nothing otherwise.

corsair/OCZ Ram atleast 1600mhz for overclocking you should see 4ghz with wc comfortably

GTX295 OR 4870X2 in my opinion little separates these to cards have tried both forget the SLI xfire etc its a waist of money....tried that also only one I can recommend is gtx280 now gtx285 SLI but its expensive and hardly any benefit ver buying a gtx295.

If you insust on SLI buy 2x 295's if not 4870x2 or a GTX295 whichever you fancey all much of the much.

Would imagine the 212 is just a die shrink most likelty will gain performance but nothing major I reckon, depends wether you want to wait.

Case it really come down to preference I am very happy with my lian-li v1000 mid tower compact yet plenty of room..highly personaly recommend the TJ07 from silverstone or the cosmos cases from coolermaster but these are full tower.

Get a good PSU corsair, thermaltake, galaxy etc 800/1kw would be nice for future if you sli then I'd go with atleast 1kw
 
Wow, if your spending that much, maybe you could make the case out of paper mache with £50 notes?

Whatever, that will be one awesome machine...
 
name='Diablo' said:
Wow, if your spending that much, maybe you could make the case out of paper mache with £50 notes?

Whatever, that will be one awesome machine...

lol about that but its tru :D

mr. smith with a build like that i wouldn't go with anything less than a full tower, maybe a lian li with some mod work plus a 480 rad? also a cosmos S would be good.

also a good mobo is an evga x58, but the x58 rampage is truly the best i think.

good luck with your future build, also remember because its not in near future, im pretty sure we will have some updates in hardware so if you doing the research for this build right now, maybe it wont be the top in some months.

Soap.
 
I hear what you guys are saying, the 965 is like 3 times the price... So I'm only likely to get ~4ghz on i7 irrespective of 920-965xe. 4ghz isn't impressing me, I'd be annoyed.

Asus revolution looks nice, I'll prob pick that up.

GPU - so the 212 is just a 40/45nm die shrink of the 280... Wow. Lame. Suppose gddr5 will be included. I was hoping it would be the 295 mashed into one pcb/die.

The 295 is basically a hybrid 260/280 and falls just short of 280 sli power... Anyone seen a 295 sli review, nm, I'll google it. It's an annual thing for me now so I may as well get 2x295 and just deal with whatever issues I get later. Fk it, I may as well wait for the 212 to show.

Case - I like my v1000 but I want smaller. SMALL.

Water - it will have to be the slim rads, black ice with smaller diameter tubing as I'll need the flexibility. Maybe 2 loops, one for the gpu's, one for the cpu.

SSD/HDD - I'll need a raid card for all these, any ideas?

Might have to get TTL to crowbar all this into a small case...

I'm kinda annoyed. I though if I stepped back for a while some stuff might happen so upon my return I'd be blown away. But I'm not.
 
I think this is getting a little silly. This is an annual build so I don't mind dropping some £££ but I need to reign this in a bit.

1. I'm sold on the dual 295's as this rig has to be able to max everything now and in the future (lets face it, this rig will only just max crysis at this res with aa/af). They stay irrespective of all logic.

2. Not sure if I need that many hdd's or that £400 raid card - BUT - one thing that realy grinds my gears is how unresponsive my current pc becomes when I'm un-rar'ing things and doing other things. The hdd just seems to lock up so I want turbo fast storage.

3. Blu-ray; i want this so I can burn blu-ray and get some hd play back through my new 50" Samsung :D ... There might be a better/cheaper alternative?

4. PSU - could get the 1000w corsair??

5. How on earth am I going to get this into a small case?

E.g shopping list...

picture.php


That doesn't include the case, kb/m, possibly a new 24"/30" monitor... Or cooling... I mean I bet 295 wb's are £100 a pop!

So, where can I save some money peeps?
 
name='VonBlade' said:
Four Velociraptors in Raid AND SSD? That's over-egging the pudding somewhat surely?

Possibly, but the SSD's are too small for storage. 64gb will be for the OS and key apps/current fav games. I suppose one SSD could suffice saving me ~£200...

The raptors are sort of my storage solution. Raid should deal with moving/accessing data. Not really sure if I will have/should have one big raid0 with all four (1.2tb), or maybe 2x2 raid0 (600gb each).

One of my major gripes with my pc is the hdd access so I need that sorting. Perhaps it is overkill especially that particular raid card but hey, I'm all ears for viable (cheaper) alternatives!
 
I can appreciate the outlay, but tbh I'd look seriously at the best quality monitor money can buy rather than spend the cash on any of the drive products listed.
 
Hmmmm storage with high budget....

One thing you could do with such a RAID card is using a quite unsual RAID: 5+0. This would mean you have a RAID0 (speed) consisting of two raid 5 (redundancy + speed) arrays. This would require at least 6 harddisks as raid 5 needs 3+ and you have two raid5's.

The cost/benefits assuming you use 1TB drives:

** 2x3 disks:

70 * 6 = 420GBP

Storage capacity: 4TB

Storage loss: 2TB

Storage loss %: 33%

** 2x4 disks:

70 * 8 = 560 GBP

Storage capacity: 6TB

Storage loss: 2TB

Storage loss %: 20%

Would save you about 500 pounds on the velociraptors and I assume 4-6TB is more than enough for now :)

Also I'm not so sure about the ssd's. They have low response times but they are also very small and the read/write speeds are on par with high end conventional drives.

While looking around the net, I came a cross two links you might want to take a look at:

9x s-ata RAID cards comparison

Raid 0 vs 1 vs 5 vs 10 vs 50 benchmark
 
name='maxw' said:
why not have 2 raptors in RAID 0 & then a 1TB Samsung F1 as they're fast drives too.

My storage drive gets a daily hammering with me unraring/deleting/moving/and using files on it all at the same time. This causes it to spazz out. So one F1 drive would just react in the same way my 750gb does... Grinds to a halt...

name='Rastalovich' said:
I can appreciate the outlay, but tbh I'd look seriously at the best quality monitor money can buy rather than spend the cash on any of the drive products listed.

TBH, that price has to come down. It's silly money. Right now I'm still trying to figure out the config.

Monitor wise I'll probably get another new 24" but I might just keep my current dell as it serves me well... Not seeing the point in spending on a monitor unless you can convince otherwise?

name='monkey7' said:
Hmmmm storage with high budget....

One thing you could do with such a RAID card is using a quite unsual RAID: 5+0. This would mean you have a RAID0 (speed) consisting of two raid 5 (redundancy + speed) arrays. This would require at least 6 harddisks as raid 5 needs 3+ and you have two raid5's.

The cost/benefits assuming you use 1TB drives:

** 2x3 disks:

70 * 6 = 420GBP

Storage capacity: 4TB

Storage loss: 2TB

Storage loss %: 33%

** 2x4 disks:

70 * 8 = 560 GBP

Storage capacity: 6TB

Storage loss: 2TB

Storage loss %: 20%

Would save you about 500 pounds on the velociraptors and I assume 4-6TB is more than enough for now :)

Also I'm not so sure about the ssd's. They have low response times but they are also very small and the read/write speeds are on par with high end conventional drives.

While looking around the net, I came a cross two links you might want to take a look at:

9x s-ata RAID cards comparison

Raid 0 vs 1 vs 5 vs 10 vs 50 benchmark

Thanks for the post and links... I don't think I need that particular raid card, surely a £100 one would suffice??? I know jack about raid cards and I've only ever set up raid0 through the mobo controller.

Your proposed solution gets rid of the SSD's (£400 saved) and swap out the raptors for lots of cheap drives, 6-8 1tb drives? (~£500 saved). Am I booting up off this raid5+0 or get one veloci in for boot?

Cheers peeps

Edit: AND there is the issue of the physical space of all these drives... I want to cram this rig into a ssf style case...
 
Hmm the physical space would prove a problem :p Eight 3.5" devices aren't easy to hide xD

But yes, I'd say just the 6-8 1TB drives and partition it into OS and data. The raid50 benchmark in the second link I gave shows 600MB/s read and 450MB/s write with large (1MB+) files. Admitted, SSD's reach 70MB/s at the very small file sizes, but I just do not think they are worth the money.

A thing you could however do is a single 16GB ssd for OS only, which will make things a lot more responsive.
 
Jesus christ,

Its your money and its totaly upto you....

I have doen all this and spent thousands on the best of the best tri li quad sli (none of which scale well aboce SLI), extreme cpu, dual wc loop the lot.

I'll give you some adivse from someone whos been there and done it....

Dont waist your money if you can afford to have a top machine have 1x gtx295 i7 920 with ramapage II or whatever is equivilant at the time 6gb ram good wc loop cpu only is most sensible and if you want fast drives 2x raid 0 raptors I have these and they are extremely fast and cannot be beat on performance SSD's inc and there cheaper buy yourself a good lcd this will niggle you afterwards....

And put some money into your bank account and be satisfied we are in the middle of a recession who know how long it will last!? the above machine is of the same spec as mine it will be more than capable for many years.

and beleive me an i7 920 @ 4ghz is more than enough it flies trust me.

Thats my advice, do as you will but your throwing good money after bad for a bigger e-*****.

p.s you sound like myself, you seem to like keeping up with the latest, think this one if you wanna sell up stuff and move up if you have 2x 295's (which will be of no benefit in the real world other than a benchmark score,) you most likely will want to sell them you will take a loss on them then you have to buy the new cards wich are never cheap keep it sensible and it stays ever so slihtly more affordable and not such a burden to swap around.

unless of course you have just one euro millions and money is no object then good luck to you I don't blame you :D
 
Also revolution board I doubt will be a good choice the ramapge is your best bet there will be the best support for it a it's well known the revolution looks over complicated...puts me in the mind of a skulltrail board, over the top
 
Well I'll be brutally honest with u, as Mr Smith hadn't been on the forum, or not as present, I did sneakily think SwaleSmith & Mr Smith were stealthfully 1 in the same :p

I don't personally think the budget is that crazy either. Many of us can remember Mr Smith happening to buy some pretty solid gear on a frequent basis. As it happens the progress in equipment performance got that small that justifying the outlay on a regular basis seemed a waste (big assumption on my part).

Now he's buying a wedge of goods for a yearly upgrade, the figure will most likely be massaged down by anything up to £1k and he'll end up with £2k of cash spending for a year. Sounds a little healthier than a new gfxcard arrangement every 3 months or so. Less hastle too.

A year of planning for a £2k outlay ? Isn't incredibly bank-breaking if u organize ur cash, plan it out and don't have 50 million commitments.

(Does it sound too much like trying to justify my own purchasing around november-ish ?)

Oh and get answers from w3bbo on the Dell 30" he has ;)
 
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