School Funded Ultimate PC Project

I attend a technologically inclined (notice I don't say a tech school straight out because they're all complete idiots) school in Connecticut and we are working on acquiring a grant from the school board to build an ultimate gaming computer as a publicity project for them to get more students. We have some general ideas on what we will be using but I would appreciate some help on what we can add to really boost the performance. After we are done we will put the entire computer on Ebay and set the reserve price for whatever the school granted us so that we can pay them back and any bids over that price will be ours. Woopee! We are going to use a Thermaltake XASER Full-T black case and Asus A8N-SLI mobo with dual BFGTech 7800GTX 512MBs OCed in SLI. Thats about as far as Ive gotten .

You could finish it with an FX-57, 2x1GB Ballistix, and a PC P&C 510SLI PSU, and maybe an X-FI sound card.

EDIT: Forgot about the HD's. A 74GB Raptor for the OS and games, and maybe a 500GB Hitachi drive for storage.

That would make for a pretty sick setup

are you planning on overclocking it? what have you considered for cooling?

if you really want to impress the people you would also watercool the same setup that nexus said.

the only problem i see with your plan is hardware tends to lose its value so if you resale it on eBay you probably wont get all the money back.

what tech school in ct do you go to, and by the way to the forums

Ya, I doubt you will get all your money back. With the hardware you listed so far it would be close to 5G. Although it would be a really awesome computer. Throw in some water cooling, maybe a Dell 2405. Now that would kick *** !!!!

Don't get the thermaltake case. Get the new silverstone, here:
http://www.silverstonetek.com/products-tj07.htm

Don't waste time with a 500gb drive. Go straight for the four 74gb raptor raid array.

Also check out the Blue Gears HDA Digital Mystique 7.1 sound card vs. the x-fi.

If you're going all out, get the PCP&C 700w unit.

definately raid some raptors...

Yes we are planning on overclocking it and using water cooling.

http://www.xoxide.com/koolance-exos-2-black.html

Looks good and does the job well. The equipment would be brand new so I do not think there will be that much of a drop in value especially with the quality of the products used. I mean an Xbox 360 sold for $1MIL I think we have a chance of breaking even.

Don't Koolance. Thats the easy way out. (and they suck for the money compaired to a custom system) Build a REAL system. Feel free to poke your head around the cooling section and ask any questions.

Tracekill said:

we are working on acquiring a grant from the school board

Click to expand...

Good luck with that, it's pretty unlikely.

Who's going to be gaming on this fantastic rig? If it just sits behind a pane of glass it's a waste of hardware, don't you think?

How can you say its unlikely? Do you know my school board? And no we will be selling it on Ebay after the project is completed so whoever buys it will be gaming on the rig. I find your pessimistic annoying.

personally I think this is a waste of tax dollars. I mean I don't think the government should be funding this, even if they want to teach building of PC's you can do that with 5 year old hardware. Plus with the depriciation of hardware I don't think you will make nearly as much back by selling it on Ebay. Plus secondly how is it going to gain your school more students if it's sold so either you keep it and try to gain students with it and then it's just a waste of tax money so a buncha kids can play video games on hard working American's dime. The other alternative is you keep it for a few months, maybe a year in hopes of getting some publicity (and personally I don't see how you could gain students by just saying "look at us, we have 1 kick *** gaming PC) and by that time it has depreciated in value quite a bit and you try to sell it and end up losing quite a big chunck of change. Even though you say you will set the reserve price to the cost of building it it is very unlikely that you will get that back unless you sell it imiedietly (defeating the whole point of using it to gain new students) and every day basically it is no longer brand new and loses value as newer hardware comes out making it harder to resell for the origional building price.

So you can why I think this idea is quesitonable, if you keep it for a short time and resell it and make back nearly the building cost well you won't have time to display it and you might get 1 or 2 students but if you keep it longer with the way hardware prices just fall you may gain a few students but lose a bit of money on this investment.

Now don't get me wrong I don't see anything wrong with having a top of the line system but there is a difference if it's payed outa your own pocket or the tax payers.

Get a 15k SCSI drive for the OS instead. More expensive but faster than a single Raptor by a healthy margin. Even faster than a RAID.

RAID 0 is actually slower than a single drive for small, random disk accesses, and has a higher aggregate seek time as well. These are bad features for desktop/gaming performance. Its high throughput really doesn't come in handy all that often.

Oh, and screw the 510 PSU. Get the kilowatt model.

Some strong words.

Couldn't agree more, pure waste of money and I don't even live in the U.S.
Sounds to me like the board is trying to spend their allocation for this year so they get the same amount next year...

Would be interested to know where you saw an xbox360 sell for US$1 million. Perhaps you meant $1,000?

While fuzzba11's pessimism may be annoying, or a wet blanket on your enthusiasm, I believe he is making a valid point. Specifically, what is the point of this project? You are not giving many details so that this very enthusiastic community can offer advice.

For example:

Are you only doing this to show how powerful a computer today can be?
Are you going to be modding the case to make it truely eye catching?
If so, what kind of mods are you wanting to do? integrated lcds, integrated water cooling?

If you can get the school to loan the money (I call it a loan since your goal seems to be to repay it), great, I for one look forward to seeing pics of the results. However, if you are asking your school to put out this kind of money just to build a "wet dream specs" comp, I would point out that many of the individuals on this board who get great speeds will often spend months tweeking and tuning to get the absolute best out of their system. in this time, new items will often come out, lowering the value of the original material.

Of course, if this is to be a true PR build, showing what the students of this school are doing, would it not be better to truely put your skills to the forefront and go full custom, with as little "off the shelf" hardware as possible? Perhaps integrate multiple classes into the project, and create a "Digital Mascot" as it were?

I do wish you luck, and it seems you have a solid foundation of what the bleeding edge is in the realm of computers. If you are able to pursue this project, I have no doubt that the community here can be a priceless resource to aid you.


Take care,
JKrepps

you will lose money if you put this on ebay

Grab the A8N32-SLI mobo. As for the vid cards, if I remember correctly, Maximum PC compared a lot of 7800GTXs and the Asus one came out on top. I would look into that if you want the "ultimate." I'd grab some OCZ ram. I believe they have some ddr600 that runs at 2-2-2-5 and you can probably get it in 2x1 gb. They also OC very well and have the lifetime warranty with overvolting. Definitely grab the FX-57. I'd get a Creative X-FI sound card and some Logitech Z5500 speakersto go with it. If you can get the money, grab two 2405's and have one hell of a desktop. For hard drives, I'd grab 2 74gb Raptors in RAID 0 and one 500gb Hitachi or Maxtor for storage. You could probably be fine with a pc&c 510w, but why the hell not, get the kilowatt model. It is supposed to be ultimate, isn't it? For a case, I'd think about something with a window. A Thermaltake Tai-Chi would be pretty cool if you have the hydraulic doors open. If the Coolermaster 830 is out by the time you get the cash, definitely go with that. You absolutely need to watercool this. If you want impressive, you need watercooling. Don't get a kit; buy the parts separately. Then get some nice UV dye for the water, and put a couple of lights in the case.

What school is it?

ait.echalk.com -- That one

And I assume that the 32 in the A8N32-SLI refers to like 32-bit and the processor is 64-bit or at least Im assuming so whats the difference between the 32 and the one without.

Also I was thinking. To those that say we will lose money selling this on Ebay because the value of hardware goes down over time, don't some people pay to have computers built for them? I mean its not like we build it and use it for a year and then sell it as an old piece of junk. Also Im not even sure were going to sell it anymore, the board liked the idea of the computer running like Protein Folding and SeTI type matrix programs.

The 32 comes from two x16 pci-e slots.