OddThinking

Maybe consider going mobile? I bought a Samsung NC10 recently and I’m loving the plucky little thing to pieces.

It’s traditional for you to sell me your ram at this point.

Oh, and are there some rushed requirements?

I’d be looking for some comparable system builds to what you want – like this LGA775 system for example – and pick out just the parts you need, if you want to self-build. A reputable system builder should be listing builds they’re willing to back.

If you’re in the market for a new backup machine. I have a chunky 1GHz Pentium III laptop with 20GB drive sitting next to me at work. Free to homes even of serial computer-related disasters. I think it’s 384MB RAM. Runs XP and Ubuntu fine. Just requires an external keyboard and mouse due to the line of keys “9ol.” being flaky…

Assuming you’re looking to by an Intel CPU, you could do worse than go with what I’m using. I’ve currently got an EVGA mobo using an NVIDIA nForce 790i Ultra SLI chipset (not that I’m all that likely to use the SLI features here, nor the overclocking that the Ultra style chipsets support). This is quite good, and (moderately) affordable – I’ve only had a minor problem with the microphone audio quality on the built-in soundcard. That’s coupled to an Intel E8400 (3Ghz, dual core), and is still damn fast.

The newer Intel X48 and X58 chipsets are also very good, but only the former is likely to be cheap at this stage, since the latter came out only recently.

These 3 chipsets (4, including the NVIDIA 780i) are likely to last you longer than the current socket type is supported, and should not become bottlenecks as we all move more towards HD video streaming across our very high speed networks… even when those network speeds rise up to gigabit or better speeds.

Just whatever you do, don’t by VIA. They’re systems have the worst reputation of any chipset manufacturer of desktop equipment. Although apparently they’re a little better in the embedded space?

Update: Today, I purchased some thermal paste, and my computer seems to be behaving now.

<whinge>
Every year, I vow not to set foot in the local mall in December. Today, I broke that vow, because the local electronics shop’s web-site claimed that they had “more than two” thermal paste kits in stock. After a miserable experience dealing with Christmas shopping crowds, and poor service, I found that they didn’t stock it at all.
</whinge>

Aristotle,

My desire for mobility is low. (I’d use it while I watch TV, but I can just work around that by watching TV on my desktop. I’d use it while travelling to port around files and backup photos, but I just bought an external drive that has a built-in card-reader, so I don’t need that either.)

My desire for RAID, lots of screen real-estate, good performance for image editing is high, and low prices are high

So, notebooks aren’t in my near-term future, despite the coolness aspect.

Chris,

Thanks for the offer, but with a working motherboard, I don’t need it any more.

Last time, my RAM was 3-4 days old. This time it is 3-4 years old. I am not sure you’d want it.

Now that the motherboard is working, the question comes up: for the price of a case, power supply and some old hard-drive hard-drive, I could keep my old machine running when I upgrade (which was originally planned for Jan-Mar ’09.) Is it worth keeping it to make my fallback machine a P4, instead of a P2?

And yes, I wrote down some requirements for a new machine on a yellow sticky note. I didn’t have many.

• CPU: should be >4 times faster than my existing one (which is a P4 3.2 GHz)
• RAM: 3-4 GB. I assume the 2 GB I have now is useless for re-use.
• Monitors: Support for 2, preferably 3, monitors; likely to go digital LCD within 3 years.
• Support for 4 x SATA, including RAID1 on 2 of them. Support for 2 x IDE (preferably 4).
• If I am getting new drives, I would like 3x500GB for the main storage. (Two mirrored, one backup). Is a small 10,000 RPM drive worthwhile as a boot/pagefile disk? How much does it reduce seek-times?
• It shocked me when it happened, but I am a convert for quality computer cases. If I need one, I am willing pay a few more dollars for a nice one.

Richard,

I looked briefly at the SLI, decided I didn’t need it, moved on (and then promptly forgot what it was. Something to do with a proprietary nVidia graphics cards protocol?) Maybe I should look again.

The X48 chipset was currently at the top of the list, but I haven’t really been able to compare prices meaningfully yet, so I don’t know if it worthwhile.

The dude in the shop today suggested the P45 chipset and a 2.5 GHz CPU chip, after asking me exactly two questions: “Do you game?” and “Do you have DDR or DDR2 memory?” I walked out unimpressed.

As for Gigabit networks, I would be ecstatic to get 10 Mbps. Networks will remain the bottleneck for sometime for me. (Although, file copying on Vista is sometimes on the same order of magnitude as networking! How can file-copy be CPU-bound? It flabbergasts me.)

I know you’re in retirement, and your PC is now working again, but what the hey…

Hard Disks

On the value of 10,000 RPM drives This is from mid-2007, but probably worth considering Tom’s Hardware – Cheap RAID Ravages WD Raptor…

I recently replaced an 320GB 8MB cache boot drive in my home “productivity” box with a 1TB/32MB cache drive and achieved about a 40% XP startup duration decrease. I’m not lusting after RAID0 or Raptor performance.

Spending AU$230 on two 500GB drives with 32MB caches and using them as a RAID0 will decrease system reliability, but should provide good image loading and system startup. Bare 7200RPM/1TB/32MB cache/SATA II drives are in the AU$165 range these days there should be no need to skimp on backups.

A 150GB WD Raptor is about AU$250. Tim alleges that WB have no Australian presence for dealing with warranty issues, so turnaround on a dead drive is 4-6 weeks compared to 2-3 days(!) for Samsung and Seagate.

If you really care about IO performance what about an entirely RAID0 box, and two identical eSATA-connected external drives for backup? One external for daily file backups and the other for creating a monthly 1TB bootable exact copy of your RAID0 array. Get another file backup drive to rotate off site…

Worst case, if you lose a drive in your RAID0, you can swap in your external monthly system backup drive as boot device.

Another alternative (with Intel chipset motherboards) is the ability to partition mirrored drives to be both a RAID0 and a RAID1 drive. Boot off a small RAID0 partition, set up the rest to be RAID1 and keep a spare copy of your RAID0 image on the RAID1 partition or on a small external drive…

Graphics cards

If you’re going to use some variant of Photoshop CS4, you might consider a modern many-core GPU – see http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/viewContent.do?externalId=kb404898

Most modern graphics cards have two DVI outputs. They generally come with DVI-VGA converters too, though this may be becoming increasingly unnecessary.

Power supplies

Get a good new one regardless. I’m not sure what would be power supply output par for a machine of this size with up to two graphics cards, but it would be more upwards of 500W. 650W?

Chris,

Thanks for the thoughtful reply.

Hard Disks

You are probably right that I should look at RAID0 over Raptor, from a price/performance perspective.

I divide my files into two categories: the files I want safe, and the files I want fast.

Safe Files

I have all of “My Documents” on a RAID1 set. I would like to improve the size of this; it is sitting at 95% full! I would like to improve the safety of this. (e.g. a third drive being swapped into the RAID set periodically, to make a behind-the-scenes, 100%-accurate backup) I don’t care much about throughput; I don’t believe it is a bottleneck. I don’t know of any applications I use that can process the files at the same rate I can read them from disk.

Fast Files

I have my my pagefile, OS and applications on a second drive. I don’t care much about its safety. If this drive was to die, I would swear profusely for the two-to-three days it took to rebuild, but I wouldn’t curl up into the foetal position and sob for a month, like I would if the other drive failed. I don’t care much about the size; 100GB is plenty.

I would like to improve the performances of this. This is the drive I would consider replacing with RAID0 or a Raptor drive. My suspicion is that it isn’t the throughput of the drive that is limiting, it is the seek time – especially of the pagefile. The Raptor has a much better seek time.

There are a lot of conjecture in the above statements, so I haven’t convinced myself. Your recent experience with the replacement drive with a larger cache, suggests to me that perhaps a bigger cache could have a bigger impact than a faster seek time.

So, I think your suggestion for RAID0 and RAID1 on the same 2 (or 3, for backup) drives (with decent cache sizes) is the way I should go, to get the best price/performance.

Graphics Cards

Moving more of the image-rendering to the GPU sounds like it would make a significant improvement to an occasional operation. That said, I want to do more of that kind of operation in the future, so I will be looking at this.

Power supplies

650 Watts! You’re kidding? This is faster growth than my direst predictions.

I’m going outside now to kiss the environment goodbye before I upgrade.

I would advise chatting to (some call him) Tim about his RAID0/RAID1 setup. I believe he runs his home (windows-based) server in this configuration. Here is a primer on the enabling technology.

Also, have you ever thought you might get by with just a large, fast-ish, modern hard drive and a good backup system?

(There are so many typos and brain-fades in my hasty comment above I won’t bother to mention that you should liberally correct it)

I have realised that my plan to divide the drives into RAID0 and RAID1 partitions wouldn’t meet my goals.

If I want to carry out my plan of having two RAID1 drives in the machine, and one spare acting as a 100% backup, away from my machine, then I can’t be having any RAID 0 partitions on the drive.

New plan:

* 2 x new RAID1 (and a spare) for the important files.
* 2 x existing drives, reconfigured as RAID 0 for the fast files (e.g. OS).

I dunno how I will migrate though – I want to put the OS for the new machine right on top of my important files for the old machine. May require two OS rebuilds 🙁

Oh, and my main monitor died in the heat on January 1st, and my RAID set is currently broken, so I looking for an earlier than hoped upgrade.