High End PC

[JAC]

If you were going to build a high end PC system, what components would you use? ( Intel cpu )

[D.8080]

Depends on what you are planning to do with it, and how much money you can spend.


Upgrade path if needed to last quite sometime.



Do you need a "Crysis" machine?

[Mixeur]

E6850 or if you wait E8500
P35 based mobo
Geforce 8800GT
3 Go DDR2
2x8Go 300x compact flash plugged with IDE Adapter on a raid ATA card (RAID0) for the system
2x500 Samsung T166 SATAII

[Mixeur]

Moreover, crysis machine does not exist yet (needs geforce 9...)

[Wizzard1]

Mix- Why 3GB and a booting on CF? The write speed on those is horrendous! Also, RAID0 is INFERIOR to RAID5... No redundancy!

Here ya go:
P35 (I like the GA-P35-DS3R)
E6850 (High-end dual, NOT quad)
8800 Series GFX
4x250GB 7200.11 in RAID5
1x750GB 7200.10 for storage
2GB Patriot DDR2-800 (GOOD overclocker!)

Also, NOT Vista WinXP Pro or MCE.

[Mixeur]

3Go, because it is same than 4Go, especially if you don't use 64 bit OS.
Write speed are not so bad and read speed are very high. And moreover access time are 100 times faster than HDD (some cards have 0,1 ms access time !).
At the end your OS is definitely faster than with any 10000rpm HDD.
For RAID5, I don't know, I didn't really studied the question.

[Mixeur]

OK I just studied the RAID5 question : write performances are very poor in RAID5, because it only handles 8ko clusters : cpus must make a lot of parity calculations and it doesn't fit the way the cards access to their data blocks. Best cluster size are 64 or 128 Ko.
So I confirm : RAID0
Here is an interesting graphic in french :

"Disque Dur" means "Hard Drive"
"Carte" means "Card"
and "seule" means "alone"
Test is made with 266x cards and with Maxtor 250GB 7200rpm Hard Drive

[D.8080]

Mixeur: Un peu d'humour! (Thierry Lhermitte)


I was referring to this,
http://www.tomsgames.com/us/2007/11/02/crysispc_part2/


Mixeur, Jac hasn't replied yet.

He may be needing a machine for heavy Adobe something... or just making a surprise to some kid in his family, and doesn't want to spend more than 800$...

[Wizzard1]

Different controllers support different cluster sizes, and if you format NTFS with a matched cluster size (I use 16-64k normally, depending on the drive's use) RAID5 is fast.

My point was, though, RAID0 offers no hope of recovery if one drive goes bad

Indeed, performance is less, but redundancy is quite key!

Good numbers, BTW

http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/08/07/raid_scaling_charts/page7.html
http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/07/02/raid_scaling_charts/page11.html

[Mixeur]

Risks to loose data with SSD are very low compaired to HDD. Enough acceptable for me, in fact.

800 $ is not enough for any high end PC.