PC building guys in here

[Rogue Leader]

So I think I'm finally going to replace my aged Alienware. I ALWAYS build my own computers the only reason I got an Alienware is they had a rebate deal at the time that made it cheaper than building my own. I've built hundreds of computers in the past, but haven't built anything recently so I wanted to get a couple opinions:

Firstly the specs (BTW I'm an AMD guy, just a personal preference), I went for high-er end but well tested stuff (ie the mobo is not cutting edge, rather have the reliability), also I don't play games so my graphics card is a little weak but I don't really care. I use my PS3 for games. Looking to keep this under like 700-800 bucks.

AMD Phenom X6 1100
ASUS M4A79XTD EVO mobo
8gb Corsair Vengeance PC12800 RAM
600w PSU
DVD RW drive (for now)
2x 1.5tb drives in RAID 5
1 64gb SSD (with a question)
Windows 7 Pro 64 bit
ATi Radeon 5670ish based video card

So my questions:
1. is a 64GB SSD enough for Windows 7 64 Bit?
2. Am I better off going RAID 10 over RAID 5?
3. Sound... so I have a Sound Blaster Audigy 2ZS that I absolutely LOVE in my Alienware. It is a PCI card with an external "Audigy Drive" that has lots of digital inputs and outputs etc. Creative, or anybody else, doesn't make anything like this anymore, so I was going to just disable the motherboard's onboard audio, pull it from my old computer, and install this instead. However my concern is that this will drag down the performance of the rest of the PC, its a 6 year old card. Any thoughts?

Thanks guys, would post this on a PC forum but I'm not a member of any and I'd rather get the friendlier non "read the faq noob!" responses I would get here.

[GTAHVIT]

couple questions.

are you doing logical drive partitions to get raid 5? I didn't know you could do raid 5 with 2 drives.

as to the 64g ssd yes you should be fine as long as you install your apps on the second drive I have a 124 ssd in my alienware laptop and I just recently had to move some old video and image files to my backup drive.

Otherwise the build looks good to me.

I'm not much of a PC builder anymore, I haven't built one in a few years.

But I'm thinking about a media server... I'd like to build a bare bones system to run Tversity...

I May post that up here as well.

I'm thinking that will be quite the machine when you are done.

[Rogue Leader]

Originally Posted by GTAHVIT

couple questions.

are you doing logical drive partitions to get raid 5? I didn't know you could do raid 5 with 2 drives.

as to the 64g ssd yes you should be fine as long as you install your apps on the second drive I have a 124 ssd in my alienware laptop and I just recently had to move some old video and image files to my backup drive.

Otherwise the build looks good to me.

I'm not much of a PC builder anymore, I haven't built one in a few years.

But I'm thinking about a media server... I'd like to build a bare bones system to run Tversity...

I May post that up here as well.

I'm thinking that will be quite the machine when you are done.

With RAID, honestly I'm not sure Its been so long since I did this. I just want to run the 2 drives in parallel so if one craps I still have the other.

As for the SSD I literally want to only put the OS on there and will put all my data on the dual 1.5TB drives. I will be pulling my old 320 GB backup drive from my old PC and using it as an external SATA drive for backups as well.

I may actually gut down the rest of my old PC, put it in a smaller case and make a Liunx box out of it just to play around.

[GTAHVIT]

Originally Posted by Rogue Leader

With RAID, honestly I'm not sure Its been so long since I did this. I just want to run the 2 drives in parallel so if one craps I still have the other.

As for the SSD I literally want to only put the OS on there and will put all my data on the dual 1.5TB drives. I will be pulling my old 320 GB backup drive from my old PC and using it as an external SATA drive for backups as well.

I may actually gut down the rest of my old PC, put it in a smaller case and make a Liunx box out of it just to play around.

OK so you are talking Raid 0 or 1 (mirror) which makes sense.

yeah I'm thinking you will be good to go then. Keep in mind that Software raid (using the OS to manage the mirror) can still be problematic. you might want to consider hardware raid controller. they aren't too expensive and then you have true fault tolerance between the data drives.

[Steve Dallas]

Originally Posted by Rogue Leader

\
So my questions:
1. is a 64GB SSD enough for Windows 7 64 Bit?
2. Am I better off going RAID 10 over RAID 5?
3. Sound... so I have a Sound Blaster Audigy 2ZS that I absolutely LOVE in my Alienware. It is a PCI card with an external "Audigy Drive" that has lots of digital inputs and outputs etc. Creative, or anybody else, doesn't make anything like this anymore, so I was going to just disable the motherboard's onboard audio, pull it from my old computer, and install this instead. However my concern is that this will drag down the performance of the rest of the PC, its a 6 year old card. Any thoughts?

1) No. I'm finding my 250GB SSD isn't enough, but I also have Steam Applications loading to my C: drive...so I have to swap out applications sometimes when I'm not using them to keep 20-30GB free at all times. It's really nice to have extremely fast load times for some games. I'm talking the difference in Dragon Age II of 15 second load times versus 1:00+ load times.

2) C: drive should be SSD and should be OS. If you want to do RAID 5, you'll need 3+ identical drives. I wouldn't bother with RAID 10. RAID 5 can be nice, but only if you have hot-swappable drives.

3) It possibly could. I have the X-Fi Titanium Fatal1ty Pro Sound Card, and that was available 1 year ago, and is awesome.

Added note here. I know you like AMD/ATI, so I won't go into how much I don't like those personally...we all have our little faults

What I did really want to say, though, was that when I was doing my own builds, I was still using Falcon Northwest as a guide for speccing out my machines I'd build. So I'd go to their Mach V build site, and check what parts I could afford that were on their list, choose those, buy them through Newegg...and put it together myself.

I'll post a build from there in a sec that you might want to consider...

[Steve Dallas]

OK, took me a bit to find it, but instead of going with a RAID, consider using a DROBO as an external drive.

These things are awesome, and I plan on getting one soon to expand my drive space.

http://www.drobo.com/

[Steve Dallas]

My build suggestion:

AMD Phenom II X6 1100T 3.3GHz
Asus Crosshair IV Formula Motherboard
Same RAM you specified
1200watt PSU
Start with 1 Radeon HD 6970 video card, but expand to 2 later
Everything else looks good, though I would also go bigger on the SSD, and make sure it is a Crucial M4 SSD because of performance/reliability.

[Rogue Leader]

Originally Posted by GTAHVIT

OK so you are talking Raid 0 or 1 (mirror) which makes sense.

yeah I'm thinking you will be good to go then. Keep in mind that Software raid (using the OS to manage the mirror) can still be problematic. you might want to consider hardware raid controller. they aren't too expensive and then you have true fault tolerance between the data drives.

Cool, the mobo I am gonna get has RAID 0,1,5,and 10 available onboard, one of the things I looked for.

Originally Posted by Steve Dallas

1) No. I'm finding my 250GB SSD isn't enough, but I also have Steam Applications loading to my C: drive...so I have to swap out applications sometimes when I'm not using them to keep 20-30GB free at all times. It's really nice to have extremely fast load times for some games. I'm talking the difference in Dragon Age II of 15 second load times versus 1:00+ load times.

2) C: drive should be SSD and should be OS. If you want to do RAID 5, you'll need 3+ identical drives. I wouldn't bother with RAID 10. RAID 5 can be nice, but only if you have hot-swappable drives.

3) It possibly could. I have the X-Fi Titanium Fatal1ty Pro Sound Card, and that was available 1 year ago, and is awesome.

Added note here. I know you like AMD/ATI, so I won't go into how much I don't like those personally...we all have our little faults

What I did really want to say, though, was that when I was doing my own builds, I was still using Falcon Northwest as a guide for speccing out my machines I'd build. So I'd go to their Mach V build site, and check what parts I could afford that were on their list, choose those, buy them through Newegg...and put it together myself.

I'll post a build from there in a sec that you might want to consider...

Well I really plan on using the SSD for the OS only, I will run all programs off the hard drives, and I don't play games sooo... Not sure that I will run into the same issues. I will be mostly doing some photo and HD video editing with this, programming for Android, obviously surfing the internet, and watching porn of course lol.

As for the sound card I would probably get that if I had to get a new one, but then I lose my digital coaxial out, all the extra inputs, remote control, etc that I had with the old Audigy. I just would be pissed if it would drag on the system....

Using high end systems as guidelines sounds like a good idea!

Originally Posted by Steve Dallas

OK, took me a bit to find it, but instead of going with a RAID, consider using a DROBO as an external drive.

These things are awesome, and I plan on getting one soon to expand my drive space.

http://www.drobo.com/

This is cool but I don't think that data backup is that much of an issue for me that can't be solved with a RAID setup and a $60 hard drive, this seems like overkill for me, and as well I'm short on space for more devices under and around my desk.

[Rogue Leader]

Originally Posted by Steve Dallas

My build suggestion:

AMD Phenom II X6 1100T 3.3GHz
Asus Crosshair IV Formula Motherboard
Same RAM you specified
1200watt PSU
Start with 1 Radeon HD 6970 video card, but expand to 2 later
Everything else looks good, though I would also go bigger on the SSD, and make sure it is a Crucial M4 SSD because of performance/reliability.

That sounds good except where I highlighted. IMO thats a whole lot of juice when I'm not really going to be running that many devices, also I'm not playing games so do I really need a Crossfire card?

If anything I'm considering going with a card with video capture built in (my old ATi Radeon X850XT had that built in).

[Steve Dallas]

Originally Posted by Rogue Leader

That sounds good except where I highlighted. IMO thats a whole lot of juice when I'm not really going to be running that many devices, also I'm not playing games so do I really need a Crossfire card?

If anything I'm considering going with a card with video capture built in (my old ATi Radeon X850XT had that built in).

I was posting that thinking you had gaming interest. Since you've stated you don't game, you can take my suggestion with a grain of salt, because that is what that card would really help in...a system for gaming.

That being said, I do gaming and video editing. I work with Adobe Premiere as well as all the other products in the Adobe Master Suite. The card you listed would be ok for that, but I'd still consider getting a better card than what you initially considered. Better & faster video card means more CPU cycles devoted to video processing. You wouldn't need to do Crossfire, so you could also probably step down on the motherboard to one that just supports a single card.

[Steve Dallas]

Originally Posted by Rogue Leader

This is cool but I don't think that data backup is that much of an issue for me that can't be solved with a RAID setup and a $60 hard drive, this seems like overkill for me, and as well I'm short on space for more devices under and around my desk.

The reason I'm so high on the Drobo is because I can take ALL my old drives and pop them into the Drobo, and it'll build me a single drive. I can then swap out the smallest drive and replace it with a huge one and slowly keep increasing the size of the drobo unit.

[Rogue Leader]

Originally Posted by Steve Dallas

I was posting that thinking you had gaming interest. Since you've stated you don't game, you can take my suggestion with a grain of salt, because that is what that card would really help in...a system for gaming.

That being said, I do gaming and video editing. I work with Adobe Premiere as well as all the other products in the Adobe Master Suite. The card you listed would be ok for that, but I'd still consider getting a better card than what you initially considered. Better & faster video card means more CPU cycles devoted to video processing. You wouldn't need to do Crossfire, so you could also probably step down on the motherboard to one that just supports a single card.

Yeah I'm a putz should have posted in the OT forum not Gaming since I don't really want to game. I may upgrade the card a bit, especially because I would like to have some video inputs and this card has none nor the capability.

Originally Posted by Steve Dallas

The reason I'm so high on the Drobo is because I can take ALL my old drives and pop them into the Drobo, and it'll build me a single drive. I can then swap out the smallest drive and replace it with a huge one and slowly keep increasing the size of the drobo unit.

Yeah that is a good thing but at this point I will only have 1 old drive (I'm gonna probably keep the main boot drive from my old computer to build it into a Liunx box or something).

[Hemlawk]

Just make sure you run triple monitors!

Haha! I got it and love it!

[GTAHVIT]

OK Steve... since we're on the subject... Sorry for the hijack RL

I'm looking for a good media server build. I'm thinking about running Tversity as I stated before

I'm thinking along the lines of one of these two macines...

i5
http://www.pcdirectsource.com/Item.cfm?ID=2661

i3
http://www.pcdirectsource.com/Item.cfm?ID=2653

I want to be able to do multiple HD streams music and images to DNLA clients (network bandwidth aside)

What do you think???