In over my head?

Im having a slight *PANIC* right about now...
My Friend is a photographer. (A serious career photograpgher - worked at Buckingham palace photographer, it is her life...)

She has an I Mac.

She wanted the new watercooled G5, but wont pay $5300 for it.
I offered to build a watercooled Dualie with lots of Ram and HDD space.
She gave me a budget of $3000 - I am not charging labor, but she may fund some of my mods - well see...
She is NOT computer savvy. -Understatement.

Were building a photo editing (and folding, she likes that) machine.

I have only built Knossos (Rig in Sig) I am not in the AMD world.

Im gonna die.

Yeah, so anyway, read a few stickies, and im still rattled....(deep breaths arent helping,lol)
1. The case is not an issue, Ill find a nice big one that can handle a dualie board, and that will be that. Mod as needed. Window preferable,she wants to put her transparencies and whatnot in the window and light it up. I may ask Arch (modding xaser III) for some help there, I am in good hands. No worries.
2. My first thoughts are the PSU, why not a PCP&C? Or maybe fortron- 500W+
3. Dualies take special expensive ram, am I right thinking its registered and/or buffered? shooting for 2 Gigs.
4. Processors- im kinda lost in the SMP world, but I would say its gotta be as fast as my 2.8 northwood rig -minimum. So I figure, two 2.8's - okay, super- what about hyperthreading? what about dual core? What do i know of xenons and opterons? ive got more reasearch to do here.
5. Drives - should I go with the new SATA PCIxpress ddr2 stuff? or has that hit the SMP world yet? I am still in a 478 world...I like samsung harddrives, probably get 1 High Gig or 2 100+ gig....hopefully, ill be able to find and all in one optical drive, havnt looked into it yet. standard floppy.
6. Leaning twords CRT monitor, but havnt discussed it W/ her yet. Probably any decent CRT will do. i dunno about flat panels and photo editing.
7. Watercooled Rig! - okay, so 2 waterblocks (nice ones) Big tubing, yet to settle the rest- She wants internal W/C, but im not sure about that. Watercool graphics depending on budget. I hear theres a fuss with retention clips for dualies? yet to look into much WC stuff. That comes later.
8. Motherboard - Asus? Intel? Needs to be a solid board, this is her livelyhood - overclocking is not needed nor desired.
9. What about firewire and Usb 2.0? Im pretty sure they are both mandatory.
10. Keyboard, Mouse and peripherals - I can sort that out.
11. She does not need to muck about with fans, what fans there are should be quiet and not need to be Mucked with. Easy. I can handle that.

okay, so i have been typing this Directly after getting this task. I have yet to sort out issues of budget, Actual Parts, or do enough research.
Tomarrow, I will dive into stickies at length- do some heavy reasearch, and come up with a rudimentary budget.

General Comments and ideas appreciated and desired - this is just my initial situation, and I allready have some of it sorted out.
I am in debt to the community, Thank You.

3000$ is way more then you will need to build her a nice duallie.

1. If you go Xeon the PC-DL is a standard atx mobo and all the popular XP SMP boards are ATX form factor, so case is not a problem.

2. A nice 500+ watt EPS power supply (Tagan, Fortron, Antec, Etc.) just to be safe

3. Duallie XP systems generally dont top more then 150mhz fsb, and duallie zeons are fine with pc-3200. If you want a server grade motherboard then you will need ECC, but the PC-DL & NCCH-DL are fine with regular ram(Non-Ecc).

4. Go for either some 1.6ghz low voltage xeons, or some 2.4ghz LV xeons. Either of those will easily hit 2.8 ghz if they are the D1 core. If you don't want to overclock just buy 2 2.8 xeons. Best bet would be 2 x 2.8ghz Noconas (newest revision) paired with the NCCH-DL.

5. 7200rpm 8meg cache SATA drive or a raptor if you want, size of your choice.

6. Flat panels are just as good a CRT's go with what she wants to spend.

7. Watercooling is not necessary if you are not overclocking, and is overkill for the LV xeons. If you must go watercooling go with swiftech as I believe they have some fairly cheap socket 604 waterblocks.

8. Asus PC-DL, or Asus NCCH-DL would be the best bet for xeons, MSI k7d master for XP's, and I don't know much about dual opterons.

9. Firewire and usb are standard on the pc-dl and ncch-dl (based on the 875p chipset) not sure on the server boards and fairly sure MPX boards do not have firewire.

My personal opinion for best duallie machine for the money, that fits your needs
Asus pc-dl 200$
2 x 1.6 ghz LV xeons 110$
2 gigs pc-3200 325$
250gig HD 150$
16x DL Dvd writer 60$
Case 100$
Watercooling (250$) (prebought kit) <-- not needed or 2 x socket 603/604 heatsinks
550 watt eps PS 85$
20" Dell LCD ~550$

At the most this costs around 2000$, if you go with actual 2.8 processors it will be around 2300$ with the watercooling. These are rough prices and you can probably do better then most of them.

A tip from personal experience is to maybe let a company build the computer for her so that she doesn't come to you every time her computer has a "problem".

Biut the only things I'd add in is WinXP PRO for OS and maybe two harddrives in a raid mirror setup. My vote is for 2.8ghz Xeons and no overclock, machine will still be quiet unless realy working it hard and then the noise won't be a problem.

Thanks Yall!
yeah, i think ill just go with the new nocona's ( 2.8 retial coolers) and the ncch-dl some premium ram... Torn between the PCP&C EPS and the TTGI 550SS With an adaptor.. whichever is quieter...probably some aluminum server case with a window... still looking into that, but might get away with a regular sized Alu case W/ Window...would it be nice to slap some XP-90's or 120's on it? Sure, but i dont think thats possible...gotta get XP Pro from what ive heard, just fine....probably go with a flat panel... might as well find her a nice one in the 17" or larger range... am I right thinking I am to go for SATA drives? must the RAM be ECC? any Surplus will go twords the "Im spending $3000 and I have a $3.00 mouse!?!?!" Catagory -wireless mouse and keyboard. maybe low-end surround sound, Fans, Lights, Bling, Mods, Quiet PC hardware, Etc... the budget is enough to give her whatever she wants, with a few extras even...Still working on case, and monitor info, but i think ive got most of it settled, ill try to tell her that watercooling would be over the top... still trying to get info on colors, sizes, noise expectations from her, but I think I can do this! I guess its allways a bombshell when you get asked for the first time to build for a friend, let alone a dually... anyways, thanks again, just have a few more details to wrap up in the coming days and then we order parts!

What would be the current advantage of a duallie for mainly photoshopping (is there a version that can take advantage of dual procs?), and is there a particular reason why she wants watercooling? She'd have to learn how to maintain it, as I doubt you'd be interested (read: completely willing) in running over there every time she complains about something.

Get two 74gb Raptors and raid-0 them. Theres a huge difference in performance.

I think raptors would take me over my noise limit... ( i have to live up to the "imac" standard...rofl....) working on cases and storage, as we speak.

orionlion82 said:

I think raptors would take me over my noise limit... ( i have to live up to the "imac" standard...rofl....)

Click to expand...

You could wrap the entire thing in dynamat

What would be the current advantage of a duallie for mainly photoshopping (is there a version that can take advantage of dual procs?)

Click to expand...

Photoshop uses multiple processors.

goodie, all thats left now is the case...as long as things fit and the thing is lightweight, ( so she can move it) I dont care what she pics... shes cruising xoxide right now...

For that money, I think you can afford 4gb of ram. I think it would be a good idea, since photoshop loves ram. A proper server motherboard would be a good idea too, since they usually have more memory slots, unlike this NCCH-DL.

Only problem with a "proper server" board is you'd probably need ECC registered ram, with on these boards you can go with generic ram

for a case... look at the lian li v-1000/1200/2000 cases... plenty of room, look AWESOME, and have wheels. These cases are similar in appearance to the G5's too.

The PC-DL MoBo has SATA raid built on so I bought 2 Hitachi Desktar 160GB 7200 drive and raided 0.. I bought most stuff from zipzoomfly.com they were real fast..

Those hard drive have pretty good performance and they are real quite.

Here's my rig.

Koolance water Cooled case with 2xXeon waterblocks $250.
OCZ 520 watt power supply $120.00 (Make sure you get a big enough power supply the PC-DL used 24 pin main plug and then a 8 Pin extra power plug)
Asus PC-DL mobo $249
2 1.6 Ghz Xeon off ebay $100.00 overclock easy to 2.8 mine run at 3.12ghz noprob

2x 160GB Hitachi Desktar Sata 7200 RPM drives, $170.00
2x512 patriot ram ddr400 $230
4x 80 MM quite fans with pretty LED's $20.00 from Xoxide.com
(I mounted 2 80mm fan right over the Mobo Heat sinks to keep the mobo cool. Then to blowing out the back. To help good air flow.

This system is quite and powerful.

where'd you get your OCZ520?

http://xoxide.com/ocz-modstream-520w-modular-psu.html

Xoxide i Use for mod stuff lights fans..
zipzoomfly.com everything else.

Her funding was denied- "except for future upgrades to the Imac-Pending"
not sure that one can upgrade an i-mac, but im done with it...
learned a heck of a lot though, and got a rough idea for my next rig in a year or so...

XWRed1 said:

Photoshop uses multiple processors.

Click to expand...

Oops ^_^ Not being a photoshopper, I was unaware of that.

orionlion82 said:

Her funding was denied- "except for future upgrades to the Imac-Pending"
not sure that one can upgrade an i-mac, but im done with it...
learned a heck of a lot though, and got a rough idea for my next rig in a year or so...

Click to expand...

Bummer....this was looking to be a interesting project. I think more attention should have been paid to the monitor if she is a photogrtapher. let us know if she gets the funding in the new financial year

Why do you want a dualie? You could build a bomb rig with that much cash...FX55, 2GB PC3200 in DC, 2 x 74GB raptors in raid 0, 400GB Hitachi, 6800gt ultra, FSP 530w, Audigy2 ZS, MSI K8N, Lian Li, etc...