Thoughts on new system im building?
 

Intel Core i7 975 Extreme Processor BX80601975 - 3.33GHz, LGA 1366, 6.4GT/s QPI, 8MB L3 Cache, Quad-Core, HyperThreading, Bloomfield, Retail

EVGA X58 SLI Classified Motherboard - LGA 1366, Intel X58, SATA, SLI Ready, CrossFireX Ready, Triple Channel DDR3, RAID, Hyperthreading

Patriot Viper Tri Channel 6GB PC10666 DDR3 Memory - 1333MHz, 6144MB (3 x 2048), CL7

Western Digital Caviar Green WD10EADS Hard Drive - 1TB, 32MB, SATA-300, OEM (8 of these)

well it's stronger than mine :)

I dont know what most of that is but anything called a Patriot Viper Tri Channel has to be badass. :hitit

8 1TB drives? jebus!

Go with the Western Digital Caviar Black. They are designed for power computing applications such as multimedia, video and photo editing, and maxed out gaming computers.

will look into that, thanks for the tip

http://www.cpubenchmark.net/

I use this site for hardware info. Good luck on your system, I think it'll kick ass!

wow eight 1tb hdd's? You ripping tube content? ;)

Impressive.

Most impressive.

I'm writing this from a 800 MHz Pentium 3, 384MB RAM, 20GB HD :)

almost the same system but I have the 1800mhz RAM and went for the slower i9 because it's easy to overclock em from 2.6 to 4ghz, saves a ton of money, and you should buy the velocoraptor as your system drive, makes a huge difference!

if you don't need 12 gig's of RAM, might wanna check out the i7 870.

Sounds like a nerd's dream come true.

8TB? You do a lot of video editing? lol

All that horsepower to post in wordpress?

Sometimes "because I can" is not the best reason to buy something :1orglaugh

Which PSU are you considering ? You plan on RAIDing those 8 drives?

I dont even use wordpress on this machine ;)

mainly do video encoding on this box, which will be replaed.

I wouldnt waste the money if i didnt really need the upgrade in speed.

To further what Nemesis said, those green power drives are completely out of place
in that system. The drives are the bottleneck by far now matter what drives you get,
so you sure don't want to be buying the slowest drives around. At 5400 RPM, they
spin 1/3rd fast as the fastest drives -- from 1997. (Seagate Cheetah, 15,000RPM, 1997).

Also, with 8 drives you'll presumably being using RAID. many desktop drives,
including Green Power with have intermittent problems with many RAID controllers.
That's because when they do their self checks, or try to recover from ECC errors
they may be unresponsive for several seconds. When that happens, the RAID marks
them as bad.

I have stack of Seagate Barracudas here I just pulled out of one of the Clonebox
servers to upgrade them. The Seagate's worked well with two different RAID controllers.
They do run a bit hot though. Now I just need to figure out what I'm going to
do with this stack of drives.

I'm happy with my quad, 4gb ram, 1tb hdd and a 1gig graphic card. Suits me just well for everything I need to do :) I don't encode and edit loads of vids though.

I have a similar system to this. I went with the 920 i7 though, and it's a great value... I have the Gigabyte EX58-UD4P motherboard which I think is a bit better than the EVGA unit.

Just something to keep in mind: When I upgraded, my existing power supply wouldn't allow the system to boot. I decided on the Antec 750 watt EarthWatts PSU, and it fixed my problem. The machine is awesome... no instability issues whatsoever.

As the OP already mentioned, do NOT go with the Green drives. They don't offer consistent performance. I went with the Seagate 1.5tb Barracuda drive, and my friend with the Green drives is envious. :)

get 2 15k sas drives setup raid 0 on a 2405 for OS for speed.

you can pick up 2 74 gigs 15k sas drives for around $100 each they will blow away anything else besides ssd drives.

Is that $new?

Don't forget the SAS capable controller. :)

Pop a few extra bucks into a NVidia Quaddro setup if you will be doing heavy video encoding, possibly even look at Mpeg/rendering accelerators...

fris should also be aware that RAID0 is actually less reliable than a single HD. If a single drive out of the two (or however many) fails, the entire logical drive is rendered useless.

I currently have 2 of the nvidia geoforce 9800 gx2 1gb ssc cards in this machine

what? windows vista??

intel ssd for your system/apps drive will rock you

don't even think about putting those 8 tb's on the motherboard raid, get a real hardware pcie raid card with battery backup unit on board the card like a 3ware.

separate your system/apps from data, don't lump them all on one array. your encoding writes should be going to the dedicated array, not fighting with application and windows random ass reads/writes.

the 2405 is a sas capable controller.

link for HD http://www.thedriveshop.com/kds/prod...ords=MAX3073RC

I just built a core i7950, 12gb of ram, and then a 10k raptor drive. Its super fast, capable of large mutli-tasking tasks (exporting multiple videos at the same time, while listening to music, while batching in photoshop, etc, without missing a beat).

If you are already at your peak of what you want to spend, id think to lower the CPU to a 965 or a 950. Then for sure get better harddrives, 2 15k sas striped, at a minimum get a 10k raptor if you can't go the SAS route. Also, consider changing your motherboard if it doesn't have onboard SAS and you don't want to go the controller route. Also i would jump to 12GB of ram w/ a better MHZ on them. Make sure to check the motherboard companies QVL list though before changing to better ram. And then make sure you have an OS version that supports the 12GB of ram.

Mate go with ssd discs....

what os? if 64 bit go with more RAM, say 16 GB

Specs looking good, but what about videocard?

Is that enough RAM for Vista? ;) When he said quad core I just assumed he was going to
run a system that could actually use all four cores effectively. Something like Mac, Linux,
FreeBSD, QNX, Solaris, etc. You know, he's building a real workstation, not a cute little toy,
so I assume he'll use a real operating system, not a cute little toy one. :)

Really no reason to get the 975 extreme unless you are a crazy overclocker. Very small performance boost for the money get the 950 or 920 and still easily overclockable. Take extra cash get 2 raptors in raid 0 for your OS and keep the other 8 1 TB drives for storage. Also get the black not the green on the WD drive.

You could also take the extra money you save from the cheaper processor and get 12gb of 1866 DDR3. The Core i7 love the extra memory bandwidth.

I've bought 2 of these and 1 500GB in the last 2 months. ALL 3 have failed.

I like WD but their green drives suck.

Thats hot, not get 10 of those and you have one mean ass farm :winkwink:

I would also add I would get seagate 1.5's instead of the WD drives.

Seriously? 8 TB of HD space? Why? Unless each of your images is 25 megs a piece, which I have seen before, but that makes no sense to me....

no images, mainly raw video

Specs of my editing PC:

Proc: i7 950 core 3.0GHz
RAM: 12gigs of DDR3 1336
GPU: Dual ATI 4890's
HD: 320gig 1500RPM primary drive.

HD storage drives. 6 - 1.5 TB 7200 RPM drives set at 3gigs per second transfer rate

I have yet to see anything render and encode full 35mbps HD video as fast, period!
The proc runs cool, no need for water cooling. I will never spend money on an Extreme Edition Proc its only 3.2GHz you will not see the difference at all between the 950 and 975 core at all, even if you were to over clock both procs. What I do know is that the Extreme procs are far to fucking expensive, waste of money.

Come on 3.0GHz and 3.2GHz no noticeable difference in over all performance for that much difference in price.

sounds bad ass...i want one that has about 4 dvd drives in it

1.5TB drives have a better cost per gig ratio, but unfortunately you can't buy WD Black in that capacity.

Remember also that SSD has a sharper dropoff when it comes to quality... a unit that costs 75% of a good drive may end up being total crap. (Stuttering, awful write speeds, gradual performance degradation over time etc)

Badass machine. but I would get a Samsung SSD as primary drive(applications & OS) and rest with WD Caviar Black drives for data.

Those specs would make anyone drool.

gotta have all that space for warez!

You should run dual SSD's for your main hd, then run your 8tb array.

Why skimp on drives if you are buying that? Also if you play to run Win7, get 12gb of ram.

I use 6 1.5 TB drives for all my HD video storage mainly from SONY EX1

My primary main drive is 1500rpm sata II which my edits are on, encoding to additional 1500rpm drive.
My PC has a total of 8 drives, I am glad I installed that 1000watt PSU.