Dream Machine ??

[crabshak]

I have been going back and forth on making my next machine. I started with Pentium D 950 6 months back and almost saw the ground shaking in front of my eyes as Conroe was launched.

This is the config I have been able to decide till now.

The Mind and the Heart
Intel E6600. - I am pretty sure this is what i want. E6700 is too pricey and I can see the advantage over E6400.
Crucial Technology 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 667 (PC2 5300) Dual Channel

The Body
I am swaying between the Intel "Bad Axe" BOXD975XBXLKR and ASUS P5W DH DELUXE/WIFI-AP.
They are both comparable. One thing I am still not sure about is if the BadAxe has support for multiple NVidia cards which brings me to the next part.

The Hands
I am totally stumped about the graphics card. I am not sure if moving up to 256MB interface from a 128MB interface would make a big difference. Wouldn't 2 cards with 256MB Memory be better than one with 512MB? ATI or NVIDIA? SLI or Crossfire?
Its all a big black hole.


Two 74G (or 35G) 10K SATA Raptors in a mirrored RAID would be the boot drive.
One (or two) 320G 7200 SATA drives would be plenty for all my stuff.

This machine is going to be a VM server. I would play around with some smaller drives dedicated for VM machines.
I might add a TV Tuner in the future to make my own DVR.

All these items would warrant a 500KW+ PSU.

Another thing I am not decided about is the CASE to hold all this stuff. It has to be toolless assembly with a good ventilation. I amm not too keen on a water cooled unit. Just some well placed fans would do the trick.

So tell me what and what not to do. If all this puts you sleep well you owe me one.

 

[jleves]

For that kind of system, you are kind of hampering yourself with 667 memory. Get 800. Not sure if you are going to overclock or not, but if you ever do, you'll be much happier with 800.

The video card question depends on what you're going to do with it. Any gaming? Video processing?

Finally VM is really cool. We've been using it at work for a few years now. We have about 80 VM machines running all kinds of enterprise applications. I have a copy on my desk. Use the base OS for work stuff and a VM for all 'non work' things. Nicely compartmentalized and deletable

 

[alpha88]

Quick thoughts:


a) I'd recommend the 150 raptors over the 74.
b) 500KW is a bit overkill, how about 500 watts instead?

 

[themisfit610]

Please don't mirror your startup drive.... especially with raptors. It's so freaking slow. STRIPE THEM

Definatly DDR2 800, and overclock the snot out of your CPU. It will love you for it.

 

[dBTelos]

You can't pick a PSU 'till you know what GPU and future plans you have.

 

[crabshak]

- Point Taken. DDR2800 is not that diff in price than 667. Dunno why i didn't think of that.

- This machine will not be used for OC at least for the first year or so. I don't have much exp with that and don't want to nuke my new machine.

- Video Processing would probably be the biggest task. Converting all my home videos to DVDs. Thats what the main OS would be doing. All the surfing and chatting would be in the VM.

- My pologies. I did mean 500W.Maybe even 650W if I have two GPUs. Man 500K could power up an entire city.

- Mirroring is still in thoughts. I know it would be slow as hell but that is just the boot drive. That is why it has to be small. Maybe even 35G. Once it is set it would not be changed untill a new application is installed. Installation would probably go at a snails pace. I am thinking of the speed it would give me while booting or loading up programs. It might not even be SATA I would probably just get a SCSI card and get two small SCSI drives.
But that is all in the future. Right now I would have only one 10K drive so it would be 74G. All the junk and crap would be in a 7200 bigger drive.

- For the GPUs I was thinking of the ATI x1600 Pro or the GeForce 76 series. Maybe 128MB interface unless eombody is able to convince me to move to 256MB interface.
I am not sure what GPUs would the motherboards support. I think BadAxe has issues with SLI so crossfire is the only way to go there. Asus would probably have a better SLI support but I couldn't find any articles to back that.
If you guys think there is something better that could be done on the GPU front please feel free to put in your comments. I would really appreciate some help in this.

Thanks to all who put in their comments.

 

[alpha88]

Mirroring is a great for reliablilty when you are dealing with dynamic data.

Your boot drive is not particularly dynamic, so you'd get a lot more benefits from just buring a DVD image of the partion once you're done installing everything. (Or storing an image of the partion on a large hard drive).

Second raptors are low latency hard drives, mirroring them wont make them run at a snails pace, it just takes away pretty much all their performance advantage.