Your Dream Home Made PC?!

K

kmhtkmhtkmht

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If you had an Unlimited Budget, what kinda spec. PC would you build yourself with parts you could purchase now that would fit?

I use my PC everyday and while my 3.2GHZ 478 is adequate I am thinking about going REALLY over the top and building a ridiculous set up.
 
If you had an Unlimited Budget, what kinda spec. PC would you build yourself with parts you could purchase now that would fit?

I do.....

and im currently getting ready to build my new pc.
but im waiting for the new ati gfx card to arrive

but..


EZ Cool Alpine Silver -
7105H with LCD display ( got already )

K8N Diamond Socket 939 nForce 4 SLI ATX

Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core 4400+ Socket 939 1MB BOX (4800+ is silly price )

psu ( not desided yet )

ATI Radeon X1800 XT pci-e

2 x 1gb corsair memory

1 x wD 74gb raptor hdd ( boot drive )

2 x 300gb sata's raiding ( got already )

tv card ( got already )

Creative Audigy 2 ZS Platinum ( got already )

dvd rom ( got already )

dvdrw ( got already )


specs may change why awaiting some parts...
 
Isn't it the oldest story in the world that most people don't know that Raid (Striping) gives no real world performance benefits whatsoever?
 
T0rNaDo said:
EZ Cool Alpine Silver -
7105H with LCD display ( got already )

K8N Diamond Socket 939 nForce 4 SLI ATX

ATI Radeon X1800 XT pci-e

If you had no budget limit, you'd use a DFI Lanparty m/b, and 2 x 7800GTX in SLi, rather than the ATI effort.
 
but the at effort can be had passivly cooled out of the box. tEh 7800GTX isn't AFAIK

edit:
re read it right doofus :oops: : the x800 is passive - this is the X1800.
 
I feel it depends where you want to put it...if it is going in a loft/cupboard then your choice of components will differ greatly from something that sits in a rack/under the telly.

I know it sound slike I am stating the obvious, but none of the above mentioned parts appeal to "my" idea of a htpc...I want/need something small and quiet with high WAF. Others may want a beefy "man" setup, with hundreds of tuners:) There is no 100% correct htpc spec right now, apart from the cpu which should be an athlon anything supporting cool 'n quiet if you are going to do it yourself. For intel chips, to keep the quiet takes more effort and some custom parts to eliminate the noise totally.
 
T0rNaDo said:
......
1 x wD 74gb raptor hdd ( boot drive )
...

Sorry dude, Im totaly with Kramer and I put my money where my mouth is :D
 
kmhtkmhtkmht said:
Isn't it the oldest story in the world that most people don't know that Raid (Striping) gives no real world performance benefits whatsoever?


Eh? Thats either VERY bad English or your very wrong or I just don't understand what your really saying :confused:


Stripes ftw! :thumbsup: :D
 
wow so many replys since i posted lol

lets see.....

well i said 1 raptor for boot drive coz
i dont need loads of space on my boot drive....

but as i did say ...

specs may change why awaiting some parts.... :)

and thinking about it.. it would make sence to raid 2 of them..

the read/write speed across 2 10k raptors..... hmmmm :)


kmhtkmhtkmht : Is that AMD Dual Core chip REALLY the daddy these days

well for gaming they say the fx57 is the daddy of amd anyway...

but for multi tasking..... dual core chip all the way..


MJN : i could build quite a few top line pcs with the dearest parts of everything.. if i wanted..... but i dont.

i dont use the pc as much as i used to...

so i dont see the point of spending 2-3k or more on a top pc i will hardly use..

why i not bothered with sli...

DFI Lanparty mobo... never had a dfi board before...
though i never had a msi mobo before either.

gigabtye..... epox.... only boards ive had so far..

and i sooner stick with ati then nvidia...
i was looking at the asus x850xt pci-e pe card.
but heard about new cards coming out so i thought i would wait.

but everone has they own preferences....
 
Unlimited budget equals top speed FX57 with phase chilling overclocking goodness or even better using Liqued nitrogen cooling and watch that bad boy fly :eek: :devil:

Seperate water cooling for the graphics card and northbridge.
 
My dream home PC would have to include 2 X 7800GTX 512MB graphic cards.
 
I'd go for 2 X 3.6GHZ Xeon Nocona Chips...Dual Processor all the way....
4GB RAM
For the OS 4 X 74GB Raptors on Raid 0....
For Storage 4 * 400GB WD Caviar SE 16MB Cache on Raid 0
For Graphics i'd go with an Sapphire X850XT Blizzard...
For sound I'd get an X-Fi, the one with 64mb X-Ram
For Display I'd go with a HP 23" 16:10 TFT @ 1920x1200
I'd get one of them Lian Li cases, the one with good cooling for £140
 
It's been proven numerous times RAID 0 or 1, does not provide any performance benefits for the OS.
 
12 months ago I built the fastest machine I could in my preferred form factor. After months (years) of deliberating if wether the Shuttle pcs were what I needed, and trying some of the smaller ATX cases I opted for a Shuttle SB75G2 V2. I put in my personal preferences rather than what might have been flavour of the month at the time, so I went with Intel, ATI and Crucial for my key components, no expense spared. Final spec was:
3.4EE P4
X800XT @ PE
1 gig Crucial Ballistix
Samsung Spinpoint 160 SATA
Pioneer DV108
Crystalfontz 631 LCD module (Black/blue)
Various non-intrusive mods to keep it cool and quiet.

In my opinion the final product looked great, and the benches/game performance were blistering. In the Alienware game advisor it still comes in the top 2% of all machines scanned. That is not bad for a machine built ignoring 64bit, PCI-E, DDRII and all the other buzzwords flying about.
 
mjn said:
It's been proven numerous times RAID 0 or 1, does not provide any performance benefits for the OS.

Where do you get your info?

OS on a RAID stripe0, the OS is divided between 2 drives combining the performance from both.

Do your own tests/benchmarks with single and raid drives and you will see that the latter is a high performance benefit to the OS and the rest!
 
Dr HTPC said:
Where do you get your info?

OS on a RAID stripe0, the OS is divided between 2 drives combining the performance from both.

Do your own tests/benchmarks with single and raid drives and you will see that the latter is a high performance benefit to the OS and the rest!

The increased figures are not worth the extra outlay. Simply using 2 drives does not double the HDD performance, in fact its around 5% from what i remember. Off the top of my head one of the articles to support that is over at Toms Hardware.
 
Blatently Dual Opteron 252's with that dual socket 940 + SLI board that ABIT do paired with 2x 7800GTX's and 4GB of RAM put inside a customised case built by Lian-Li. For windows and games i'd have 3x hot swappable 74G SATAII Raptor's in RAID 5 and for storage i'd have 4x 500GB Fujistu SATAII drives in RAID 5 too.

All this would be watercooled too :thumbsup:
 
mjn said:
The increased figures are not worth the extra outlay. Simply using 2 drives does not double the HDD performance, in fact its around 5% from what i remember. Off the top of my head one of the articles to support that is over at Toms Hardware.

THen your tests are either floored or wrong.

Single IDE disk in my system pumps out 30meg a second. 1 Raptor pumps out 50meg a second, I then plug in another 1 and stripe to get 75meg a second.

You first said "does not provide any performance benefits for the OS." This is entirely and utterley wrong. If this is so then why is the industry standard on servers to build in striped arrays with spare hot disks? (Note: there are various forms of stripe, the next best is mirrored but this is a lot slower)


mjn said:
Simply using 2 drives does not double the HDD performance, in fact its around 5%

I don't believe anyone said double - anyone that did needs a slap on the wrist :D

By Toms Hardware I can only guess you mean this article ? Have you seen the date on this? Notice that they are talking about disks only just reaching 200gig for the first time ever!? :smashin:

If this is not the article you are talking about then please supply a link to a striped Raptor test that proves what you are saying and I will gladly send my entire PC to "Tom" so he can re-evaluate his testing. Another good read or me but im not striped but final read says I'm as good as SCSI stuff IDE!

Surley the cost issue is not the point in this thread, the guy said an unlimited budget. If its worth it for cost/performance ratio for him is his choice. Buying the latest and greatest processor does not make "financial" sense but, a lot of us do it because we can :smashin:

Being a network/server admin/Security consultant i've put my money where my mouth is with twin, shiney looking Raptors in a sexy little stripe. I'm very happy with this and will do it again and again and again and recommend it to anyone :) (In fact I have, with SCSI systems for more banks than you can shake a very big stick at :rotfl: )
 
Monty Burns said:
You first said "does not provide any performance benefits for the OS." This is entirely and utterley wrong. If this is so then why is the industry standard on servers to build in striped arrays with spare hot disks? (Note: there are various forms of stripe, the next best is mirrored but this is a lot slower)

I can only assume you're talking about RAID 0 here?!? You should never build a server OS on a striped (RAID 0) array!! What industry standard are you talking about? You'd use 2 x HDD in RAID 1 for the OS, and RAID 5 for the data.

Monty Burns said:
Surley the cost issue is not the point in this thread, the guy said an unlimited budget. If its worth it for cost/performance ratio for him is his choice. Buying the latest and greatest processor does not make "financial" sense but, a lot of us do it because we can.

Well, if the budget is unlimited, why are we talking about SATA?

Monty Burns said:
Being a network/server admin/Security consultant i've put my money where my mouth is with twin, shiney looking Raptors in a sexy little stripe. I'm very happy with this and will do it again and again and again and recommend it to anyone (In fact I have, with SCSI systems for more banks than you can shake a very big stick at )

Wow...i'm impressed.........guess the banks won't be though when one of their drives in a striped array (RAID 0) fails....a hot spare is going to make no difference!
 
Monty Burns said:
By Toms Hardware I can only guess you mean this article ? Have you seen the date on this? Notice that they are talking about disks only just reaching 200gig for the first time ever!? :smashin:

If this is not the article you are talking about then please supply a link to a striped Raptor test that proves what you are saying and I will gladly send my entire PC to "Tom" so he can re-evaluate his testing. Another good read or me but im not striped but final read says I'm as good as SCSI stuff IDE!

No the article is more recent, i'll dig it out.
 
Can I suggest you go read up the definitions of raid again .... raid 0 is not the only stripe - although this is what I use at home (its only a media center pc/games box anyway)

Stripe

MJN said:
Wow...i'm impressed.........guess the banks won't be though when one of their drives in a striped array (RAID 0) fails....a hot spare is going to make no difference

Don't recall EVER mention raid ZERO anywhere .... ;)

Then i must be miracle worker then coz with HOT stand-bye and the right combination of stripe the loss of a disk is not an issue. :smashin: I did not and have not ever built a mission critical system using RAID 0, for data or O/S. It is however perfectly adequate for a home games PC and as the O/S is the most accessed portion of disk makes absoloute sense to be raided (and thus have the speed boosted)
 
It's a Toms Hardware arcticle I read it from also but NOT that one.

Striping Raid doesn't Increase Performance in a Real World Scenario, but it does double the likely hood of disk failure.
 
kmhtkmhtkmht said:
It's a Toms Hardware arcticle I read it from also but NOT that one.

Striping Raid doesn't Increase Performance in a Real World Scenario, but it does double the likely hood of disk failure.

:eek: :confused: :lease: :suicide:

So your saying that myself and the entire IT world are wrong and that RAID does NOT give a performance boost!?

Please refer to this for more information on the various RAID levels and the variants on Stripe - NO ONE ever said raid zero was to be used or was perfect. Raid 5 however is a stripe, offers data protection/redundancy AND with a hot standby REALLY rocks.
 

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