Building a PC

[DaftFader]

ok so i am building my own pc ...

if i get a water cooling system .. will i have to buy seperate cooling plates ?

[BioTech]

I don't know enough about water cooling to advise. I've looked in to it a few times. Never came across cooling plates though. I just thought you had the reservoir and radiator and then the tubes did all the cooling.

[DaftFader]

I don't know enough about water cooling to advise. I've looked in to it a few times. Never came across cooling plates though. I just thought you had the reservoir and radiator and then the tubes did all the cooling.
yeah same .. but i found cooling platess and thought i might need them as they are for liquid cooling .. but i think most come with attachments .. the plates are upgrades ..
decided to go for the bog standard fans for now and upgrade to watercooling later as this looks like its gonna cost me about 2g as it is :hopeless:

[BioTech]

Just make sure you get a case that is ready for water cooling for when you upgrade.

[DaftFader]

Just make sure you get a case that is ready for water cooling for when you upgrade.
yeah i have got one that's good with or with out water cooling ;) ..

sec and i'll post the specs of what i got so far in my head ..

[DaftFader]

Coolermaster HAF 932 Full Tower Case - High Air Flow Design - No PSU (http://www.ebuyer.com/product/148685)

XFX GTX295 1792MB DDR3 Dual DVI HDMI PhysX and Cuda ready PCI-E Graphics Card (http://www.ebuyer.com/product/155538)

Seagate Cheetah 300GB 15K.6 Hard Drive SAS 15000rpm 16MB Cache - OEM (http://www.ebuyer.com/product/147996)

OCZ 6gb (3x2GB) DDR3 1600MHz/PC3-12800 Gold XTC Triple Channel Memory Kit for i7 Motherboard (http://www.ebuyer.com/product/158576)

LG Electronics Blu-Ray & HD-DVD-Rom Combo 16x DVDRW Black SATA - Retail Box With Software (http://www.ebuyer.com/product/139985)

Intel Core i7 940 2.93GHz Socket 1366 8MB Cache Retail Boxed Processor (http://www.ebuyer.com/product/151478)

ASUS P6T iX58 Socket 1366 8 channel audio ATX Motherboard (http://www.ebuyer.com/product/159360)


think i need an sata controller or something simila for the HD as well .. but am looking into that tomorrow .. :weee:

[Dr Bunsen]

Why no raid?

[BioTech]

Why no raid?

Judging by the price of the HDD I'm not suprised he hasn't gone for raid!


Dr B: Out of interest, if you were building a hardcore home machine (not a server) would you go for striped for the performance, or mirrored for the protection.

[Dr Bunsen]

I use mirrored raid everywhere, you get faster reads and a bit more peace of mind...

:wink:

[DaftFader]

Why no raid?
well the systems that my mate built used striped raid and he has had loads of problems with it ... so chose to get a stupidly fast single HD

you recon mirrored raid would be a better idea? .. it would work out cheeper as i could get a few smaller slower HD's and have it still running faster

[BioTech]

I didn't think mirrored gave any performance increase?

[Raj]

Striped give the highest sustained transfer rate [good for video and audio]

Mirrored is the most secure because you have 2 copies

Spanned [on multiple disks but not striped [essentially a bigger disk]]

Higher raid value exist:

5 - mirrored and striped with no parity
6 - mirrored and striped with parity [makes a drive rebuild easier]

We used to have both stripes and mirrors at seperate points. Our current secure storage choice is a NAS [network accessible storage] drive - essentially we have our own server in the attic :crazy_fre and on it we store all the stuff we needs redundant copies of.
In addition the primary pc has 4 drives in it and the OS is kept on a separate drive to all the data.

[DaftFader]

raid mashes up the HD's well fast tho and you get blue screen errors after about a year if the HD's aren't decent ..

i decided to go for striped raid on 2 HD's to start and add to it later now cos the HD i wanted means i have to get a sas controller and thats just extra cash .. sand the sata one i wanted got taken off the site i am getting it from so am going for 2 sata on striped raid

here's the final spec :weee:

You have ordered the following items;

Item: Arctic Silver 5 High-Density Polysynthetic Silver Thermal Compound Thermal paste 3.5gram

Item: Coolermaster HAF 932 Full Tower Case - High Air Flow Design - No PSU

Item: XFX GTX295 1792MB DDR3 Dual DVI HDMI PhysX and Cuda ready PCI-E Graphics Card

Item: OCZ 6gb (3x2GB) DDR3 1600MHz/PC3-12800 Gold XTC Triple Channel Memory Kit for i7 Motherboard

Item: LG Electronics Blu-Ray & HD-DVD-Rom Combo 16x DVDRW Black SATA - Retail Box With Software

Item: Intel Core i7 940 2.93GHz Socket 1366 8MB Cache Retail Boxed Processor

Item: ASUS P6T iX58 Socket 1366 8 channel audio ATX Motherboard

Item: Microsoft Windows Vista Home Basic -SP1- Licence and media - 1 PC - OEM - DVD - 64-bit - English

Item: Plexus Kettle Type IEC Power Lead 2m

Item: Hiper M1000 1000W PSU 8x SATA 6x PCI-E - 80plus certified 5 Year Warranty

Item: LG W2261V 22" TFT Monitor Full HD 1920x1080 300cd/m220000:1 (dynamic) 2ms 16:9 HDMI/DVI-D/VGA

Item: AKASA Black Velcro Cable Ties - 5 Pack

Item: Logitech Quickcam Sphere Webcam With AutoFocus - USB

Item: Logitech Clearchat Comfort Headset - USB

Item: Belkin Home Series 4-Socket SurgeMaster with Telephone Protection Cable 2m (£50,000 Warranty)

Item: Western Digital 1TB Raid Edition III SATAII 7200rpm 32MB Cache - OEM (2 on striped raid)

[BioTech]

Striped give the highest sustained transfer rate [good for video and audio]

Mirrored is the most secure because you have 2 copies

Spanned [on multiple disks but not striped [essentially a bigger disk]]

Higher raid value exist:

5 - mirrored and striped with no parity
6 - mirrored and striped with parity [makes a drive rebuild easier]


Oh right. Thanks for clearing that up for me then.

[DaftFader]

Striped give the highest sustained transfer rate [good for video and audio]

Mirrored is the most secure because you have 2 copies

Spanned [on multiple disks but not striped [essentially a bigger disk]]

Higher raid value exist:

5 - mirrored and striped with no parity
6 - mirrored and striped with parity [makes a drive rebuild easier]

We used to have both stripes and mirrors at seperate points. Our current secure storage choice is a NAS [network accessible storage] drive - essentially we have our own server in the attic :crazy_fre and on it we store all the stuff we needs redundant copies of.
In addition the primary pc has 4 drives in it and the OS is kept on a separate drive to all the data.
can you not also have mixed striped and mirrored? ..
eg. 2 HD's on striped to make it fast then one bigger one on a mirror of the striped raid to back the stuff up:wink:

[noname]

can you not also have mixed striped and mirrored? ..
eg. 2 HD's on striped to make it fast then one bigger one on a mirror of the striped raid to back the stuff up:wink:

Yeah - that's RAID 5 (you need a decent controller though, as many integrated motherboard ones only support RAID 0 (striped), and RAID 1 (mirrored) along with RAID 0+1).

RAID 5 (striped with distributed parity) needs 3 disks basically (all same size and preferably same model), which combine to form a striped array with capacity equal to 2 of the disks - it can recover from the loss of one of the disks, so is fairly safe but does lower the stripe performance wrt RAID 0...

There are a bunch of other RAID levels and setup complexities but 0, 1 and 5 are probably the most useful (unless you're running a server box in which case RAID 6 (striped with dual parity) might come in handy...)

As a point of interest - you do realise that using a striped array as your system disk is going to slow your PC down? Striped arrays have slower access and seek times than single drives (owing to the extra complexity of the data being spread across 2 drives) - resulting in slower access for anything other than large files - striping only comes into it's own when accessing and writing long data streams (like video or such) where the sustained transfer speed can come into play...

I've always preferred a single, fast disk to install the system on, and then used a stripe for data and recording purposes (with a sensible backup plan in place just in case)...

[DaftFader]

well i can't buy this from the place i was gonna buy it from as they only do credit on single items and no more than 2 at a time .. so need to re-think how i can get the cash .. i am thinking about getting a lone but that would meen paing interest witch i didn't wanna do as i could of got 9 months 0% interest and been able to pay it off in that time if the site had done finance on the whole order :cry:

[pixiegirl]

well i can't buy this from the place i was gonna buy it from as they only do credit on single items and no more than 2 at a time .. so need to re-think how i can get the cash .. i am thinking about getting a lone but that would meen paing interest witch i didn't wanna do as i could of got 9 months 0% interest and been able to pay it off in that time if the site had done finance on the whole order :cry:

Why not get a credit card with 0% on purchases for x amount of months and then pay off the balance in that time?

[noname]

well i can't buy this from the place i was gonna buy it from as they only do credit on single items and no more than 2 at a time .. so need to re-think how i can get the cash .. i am thinking about getting a lone but that would meen paing interest witch i didn't wanna do as i could of got 9 months 0% interest and been able to pay it off in that time if the site had done finance on the whole order :cry:

dabs.com - Laptops, Components, MP3 players, Software, Digital Cameras (http://www.dabs.com) do a 12 month interest free loan (as long as you pay it off in 12 months - otherwise you get charged interest)... Pretty good for prices generally too... :weee:

[DaftFader]

i just got a loan from my bank ... just waiting for the declaration to come through .. only gonna cos me an extra £360 quid over 18 mounths .. i got a bit extra as well .. might have a wee trip to america and all :love:

[pixiegirl]

i just got a loan from my bank ... just waiting for the declaration to come through .. only gonna cos me an extra £360 quid over 18 mounths .. i got a bit extra as well .. might have a wee trip to america and all :love:

:love:

[DaftFader]

finished building my pc now ... this is my first post on it .. and it's great hehe:weee::weee::weee:

[BioTech]

Well done mate. It's a good feeling when you've built a powerhouse and everything works perfic'.

It's not exactly rocket science, but still!

[Dom_sufc]

Well done mate. It's a good feeling when you've built a powerhouse and everything works perfic'.

It's not exactly rocket science, but still!

Definitely!

And that's some machine you've built there :weee:

[DaftFader]

i went for raid in the end .. i got vista running on a single disk and raid on the other two ... gonna install games ect. to the raid so they run faster


i'll take some pics later with my cam and post them raaa

[joshd96320]

thats some sexy specs my friend :)