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...what would be on your wishlist?
Im thinking 2 or 3 mahoosive HDDs in RAID and a few jigawatts of Memory but what chipset is best value for speed? and are onboard graphics handlers any good or is a graphics card essential for a media PC? what about soundcards etc? Are ther lower power consumption machines out there?
all going to be running W7.
I'm on my iPod which is a pain for typing long responses, but for now I will say deffo go for a SSD for you OS and main apps drive. Biggest improvement to real world speed IME.
I would have thought a solid state drive for the OS would be a good call. Then have your mahoosive RAID for storage.
I would get a dedicated GFX card for a media PC too, though haven't had the luxury of speccing a nice new once recently so I may be wrong and onboard GFX may have improved.
beat me to it pedalhead! 🙂
ooohh - hadnt thought about SSD for the OS. As it happens Im typing this on my netbook on the train which has an SSD. I use a fix called flashfire to speed up the random writes on it. Are second/third gen SSDs faster now then?
Sorry dont really know enough Stoner, I just know our programmer who is a mad keen gamer spent about 4k on his pc and was singing from the roof tops about his SSD for the OS/apps 🙂
I think I'd rather use a NAS unit than internal HDDs
I can highly recommend the Netgear NASDuo range
Forget RAID, go for an SSD - best upgrade Ive ever gone for.I'm runnning an intel x25 80GB SSD which holds my os plus other programs and the difference is amazing 🙂 eg I loaded windows 7 professional in about 12 minutes and downloads which are tagged to take about 30minutes are with me in less than 30 seconds!! 🙂
For graphics I went for a HD 5870 which is superb but big. I've gone down the AMD route with a Phenom II X4 955 processor but I think I'd look at the Intel i5 or i7 processors if you can afford it.
I built my first ever PC before Christmas and can throughly recommend it - email me if you want any further advice or recommendations.
cheers 🙂
I was planning on using the PC as a NAS anyway - also using raid for the HDDs for security for my work stuff.
Ive started getting corruptions on one of my existing HDDs (apps drive only thankfully - my data drives are manually backed up).
OK so SSD OS and apps is a tick.
What about chips?
To borrow a quote from our learned friend BD, I know I didn't [i]have[/i] to read this thread, but aaaaarrgghh... 🙂
I was planning on using the PC as a NAS anyway - also using raid for the HDDs for security for my work stuff.
You shouldn't really use RAID as your only form of storage - you need another way to back up your data such as an external HD
what's up with you DD? 😉
hitman - I keep a second back up on a SD card every day (I use beyond compare to manage my data syncs - brilliant app). Once the new system is set up Im also planning on an offsite back up too.
I also look both ways, twice, when crossing the road 😉
good to hear it 🙂
I use beyond compare to manage my data syncs - brilliant app
- tell me more
If you're buying SSD do NOT buy cheap and be careful about putting caching on them. We've been experimenting with them at work and the cheap ones lasted 6 weeks (admittedly under a lot of load).
Prepare to dig deep if your going SSD they're still expensive.
Beyond Compare is a paid for bit of software that keeps sync images between drives/folders etc. It does a quick side by side analysis flagging changes and which file version is most up to date and also showing new files. You can then choose which way to sync or which individual files have primacy. Its very useful for me as I take an uptodate syn on an SD card with me to my clients when I go on site and then I can sync any site work back to my home drive when I get in.
Atlaz - are Kingston 64GBs considered cheap? at £120 Im guessing so...
i'd buy a mac 😉 (que all the mac bashing)
thanks Stoner for the information - will look into it 🙂
In answer to your question above - I did a lot of resaerch into this and for an SSD card you need TRIM support or performance will decline. Go for an Intel - expensive but when you do your research you'll see that they're the best around at the moment.
cheers
After a load of research I went for a 160GB Intel SSD Gen 2 for my OS and most used apps/games. It's stupid fast and I love it. Makes a massive difference overall. I also store most of my music/photos etc on a Windows Home Server with a few TB of storage, automated backup over the network, redundant drives, all good stuff & really quite cheap. Oh and I also went for a 2 x ATI 5850 CrossfireX setup with three 24" monitors in Eyefinity for true gaming geekness 😀 . If you can pick up a cheap Q6600, they're still an excellent cpu by today's standards, and easily overclockable to 3Ghz on stock cooling (more on decent, even air, cooling). Only problem is that motherboards are getting harder to find, although I have a spare one sitting here I'd flog for cheapness if you're interested.
Beyond Compare is great for manually synching directories, but it's not really backup software.