Here's my new rig...what do you think?

[Rind]

Looking for advice...I've purchased much of it, but would happily replace anything in here that wouldn't be top of the line. Thanks for your advice in advance!

Case: Lian-Li 6070 ATX
Motherboard: Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe
CPU: AMD Athlon™ 64 FX-55 Processor
RAM: Corsair TwinX XMS PC3200 (2 GB)
Power: TruePower 550 Watt
Heat sink: Zalman CNPS7000A-Cu
Hard Drives: WD Raptor SATA 10000 rpm 74GB X 2 in Raid 0
Hard Drives: WD Caviar SE SATA 7200 rpm 250 GB X 2 in Raid 1
Optical Drives: Plextor 7116SA and Pioneer DVR-A08XL
Video Cards: BFG GeForce™ 6800 Ultra OC™ X 2 (SLI)
Sound Card: Creative SOUND BLASTER|AUDIGY 2 ZS
Speakers: Creative Inspire™ T7800 7.1 speaker system
Monitor: Dell UltraSharp 2405FPW 24-inch Wide Aspect Flat Panel LCD Monitor
Keyboard/Mouse: whatever

Let me know what you think...and if I could improve upon it.

Rind

[Uranium-235]

oh that puppy is gonna kick butt with anything, ANYTHING

http://www.techwarelabs.com/community/viewtopic.php?t=10952

[Jason425]

Since you're going OMFG high end with everything, I would step it up with the speakers a touch.. I have the 6.1 inspires, and they're good, but not GREAT like everything else in that comp...

creative megaworks or klipsch ultras are good

for the mouse, I recommend an mx1000.
Keyboard is really all about preference...

[Tyler]

Wow, nice system, very nice. You could maybe go with a more powerful power supply, especially considering the 4 hard drives and 2 video cards. If you're going kick-ass with everything you my aswell get a kick-ass power supply :biggrin:

[Jason425]

I have a truepower 430 and I have 2 HDs, a dvd burner and a video card (among fans, audigy 2, etc...) and i'm just fine.. I bet 550 will be quite enough.. the weakest link is in his speakers, ram (pc3200 instead of say 4000+), soundcard (audigy 4) or mousepad (he didn't choose one yet) at this point.

[Tyler]

True true, I'm just saying he could get something a little better to match everything else being awesome on his system hehe. Rind, Do post some benchmarks if and when you get the chance. :)

[Rind]

Thanks for the advice. I'll look into the speaker upgrade. I haven't been much of an audiophile...these are 7.1 so I'm sure I won't notice much of a difference between them and a $300 set...but I'll look into it nonetheless.

Once I have it completed, I'll post some benchmarks. Where do I get the software to run benchmarks?

Also: where would I get a better powersupply? I've noticed that 600W is about the largest around. Is there something better than 550?

Rind

[Tyler]

Thermaltake makes some nice power supplies. Something like this.. http://www.thermaltake.com/purepower/w049atx12v/w0049atx12v.htm would be awesome.

As for benchmarks you could check out www.futuremark.com and get 3dmark2005, and/or PCMark etc. You could also just do some benchmarks on some games like Doom3 and Farcry or something.

[Dragon]

i dont know.. i have to definitely recommend the Klispch Promedia Ultras... they sound AMAZING

[Jason425]

$$$ though... and i've heard some concerns about reliability..

[Dragon]

no kidding? i didnt see anything. but it doesnt matter, they arent digital;, my headphones are analog, which means the speakers are going to have to be digital. cuz im lazy, but partially for DTS. anyway, once i get around to paying for them, im gonna get the new Z-5500. they look nice.

[Omega]

I would actually recommend re-thinking your storage setup. Although dual 74 gig raptors is certainly a spendy way to go, I think the money could be better spent, with approximately the same performance. I think going with anything past a 36 gig raptor doesn't make much sense at all. You don't want to drop $2/gig into storage drives. It doesn't make any difference how fast you can read a data stream, when you just need to play a video at 300 KiB/s :P (yeah, I know, it was a somewhat sarcastic exaggeration).

I recommend a standalone 36 gig raptor for your system/boot/application drive. The quick access speed is the component that's really going to matter in speeding up application loads, etc. Switching that into RAID 0 does nothing to help access speed, and just increases the consecutive read throughput, really (which doesn't come into play all that often in regular usage patterns...not on the level of needing it to go higher than ~40 MiB/s, anyhow). With 2 gigs of ram, you don't need to worry about running to your pagefile very often (unless you're planning on using this rig for a bunch of virtual machines, or something bizarre), so I'm not going to recommend a second standalone raptor for dedicated scratch usage, which could be a consideration in other systems. (Side note: don't use the raptor for anything but your system and programs; that is, don't use it for storage.)

Then, for your storage, skip RAID 1. It's needlessly wasteful. With the money you've saved on dropping from two 74 gig raptors to one 36 gig raptor, you can easily afford a nice 3ware hardware RAID controller that can handle RAID 5 well. If you're not completely familiar with the RAID levels, this allows one drive in the array to fail, and not lose any data. As compared to RAID 1, you only lose the capacity of one drive in the array, so the more drives you put into the array, the less data you lose, percentagewise. (Ex: put 4, 250 gig drives onto the 3ware 9500S-8, and you'd get 750 gigs of capacity ((4-1) * 250).)

[Marix-FNW]

That will be a sick system.

[Marix-FNW]

Though i would throw in an LC system (KOOLANCE EXOS2) It would be the smartest thing to do, most of those components run hot (especialy the Raptor, which i have been having issues with in my Falcon)