[V3]

My main rig just died, no power what so ever when I pressed the switch, I was due to get a new rig about a month or two ago, I was hoping to go with Bulldozer (sticking with AMD) but delay and all, now my main rig is dead. I was hoping it would last the delay but it didn't, I'm a little put off, but my head is sort of clear.

Anyway I put this together rather quickly

CPU: Intel i7 980 (Is the two extra cores and 32nm worth $300 premium over 960?)
Mobo: Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD3R (This got 10 SATA port right ?)
RAM: 6*Kingston 4GB DDR3 1333 (finally 24 GB on the cheap, Is 1333 good enough if I'm not planning to OC ?)
HDD: Hitachi 2TB Desktar 7K3000 (Was considering SSD, but need space)
Video Card: GeForce GT520 (Is this good enough to run Win 7 any better alt ?)
Case: Fractal Design R3 (Any other case with similar internal design for the hdd bays, this one is nice, it got 8 hdd bays facing to the side.)
PSU: Antec True Power New 750W Blue (Overkill ? would 550W suffice ? only like $30 premium)
OS: Win 7 64 Pro (Finally moving on from XP)

I will be carrying these over from my dead rig:

Asus Xonar STX, Leadtek TV Tuner, Five 2 TB hdds, and some SATA optical drive.

Will likely fill up all the 10 SATA port on the mobo with hard drive in the future. Any advices and recs will be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

[pjbliverpool]

What will the rig be used for? I'm assuming it's not for gaming based on those specs?

Either way, I wouldn't bother with an i7 960 when an i5 2500K will be both cheaper and faster. The Hex-Core 980 might be faster than the 2500 (or 2600) in some non-gaming tasks though.

[V3]

Typical uses would be

-Reading B3D Forum, etc..
-HD Video Editing, encoding, etc
-Archiving and maintenance video and photo
-Listening to music, maintain my music archive.
-Reading PDF (This is sort of slow on my dead rig, but I believe it will still be slow)
-Photo Editing (High res RAW file around 4k x 4k)
-Digital Painting
-Vector Drawing
-Little 3D modeling and rendering, (not so much now days)
-Record and playback TV News,
-Watch Bluray.
-A little gaming, well close to none, I may play a game of Go here and there while waiting for an encode, but I just read B3D mostly.

[pjbliverpool]

Originally Posted by V3

Typical uses would be

-Reading B3D Forum, etc..
-HD Video Editing, encoding, etc
-Archiving and maintenance video and photo
-Listening to music, maintain my music archive.
-Reading PDF (This is sort of slow on my dead rig, but I believe it will still be slow)
-Photo Editing (High res RAW file around 4k x 4k)
-Digital Painting
-Vector Drawing
-Little 3D modeling and rendering, (not so much now days)
-Record and playback TV News,
-Watch Bluray.
-A little gaming, well close to none, I may play a game of Go here and there while waiting for an encode, but I just read B3D mostly.

Certainly a 2500K or 2600K will cope with any of that and better than a 960 to boot. But the 980 will probably be faster in a few of those tasks thanks to the extra cores. Certainly the video/photo editing/encoding and 3d rendering side of things. Whether the massive price premium is worth the extra ~20-30% performance boost over an already very fast processor though is down to your budget.

Isn't 24GB a bit overkill though? Speed wise that RAM will be fine as it's already as fast as Sandybridge supports without overclocking. 1600Mhz will give you some extra headroom for more aggressive timings though - not that it will make a huge difference.

[homerdog]

Hard to justify the 980 when a 2600k would be about as fast and about half the price.

[Squilliam]

Why not get a SSD instead of say having the most expensive processor?

[homerdog]

Definitely. Stick with Sandy Bridge and get an Intel 510 series SSD. That is the ticket.

[Blazkowicz]

an insane amount of memory is nice, nothing worse than being held back by a lack of it when loading it with ridiculous amounts of heavy content.

on a slow rig (VIA C7 w/ 1GB that mainly does NAS and torrent) I hit swap just from web browsing with no flash plugin on a barebones linux desktop. times are funny.

with a sandy bridge you have an ability to use 8GB sticks in the future, they are mostly unavailable yet but ddr3 will stick around for a while. you might count on that to ease the choice.

400W PSU would be enough, you may even use integrated video and/or pick something like a 350W Be Quiet for the fun.
GT520 runs CUDA stuff though (just for the sake of running bits of software while it's slowly becoming relevant), and has low TDP.

[Grall]

Like others have chimed in repeatedy already, expensive (Intel) CPUs aren't really worth the expense. AMD high-end chips are apparently quite cheap from what I understand, Intel...not so much. And the speed increase from a mid-range to bleeding edge is only going to be relatively marginal, especially in this day and age with turbo boost and such features.

Quad-core is the way to go though. I just played some Portal 2 on my Macbook, and with a dual core sandy bridge CPU the gel blobs are quite blocky indeed. On my now aging Nehalem quad core rig, where each core's quite a bit slower than sandy bridge's, they're very smooth and rounded. So for gaming, more cores is a big plus these days.

Also, heavy multitasking can also benefit from more cores. I dunno how many programs you typically run at a time, but if you actually do run more than one program that's doing more than just waiting for user input, more cores can be a big help. Plus, actual computational work gets a huge performance boost as well of course.

SSDs are really nice, if you can spare the expose. Keep the OS and your applications on one, doesn't have to be very big or expensive. Depending on what you do the performance increase can be freakin' AMAZING, and if you have one you're going to become spoiled very quickly and will start to feel itchy and impatient as soon as you have to sit in front of a ghetto hard drive-equipped PC. In other words, an SSD is both a blessing and a curse at the same time.

[homerdog]

He said he was doing video encoding, and Intel CPUs are going to buttslap anything from AMD there. Also for archiving and rendering.

[Blazkowicz]

here the data is big files on HDD.
but certainly the SSD is great for many things, not waiting on your computer for something as simple as launching the file manager, doing a virus scan, and so on. or an occasionnal, little crappy task : I downloaded the content of a full mail box with a mail client, moving mails around takes ages.

I believe we would need some fine grain settings though : putting image thumbnails on SSD for once.
ditto for windows superfetch, where are the controls for superfetching what I want and only it?, that would be great for a machine with no ssd. prefetch file manager, web browser etc., prefetch image editor a few minutes after that, etc.

for cheaping out, I wonder about using the first half or first third of a samsung F4 320GB, with disabling windows indexing and all that crap

lastly if you know you will be using the video editing software with CUDA support for fast seeking, preview etc. you should shoot out for something like the gainward GT440 1GB gddr5.
if not, Z68 video and adding a geforce 640 later is nice.

[Blazkowicz]

regarding the case, there's the Chenbro SR11169.
similar in size and price but looks more old school (with less cooling). it does not have the 90° slanted HDDs, but has a purported easy fixation system done only from the side you're facing. and it doesn't have a door.

this is my personal choice for such a rig. I'm not an old fart but feel grumpy about these things

[I.S.T.]

Guys, he's doing video editing, encoding and the occasional 3D modeling. He needs the extra cores. One of the few justifications for more than four cores(Hell, more than two, given all of a dozen games can actually use more than two).

[Zoosk]

Just one hard drive?

I would save money on the cpu as mentioned above and then get one SSD or 240MB size or so, 1 TB hard drive and then 1 TB hard drive as a backup for the first two drives.

Why would you spend all that money on a PC and not get that sort of thing? The SSD will make it far more snappy and backing up to a 2nd HDD makes it a lot less painful when things go wrong.

[Dr Evil]

I count six hard drives.

[Tahir2]

HDD: Hitachi 2TB Desktar 7K3000 (Was considering SSD, but need space)

In my experieince putting one of those drives as your main OS drive is not recommended, I have found the seek times of large capacity drives to be absolutely horrendous. I have a Samsung F4 2TB drive and used it as a main OS drive for a few months until I went with an SSD.

If you are not keen on SSD (and I have to agree it is still very pricey for any significant amount of storage) then an alternative suggestion would be to go for a quick 500GB HDD instead. I have built simple systems for customers using some quick(ish) 500GB 7200RPM drives and they felt much snappier in Windows than my own system even though I had better hardware elsewhere (more RAM, better processor etc).

[Grall]

While seeking in absolute terms might be somewhat worse these days with the crazy platter capacity of current hard drives, caching has also improved to make real-world application performance about on par or maybe even better than hard drives of the past.

Besides, all drives of a particular family have the same platter density, so buying a smaller capacity drive wouldn't help...

[digitalwanderer]

120mm blue LED fans, at least 6.

[V3]

Heap of thanks guys. I was busy putting together backup rigs and transferring stuff to them, even if I order stuff in, it will takes a week or so for it to arrive and several days for me to put it together barring DOA parts. It's a pain with backup rigs as they are slower and I need two to split the workload.

With regard to hdds, I have eight in my main rig, one for OS and programs, another one for Internet, music and swap files, two for video editing and encoding and four for Photoshop swap space.

Ideally I want 4-6 more hard drives into the rig, which was why I was sort of looking forward to SNB-E and X79 platform, with the built in 14 SATA ports. It's freaking around the corner too. Anyone here know the actual ETA for SNB-E ?

As for SSD, how good is it with multiple read and write VS multiple hard disk read and write ?

Can I just use one SSD compare to multiple hdds I am using currently ? Also how quickly will I wear out the SSD ? I mean typical SSD is 128 GB, My Photoshop temp file is around 20+ GB on just one of the hdd. I am roughing that I typically write about 100 GB about 16 times a day.

Also the rig is 24/7 so I don't reboot Windows or even quit out of Photoshop or my other programs, encoding or other image processing can run overnight, will SSD still the way to go ? I am hoping the 24 GB of RAM will help me remove SATA from the equation altogether and Windows 7 will be smart enough to have everything I need in that memory. Am I wrong ?

[almighty]

980X - Over priced and runs to hot and gets its ass handed to it by a Sandy Bridge powered CPU.

Get a 2600K and a P68 motherboard that has an NF200 chip, Water cool it upto 4.8+Ghz and it'll smash a 980X at everything.

Get 1600Mhz memory, 1333Mhz is just too slow and won't provide a lot of bandwidth.

[homerdog]

Originally Posted by V3

Heap of thanks guys. I was busy putting together backup rigs and transferring stuff to them, even if I order stuff in, it will takes a week or so for it to arrive and several days for me to put it together barring DOA parts. It's a pain with backup rigs as they are slower and I need two to split the workload.

With regard to hdds, I have eight in my main rig, one for OS and programs, another one for Internet, music and swap files, two for video editing and encoding and four for Photoshop swap space.

Ideally I want 4-6 more hard drives into the rig, which was why I was sort of looking forward to SNB-E and X79 platform, with the built in 14 SATA ports. It's freaking around the corner too. Anyone here know the actual ETA for SNB-E ?

As for SSD, how good is it with multiple read and write VS multiple hard disk read and write ?

Can I just use one SSD compare to multiple hdds I am using currently ? Also how quickly will I wear out the SSD ? I mean typical SSD is 128 GB, My Photoshop temp file is around 20+ GB on just one of the hdd. I am roughing that I typically write about 100 GB about 16 times a day.

Also the rig is 24/7 so I don't reboot Windows or even quit out of Photoshop or my other programs, encoding or other image processing can run overnight, will SSD still the way to go ? I am hoping the 24 GB of RAM will help me remove SATA from the equation altogether and Windows 7 will be smart enough to have everything I need in that memory. Am I wrong ?

SSD is the way to go it. An Intel 510 series will smash even a large array of HDDs in terms of general performance. It's also uber reliable and will last years of heavy (ab)use.

You'll still want the HDDs for mass storage and backup obviously, but use an SSD for the system drive and whatever apps you frequently use.

I can't find a legitimate timetable for Sandy Bridge E, but there are P67/Z68 mobos out there that have boatloads of SATA ports if you need them.

[Blazkowicz]

socket 2011 motherboards for consumers are weird : only four DIMM slots! so to get more DIMMs you will have to wait for some "workstation" or "server" variant, don't know what they are planning.
there will be X79 1366 motherboards by the way.

instead of that "SNB-E for suckers" you can have a look at socket C32 too, if it's available to you. it takes a pair of cheap opteron (phenom II X4 and X6 equivalents) and an assload of memory (can build a $2000+ PC with 64GB of registered ddr 1066 memory.)

but a 2600K is easier.
you can look for controllers with 8 SATA ports, or two mini-SAS ports, they are mildly cheap (cheaper than before, which is not saying much). they can be very affordable on ebay and the like.

[hoho]

Originally Posted by homerdog

It's also uber reliable and will last years of heavy (ab)use.

Any decent statistics on that? Seems kind of odd stating that they are that reliable considering the newer ssd's were launched just a few months ago

[Dr Evil]

Originally Posted by Blazkowicz

socket 2011 motherboards for consumers are weird : only four DIMM slots! so to get more DIMMs you will have to wait for some "workstation" or "server" variant, don't know what they are planning.
there will be X79 1366 motherboards by the way.

Well with the quad channel memory config it makes sense.

[almighty]

Gigbabyte 990FX UD7 + 8 Core Bulldozer