just get a dell and be happy












j/k, i wish i had the fkn money to spend on a super computer. Looking at the specs on the first post is probably almost the excact same setup I would get if I had a few thousands of dollars to spend.... man... i'm jealous

 

You have four 400 gig baracudas, I would suggest using a flat load controller like the Promise. This will increase your disk access speed significantly, up to four times faster! If money is an issue, lose one of the CPU's, it is unlikely you will have an application that can maximize two cpu's.

Note: I don't know why you have so much disk space, is it for a RAID system? If so I would strongly suggest a controller like the Promise - not the only one just cheap and easy to set up - that can flat load with two drives and mirror to the other two OR use all four for a flatload - flatload means to add the drives together so you get one large drive instead of several smaller drives with different letters.

Why did you go with the ASUS radeon instead of the ATI radeon? Money because it is the second video controller?

I didn't look up your parts, but I see a very large power supply, I agree but I'd get one of the redundant server p/s - this is really a dual 400 w p/s with seperate power input - it can supply 800 watts of peak power, for example when you start up your computer, but has redundancy for normal operations - just in case!

I would also suggest a large 2500 ish VA UPS such as APC that has an auto power shutdown feature. This could really save you because backup up 1.6 terabytes isn't easy. Do not plug your printer into this UPS.

What size monitor(s)? That would generally mean more to me than CPU muscle.

To save a little money consider slightly slower cpu's and do you really have a requirement for 4 Gigs of main memory? I know you said graphics but seriously....or is this a dual bus mainboard...still haven't looked it up

Note: When running two cpu's most motherboards still only have one memory bus so the memory access speed cpu to memory is cut in half, since memory is already slower than the cpu, this can make the computer slower than running a single cpu.

Good Luck!

 

Thanks for the reply - a few answers:

The mobo has native RAID support, and I'm planning to configure all four 400G drives as a single 800G RAID10 partition. One idea proposed earlier was to use a pair of faster drives in RAID0 for storage & swap, and use the 800G RAID10 for persistent storage.

The redundant P/S is an interested idea; I'll look into it. I already have a UPC with an auto-shutdown communication protocol, which I agree is quite useful.

I've got two 23" 1900x1200 LCD displays on my current system; the Apple 30" were attractive but the video card to support them was expensive, noisy and not AFAIK particularly good for 3D games.

The memory & CPU are primarily there to support Photoshop and Premiere operations - I work with 17 Mpix RAW digital images (100 MByte TIFFs), and these chew up a LOT of CPU and memory during processing. My existing P4/3.6 w/2G RAM is slow, almost painfully so, when working with images.

 

what exactly do you do?

 

You did not mention any soundcard. Are you going to use one on the mb or get a decent card later? this also leads to question of audio system for this beast

Another option for data disks is raid5 instead of raid10 but this may require sw raid.

 

> what exactly do you do?

I work with computers

> You did not mention any soundcard. Are you going to use one on the mb

The mobo has a good chipset (Analog Devices 1981B) but doesn't expose any digital connector. I'm going to transplant my SB 5.1 card from my prior system into the new machine.

 

yes i know you work with computers, what do you do with them?

image files that large arent normaly typical use

just curious is all

 

I have had real problems with on-board RAID. esp from the Tiwan manufacturers - nothing just fails, lots of soft errors, really makes computer run slow. The integrated RAID controller they usually use is Promise. The external IDE promise controllers though, never seems to have any of these issues.

If it was me, actually I just did it a week ago , I would use an external Promise 2000 controller and RAID 1+0 (RAID 1+0 is RAID 10) - which is flatload across two disks then mirror them onto the other two disks - if your controller really does this, then you should be cooking. The mirror part will go faster if it's on a seperate controller. All four disks must be excactly the same otherwise the flatload (RAID 0), won't be optimized.

The video card to support the 30" Apple screens is useless for video games and won't even run most of them.

Due to the dedicated cache RAM that photoshop uses, faster hard disk drives should net you more power/speed. I know the newest version of Photoshop is multithreaded, but I think it was optimized for the Intel P4 hyperthread technology. I again warn you about sharing a single bus with dual processors, you will slow down your memory access. I have no idea what Premiere Operations is or how it works. Lots of my customers use Photoshop though.

They are dual core CPU's, so this might aggravate the memory access speed issue even more, because the dual cores must share the CPU I/O - memory AND address - I haven't modeled AMD CPU's since the old K7, so I don't know this as a fact, but it is a glaring issue in the past. It is also an issue with the multi core/multi processor bus built by IBM.

 

> image files that large arent normaly typical use

I have a Canon EOS 1Ds Mk2. 16.7 Megapixels, RAW file format... it adds up.

> If it was me, actually I just did it a week ago , I would use an external Promise 2000 controller and RAID 1+0

OK, you guys officially suck I've added to my existing config:
* 2x Western Digital Raptor 74GB 10,000 RPM
* 3Ware Escalade 9500S-4LP Serial ATA RAID Controller
* Creative Sound Blaster Audigy2 ZS

The two 74G 10K drives will be configured as RAID10 for c: , while the 4x400G drives will be a RAID5 storage partition.

 

Whatever you do dont let your son get too into computers. With that kind of bankroll he could really do some damage haha. Sure cars are just as expensive but at least they get girls :P

Also why not go with dual nvidia cards?

 

with that much hard drive space you must have lots of pr0n

 

I have lots of pictures, that's for certain.

 

LOL

 

> Whatever you do dont let your son get too into computers. With that kind of bankroll he could really do some damage haha. Sure cars are just as expensive but at least they get girls :P

Err, two things:
1) Cars are about 20X as expensive as computers. If he has to get into something, it'll be computers for sure. Right now I'm trying to hook him on R/C trucks -- mostly of course as an excuse to play with them myself.

2) As a dad, I'll opine that the kind of girls my son would "get" as a result of having a flashy car are not really the kind I'd want him dating. That's not to say he won't be driving some nice wheels once he graduates from college in... oh, 15 years or so

 

I agree, that is a better solution in my book too.

Good Luck!