ephex - quad - raid 0 raptors - 8800gtx = $3900

[adriaan]

This is a repetitive post but since I changed my build maybe people would be interested in this configuration for themselves. I ordered it yesterday and got a big thumbs up from MG, thanks to the people here, cnet, and of course MG's damn good phone service. I made this mostly for the poll, and of course to show off!
_________________________________

Exterior Automotive Color: Black Brushed Aluminum Finish

Power Supply: 1000W Enermax Galaxy Power Supply

Motherboard: NVIDIA nForce 680i SLI Motherboard

Processor: Q6600 Core 2 Quad (2.4GHz x 4)

CPU Cooling: Maingear Arctic 120mm CPU Water Cooling System

Memory: 2GB Corsair XMS2-8500 DDR2-1066

Do you want us to Redline™ your CPU?: YES

Hard Drive One: Western Digital Raptor Enterprise 150GB 10K RPM 16MB Cache - SATA

Hard Drive Two: Western Digital Raptor Enterprise 150GB 10K RPM 16MB Cache - SATA

Hard Drive Three: Western Digital Caviar SE16 250GB 7200RPM 16MB Cache - SATA II

RAID (Requires Identical 1st & 2nd Hard Drives): RAID 0

Flash Card Reader: All-in-One Internal USB 2.0 Flash Card Reader & Writer

Optical Drive One: 20X Dual Layer DVD±RW Drive w/ LightScribe Technology - black

Video Card: NVIDIA GeForce 8800GTX 768MB PCIe

Do you want us to Redline™ your GPU?: YES

Sound Card: Creative Labs Sound Blaster X-Fi™ XtremeGamer

Network Card: Dual Gigabit LAN

Game: FREE! Guild Wars: Factions PC Game

Operating System: Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate (32-Bit)

Warranty: 1 Year Maingear Warranty

Total: $3,897.20


adriaan

[blindem]

I voted "bad," cause that is gonna be one bad system. :D

:foshiz:

[adriaan]

hahahaha your baddddd too i shoulda actually made that poll funnier now that you bring it up...lets burn it on the grill and see how it tastes

:bbq:

:jaw:

[theDreamer]

Solid build.
Because I have my choices, but this would throw more money at your build and I love space. I would go for some terabyte drives and such, along with 64bit Vista. :wink:

Your build is very solid though, and a great price.

[blindem]

Yeah, that price is really impressive. I threw 4GB ram, a larger third drive (500 instead of 250), 2 ultras in SLI, an Elite Pro sound card in mine, and the price difference is amazing compared to this one, and for the immediate future, this one will probably fly nearly as well!

[adriaan]

For being under 4K I'm very very pleased, which is why I'm trying to let people know what build I have because its more affordable for something that will last a very long time. I am expecting about 4/5/~6 years off this machine, which equates to $500 a year or $42.00 per month minimum.

I don't think I will ever need more than 150+250 = 400GB of HDD space inside this box, I have about 80GB of music and 100GB of photos and 50GB of programs and thats just breaching half. I have a lot of videos on my servers, but I'm not worried about those being on this machine all at once. Whenever I'm working with videos I tend to do it a few at a time.

I already own a 500gb server in my apt, my web host gives me 1000gb of space, and I have a 500gb external for safe keeping. I will never ever ever be able to fill all of this space up, 2400GB is way over the spectrum of possibility for personal use. Even if I'm backing up everything all the time, I don't think I have more than 2 images of all of my stuff and thats about a terabyte for EVERYTHING; clients, personal, videos, etc.

I'm gonna get some more RAM in a bit. I can still go SLI with two GTX 8800 cuz I have the 1000W PSU but I'm not trying to build a rendering farm lol. I don't really care about my sound card so much, I have a sick sound system in my living room with these beautiful speakers and if I'm gaming I wear headphones anyway. From my experience in tournaments, I've kicked some major ass with an 8 channel on BF2 CS and AA.

You guys play games I assume. Which are your passions?

[adriaan]

blindem, your box sounds absolutely riddddiccculousss

[ginfan]

Looks like a nice system. You and I spent almost identical coin, but we made a lot of different choices. CPU and OS choices are debatable, but those that were clear upgrades are in bold. Curious what folks think in comparison. Gaming will be my primary use--for that past couple years, most of my time has been spent in Everquest2.

http://i164.photobucket.com/albums/u16/oldraj/comp.jpg

[blindem]

Gaming is my primary use, but I also record/mix vocal and instrumental music, which is made a lot easier with the higher end sound card (and it's external box) and the quad processor, imho. Yeah, I kind of went overboard on mine, but then it costs 2/3 more than what you're paying as well. I'd say yours looks like a great system, especially when you describe the setup you have already.

I'm currently primarily a Guild Wars and Company of Heroes player, but I'm really looking forward to some of the newer games coming out, like BioShock, Crysis, maybe Call of Duty 4, etc. Though I was a dedicated EQ player, I never really got into EQ2. I played WoW for a bit, but I really didn't like the, at the time I played, raid-dependent hardcore aspect of the end game, so I left it. I have never looked back and don't miss it at all. I'm intrigued by BF 2142, but I've never bought it and given it a try, especially since there are so many highly-anticipated shooters coming.

[adriaan]

ginfan- First, I love gin and tonic and whiskey straight up. Interesting choices. Is the Ultra really that much better than the GTX? Quad games have already hit the market, I would suspect some really good FPS (thats what I play) to come out using multiple threads in the near future, which would require more cores and less HDD space, although the RAM and the Ultra definitely will improve your game play without a doubt.

blindem- I don't know of the games your talking about, apart of CoD4. I got Guild Wars for free, so maybe I'll play it, but RPGs take too much of my time and I love BF2's multitude of possibilities.

[ginfan]

...Is the Ultra really that much better than the GTX? Quad games have already hit the market, I would suspect some really good FPS (thats what I play) to come out using multiple threads in the near future...

The Ultra is only slightly better, but it's price dropped the week of my purchase which pushed the decision for me. I was GTX all the way for 2 months prior :wink: Future, I will probably just replace the card, but if I want to SLI a second Ultra for a performance boost, my rationale is that combined, the Ultra will give a more significant push and that the price between the Ultra and GTX will be even more negligable in a couple years when I'm debating the choice.

My thought on quad games is this: Right now the E6850 is cheaper and often beats the Q6600 in gaming benchmarks. True, as games better utilize the quad, the Q6600 will be superior, but in 2 years I'm guessing I'm gonna want to upgrade my proc anyway and at the lower price of the E6850, it is easier to justify the upgrade in my mind, plus all my system settings are at 1333 mhz overclocked and will perhaps need less tweaks to balance out. If I was doing a lot of sound mixing like Blindem, it sounds like the Q6600 would have been a no brainer.

As you said, FPS games have a lot on the horizon for Quads, but I'm more a MMORPG guy and think the first game that might stretch my system is Age of Conan Online planned for late 2008.

I've been going back and forth kicking myself in the pants and patting myself on the back for not raiding a second Raptor. I'm just not sure how much more performance it would give, but since I was over budget, I had to cut it off.

Since we are talking future, I had no need for the business functions of Vista Ultimate, but I think 64 bit, though bothersome at first, will be necesary in the near future. I don't want to dual boot. This way I can address 4 gb of memory now, and from a future uprade point of view, I'm thinking 2 gb dimms x2 are better than 1 gb dimms x2 for future upgrade considerations.

The TV tuner is so I can record my wifes favorite shows to dvd, commercial free so she feels she did the right thing in letting me buy such an expensive toy. That and I can watch cartoons while in the middle of a tradeskill grind :)

All this said, I could be and often am completely full of crap :roll:

[adriaan]

hahahahahahaha you make some very wise points, especially with consideration to your wife. by no means should you have not gotten the receiver. that's going to be a lot of fun to play with wife or not :)

i see your point behind the 1333mhz and that was by far one of my biggest peeves with going quad, but i figured letting MG redline my quad would make the difference between the E and the Q close non existent. I posted links in the other topic i made that compare these processors. one is tom's hardware the other is some other reviewer. Overall these two processors are very close but you are correct, the E wins with games, but the tests were all made without multi threaded games except some Supreme Commander game. Also, yes MMORPGs dont multi thread as much as the fast paced action of FPS ;D lol sorry im obsessed with FPSs since I was 10 and i can't justify WoW after seeing a best friend lose everything to it.

my boss is definitely gonna be wondering why im spending so much time at maingear.com lol

[blindem]

Sounds logical (i.e. not full of crap) to me. :)

Yes, the sound mixing/recording is what pushed me to the quad -- well, that and the MG rep advice once I told him what I was doing. I don't have as good as reason for the Ultras other than desire (well unless you count the epenis factor :wink: ). Like adriaan, I think redlining the quad will help a lot with getting it close to the same performance in games, at least until they start coming out with the next-gen stuff. Ginfan, if it was out of your budget, I'd stick to patting yourself on the back for not getting the second Raptor. I did get the second, but I'm not sure how much more performance it will have either, so given that uncertainty, you were probably wise to go with the cost effective choice. I also went with 64 bit and the higher ram for the same reasons you mentioned.

I guess I kind of fall between you two guys. I like many FPS, but I'm also a pretty dedicated MMORPG player (in this case GW -- if you do decide to give it a try adriaan, let me know; I'll look you up in game and help you get started, though GW has a much easier learning curve than, say, WoW). Most of the games I'm kind of immediately excited about coming out are FPS, but there are a few interesting MMORPGs on the horizon as well, like the aforementioned Age of Conan and Warhammer Online.

[adriaan]

i can install a 64bit ultimate later and upgrade to 4gb right? i hope i didnt mess that one up lol

i talked to MG about the 2xRaptors, they said its definitely going to have a performance boost. you'll also have great recoverability. i've built a raid 0 and a raid 5 before and they do help to a degree. ive also found it tough to make a non raid into a raided computer but im not a pro thats prolly why.

[blindem]

Yeah, you can update to 64-bit later. I understand it's not even that terribly difficult and can be downloaded. Since MG said they'd install the 64-bit for me from the start, and I already have the RAM, I decided to go ahead and take the plunge. I don't think you messed up, as you can just change it up when you add the extra RAM.

[ginfan]

I had heard that going 64 bit required a complete re-install, but I don't know if there is any truth behind it.

I signed up for Warhammer Online Beta a couple weeks ago, but honestly, it seems like more of the same, but AoCo has my attention. The big thing is it isn't point, click and auto attack, you actually attack based on position with approriate consequences. Swinging at a monster's head vs. his legs may change the outcome of a fight. I'm curious to see how it turns out.