[flicka128]

I'm on the way to building my first PC and I have a few questions and if anyone has any suggestions that would be cool too (I'm sorry ahead of time if these questions have already been asked!)

This is the hardware I'm looking at:

Thermaltake Armor Case
eVGA 680i
Intel E6600
Silencer 750 Quad (PC P&C)
4 x WD 250GB (RAID 5)
eVGA 7950GT KO Superclocked
MEMORY: at least 2 x 1GB Corsair DDR2 800

Questions:

1) Is that PSU going to be enough if I decide to SLI two 8800 cards? :up: /:down:

2) -Is it worth the money to get a Raptor drive to use for the OS?
-If so, should I RAID 1 two of them for security?

3) How do I install the OS fresh on a RAID configuration?

With the 680i board I can use up to DDR2 800 of regular RAM or up to 1200 SLI ready mem... How much of a performance boost would I get if I used DDR2 1111 with 4-4-4-12 timings vs. DDR2 800 with 4-4-4-12 timings (I've read overclockable to 3-4-3-9) .
4) Is it worth more than twice as much money ($250 vs. $600)?

 

[flicka128]

I think I may start off with 2 raptor drives instead and then when I start running out of space I will add the RAID 5 storage drives...

 

[Sniper98G]

Raptor drives are fantastic the 36GB models are good and the 74GB and up are even better, mostly due to the command queuing they use. If you are going to get two of them I would use a RAID 0 instead of RAID 1. Your system disk should be all about performance not security (reinstalling windows isn't very hard its you personal files you have to take care of). Another option is to leave them both as single drives and move your paging file to a separate drive off the system disk, this can really help performance.

 

[Sniper98G]

One other thing. If you are going to install windows on a RAID drive be sure to get a 3.5" floppy with the computer as this is the only media that widows (at least up to XP) will except RAID drivers from during installation.

 

[flicka128]

i thought to install the OS I'll need to set up RAID before with the BIOS...? I'll be getting the 680i board (as you can tell... This is my first build.)

 

[griffinspc]

Frankly the suggestion for 2 identical SATA drives above with the second partitioned with a small partition for the swap file (10GBs let's say) is my recommendation. I have two 160GB barracudas set up this way and the performance is excellent. RAID 0 is not a security setup, loss of one drive means loss of another and RAID 1 (mirror) offers protection but at a loss of storage space.

With two independent disks you get performance and security as you can use Acronis or any other app to create an image to the second drive and/or make copies of important files to the second drive. It's also a great place to store music and video.

 

[schusterjo]

eVGA 680i

not impressed, would stay wit name brand
Asus
Abit
MSI
ext.. (Name brand)

eVGA 7950GT KO Superclocked

not impressed, would saty with name brand
ATI=ATI
Nvidia=BFG
And look what you would be missing with a card that will not be able to play DirectX10
http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=77741

With the 680i board I can use up to DDR2 800 of regular RAM or up to 1200 SLI ready mem... How much of a performance boost would I get if I used DDR2 1111 with 4-4-4-12 timings vs. DDR2 800 with 4-4-4-12 timings (I've read overclockable to 3-4-3-9) .
4) Is it worth more than twice as much money ($250 vs. $600)?

http://forums.techguy.org/hardware/531492-guide-building-your-own-system.html

Scroll down to the 5th post (my post) and read about the ram.

 

[Rich-M]

Nothing wrong with Evga Nvidia display card at all, in fact they are desiirable.

 

[schusterjo]

Nothing wrong with Evga Nvidia display card at all, in fact they are desiirable.

Didn't say anything was wrong with them, I personally like to stay with the 2 I mentioned.
what I am wondering about more so is so close to directX10 coming out why spend so much money on a card that will not be able to play directX10 games ever. If money is an issue buy a $100 dollar card (BGF 7600GT) and use it till you have the money saved up.
DirectX10 is going to be a leap in graphics not a step.

But your right Evga is a good card, nothing wrong with them.

 

[bigbear]

Can't imagine if this your first build why you would want Raid 5, its more for servers
I doubt the mobo supports it, you would need a pci raid controller card to use Raid 5
http://www.acnc.com/04_01_05.html

 

[Sniper98G]

many new desktop boards are supporting RAID 5 on board, some are even supporting RAID 10 (1+0 if you prefer). The problem with a RAID 5 array is that in order to make up for the performance drop the parity calculations cause you need to have something like 5 disks to strip, most users aren't going to want to buy that many disks (if their controller even supports that many). If you are willing to go this big you are much better off installing a fast disk for your system and programs and secure disk (like a RAID 1 array) for your file storage.

 

[crjdriver]

EVGA makes great video cards; they [evga] leadtek, and bfg are really the only ones I recommend for nvidia cards.

Their motherboards are actually made by leadtek and rebranded. In any case, I would go with a board using an intel chipset NOT an nvida chipset.

 

[Rich-M]

EVGA makes great video cards; they [evga] leadtek, and bfg are really the only ones I recommend for nvidia cards.

Their motherboards are actually made by leadtek and rebranded. In any case, I would go with a board using an intel chipset NOT an nvida chipset.

I didn't realize that about their motherboards,only that they do not make them. I would avoid that like the plague.

 

[crjdriver]

It is not that they are bad or anything, just that they do not make their own boards. At least they are not made by ecs; that would be a problem.

 

[Rich-M]

It is not that they are bad or anything, just that they do not make their own boards. At least they are not made by ecs; that would be a problem.

Leadtech is no better than Ecs I'm afraid crj.

 

[crjdriver]

Leaktek makes decent video cards however I have not used any of their mb for builds.
I had an old winfast [leadtek] video capture card that worked fine also.

 

[flicka128]

what I am wondering about more so is so close to directX10 coming out why spend so much money on a card that will not be able to play directX10 games ever.

the 2 biggest reasons for me wanting to go with the 7950 GT KO Superclocked is that
1) It's a really good card for the money and It'll play a lot of whats out there now, and
2) eVGA has the 90 day Step-up program which I can step up to the 8800's in a couple months when they are a little cheaper and "outdated"

 

[flicka128]

The problem with a RAID 5 array is that in order to make up for the performance drop the parity calculations cause you need to have something like 5 disks to strip, most users aren't going to want to buy that many disks (if their controller even supports that many). If you are willing to go this big you are much better off installing a fast disk for your system and programs and secure disk (like a RAID 1 array) for your file storage.

Reading reviews: RAID 5 provides performance between RAID 1 and RAID 0, but with the "same" security.

It would cost me about $300 for for 2 74GB Raptors which is a little expensive considering that 4 250GB (WD Caviar) would cost about $320, and offer about 5 times the storage...

 

[Sniper98G]

A RAID 5 array will offer better read performance than a RAID 1 array but slightly lower than a RAID 0 array (with the same number of disks). The write performance is a whole different story. A RAID 5 array must make parity calculations for every byte written to the disk. Parity calculations take up a very large amount of resources due to the shear volume of math that must be done, this results in very decreased performance. A 3 drive RAID 5 array will have much lower write performance than even a single drive (or RAID 1 array as they operate at the same performance as a single disk). So if you are only concerned with read performance RAID 5 is a good way to go. If you want good write performance too then RAID 5 is not such a good option. For ultimate performance and fault tolerance you could try a RAID 10. RAID 10 offers the speed of RAID 0 and the security of RAID 1 but requires 4 disk and you loose half the capacity.

That being said there is another issue. That you are not planning to use the same drives in both configurations. Single controller RAID with only a few disk does not offer that large of a performance increase in a RAID 0 array with 2 disk your performance is only about 33% better than a single drive and 3 drives will only be about 50% better than a single and the percent of increase keeps getting smaller as you go. The raptor drives however will and an additional 30% or so to the overall performance of your array.

 

[flicka128]

When I am building the system will I need to configure a RAID setup before I install the OS (If I wanted to put the OS on an array)?