New Build

[ohgee]

Some of the components listed are based on reviews appearing in Techgage. I would like to thank all of those reviewers without whose efforts I could not have put this together..

Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3P (rev. 1.1)
CPU: Intel E8600 3.33 GHz
CPU Cooler: Arctic Cooling- Freezer 7 Pro
GPU: Zotac GeForce GTX 285
RAM: Mushkin 2 x 2GB DDR2- 800 CL- 4, 4-4-4-12
Case: Silverstone FT01- SW
PSU: Corsair 620HX
HD: Western Digital Caviar 500 GB
Optical Drive: LiteOn DVD- RW
Zip Drive: Iomega Zip 100
Sound Card: ASUS Xonar DX
Voice, Fax: Zoom V.92 PCI Voice Fax Modem
Monitor: Samsung 2232 GW or 2253 LW

1. The CPU is a high end core 2 Duo rather than a Quad, since present apps. don't take full advantage of the quad architecture.
2. I wanted a high end single GPU, rather than doubling on a lower end one.
3. The Mushkin RAM is more expensive than a comparable Crucial Ballistix. I read that the Crucial must be overclocked in order to achieve the same timing. I will not be overclocking this system.
4. The HD is much more than I need. I might go to (2) 250's and use one of them for a full backup. I am not certain if I should hook them up in a RAID configuration.
5. On the Optical Drive, I'm wondering if this should not be a blue-ray unit.
6. The total system adds up to $1627. My present (9) year old Dell XPS D300 Pentium II, which refuses to die, cost me over $3000 at the time.

I certainly would appreciate any comments pertaining to my notes, the choice of components, and their compatibility as a system.

Thank you.

 

[Merlin]

Looks Great.......any pics yet?

The BlueRay player burner ....... LG has a great buy at 224.00 at nnewegg, I'll grab one myself soon

 

[Rob Williams]

Ahh, the thought of building a brand-new machine... it's a great feeling

Those choices look quite good overall, but I'd like to make a few small recommendations so that you can both save money and make improvements in some spots. First and foremost, I'd recommend considering a Quad-Core chip, such as the Q9400. It has the same amount of Cache as the E8600, but offers twice the cores. If it's raw speed you're after, you'd have no issue overclocking that chip to at least 3.0GHz (and you could likely hit 3.33GHz I'm sure). It's a lesser-expensive chip, but far more robust in my opinion.

Another thing would be the GTX 285. Since you look to be using a 22" monitor (I'm assuming by the model numbers), that card would prove to be a waste of money. At that monitor size, you'd be using 1680x1050, a resolution that most any mid-range card is going to eat for dinner. So, I'd recommend the GTX 260/216 instead, as it costs far less, but will offer you the exact same experience overall. At 1680x1050, you can just base your overall decision on the graphs seen in our recent review of the GTX 285 card, but I still highly recommend this change.

For the $100 you save on the GPU, you could add it to your monitor and upgrade to a 24", which to me, is one of the best upgrades any computer could ever receive. At that point, you'd be sporting a huge 1920x1200 resolution (for an example of that kind of real-estate, check out this picture)and still have the graphics power (GTX 260/216) to power it.

As for the Iomega drive... I won't even ask ;-)

Last recommendation... I'd upgrade to a 1TB hard drive. They are extremely affordable nowadays, and unless you know for certain that you'll never need one, you should definitely upgrade. Everything else in your list looks really good though.

Merlin: I agree that at $224, that drive is a good price, but that's still $100 for the privilege of being able to burn Blu-ray, which NO one is going to do when the media still costs $10+ per disc. It's still much cheaper to just burn a bunch of DVDs. I say wait until the drive and media both go down low enough, because when the time comes that a burner retails for $100, the media is going to be a lot more affordable too. There is no sense of buying a burner right now unless you have an explicit reason to.

 

[ohgee]

Rob,
Once again, your suggestion is well taken. In fact, you've not only convinced me to go to quad, after re-reading your excellent CPU review, I'm going to go with the Q9550. It's much more than I need right now but, I figure on holding on to the new build for approx. (9) years (like my present system). Since the Q9550 is only $50 more than the Q9400, over the (9) years it comes to 1.5 cents/day.more. I think I can live with that.

My initial reason for picking the GTX285 was that it's approx. in the middle of the pack of display cards in your thorough review of their performance, whereas the GTX260/216 was at or near the bottom. I'm going to stick with the GTX285 since my display needs may change in the future

As for the Iomega drive- I'll tell even if you won't ask. I happen to have (20) of the 100MB disks which I find to be extremely useful. I even still have a floppy drive. I find storing data very convenient , depending on the quantity. This way, I store data in steps of 1MB, 100 MB and 700MB. I haven't used DVD's as yet.

Merlin, as for burning with blue-ray, although it's sexy, I had not realized the disks are > $10 each. I think I'll wait a while.

Thanks again for your observations and comments.

 

[Rob Williams]

You have used your current machine for nine years, and plan to use this one for nine as well? I can't help but upgrade at least once a year. Do you upgrade as you go along, or try to stick to the original configuration as much as possible? Either way, nine years is beyond impressive.

As for the GTX 285, you're not going to hate it. I still highly recommend a larger display. I remember when I went from a 17" 1280x1024 to a 20" 1680x1050... it was amazing. Moving up to a 24" 1920x1200 was even more so, especially for gaming. Just a great size overall, especially for work flow.

There are many that still use Iomega drives, so you are not alone. I still find it a little strange to be honest though. Thumb drives are so inexpensive nowadays, and arguably much more convenient (they are far smaller and far larger in density).

With Blu-ray, I guess I was a little wrong. Prices have dropped since I last looked, but it's still not enough to make me want to buy a burner. Newegg sells 10 packs of 25GB discs for $45, so that's around $4.50 a disc. Not bad, but that's still only 250GB of space. You might as well just purchase a 1TB hard drive for $100. I admit though, one prices get to about half of where they are now, I'll heavily consider making the move. I have a lot to back up, and discs are just more convenient than anything else.

 

[Kougar]

$4.50 for a one-time use disc... I suppose that's not bad for 250GB if you want long-term data storage for data that never changes, much better a proposition than I thought it was. Thanks for the info! I agree with Rob though in that I personally always am adding, editing, and occasionally removing old data files, so I'd still prefer drives in the form of a NAS.

OhGee... an 8GB flash drive should be as cheap as a couple IOMEGA ZIP disks, so the next time ya need to buy new disks do look to thumb drives! 16GB flash drives should be around $10 this fall, they are already $15 if you catch one on sale.

And as Rob said... if you are going to keep that PC for nine long years, you WILL want Quadcore! Wow, that's just a long time... I kept my first homebuilt PC for three years, then built a new in 2006 that I upgraded into the PC I use today. I don't have the discipline to wait more than three years, so I can't begin to fathom waiting nine! I have the urge to build a new machine every year after prices drop or the next better thing comes out...

 

[ohgee]

Rob and Cougar.........My brain cells must have taken a vacation of late. I completely forgot about thumb drives. I do admit, Iomega disks are kind of going the way of the Dinosaur. Thanks guys.

This week-end I'll be looking at 22 and 24 inch monitors and decide between them. With my eyesight, the monitor has to be approx. a foot away. If the monitors get any bigger, I'm going to have to train each eyeball to look outward, at each edge of the monitor at the same time. Otherwise, I'll be swiveling my head, back and forth, like I was at a tennis match.

I'm not a gamer and I therefor don't really need to upgrade much. But I do look for quality. Also, with jv16 and CCleaner my (9) year old system has been working like a charm. However, it is slo-o-o-o-w. I suppose, after this build, my next one will be when quantum computing will be a standard. I figure that will be in about (9) years up the line.

Guys, thanks a lot for all of your help.

 

[Rob Williams]

Thumb drives are fantastic, that's for sure. To have so much storage that you can just toss in your pocket and forget about, it's great. For monitors, I'm not sure what your predicament is really, but even I have to move my head back and forth with my 24" (it's even worse with the 30"), but it's not such a big deal, really. You might want to go to a brick and mortar store and test out the 24's there, before committing to a purchase.

"I suppose, after this build, my next one will be when quantum computing will be a standard."

Haha, let's hope so. Good luck on the build

 

[Altrus]

hmmmm....building a great computer every nine years seems like a waist to me....it seems much more effective to buy a cheap computer every two years, so rather a 400 dollar computer every two year than a 1600 over nine years.

Because, theoretically, according to Moore's law by the eighth year the computer you bought would be 18x more powerful than the first 400 dollar one you bought, so if you don't do anything extremely taxing on a computer investment overtime would probably end with the "bang for your bucks" scaling better.....

 

[madmat]

$4.50 for a one-time use disc... I suppose that's not bad for 250GB if you want long-term data storage for data that never changes, much better a proposition than I thought it was. Thanks for the info! I agree with Rob though in that I personally always am adding, editing, and occasionally removing old data files, so I'd still prefer drives in the form of a NAS.

OhGee... an 8GB flash drive should be as cheap as a couple IOMEGA ZIP disks, so the next time ya need to buy new disks do look to thumb drives! 16GB flash drives should be around $10 this fall, they are already $15 if you catch one on sale.

And as Rob said... if you are going to keep that PC for nine long years, you WILL want Quadcore! Wow, that's just a long time... I kept my first homebuilt PC for three years, then built a new in 2006 that I upgraded into the PC I use today. I don't have the discipline to wait more than three years, so I can't begin to fathom waiting nine! I have the urge to build a new machine every year after prices drop or the next better thing comes out...

Just to clarify, that 250 gigs for all 10 disks. Each disk is 25 gigs so it's hard to get all happy over 25 gigs at $4.50 each when you can get 6 DVD+R's for $2 and store just as much stuff. Of course... if what you're trying to store is too big to fit on a 4.7 gig DVD you're hosed.

 

[Kougar]

Only 25GB? Thought it was at least 50GB, but if they are only 25GB then it's just a waste of money. It won't be much longer before flash drives are cheaper than DVD media in cost per GB.

 

[Rob Williams]

Heh, I checked out Newegg again to see if prices have changed at all since I posted prices above, but nope. Granted, it's been only a month, but still. As for 50GB discs, they exist but they are pretty-much quadruple the price of the 25GB ones. That's more than many Blu-ray movies!

 

[ohgee]

New Build Completed

I have just completed building my new computer and it works like a charm. In fact, I can't understand why I didn't build one sooner- I'm getting so much pleasure out of it.

Again, I want to thank all of those that helped me to consider various components, especially Rob and Gougar. Here is my final system, with a couple of pictures attached:

Gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3P, ver. 1.1
Intel Core 2 Quad Q9550, 2.83 GHz
Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro
Mushkin (2X2GB) DDR2-800, 4-4-4-12
Zotac GeForce GTX 285, 1GB
Western Digital RE3 250GB SATA 3.0, (2) HDD's
plus a leftover Samsung 80GB IDE HDD
Silverstone FT-01 case
Corsair 620HX, 620W modular.
Sony Optiarc 22X DVD+/- R
ASUS Xonar DX 7.1
Samsung Synchmaster 2343 BWX monitor

All of the components, except for the monitor were from NewEgg. Amazingly, I went for standard shipping and yet, all of the components arrived the next day. Total cost from NewEgg: $1496, less $75 for rebates.

The monitor was from Costco. It's a 23 incher, with 2048 x 1152 running resolution, 20,000 : 1 contrast ratio, 5ms. response time, $330. The resolution is higher than the standard 1920 x 1200 for even the larger 24 inchers. I was told it was designed especially for graphics designers. It was so bright I had to cut down on its brightness by 30%. Not one missing pixel.

The case fans are so quiet, I cannot hear them. They are huge and plentiful. The CPU is generally running at 37C, with the fans running at low speed.

Both Corsair and Gigabyte supplied so many power and signal cables, I have plenty to spare.

Although I've had much trouble getting a Gigabyte tech by phone, they have been responsive in answering questions by e-mail.

I'm still learning to put the system through its paces and will be experimenting with overclocking both the CPU and GPU, just for fun- I'm not a gamer.

One question I need answered:

As noted above, I have (3) HDD's in the system; (2) 250GB and (1) 80GB. I have double-booted between (2) drives in the past. However, I don't know how to set up the configuration as explained below. Let's say:

Drive (1): 250GB strictly dedicated for WinXP Pro with various logical data partitions.
Drive (2): 250GB holding Vista and Ubuntu, separated in different active partitions, and each holding logical partitions.
Drive (3): 80GB strictly for holding backUps of Drives (1) and (2).

What I want to do is to be able to double-boot between drives (1) and (2) and, once I'm on drive (2), to be able to double-boot it between the Vista and Ubuntu OS's. Drive (3) must be able to be seen by drives (1) and (2).

Of course, any other suggestions for a configuration that will accomplish the above will certainly be appreciated.

Thanks again.