Buying a New PC

[Ideologue]

2500$?

Dude, this isnt 2001 anymore, a decent gaming computer is barely 1k$.

He's probably thinking only of getting one from a manufacturer (hence the Alienware comment), which will have a huge price impact. 

I strongly recommend against doing this, Fae, but I've noticed that alot of ppl on Languish are afraid to try building their own PCs and just won't listen.

I'm building one.

I'm getting Korea a new laptop, as well, but don't think I could build that, so I'm getting a manufacturer one (probably an HP as I'm rather tired of my Dells breaking).  Just as a comparison, I was looking at some HP desktops, and while on the surface they have some relatively good deals, they do their level best to rip you right the fuck off.

My favorite example--charging $200 on top of the "included in price" crap video card for a reasonably powerful/advanced 1GB GTS 250--a card I can buy off the shelf for roughly $145.  So basically you're paying, give or take, $250-300 for a $145 GPU.  I mean, Christ, okay, I could see $20, 30 maybe even $50 extra, and rationalize it as the price of installation or even a little extra profit for HP's shareholders.  But $105-155 is Goddamn highway robbery  (And there is, of course, no option to simply leave the card out, and buy your own--although insanely you'd still save a few slim bucks even if you got the lame card and then replaced it immediately with a card you bought independently. )

As another, more obviously bad if not quite as extreme, example, a 1TB HD add-on is $150.00 extra.  So you wind up paying roughly $200-250 for a Goddamn $90 piece of equipment.

[Ideologue]

PC components (aside from the CPU) are surprisingly robust.  I had a motherboard actually catch fire once from an uninsulated wire that touched something (forget what), and the board worked fine after that for many years, even though a small portion of it was blackened and a little melted.  Also, I've bent motherboards hard several times and never had one crack or snap.

Quit smoking your employees' bribe-weed over open computers, dude.

[DGuller]

I'm building one.

I'm getting Korea a new laptop, as well, but don't think I could build that, so I'm getting a manufacturer one (probably an HP as I'm rather tired of my Dells breaking).  Just as a comparison, I was looking at some HP desktops, and while on the surface they have some relatively good deals, they do their level best to rip you right the fuck off.

My favorite example--charging $200 on top of the "included in price" crap video card for a reasonably powerful/advanced 1GB GTS 250--a card I can buy off the shelf for roughly $145.  So basically you're paying, give or take, $250-300 for a $145 GPU.  I mean, Christ, okay, I could see $20, 30 maybe even $50 extra, and rationalize it as the price of installation or even a little extra profit for HP's shareholders.  But $105-155 is Goddamn highway robbery  (And there is, of course, no option to simply leave the card out, and buy your own--although insanely you'd still save a few slim bucks even if you got the lame card and then replaced it immediately with a card you bought independently. )

As another, more obviously bad if not quite as extreme, example, a 1TB HD add-on is $150.00 extra.  So you wind up paying roughly $200-250 for a Goddamn $90 piece of equipment.

You better fucking not buy an HP.  As for video cards, I agree that it's a rip off, but be careful when buying a brand name with a clunker card, with plans to upgrade on your own.  Brand name desktops these days are usually very tightly packed, with very little actual room for expansion, and very marginal power.  In a way I'm actually glad that my HP desktop was a lemon, because there was no way I would be able to jam either new power supply or GTX 285 into it in any way.

[Baron von Schtinkenbutt]

RAID 1 will copy your data on a second hard drive so that if one fails, you still have a copy on the other one.  However, you can't operate with just one hard drive, you need another replacement before restarting your system, and then you need to rebuild the RAID array.

With a good controller its possible for a RAID 1 populated with 4 or more disks to rebuild the RAID and continue operation in the event of a single-drive failure, as long as the RAID has more free space than the size of the failed drive.  RAID 1 with only two disks only makes sense if you are absolutely paranoid about data loss or too lazy to do regular tape dumps.

RAID 0 will give you extra speed by splitting the data accross 2 hdds and having them work concurrently.  So when you write&read data to your hdd, instead of loading one big file, it's as if you were loading 2 small files.  That's for theory.  In practice, you'd never get 2x the speed.  Maybe gain at most 5% more speed, in the best possible conditions (moving large chunks of data, like one of those gigantic blu-ray ripped porn movies ).

As grumbler pointed out, this is highly dependent on what is acting as the RAID controller.  Windows software RAIDs are damn near worthless, as are many RAID controllers on consumer-grade motherboards.  The Linux kernel's Logical Volume Manager, however, is a very effective software RAID.  With the proper filesystem and drives that properly support RAIDs I've seen LVM get 70% or more of the theoretical maximum transfer rate out of each drive channel.

That's another thing, the drives.  Many consumer-grade drives don't really support RAID configurations.  You have to make sure the drives actually support being placed in a RAID in order to get the performance benefits.

The inconvenient is that if one drive fails, you lose everything.  You will have to reformat your new hard drive and the old one before you can rebuild a RAID array.

RAID 0+1 gives you the best of both world for 4x the price of one HDD as you now need 4 identical HDDs (ideally) to operate your system, but still, if one fail, you'll have to format everything.

Again, this is controller-dependent.  A good controller will rebuild the RAID pack automatically when the new drive is inserted, and may try to do so with the remaining available space.  As long as a RAID is mirrored, it can be rebuilt.

Everyone makes the same mistake of thinking RAID 1 is backup, but RAID is not backup.  It does not replace backup.  It can be used as a complement to backup.

Backup against drive failure is the whole point of RAID mirroring.

For the forum server, RAID can be useful, but for a gaming/any personal computer I don't recommend it, based on personal experience and past misconceptions...

I still agree with this statement, but because the striping and mirroring properties of RAID are useless for gaming and most home applications, even at full performance.  The 300MB/s theoretical transfer rate of SATA II is good enough for any current home applications.  The only home application I can see for RAID is the Just a Bunch Of Disks (JBOD) configuration, since this allows multiple hard drives to be configured as one.  I have LVM on the server configured this way, even though there is only one drive right now, so I can add drives without rebuilding the filesystems.

[Ideologue]

You better fucking not buy an HP.  As for video cards, I agree that it's a rip off, but be careful when buying a brand name with a clunker card, with plans to upgrade on your own.  Brand name desktops these days are usually very tightly packed, with very little actual room for expansion, and very marginal power.  In a way I'm actually glad that my HP desktop was a lemon, because there was no way I would be able to jam either new power supply or GTX 285 into it in any way.

I've actually found a Toshiba I like better, with a nice mid-range Intel Core 2 Duo P8700, 4MB of RAM, a 1GB Radeon 4650 video card, and apparently a free copy of MS Office.   It's a bit less than $1100--I think this is pretty reasonable, but don't mind being corrected.

I'm definitely not getting any HP tower.  A little research further revealed some indications that their stock PSUs are not really enough to properly, if at all, run the shit they could theoretically and exorbitantly come with.  Replacing a GPU and PSU inside a tiny, thermally problematic case is not my idea of fun.  Additionally, I want to actually build the PC, as a learning experience/fun thing to do.

So far what I've come up with for the fair dinkum thinkum is this:

Case: Azzo Solano 1000
Apparently the damn thing's gigantic and made of fans and holes for fans.  With my current the GPU running at 68C idle (and 80C should I be so presumptuous as to watch a Goddamn avi ), I've decided that henceforth I should be sensitive to the thermal properties of a case.  I want this new system to last a long time. $120.

PSU: Corsair TX650W.  I could go with a 700 or 750W device, but I suspect that's overkill. $120.

CPU: Intel i7-920 2.66GHz.  Significant improvement over the processor in my current setup, if not as ridiculously and unnecessarily so as I might prefer.  I would very much like to get a 3GHz 940 instead, but 1)know damned well I don't really need it and 2)don't want to pay for it. $279.

Motherboard: ECS Black Series X58.  I don't know very much about boards, and chose this one, aside from the obvious reason that it is a i7-compatible X58-type board, because it offered 6 memory slots, integrated networking stuff, and fails to be very expensive.  I am open to suggestion here, and am still researching the matter.  As I said, I wish this system to persist for a very long time, and I understand a quality motherboard is essential to achieving that goal.  $210.

Memory: 6GB OCZ 3 x 2GB 240-pin DDR3-1600 SDRAM.  I believe this will have no issue with my selected motherboard, but if I am blithely ignoring something--like frequency--please tell me.  $113 (I believe this might have been a sale, and subject to vary, however).

GPU: Sapphire AMD Radeon HD 4870 Vapor-X 2GB.  Almost certainly more than I will immediately need, this video card has 16 times the dedicated memory of my current one. :xd:  It's actually likely to be even more superior than that simple metric would indicate, due to the vast gulf in time and methods between their manufacture.  For example, the Geforce 8300POS currently in my possession still uses DDR2 memory.  That may or may not be on fire.  This brings me to what surely appears as the most gimmicky aspect of the new card, the Vapor-X cooling thing.  I've read a number of reviews that suggest that it really-really-works, however, and keeps the thing quite cold, extending the lifespan of the device.  Finally, it has HDMI connectivity with integrated audio whatevers, a major selling point for me.  $200.  Note: I could get the 1GB for $150, and am not completely sold on the 2GB model, which has been intimated to not add much to performance.  It is possible that my desire for the 2GB card is driven primarily by a frankly irrational urge to see the desktop strongly outcompete the laptop in every category.

HDD:  Western Digital Caviar Green 7200rpm 1TB.  Cool.  Believe it or not, I looked at SSDs, but as you might imagine very quickly retreated.  I rather wanted one for the laptop, however.  Their prices have not fallen as quickly as I'd hoped.   I'll be cannibalizing the current system for its rather new 750GB drive, as well. $85.

Optical: LG BD-RW.  Besides providing me with an extra blu-ray player--a decidedly marginal value since I have a dedicated unit to do that--a blu-ray burner will permit shitloads of space-efficient backup.  Additionally, a vague idea is forming in my mind of buying my parents an HDTV and throwing in the redundant blu-ray player for Christmas.  This will largely depend upon my sister's desire for participation, as I am in no wise spending ~$700 on my parents' presents.  $150.

Software: This is a Goddamn pickle.  If I buy from a manufacturer, I get a Windows 7 upgrade free.  But if I actually buy Vista, I don't get shit.  Options are as follows--1) never get Windows 7 and use Vista 64 till the day my computer dies; 2)wait till October 22 to build my computer, purchase Windows 7; 3)buy Vista and then buy Windows 7, which I call the "retarded option"; 4)use a free OS, some Linux bullshit, and complain for the rest of my life about how I can't get anything to work remotely correctly; 5)use a free OS, then buy Windows 7 on 10/22.

Option Four has the advantage of possibly never costing me anything, and the disadvantage of raising the spectre of preventing major applications like Photoshop CS3 or any game made ever from running period, and, even more insidiously, potentially turning me into vonmoltke.  In all likelihood, I will choose Option One, although that is by far the least fun of them all because it involves waiting.

Total as it stands with parts above is $1287, with costs likely increasing to roughly $1400, depending on my OS solution.  I think that's pretty okay.

I don't think there's anything I'm forgetting (obviously I need thermal compound and SATA shit, but besides that, I believe I've covered all my bases).

I think it's a pretty good system.  I'm open to suggestions on all points, however.

[Caliga]

HDD:  Western Digital Caviar Green 7200rpm 1TB.  Cool.  Believe it or not, I looked at SSDs, but as you might imagine very quickly retreated.  I rather wanted one for the laptop, however.  Their prices have not fallen as quickly as I'd hoped. $90.

This is exactly the model I just put in my desktop and I'm extremely impressed with it so far.

[Ideologue]

HDD:  Western Digital Caviar Green 7200rpm 1TB.  Cool.  Believe it or not, I looked at SSDs, but as you might imagine very quickly retreated.  I rather wanted one for the laptop, however.  Their prices have not fallen as quickly as I'd hoped. $90.

This is exactly the model I just put in my desktop and I'm extremely impressed with it so far.

It's very cheap--I'm always amazed by the price of HDD storage.  I sort of feel hosed on the 750GB drive I bought, as it was actually a few bucks more expensive than the 1TB.  But at the end of the day, they were both about as cheap as the metal they're made of.  If only SSDs were as cheap as what they're made of--as you might imagine, I was particularly interested in their impact-resistant technologies for Korea's new laptop.

[Baron von Schtinkenbutt]

Motherboard: ECS Black Series X58.  I don't know very much about boards, and chose this one, aside from the obvious reason that it is a i7-compatible X58-type board, because it offered 6 memory slots, integrated networking stuff, and fails to be very expensive.  I am open to suggestion here, and am still researching the matter.  As I said, I wish this system to persist for a very long time, and I understand a quality motherboard is essential to achieving that goal.  $210.

That describes any Nehalem board.  The Nehalem chips have three integrated memory controllers supporting triple-channel memory, so all the boards will have 6 or 9 slots per processor socket (Nehalem Xeon memory is a more complicated thing).  This affects the choice below, as well.

For the motherboard, go with one of the eVGA, Asus, or Gigabyte boards.  There are several at the price point of that ECS board, with the added bonus that they aren't ECS boards.

Memory: 6GB OCZ 3 x 2GB 240-pin DDR3-1600 SDRAM.  I believe this will have no issue with my selected motherboard, but if I am blithely ignoring something--like frequency--please tell me.  $113 (I believe this might have been a sale, and subject to vary, however).

That memory is too fast for the chip you picked.  Officially, the 920 doesn't support memory faster than 1066MHz.  If you go for something like the OCZ Gold 3x2GB 1600MHz, though, you really aren't paying more than you would for good 1066MHz memory anyway.

There are more memory issues with the Nehalems that require me to consult some documentation I have at work in order to address, so I'll update that later.

[DGuller]

As for the Windows question, I was able to buy Vista 64 with a free upgrade to Windows 7, just like you would with a brand name PC.  I'm not sure if Newegg still offers it.

EDIT:  Here it is. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16832116677

[Ideologue]

That describes any Nehalem board.  The Nehalem chips have three integrated memory controllers supporting triple-channel memory, so all the boards will have 6 or 9 slots per processor socket (Nehalem Xeon memory is a more complicated thing).  This affects the choice below, as well.

I could've sworn I saw ones with only three slots.  I must've been reading them wrong (3 X PCI-E slots, maybe.)   Either way, this makes a lot more sense.

Aha--I did find one with a different number.  Intel's own DX58SO has four, which is baffling.  I don't understand this.

For the motherboard, go with one of the eVGA, Asus, or Gigabyte boards.  There are several at the price point of that ECS board, with the added bonus that they aren't ECS boards.

You got it.  Is the Gigabyte UD-4 (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128374) decent?  1333 seems to be the memory standard (with support for overclocking that I won't be doing), and although it's potentially hype, the thermal and power efficiency aspects of the board appeal to me.

That memory is too fast for the chip you picked.  Officially, the 920 doesn't support memory faster than 1066MHz.  If you go for something like the OCZ Gold 3x2GB 1600MHz, though, you really aren't paying more than you would for good 1066MHz memory anyway.

After looking it up, the 920 FSB runs at 1333MHz, and this is the speed the memory should run at as well, I think.  Also, I take it OCZ isn't "good"?   I'm not married to it--does memory vary enough by manufacturer to make a difference?

There are more memory issues with the Nehalems that require me to consult some documentation I have at work in order to address, so I'll update that later.

Cool, let me know.  Thanks for your help, W.

As for the Windows question, I was able to buy Vista 64 with a free upgrade to Windows 7, just like you would with a brand name PC.  I'm not sure if Newegg still offers it.

EDIT:  Here it is. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16832116677

Very awsome, DG.  I googled the heck out of it, but all I got were links to Microsoft's "keep manufacturers from losing six months of sales" partnership programs.  Never bothered looking on Newegg.  I am: poor searcher.

I think I'll be going with Option Six now, having my cake and eating it too.

[Caliga]

After looking it up, the 920 FSB runs at 1333MHz, and this is the speed the memory should run at as well, I think.  Also, I take it OCZ isn't "good"?   I'm not married to it--does memory vary enough by manufacturer to make a difference?

People say it does matter, but I don't think it matters any more than with any other component manufacturers.  There is always a cheapo brand or two that does truly suck, but most of the other manufacturers are about the same in quality.

I think the most important component is the motherboard, and that's the only one where I am fairly selective with manufacturers--all of my motherboards ever have been ASUS except for one DFI board I bought about 6 years ago because it was an absolute steal at the time (and it did turn out to be a great board).

[Baron von Schtinkenbutt]

I could've sworn I saw ones with only three slots.  I must've been reading them wrong (3 X PCI-E slots, maybe.)   Either way, this makes a lot more sense.

Aha--I did find one with a different number.  Intel's own DX58SO has four, which is baffling.  I don't understand this.

That board was Intel's reference design at launch.  I have no idea why they only put four slots on there.  The technical documentation indicates it only supports 16GB of addressable memory; I don't know why this is, either.

You got it.  Is the Gigabyte UD-4 (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128374) decent?  1333 seems to be the memory standard (with support for overclocking that I won't be doing), and although it's potentially hype, the thermal and power efficiency aspects of the board appeal to me.

That board is fine.

After looking it up, the 920 FSB runs at 1333MHz, and this is the speed the memory should run at as well, I think.  Also, I take it OCZ isn't "good"?   I'm not married to it--does memory vary enough by manufacturer to make a difference?

OCZ memory is certainly good; I use it.  That's why I pointed out those particular sticks.

The current i7 chips (except the ridiculously overpriced "Extreme" chips) don't officially support memory speeds higher than 1066MHz or Quickpath throughputs higher than 4.8GT/s.  Several motherboard manufacturers have figured out how to unlock the 1333MHz clock, but it isn't "official".

As for the memory topology, I couldn't find the document I was looking for, but I found enough other documentation to jog my memory.  The i7 has three memory channels and supports two DIMMs on each channel.  (Note: I get specific terminology mixed up when talking about Intel's products, as they aren't very clear in some cases.  I have seen the memory channels referred to as if each had its own controller, and I have seen them referred to as a single controller.  I can't confirm which is correct.)  If the i7 Bloomfield cores work the same way as the Xeon Gainestown cores, adding DIMMs to each channel drops the memory bus speed.  In your case you weould get full speed, but if you added a second rank of memory to the board it may drop the bus speed.

[Caliga]

IIRC I have only used OCZ, Crucial, Corsair, and Patriot.  I did send a defective stick back once but I forget which of those brands it was.

[viper37]

I still agree with this statement, but because the striping and mirroring properties of RAID are useless for gaming and most home applications, even at full performance.  The 300MB/s theoretical transfer rate of SATA II is good enough for any current home applications.  The only home application I can see for RAID is the Just a Bunch Of Disks (JBOD) configuration, since this allows multiple hard drives to be configured as one.  I have LVM on the server configured this way, even though there is only one drive right now, so I can add drives without rebuilding the filesystems.

yes, as I said, I was referring to personal computers where it's near worthless.  Who's gonna invest in 4 HDDs at home, under Linux to get the best possible performance from Firefox?

[DGuller]

Definitely don't buy memory from G.SKILL, they sent me one dead stick.  OCZ memory seems fine.