PC upgrade advice / components wanted

[Grant620]

Hi there
I'm after building another new PC.
Anybody on here that sells PC parts?
Fancy helping me spec it and supply the parts?
If so, drop me a line on grant@gb-ent.com

Cheers

[Scott]

doubt anyone here will be able to supply cheaper than the big boys.

what is the pc for, you'll get ideas on components, or links to full systems posted up for you to choose from...

[Grant620]

Basically I want something that is fast, but not mega pricey.
I do a lot of CAD work, so need a single decent graphics card with VGA out.
Plenty of RAM (4gb +)
Multi core processor.
I currently have a 400gb Samsung SATA drive which I would like to keep, ideally in some sort of RAID set up where I have constant back up. Don't understand all the Raid stuff.
Never play games, never do any crazy number crunching etc.
Just need it reliable and able to multi-task well.
Will be running Vista 32 until Windows 7 is fully released, so needs to be able to run Vista comfortably.

I used to love spending hours searching round for pc parts and speccing them up, but just don't have the time now

[Grant620]

I think I need something like this:
CPU:
http://www.microdirect.co.uk/Home/Produ ... 066MHz-FSB

Mobo:
http://www.microdirect.co.uk/Home/Produ ... 5-DDR2-ATX

GPU:
http://www.microdirect.co.uk/Home/Produ ... DDR2-PCI-E

Memory:
http://www.microdirect.co.uk/Home/Produ ... ition-Dual
2 of

HDD:
http://www.microdirect.co.uk/Home/Produ ... aviar-SATA
x3 in RAID 5
Do I need a RAID Controller?

[Grant620]

Might be better off with this mobo:?
http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Asus-P5Q ... A-RAID-ATX

Built in RAID controller it looks like

[Scott]

its not clear if the first mobo has it built in or not, most of them do, or maybe ive just been spoiled by good mobos.

raid doesnt make a backup of such, it will just mirror 1 disk onto another, preventing you from losing data in a single drive failure. This is done at a low level by the motherboard chipset, and is presented transparently to the host operating system as one 'logical' disk, even though it may comprise of many physically disks.

With the price of disks so cheap, no need to go raid 5 really (which basically uses 1 disk of a set, for redundancy, so only 1 drive can fail and still be safe), as it isnt as fast as just basic mirroring. You could go for 4 disks, and get 2 stripes, mirrored, so you have twice the speed and also each disc mirrored, fast and reliable.

tbh, that would be overkill, unless you find that your cad package is caining the hard disk all the time, but i doubt it. Widnows 7 is very nippy on my machine, and it does seem to caine the hard disk a fair bit. If your going for larger hard disks, some of the newer ones are actually slower as they are more for capacity/media storage than OS transactional type stuff. I have 2x 160gb sata drives striped and it seems to make all the difference to the speed of the machine...

All the other components are fine tbh, try and go for the largest amount of cache in the drives aswell.

if your cad package supports CUDA extensions for processing oomph (offloading work to the graphics card other than display work), then perhaps splash a little more out on the gfx, otherwise, that card will run 2 monitors fine.

[Cableguy]

Raid 5 isnt as fast as basic mirroring ?

Raid 5 is in some cases faster than raid 0, which is faster than raid 1 mirroring.

Thats the whole point of RAID 5 , to get a bit of the best of both worlds, you get the reliability from one drive being able to fail , and you get ther performance of the data being split over more than 1 drive.

RAID 5 is the way to go imo, either that or RAID 0 with a large cheap drive to backup to.

RE: the system , i think it may be better to go the AMD AM3 route rahter than investing in old technology on an intel setup.

Something like a quad core phenom of your clock choice to suit your budget then a motherboard like the gigabyte GA range.

At least then you get the latest socket type to proof for future upgrades ( the cpu you picked above is already old school with the new pentium 1366 socket (i7) AND the i5 1156 supersceding it ) and its the cheaper alternative to intel with just as much power.

[Grant620]

Can you suggest a mobo and processor in the same price ranges please?
Mobo at £80 ish and CPU at £100 ish

You think the memory and HDDs would be good?
And the GPU is up to scratch?

[Cableguy]

Mobo - £70 - http://www.ebuyer.com/product/167782

CPU - £80 - http://www.ebuyer.com/product/173368

Your memory was DDR2 , again old technology , the board above uses DDR 3

Memory - £90 for 4gb http://www.ebuyer.com/product/169240 ( 1600 mhz too not the base 1333 ) so some headroom for tweaking the bus speed if you desire.

These drives are £50 each but use a 32mb cache

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/167819

Cant really go wrong with any hard drive choice though tbh , the difference will be negligable.

Im really out of touch on GPU's so ill either do some digging or let someone else comment , but my first impression is £30 maybe isnt quite enough cash. I would be looking to spend around £75.

[speedx]

go for raid 0 and dont bother with an onboard raid, go for a seperate card.

your also saying you want 4gb+ ram a 32bit o/s aint gonna utilize it all, you'd need a 64bit o/s

HTH in some way

[Cableguy]

32 bit operating systems utilize a total of 4gb, granted the graphics card falls in to this category too , but its not worth fitting 3 gig to compensate for a graphics card.

[Grant620]

Mobo - £70 - http://www.ebuyer.com/product/167782

CPU - £80 - http://www.ebuyer.com/product/173368

Your memory was DDR2 , again old technology , the board above uses DDR 3

Memory - £90 for 4gb http://www.ebuyer.com/product/169240 ( 1600 mhz too not the base 1333 ) so some headroom for tweaking the bus speed if you desire.

These drives are £50 each but use a 32mb cache

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/167819

Cant really go wrong with any hard drive choice though tbh , the difference will be negligable.

Im really out of touch on GPU's so ill either do some digging or let someone else comment , but my first impression is £30 maybe isnt quite enough cash. I would be looking to spend around £75.

That Mobo doesn't have RAID 5 support?

32 bit operating systems utilize a total of 4gb, granted the graphics card falls in to this category too , but its not worth fitting 3 gig to compensate for a graphics card.

Not sure I see what you are saying there?
Basically don't do more than 4gb ram yeah?

[Cableguy]

Correct mate , no more than 4gb will be used effectively.

Your right on the motherboard, its the 790 that supports raid 5 not the 770 , the 790 weighs in at about £110 though so might be worth just getting an add in card. Or running raid 0 with a backup disc

Failing that , this board supports raid 5 and is on special this week

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showprodu ... ubcat=1481

[Null_Byte]

Unless this is a server I wouldn't bother with RAID5 tbh.

RAID5 can be fast on reads, but writes are very slow, you will also need multiple disks, and unless your using a half decent card it really isn't something you would want to trust, as onboard raid can be flakey as hell.

If I was you, I would strip (RAID 0) the disk, for performance or just use a single disk, and have a portable USB drive plugged in (or a standalone NAS box) you can do a nightly backup to, there are a million and one backup solutions out there, or you could just go for the real basic copy and paste. That way if your PC ever does go t1ts up you can easily unplug and move your data to somewhere else. For domestic use this would be more than sufficent.

PC wise, I would check out some of the big names like Dell, they do some cheap high end kit which will come with warrenty and support and just be a whole lot less faffing about than building your own - you could even just buy a graphics card afterwards and bung it in.

Just my 2p

[Grant620]

Thanks all...

OK, pretty much made my mind up now on everything apart from GPU.
So, 1gb card to suit please... Recommendations?

[Sheaf]

More of a question to the people in the know than a suggestion, but how do NAS drives with built in RAID compare in a situation like this? (I'm thinking like the Netgear readyNAS with built in RAID 1 IIRC).

I'm just thinking that maybe keeping the data off the PC on some kind of independant storage which is backed up would be another solution? Enabling future PC upgrades with less data transfer hassle, plus data retrieval via another laptop or whatever if the PC goes wrong.

I'm expecting the answer will be it's not viable due to the ethernet speed bottleneck, but surely the CAD files aren't that big? Everything at my work is stored on the server.

[Cableguy]

They work very well sheaf, but as you suspect performance is somewhat bottle necked by off the shelf network solutions. Larger corps will have dedicated nas and fibre optic cabling.

[Null_Byte]

More of a question to the people in the know than a suggestion, but how do NAS drives with built in RAID compare in a situation like this? (I'm thinking like the Netgear readyNAS with built in RAID 1 IIRC).

I'm just thinking that maybe keeping the data off the PC on some kind of independant storage which is backed up would be another solution? Enabling future PC upgrades with less data transfer hassle, plus data retrieval via another laptop or whatever if the PC goes wrong.

I'm expecting the answer will be it's not viable due to the ethernet speed bottleneck, but surely the CAD files aren't that big? Everything at my work is stored on the server.

If you get one with gigabit and have a gigabit switch (cheap nowadays) then really, I think you would have to be really pushing data to notice a difference.

If your streaming blue ray to multiple PC's or something then i can see how a bottle neck would be an issue, but if a CAD file takes an extra 5 seconds to save, are you REALLY going to notice?

Commercial setups include fibrechannel, and dedicated SANs - not just because you have heavy usage with large files, but more because you have lots of little files, shares, and users which really bog down storage systems. The emphasis is also on uptime, so they have failover drives, and depending on how advanced the setup is, it will dynamically move the data about depending on frequency of use and allow you to swap drives and rebuild on the fly. In a home situation if you have to power it down to change a hard drive its not the end of the world

[Grant620]

What do people think to this card:
http://www.ebuyer.com/product/175722

Thanks must go to Cableguy for all his help so far - been a diamond on MSN to me. Cheers dude.

[Beaker]

The readynas duo is a very good bit of kit and well worth the money.

[Grant620]

Strange graphics card

[420gazza]

i'm using the nvidia 9500 gt graphics card and tbh it's been ace so far, it has 1gb of dedicated memory rather than using shared, and never struggles to run my vista 64bit and any films/ games i play etc.

[Grant620]

Back to the RAID issue...
Set up in a RAID 5 array, my mobo instructions bang on about not being able to install an OS on a RAID drive without doing something or another.
WTF?
Surely I can just go to BIOS, set RAID array, then install OS off DVD as per normal?

[Scott]

what os are you using?

which mobo did you go for?

had no trouble myself installing 64bit win7 straight onto raid0 on nvidia chipset system.

Assuming you have set up the raid in the raid bios, and initialised it / set it bootable, see what happens when you boot from the DVD.

[Cableguy]

Back to the RAID issue...
Set up in a RAID 5 array, my mobo instructions bang on about not being able to install an OS on a RAID drive without doing something or another.
WTF?
Surely I can just go to BIOS, set RAID array, then install OS off DVD as per normal?

Yeah should be able to OTHER THAN in most cases windows doesnt have the drivers for the raid card/device. So you need to put them on a usb stick , then when windows is installing and it asks if you want to install RAID or third party drivers press F6 i think it is you need to use that and then tell it where the drivers are. Otherwise windows wont see the discs.

[Grant620]

what os are you using?

which mobo did you go for?

had no trouble myself installing 64bit win7 straight onto raid0 on nvidia chipset system.

Assuming you have set up the raid in the raid bios, and initialised it / set it bootable, see what happens when you boot from the DVD.

Using Windows 7 Professional 64bit.
Asus M4A79XTD EVO Mobo

There seems to be talk in the instructions of doing just what Dan says and creating a RAID Driver/startup disc - they recommend using a USB floppy drive, but a normal USB pen drive would be better IMO.

Presumably I can download the RAID drivers off of the ASUS site and whack them on a USB stick.
Lovelyjob.com

[Null_Byte]

you will need to initialise the RAID array first, hop into the RAID BIOS, not the PC BIOS to do this.

If you are installing windows it often doesn't support the raid array without drivers, of course it is not possible to install drivers without a windows installation. so the solution is to load the drivers at setup and use those to install windows.

To do this on windows xp you would have to create a diver floppy disc as a floppy drive requires no drivers itself. Under windows 7 this may have changed, I haven't had cause to play with that so I can't tell you off the top of my head.

[Scott]

assuming youve done the following?

gone into main bios, enabled RAID on the sata ports your using.
subsequently rebooted, gone into raid bios.
set up your logical drive (1x raid 5, comprising 3 connected physical disks etc)
'initialise' this (might do it automatically in simple mobo raid setups)
set as bootable.

boot from the DVD.

If you dont see the 'hard disk' to isntall to, then you will have to sort out the 'dos drivers' for the install, although as mentioned, i had no trouble with win 7 beta using nvidia mobo raid.

From what i recall of the win 7 'dos' installation part, it will probably be quite happy pulling in raid drivers from USB or CD drive etc. Most mobo instruction are probably still talking about win XP or 2000 days where you had to use a floppy drive (and indeed press f6).

Let us know which but your getting stuck at, you could be worrying for nothing!

[Grant620]

I've not tried it yet as I'm waiting for a couple of small bits to finish the build, but figured it was best to know now rather than later!

[Grant620]

OK, just installing Win 7 as we speak.
Even with win 7 I had to use a USB stick to install the 3rd party RAID drivers, but it was painless enough.
Got 3x 500gb drives in RAID 5 and it recognised 1x 999gb single hard drive and started installing.
Nice.
Fairly hassle free so far.
Thanks once again for all that offered advice.

Hopefully the XP Simulation mode will work well as I have some old software that is not compliant with Win 7!