Maximum PC Dream Machine '05

[theMan]

here, i just put this together. man, its insane.

Motherboard:
DFI LANParty nF4 SLI-DR ? $180

CPU:
AMD Athlon 64 FX-57 (San Diego) ? $1,156

Video Cards:
2x eVGA e-GeForce 7800 GTX KO ? $1200

Memory:
2048MB OCZ EL DDR PC-4000 Dual Channel Gold VX ? $380

Power Supply:
PC Power & Cooling Turbo-Cool 850 SSI ? $470

Hard Drive Controller Card:
2x Adaptec SCSI RAID Controller 2200S ? $1400

Hard Drives:
4x Seagate Cheetah 15K.4 146GB (ST3146854LW) ? $5500

DVD/CD-RW:
2x Sony VRDVC20 ? $720

CPU Cooling:
Asetek Vapochill Lightspeed? $889

Graphics Cooling:
2x Asetek Vapochill Lightspeed? $1778

Chipset Cooling:
Asetek Vapochill Lightspeed? $889

Monitor:
NEC-Mitsubishi Diamondtron UWG RDF225WG 22-inch CRT Monitor ? $4750

Sound Card:
Sound Blaster X-Fi Fatal1ty FPS ? $200?

Other:
???

TOTAL:
$19,512

 

[DVad3r]

^ way better

 

[Lithan]

I'd actually go for AMD's top end Dual core at that price-range, because I would run that rig into the ground.

Why is the monitor so pricey? Specs don't look like anything special. Am I missing something?

 

[theMan]

i just went to froogle, and typed CRT, and sorted highest to lowest, and that was the most expensive one. hehehe

 

[JEDIYoda]

raid3 garbage???

 

[TGS]

Originally posted by: JEDIYoda
raid3 garbage???

Out of most of the RAID types, yes. You know of any big storage companies that use RAID 3 in their architectures, because I sure don't...

Blurb from netapp on raid 3:

RAID 3 is like RAID 4, in that it uses a single parity disk, but stripes in RAID 3 are so small that each individual read or write operation must access all disks in the array. For instance, the first byte in a block of data might be on the first disk, the second byte on the second disk, and so on. RAID 3 systems often keep the disk heads synchronized to reduce latency. RAID 3 is a good fit for applications that require a very high data rate for a single large file, such as super-computing and graphics processing. It performs poorly with multi-user applications that generate many unrelated disk operations in parallel because each operation generates traffic on each disk in the array. By contrast, each data disk in a RAID 4 array can satisfy a separate user request at the same time.

I couldn't find anything from the other big guys. Not to say RAID 3 doesn't have it's applications, for a power user RAID 3 is rather pointless. From the cencept that a user is trying to maximize the performance of the HDD subsystems, a RAID 10 array will outperform a RAID 3 hands down in all aspects. With no parity calculations, striping, and mirroring it's possibly the most perfect array type, IMO. Though it is the most costly to implement.


Edit: It's really a call on parity versus mirroring.

Here's a link on RAID 3. Look at the remarks for random read and write performance, and compare those remarks to RAID 10. That should provide a striking contrast on the performance levels one could expect in their Dream Machine.

 

[CreativeTom]

Dumb