Building a computer? Need advice/suggestions? Come here!

[Zeph]

Bleh, not really in a position to wait six months. Anything stupid here? Whenever grant money comes in, I'm thinkin that this is along the lines of what I'll pick up.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16819115070 2600k
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813131702 long warranty mobo
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820233184 (two of these for 16GB)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822136803 (thinking about two of these for RAID)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822145493 (storage)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16814130655 GTX 580
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16817153131 (last time I bought a PSU, 500 watts was super duper high end and CPUs were 120nm process)

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16811133192 (99% won't get this because of the price but my room is next to the laundry and there's a stupid amount of dust and lint that floats in. Filters are very appealing to me.)

I'll nab an OEM copy of Win7 64bit and cannibalize an optical drive from somewhere. Come January, I'll pick up a pair of 24" Ultrasharps and put them on the DVIs and HDMI to my current 24". It'll go on the left for start menu and icons while the other two are for productivity software on the center and right.

Would a 6970 be a better deal? It's loads cheaper for 10-20% less performance. While that wouldn't be much of a deal now, would the 580 be worth buying for say three or four years from now? You say PCI 3.0 is coming so I'm wondering if the increase in bandwidth will leave what's here now in the dust. Not like I could cheaply upgrade a few components when the time comes though.

Also, whatever happened to Creative's stranglehold on the sound card market? Did the switch to digital output kill them off or something? The buzz from onboard sound always bugged the hell out of me when I had my last desktop. Is that a problem anymore?

[Amit]

Man somebody's got money to blow.

[Cortexian]

A couple 2,000MHz 4GB memory DIMMs would probably give you all the performance you need, and then some.

An SSD would give you better performance but less storage space for that cost.

Personally, I'd RAID-1 or RAID-5 two or three storage drives instead of running a RAID-0 for the OS/Programs performance.

GTX 580 is an amazing card, when running single card I think I'd rather take the CUDA+PhysX benefits instead of the slightly faster AMD offerings.

Get a Corsair PSU, they have legendary customer service and generally make great products.

[Zeph]

Do the raptors even saturate a sata 2 pipe? I know most solid states can, but where do the Raptors line up alongside that? Just wondering if the sata 3 on them is really necessary. Even if they aren't, the price point on the sata 3 drives are very close over their supposedly less potent siblings.

Was planning on RAID-1 for the raptors, but apparently their reliability has gone way up over the past 8 years; I could probably RAID-0 them and be fine really (lawl). The raptors are so fucking big now I'd probably never fill one. Unless I decide to make an .iso for everything I can grab, the largest file I'd work with would be a couple gigabyte photoshop file I'd be sending off to a 60" wide printer. The 3TB drive is only gonna be for weekly archives of dev projects.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822136697
RAID-5 on that with 4d1p would be overkill in terms of storage for me while being cheaper. I'm really more interested in the drives speed than its storage potential. SSDs have come a long way, but I'm still not ready to hop on the bandwagon yet; might be something I'd upgrade more than a year from now perhaps.

Man somebody's got money to blow.

Yes, I've finally become so poor, they're paying me to go to school. It's a welcome change.

[Cortexian]

I top out my OS/Programs drive around 300GB. That's with most of my games installed including the Star Wars: The Old Republic beta client which is 27.2GB (and I have the other one that's 51GB on the C: drive right now as well). I'm fairly certain that even the new raptors in RAID-0 don't tpo out SATA II let alone SATA III. Just get one of these instead of the two raptors for $440 and you'll probably be fine.

[king_nothing_]

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820227744

Max Sequential Read
Up to 1500 MB/s

Max Sequential Write
Up to 1225 MB/s

:O

[Donut]

i have that exact same motherboard, and i approve.

[Amit]

If Zeph buy's his CPU before Tuesday, he'll get $15 off

[Patrickssj6]

If Zeph buy's his CPU before Tuesday, he'll get $15 off

converted into real world money that's like 10 breadcrumbs

[Amit]

I doubt he cares since he says that place is paying for his computer.