Little Help From My Friends....

  • Thread starter Thread starter Don
  • Start date Start date
D

Don

Yeah. That's human nature. Always calling people you don't know "friends"
when you need some help:-) Well, I plan on doing my fair-share of the
homework along the way but what I really need is just a simple "nudge" in
the right direction.

Here's the goal. Need to build a new system for business use....I own the
business so I don't have to worry about selling the boss..heeh. I build
about 1a year so I'm NOT a genius or know 1/4 of what most you know.....

Here's what I "like" so far:
P4C800E Dlx
9600-9800Pro ATI video card(whatever I can get the best bang for the buck)
P4- 2.4 to ?? Again, I'm looking best bang for the buck.
I need help with Ram?? I typically use Mushkin
I REALLY need help with hard drives....all this ATA/SATA/RAID crap is
killing me. I NEED to take an afternoon and learn about this stuff. I want
smaller HD's and I want to use again, best bang for the buck technology. So
recommend some HD arrays. Raptors? Something in the neighborhood of
20-40gigs each? I have another puter with 3 drives totalling 500gigs that I
do regular dumps of my data. Will this be compatible with an "array"?? I
do it via a router/XP home networking.

Primarily system is used for my business. I run Autocad, Solidworks and a
bevy of MS products....of course, I love to game when I can. Performance IS
important but cost/functionality is too. I don't want bleeding edge. Maybe
leading edge. I just want a nice "bang for the buck" system.

Give me your suggestions to complete this system please. I'll promise to
dig in here and look over the old posts and determine my final selections as
well.

Thanks for your time.

Don
 
"Don" said:
Damn. Guess I ain't got any friends in here anymore. LOL

Don
Click to expand...

It helps to concentrate on a particular issue you might be having.
You can price out parts, just like the rest of us. And as you are
in a business, you can write off more stuff than us hobbyists.

Ram is an area that has a few gotchas, but any ram that isn't backed
up by a datasheet, we can only offer opinions. To see what works, spend
a few hours looking through posts in Abxzone.com. Personally, I just
look on the Crucial or Kingston websites, as they have a compatibility
database and will guarantee that they will provide the right kind of
memory. If you are an overclocker or insist on the last MB/sec of
memory performance, then be prepared to spend more time and effort
finding a high performance memory that works.

Same warnings goes for large modules, like 1GB sticks. They are dangerous
to buy, as so many of them use inappropriate memory chips (like the
cheap ones you'll find on Pricewatch.com). The 512MB sticks, by
comparison, are very safe.

As far as disks go, they are a commodity item now, and no matter what
you buy, you are guaranteed to have trouble real soon. So, the issue
is, what is the best way to do backups, rather than what is the best
drive. An old IDE drive will give you the simplest install, and there
is no difference in performance compared to a SATA drive, as the
media rate of the drive is the real limit to performance. If you are
interested in performance metrics or temperatures, try
storagereview.com and the performance database, as it will show you
which drive is fastest, quietest, or coolest running.

You mention "arrays". What do you hope to achieve - reliability
(mirroring) or speed (striping) ? If you run a mirror, think about
the procedure that you go through when there is trouble (remove
bad drive, wait to rebuild replacement drive from the good drive
- but, do you trust the good drive ? Mirrors make me nervous).
I don't see much to recommend an array unless it is running on
a server somewhere (shared by multiple users, and noise is limited
to the server room).

As for saving money, I've learned the hard way, that building your
own system is not cheaper than buying a commodity box from someone
else. The clever retailers have priced things, such that you'll have
a hard time undercutting the Dells or Gateways of the world.
If you run into problems along the way, you'll end up buying extra
hardware for testing purposes. It is hard to see how to save a buck
by doing that. And, as this is a business, you are paying
yourself assemblers wages while building it. I have a local shop
that builds systems for not much more than the cost of parts, and
if there is trouble during the build, they eat the expense.

I think if you hadn't mentioned this was for a "business", you'd
have found more "friends". As a business, this is called
"free consulting" :-)

HTH,
Paul
 
I thought I was concentrating on a particular issue. Trying to find out the
best parts to mate to a motherboard.

I run my business from my home. I'm a one man entity:-) I'm not building a
server or looking for networking advice in a multi-user environment. I use
my daughters system to house 3 hd's that I use to backup my data from my
main system!! That's my network!! I also realize that custom building is
not going to be cheap. I've built about 7 systems in the last 3 years so
I've experienced that:-(

So the only "consulting" I was looking for was just simple recommendations
on what HD's, memory, video products work best with the P4C800E so I could
buy them and have minimal problems at start up. I was also looking to get
some recommendations on this Raid stuff that everyone is talking about.

No problem. Thanks for your help with the memory suggestions/sites. Like I
said I'll do my homework, and I have been.

Thanks!!

Don
 
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