New Computer, Suggestions Needed....

[deathman20]

Alrighty, after coming up on 1 year of my current rig and with nothing really in the light of coming out thats big in the next few months its time to upgrade my system.

Going back to intel this round since the Core 2 Duo is out now but well of course I need a few suggestions.

Harddrives... Well im going with either 250Gig or the 320Gig Perpendicular drives, 3 of them to be exact to setup in Raid 5. Really is there any down side to this? I want redundancy (so I don't have to concentrat on backing crap up constantly) but also want more speed which Raid will help with. I'm coming from 2x 250gig drives (not raided) and use ~50-70% of them at any one time. Decided 2-3x 320gig's in Raid 0

Ram... I want something good, and I will not go back to Ballistix, sorry bad experiance from them. I've had G.Skill in my current rig and love it. Anyways looking for high speed (Think at least PC6400+) in 2x 1gig kit. I will want to upgrade to 4gigs eventually (with vista around the corner and all), and hopfully any experiance with Conroe setups right now and using 4 sticks of ram would be helpful. Decided 2x G.Skill PC-6400 2x 1gig Kits

Motherboard... Not really picky with boards. Asus have worked good for a few people I know, Abit has been my all time favorite with Intel Setups and I love my DFI for AMD rig. Really not sure what to go with, I won't be doing any SLI or Crossfire setup so don't need a board for that. Decided ASUS P5B Deluxe/WiFi-AP

CPU... Well the big choice what CPU. I'm going with either the E6300 or E6600, the E6400 might be an option due to the higher multiplyer. I know the difference is small between caches but he its always nice to have bigger Has anyone noticed any difference between the processors for OC's really? Any heat difference really between the 2mb cache and 4mb cache also? Decided E6600

Heatsink... I don't think mine will fit on them so I need a new heatsink Suggestions are welcome. As you can see I have a XP-120 on a naked Opty 170 so size really has no bother to me as long as it will fit into my case. I have all the fans I need for it so thats not an issue at all either. Decided Scythe SCMN-1000 really due to the fact that Thermalright jumped the price $8 today



Anyways any help at least narrowing things down would be great. I'll probably drop this into the Intel thread later but figured since it was more or less a whole system I'll keep it out of there til I get some things narrowed down a little bit.

As always, thanks in advance, and help me build a nice setup

BTW The wife agreed to me upgrading (holy crap) so I gotta make it count without blowing a huge hole in the wallet but I got ~$1200-1400 to play with, and if I can get 4gigs of ram now that might be sweet as well (less to worry down the road).

Ordered

 

[BossBorot]

Just so you know on the 7200.10 320gb Seagate hdd you can use the coupon code BUYBARRACUDA for 5 bucks off, but you can only use it once. However you can order the hdd twice on two seperate orders and apply the coupon code again, to save 10 dollars making each 89.99 shipped.

Also you may want to look at the intel matrix raid results in this thread and not just to see how fast it is. Running software 0+1 raid will give you the benifits of both raid systems just like raid 3 does, but it only requires two HDDs, if you are willing to do it you could set up part of the raid array as raid 0 with your applications and files that you want to access fast, and still use the rest as raid 1 to have some redundency. The advantage of this is that you can do it with only 2 HDD's instead of the 3 req by raid 5. The end decision is up to you I'm just pointing out some alternatives here.

Also the coupon code still works, even though its old now, I tried it before I posted this.

 

[deathman20]

Hmmm cool thx for the info on the code I'll have to make sure I order semi soon for those at least.

As for the intel matrix raid. I know I was reading up on that before, hence why I basically decided to go Raid 5 since I'd need 3 drives anyways with how much space would be used doing a 0+1 on 1 drive. Thanks for the suggestion though. Was just wondering if there was more or less a downfall to it is really besides that it needs 3 drives.

 

[BossBorot]

The only downfall of raid 5 IMO is the requirement for at least 3 disks, if you can accept the price if 3 then that is the way to go.

Also the coupon code works only on the 320 gb version. I would get three of the 320's if you can as they are only 30 bucks more, if you use the coupon code three times that is, in total then 3x of the 250gb version. 30 bucks will net you about 900gb of formated space vs 700gb of space so if you can afford it go with the 320's.

 

[deathman20]

The only downfall of raid 5 IMO is the requirement for at least 3 disks, if you can accept the price if 3 then that is the way to go.

Also the coupon code works only on the 320 gb version. I would get three of the 320's if you can as they are only 30 bucks more, if you use the coupon code three times that is, in total then 3x of the 250gb version. 30 bucks will net you about 900gb of formated space vs 700gb of space so if you can afford it go with the 320's.

Alrighty decided 320's but only due to Newegg only has 2 250gigs in stock, besides figured I'd use the space also

 

[johan851]

You sure you want to do RAID 5? Without a hardware controller you're going to suffer from very slow writes and a high CPU utilization. Better to go RAID 0+1 or something like that from a performance (and reliability) standpoint.

 

[deathman20]

You sure you want to do RAID 5? Without a hardware controller you're going to suffer from very slow writes and a high CPU utilization. Better to go RAID 0+1 or something like that from a performance (and reliability) standpoint.

Well arn't the intel chipsets for Raid halfway decent? I thought they where yeilding ~%5 utilization of the cpu when preforming. Which isn't much worse then what people get with single drives even today, and Raid 0 I know runs in the same ball park.

 

[Mr. Chambers]

Yeah all that I've read on RAID is if you're doing anything other than RAID0 or 1 that you really need a hardware controller, but I don't have any first-hand experience with it just something to keep in mind!

 

[deathman20]

Hmmm Going to drop this question in the HDD section.

 

[Mr. Roboto]

Check out this ram:
http://www.newegg.com/product/product.asp?item=N82E16820231065

Alot of people are using it for their conroe builds, myself included. It's a bit more expensive because it uses the D9 chips, but they are great and OC extremely well.

For the heatsink, get the Thermalright ultra-120. Did alot of research before I got mine and I love it. I idle around 26C, full load at 35C.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16835109125

 

[johan851]

Well arn't the intel chipsets for Raid halfway decent? I thought they where yeilding ~%5 utilization of the cpu when preforming. Which isn't much worse then what people get with single drives even today, and Raid 0 I know runs in the same ball park.

Yeah, it's pretty decent, but I wouldn't use it for an OS drive. RAID 0 and RAID 1 work very well, and RAID 5 works pretty well as a storage array, but no matter how you look at it, booting from a non-hardware RAID 5 partition is going to be pretty slow.

 

[deathman20]

Check out this ram:
http://www.newegg.com/product/product.asp?item=N82E16820231065

Alot of people are using it for their conroe builds, myself included. It's a bit more expensive because it uses the D9 chips, but they are great and OC extremely well.

For the heatsink, get the Thermalright ultra-120. Did alot of research before I got mine and I love it. I idle around 26C, full load at 35C.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16835109125

I know I was looking at those 2 exact same things myself

Do you know anyone running 4gigs of ram (4x 1gig sticks) in a conroe right yet?

 

[Mr. Roboto]

I don't know anyone who is, but i'm sure someone on here must be though. One thing to note, if your running the 32bit version of xp, i'm pretty sure it can't make use of 4gb of ram. If gaming is the most memory intensive thing you do, i would just stick with 2.

 

[deathman20]

I don't know anyone who is, but i'm sure someone on here must be though. One thing to note, if your running the 32bit version of xp, i'm pretty sure it can't make use of 4gb of ram. If gaming is the most memory intensive thing you do, i would just stick with 2.

Its for Vista really. Vista definatly uses a good gig of ram and I will want more left over for other things as well. I do a bit of 3D work so all the more helps in the ram department.

 

[Mr. Chambers]

By default I thought XP could only use 3GB of RAM, but I thought there was a fix to make it see 4gb? I can't seem to find anything at the moment, but perhaps ask that question in the OS section so redduc900 or someone can take a stab at it if you want to use XP.

If you'll be using WinXP 64-bit edition this problem is null, as it can address up to 12GB I believe...

 

[Mr. Chambers]

Hmmm Going to drop this question in the HDD section.

Good idea, I'll keep an eye on it I'd be interested to get to the bottom of this as well.

 

[deathman20]

By default I thought XP could only use 3GB of RAM, but I thought there was a fix to make it see 4gb? I can't seem to find anything at the moment, but perhaps ask that question in the OS section so redduc900 or someone can take a stab at it if you want to use XP.

If you'll be using WinXP 64-bit edition this problem is null, as it can address up to 12GB I believe...

I'll be upgrading to Vista when it comes out. I just want it now if its possible so I can more or less resolve any issues right away instead of 5 months down the line say. I could care less if I only see 3Gig in windows currently I'm looking forward to the future.

 

[deathman20]

Well had a little time to look on forums and that at lunch to do a little research on it.

Raid 5 might be out of the question now looking at it for a main drive, forgot about the parity calculation information. Guess I'd be looking say at 3x 320gig drives that I can get ~500 gigs of space out of yet have full redundancy, and is supported by the motherboard which hopfully has a high potential for OCing. I might just get a 4th drive and do the full blown easy 0+1 raid but I want to see if I can save the extra $100 and spend it on other parts of hardware.

 

[deathman20]

Well decided also on the E6600, might as well..

Then the last thing is the mobo, and alot of people keep saying the Asus P5W-DH is where its at currently.

BTW Ordering 2 ram and 2 HDD sets currently on 2 orders to get all the deals saving me $100

 

[greenmaji]

Any luck on finding out how to adress the 4gigs of ram with 32bit-XP yet? (its still the best supported MS OS)
I'll link someone that ran 4 sticks with C2D but it was more about tweaking the mem to run together *voltage and timings* and supprisingly the faster ram got the slower ram to run quicker (two diffent types, sizes and speeds)