building a pc

[mind synthesis]

ok i am sure most of you don't use a pc but, money is tight and i need a faster machine with more ram... i was looking into a asus motherboard with an intel chipset p35 with ddr2 but upgradedable to ddr3 ram. does anyone here run a similar setup? any recommendations? is there something better on the market. any feed back would be great.

TIA

[rwc]

I know it's lame, but I'm going to quote my post from the other thread.

I've been building computers for about 13 years. In this time I've made many stupid mistakes, or bought things I regretted buying, and did a lot of research each time I bought something that didn't fit me well, and bought new stuff later based on that research. I wasn't well equipt financially when I was six years old either so I used stuff that people were throwing out for my projects until I was 16, so I did get to use hardware from 20 years ago.

If I were building a PC for audio now, it'd be something like this. I left out the interface because you had already picked one but if not I'd definitely dump the firewire shit and get something from RME.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6819115017

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6820227195

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6817151030

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6811125468

http://www.jab-tech.com/Nexus-80mm-Real ... -3859.html

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6822148231 <-- get two

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 822148298R <-- get two

http://www.cooldrives.com/saii3gra4p64.html

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6813131225

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6814121093

http://jab-tech.com/Enzotech-Extreme-X-pr-3722.html

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6827118002

Now I'll explain why I chose the parts I did.

The q6600 is a great processor. As time goes on(even now) more programs, ESPECIALLY MULTIMEDIA RELATED ONES are becoming multithreaded. The video encoding world jumped on this, I'm sure audio isn't too far behind. Intel always had a heads up for multimedia until AMD totally creamed them, but AMD dropped the ball once the conroe/allendale based CPUs came out, and it's been downhill for them ever since.

Intel used to push their hardware until it ran hot and was just at the limit of the architecture, where AMD would make a new architecture, but now it's the other way around. AMD doesn't really have anything too impressive at the moment.

XP runs fine with a quad core CPU. I rape mine daily.

OCZ makes great memory. It's DDR800, slightly faster than the DDR667 apple uses and most manufacturers ship as default, and it's cheap for 4 gigs. Also two sticks which is better for performance than 4, and the latency is more than acceptable for 2 gig sticks at ddr800.

The best PSU company is PC Power & Cooling. They are durable, they have the best voltage regulation, and they measure with 0 ripple which few if any others do. Seasonic is their OEM for a good amount of their products, as well as the OEM for other companies that produce quality products. But above all
they are the QUIETEST!

The Chenming case is truly a great design, and here is why. Most cases have one, or zero intake fans near the HD, which is bad. And it's usually covered by so many stupid grilles and decorations it's useless unless it's 2700 RPM which is useless. This one has 2 small exhaust fans where required, and 3 in the front. One for regular intake, and two for the HD bays, and if you're not using the second HD bay, you could have extra ventilation as the HDs wouldn't be blocking it.

I use chenming cases all the time. Fuck the Antec/thermaltake BLING BLANG stuff - this is simple, works, and is easy to fit stuff into. I like ROOM!

Those fans are quiet. See here

Seagate makes, IMO, the most reliable drives. They were the first to come up with a quiet cool running drive. It's the only drive brand I've ever dealt with where I haven't had a failure, even on used drives.

We're getting 2 smaller ones for the OS, because I intend on using RAID 1.
RAID 1 is mirroring. that means whatever goes on one drive is copied to the other instantaneously. Say your OS drive dies in the middle of a session. You could either

a) give up that session and say "sorry, no more recording" - totally unacceptable.

b) Hope you saved and take out another drive with the EXACT same image on it of the one that died. this means opening the computer while the client is there.. oy. Eff that! You may be back up and running in 20 minutes, but do you really want your client to wait, or deal with it? Also, if you changed anything on your install since making the image, you're fucked!

c) Have RAID 1, see that a drive died when something blinks on your taskbar, continue the session unscathed and without issue, and after the client has left happily switch out the dead drive for a new one.

C is the most appealing.

750 gigs is, to my knowledge, the best dollar/gig out there right now. Same reasoning as above. Get two so you don't have to worry about shit like drives dying during a session. Yes, you can back up to another drive while the session is happening, but if a drive dies and you have to stop the session, it's compromised and there's no fixing that.

The RAID card uses a well known well supported chipset, and is reasonably priced.

The motherboard is great. I used to be a big overclocker and as much as people got down on ASUS, their products are amazing. They took a lot of abuse and still worked. they could always perform better than gigabyte or abit on the same hardware, and never had stability issues where the other two wouldn't be able to boot.

Also the board cooling is great. They did what I always recommend buying extra heatsinks for, they heatsink the mosfets on the board as well as the northbridge and southbridge. P35 performs better than 975 and 965, is slightly behind x38 but costs a lot less, so I recommend that board, which is the best model before you get into a bunch of unnecessary built in wifi/remote shit.

You don't need a star video card I imagine. Just chose something recent, nvidia(for some reason they are much better at supporting weird resolutions and weird monitors), passive, from a good company.

That CPU heatsink performs better than the Tuniq Tower which is known to be the best. However it also points down on the board, which is important since it cools every component on the board. The board is passively cooled with heatsinks so this compliments it well. The fan can run at a low speed, I'm sure in the ASUS BIOS you have good fan speed control.

Sony NEC was the OEM for some of the high end plextor models. I think they may still be. They're cheap, fast, error free and reliable.

I guess the only thing I didn't do was verify you could do two separate RAID1 arrays with that card. I've used a similar silicon image chipset with a syba pci-x card and it worked well, but not for the OS, and it was raid 0. I have set up raid 1 with different chipsets for other PCs though.

I'm sure I left something out. Again I'm not an expert, I don't do IT for a living nor am I qualified to do even basic computer stuff to a professional standard, this is just from my experience dicking around with hardware as a hobbyist for a long time. so if any IT people chime in on this thread feel free to shitcan what I've said above.

[@?,*???&?]

Interesting, a Chinese imposter perhaps?

[rwc]

Interesting, a Chinese imposter perhaps?

American fo sho. NYC.

[planresonate]

Thanks for reposting this. I haven't a lot of TOMB searching, and you've provided a lot of helpful points of reference.

I'm immediately prejudiced by your endorsement of RME and your choice of chipset. Raid 1 sounds like the way to go and I've also had good experience with Seagate.

Has anyone else had experience with the PSU or the case? I wonder if both are as quiet and high quality as described.

Thanks again for the great post.

Jeff

UPDATE: looks like that specific case is deactivated at Newegg. The 750 GB Seagate drive is also deactivated.

[rwc]

You'd be crazy to take my word for it. Check silentpcreview.net, or jonnyguru.com. the seasonic stuff is solid.

A quick search should reveal some other chenming cases.

[tubetapexfmr]

I'm going to have to disagree with some things here on this previous build list. Of course each build is tailored to each individual, but that case is WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY too big for 99% of people. Seriously, that thing is a monster server case, not the kind of thing you would put in a recording studio. Also, the best cost/MB ratio belongs to 500 GB drives for right now. The 750 GB size will replace this, but hasn't yet. In fact the cost of the 1TB drives is pretty good right now and about the same $/GB as the 750 GB.

Your suggestion of 2x 80GB drives in RAID 1 is also perplexing. First of all I wouldn't use 80GB. That is way too small these days AND they have the smaller 8 MB cache and higher latency. Logic Studio for example (I know its a Mac program) takes up like 40+GB of space just for its install alone. Since they are cheap, I'd go with the Seagate 250 GB, more than 3 times the space for not even $30 more than the older tech 80 GB.

RAID 1 mode on the boot drive is interesting. I've never tried that before, but I've also never had a hard drive failure with Seagate drives, ever. For this purpose though, I would find a motherboard that supported RAID on its own rather than use the expansion card. Everything else you said was spot on as far as I'm concerned.

Building a computer can be a daunting task if you haven't done it before. My advice is to read as much as you can and build what suits you. For instance just this week I built a Pentium 4 3.0ghz/800mhz bus/1 GB DDR400/60GB boot/120GB record/ Shuttle PC for under $200 with used parts. Its purpose is just for tracking a digi001 rig at live shows. I don't need a lot of power there and if something happens to it then no big deal. A full-blown, plugin-loving Hackint0sh mixing rig however needs to be much beefier (just for the sake of argument).

$254 CPU: 2.4 ghz Core 2 Quad http://tinyurl.com/2g6n75
$190 MOBO: Intel BadAxe 975X http://tinyurl.com/29cvy4
$170 PSU: Seasonic quiet 600W http://tinyurl.com/2xegsv
$150 RAM: 4 GB PC2-8000 http://tinyurl.com/yvesd4
$ 70 Boot Drive: Seagate 250GB http://tinyurl.com/2awr8c
$120 Record Drive: Seagate 500GB http://tinyurl.com/ypho4k
$ 28 DVD+/-R: Lite-On 20X http://tinyurl.com/2axxxf
$ 45 CPU Cooler: Scythe Infinity http://tinyurl.com/2fnw5e
----------------------------------------------
$1027 Total

For about a grand you could have a smoking 64-bit, Quad-Core system for XP, OSX, and Linux in one box. 24/192 anyone? Notice I left out the case. its easy to find an old case cheap or free. Recycle what you can, right? I am going to build this in an old G5 Case. Those are about $150 these days. Good luck on your own build.

[rwc]

I'm going to have to disagree with some things here on this previous build list. Of course each build is tailored to each individual, but that case is WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY too big for 99% of people. Seriously, that thing is a monster server case, not the kind of thing you would put in a recording studio. Also, the best cost/MB ratio belongs to 500 GB drives for right now. The 750 GB size will replace this, but hasn't yet. In fact the cost of the 1TB drives is pretty good right now and about the same $/GB as the 750 GB.

Your suggestion of 2x 80GB drives in RAID 1 is also perplexing. First of all I wouldn't use 80GB. That is way too small these days AND they have the smaller 8 MB cache and higher latency. Logic Studio for example (I know its a Mac program) takes up like 40+GB of space just for its install alone. Since they are cheap, I'd go with the Seagate 250 GB, more than 3 times the space for not even $30 more than the older tech 80 GB.

RAID 1 mode on the boot drive is interesting. I've never tried that before, but I've also never had a hard drive failure with Seagate drives, ever. For this purpose though, I would find a motherboard that supported RAID on its own rather than use the expansion card. Everything else you said was spot on as far as I'm concerned.

Building a computer can be a daunting task if you haven't done it before. My advice is to read as much as you can and build what suits you. For instance just this week I built a Pentium 4 3.0ghz/800mhz bus/1 GB DDR400/60GB boot/120GB record/ Shuttle PC for under $200 with used parts. Its purpose is just for tracking a digi001 rig at live shows. I don't need a lot of power there and if something happens to it then no big deal. A full-blown, plugin-loving Hackint0sh mixing rig however needs to be much beefier (just for the sake of argument).

$254 CPU: 2.4 ghz Core 2 Quad http://tinyurl.com/2g6n75
$190 MOBO: Intel BadAxe 975X http://tinyurl.com/29cvy4
$170 PSU: Seasonic quiet 600W http://tinyurl.com/2xegsv
$150 RAM: 4 GB PC2-8000 http://tinyurl.com/yvesd4
$ 70 Boot Drive: Seagate 250GB http://tinyurl.com/2awr8c
$120 Record Drive: Seagate 500GB http://tinyurl.com/ypho4k
$ 28 DVD+/-R: Lite-On 20X http://tinyurl.com/2axxxf
$ 50 CPU Cooler: RCX-Z4 http://tinyurl.com/ywxanp
----------------------------------------------
$1032 Total

For about a grand you could have a smoking 64-bit, Quad-Core system for XP, OSX, and Linux in one box. 24/192 anyone? Notice I left out the case. its easy to find an old case cheap or free. Recycle what you can, right? I am going to build this in an old G5 Case. Those are about $150 these days. Good luck on your own build.

You won't have a boot drive fail until you have an important session. It's a cheap way to avoid misery IMO.

The case is great as a regular as well. More room = better ventilation. Most places I see with a PC never have it visible anyway. They're cheap, too. I love building into stuff with room, makes my job easier.

I still contend that mobo RAID sucks.

I like the build you came up with except the cooler.. rosewill has a (well deserved)reputation for being garbage. Like the behringer of newegg.

[tubetapexfmr]

I like the build you came up with except the cooler.. rosewill has a (well deserved)reputation for being garbage. Like the behringer of newegg.

Yeah, I already changed the cooler to a Scythe. I was trying to get everything from Newegg. The cooler is the one thing you can't ignore. Good cooling will avoid breakdowns just like in a car.

Rosewill=Behringer, Scythe=Presonus?

I still contend that mobo RAID sucks.

Explain. I know mobo IDE RAIDs used to suck back in the day, but aren't the modern SATA RAIDS on the mobos way better these days? I've heard good things about the BadAxe mobo RAID in particular. It has two sets and a lot of modes.

You won't have a boot drive fail until you have an important session. It's a cheap way to avoid misery IMO.

Good point. Ideally if I am going to step up to 24/192 I'd run a RAID 0+1 set for the record drive. At least running RAID 1 alone seems to be cheap insurance. OK, so double the drives. Its still only about $1200 for the build.

[Mradyfist]

I think mobo RAID is ok for RAID 1, but the problem is that RAID 5 is better in so many ways, and for that you really want a separate controller so you don't load down your CPU with it.

Personally, I wouldn't do RAID for the system drive unless you were working somewhere where you absolutely couldn't have the rig be down for more than a day or two. I'm not sure I've ever had an HD actually die in the middle of something, it's always been when they spin up for me. One day everything's smooth, and the next your computer can't find every other dll.

[chorga1]

I had my raid controller go on my mobo a few years back - asus with Promie Raid controller - never pleased with its configurability anyway..