New PC. What do you think?

[Jason]

btw, here's my full system specs. total price is coming in at $1,065 USD. i was hoping to stay at or under a grand, but i splurged just a wee bit on replacement case fans and a replacement fan for the hyper 212+. went with scythe's. i like a nice and quiet system.

Intel Xeon X3440
Gigabyte GA-P55-UD4P
G.SKILL 4GB (2 x 2GB) DDR3 1600
XFX Radeon HD 5770 (Juniper XT) 1GB 128-bit GDDR5
Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 500GB HDD
Sony Optiarc 24X DVD Burner
Cooler Master RC-690 ATX Mid Tower Case
Corsair 650TX 650W PSU
Cooler Master Hyper 212+ HSF
Scythe Slipstream Case Fans (x3)
Scythe PWM Fan for HSF
Arctic Cooling MX-2 Thermal Compound
Microsoft Windows 7 Professional w/ Student Discount

[megaman89]

the only word I understood was "DVD Burner"

[Jason]

yeah, not gonna lie, i'm a pretty huge nerd.

went to school for computer science, but i had quite a few friends in electrical engineering and i love the hardware side of computers just as much as the software side.

[Xog]

f u! its a nice ass pc! if i was getting this pre built by some company it would be like 2500! hater!

..and thanks about the house

just used dell's build a PC and made a better one for $864.88 just kidding i did not do this

[Ephemeral]

ssd > raid

but yeah, raid setups are pretty slick

i'll probably end up going raid because i don't have the patience to save up for an ssd

yeah, not gonna lie, i'm a pretty huge nerd.

went to school for computer science, but i had quite a few friends in electrical engineering and i love the hardware side of computers just as much as the software side.

These statements don't sync, anyone who has extensive experience with RAID hates it. Get with the program Jason

RAID (SCSI flavor) has been plaguing IS/IT admins for years. While it is true that hard drives are generally the last mechanical components in most systems and that that hard drives are mass-produced pieces of shit, RAID configurations make little economic sense.

Common situations where RAID doesn’t help at all include when the controller writes trash to all drives (happened to me twice in last 6 years due to bad RAM). Even if RAID does it job and successfully removes a failed drive from the chain, you aren’t out of the woods yet. First, it is likely that you’ll need to replace the failed drive with the exact same drive size, nothing smaller or larger. I had a failed RAID drive a few months ago in a Dell server, that size SCSI drive was no longer available from any manufacturer, Dell’s solution was to try to sell me 3 new drives for a total of $735 (and good luck on migrating the OS to all the new drives).
Second, ever actually replace a failed drive on a mission-critical box? Talk about a ‘plug and pray’. Here you are sitting in front of a DOS-era RAID BIOS screen that you might use once or twice every few years, faced with selecting configuration settings that have the potential to wipe your entire RAID away, leaving you with un-recoverable blank drives.

RAID sucks ass. Want reasonable redundancy? For all client type PCs disable the RAID functionality and simply use a disk imaging application to image the drive to another physical drive (internal of external). For server PCs either do the same or better yet have complete redundant systems.

[PH]

in response to thread title

not much bro

[Doc Flabby]

Alot of people don't understand that, RAID is NOT a backup system.

You're much better off spending the money on SSD hard drives you're get much better performance.

RAID is designed for servers, and keeping uptime high, these servers STILL take regular backups. Our RAID-5+1 server backs up to portable hard drives every night.

When you buy a raid system, and want to get good uptime you should always buy 2 separate controller (1 to use in the system and 1 space, if that controller dies) Get controllers with battery backup unless you have a UPS as if theres a power cut your hard disks will get rinced with out this. In raid you should also try to mix drive manufacturers, as like happend to us once, drives produced in the same batch they have a tendancy to fail at the same time. Also when you setup raid, put a hotswap drive IN the server, so you don't need to remember to swap it, if a drive fails.

That said RAID has worked fine for us over the last 15 years, we've had a number of drives fail, and its allowed our business to keep opertating without downtime (which was the whole point, we still take backups) Weirdly every drive failure has rebuilt automatically when we swapped in the new working drive with no problems, if the software is setup correctly this is what should happen, you shouldn't even need to go into the menu, and if you install a hot spare, this can happen without intervention. Of cource this does add to the cost substancially, the problem with raid is its pointless doing it half-arsed, you might as well not bother at all, we have bought top of the range controllers and hard drives though (the server cost arount £2,500, before software) . Dells are pieces of total crap

[Displaced]

who needs RAID for redundancy, I use RAID exclusively to decrease read/write times... (not significantly, but still)

hard drives are pieces of shit anyway, thank god they are slowly going the way of the mammoths.

[Jason]

eph, i should have said raid was pretty slick back when i first discovered it. i wouldn't bother with it now. i just like to have a fast OS drive and a large external or two for backup.

[Guest]

lol xog i was just about to respond to you and then i noticed what you did in the quote..gg :P

made some changes to my setup..ordering in 5 days!!

-LG DVD Burner

-Antec Three Hundred Black Steel ATX Mid Tower Computer Case (only 2 fans, but I needed to make room for spending in other areas!)

-HITACHI Deskstar 7K1000.C 1TB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive

-SAMSUNG T240HD Rose-Black 24" 5ms HDMI Widescreen HDTV Monitor (was close to spending $30 less for a 22" LED backlit monitor. I stuck with this 24" because it has 1920x1200 res though..)

-SAPPHIRE 100283-2L Radeon HD 5770 1GB 128-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 2.0 x16 HDCP Ready CrossFireX Support Video Card (20 dollars less than the Vapor-X model I chose, but almost same performance)

-CORSAIR CMPSU-750TX 750W power supply

-OCZ 6GB (3 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) Desktop Memory (XMP ready, makes it easy to setup with my motherboard so it runs at 1600 instead of something slower)

-ASRock X58 Extreme LGA 1366 Intel X58 ATX Intel Motherboard (still the best LGA 1366 mobo for the money!)

-Intel Core i7-920 Bloomfield 2.66GHz LGA 1366 130W Quad-Core Processor

$1397.36 after shipping/tax..$1357.36 after mail in rebates

..Can't wait!! As far as a solid state disk..they are still too expensive for my budget. I'll have to be patient and wait until I get one. The cheapest SLC architecture solid state on newegg with 32GB was $185..=X I don't see any point in going lower than 32GB. Otherwise all I can do is have my OS on there and no design software..

[Jason]

trance, if you're gonna go with the 5770, get an xfx. xfx offers a lifetime manufacturer's warranty.