New workstation........(help).........

[Morne]

I'm geussing you're getting the 2nd Hard drive as this will be your main storage drive? This is the bottleneck in your pc in general
In that case I would suggest a "3 Hard drive Raid 5 configuration" as your "2nd Hard drive" This will give you a speed increase when reading/writing to the drive, as well as some "backup redundancy" built in.

[Saulman]

I'm geussing you're getting the 2nd Hard drive as this will be your main storage drive? This is the bottleneck in your pc in general
In that case I would suggest a "3 Hard drive Raid 5 configuration" as your "2nd Hard drive" This will give you a speed increase when reading/writing to the drive, as well as some "backup redundancy" built in.

This is from pcspecialist and they don't seem to be offering RAID5 as part of their build. They offer RAID 0 and RAID 1. :-/
How much faster are we talking? I was more concerned about storage for the 2nd HD. All my applications will run from the SSD.

Feel free to tell me if this is wrong. I'm open to ideas.

[Morne]

raid 5 (with 3 drives) will be more or less same speed as raid 0 (with 2 drives), but with raid 5 you can recover if the any of the 3 drives fails for some reason, by just replacing the failed drive. With raid 0 if any of the drives fails you loose all your work.
Raid 0 with 3 drives will be faster than Raid 5 with 3 drives, but as I said above, with raid 0 (no matter how many drives you use to get raid 0), if only 1 drive fails, you loose everything on your raid

Raid 5 gives an in between (something nice from both worlds), speed, and possibility to recover from drive failure

[Saulman]

So what's RAID 1?

[Alan Iglesias]

1GB NVIDIA GEFORCE GTX460 GDDR5 PCI EXPRESS - DirectX® 11
2nd Graphics Card
1GB NVIDIA GEFORCE GTX460 GDDR5 PCI EXPRESS - DirectX® 11

I also have a question........in laymans terms, what's the point of two graphics cards?

With two graphics cards, you can do a fair bit of RT/GPU rendering while keeping the slowdown of the interface to a minimum. In your case, I'd go with the 2gig versions of the 460 so you can fit larger scenes into it when using RT/GPU for test renderings.

-Alan

[Dariusz Makowski (Dadal)]

NO FOR GTX 460 !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

GO get 2 GB version, screw the 1 GB one lol.

also

Memory - 1st Hard Disk
80GB Intel® X25-M 2.5" SSD (34nm / upto 250MB/sR | 70MB/sW)***SPECIAL***
2nd Hard Disk
1TB WD CAVIAR BLACK WD1002FAEX, SATA 6 Gb/s, 64MB CACHE (7200rpm)

dont take WD CAVIAR BLACK, take professional WD RE3/4 + They for business more reliable, caviar is for kids :P

Also t he SSD... if u badly want it go for it... Keep in mind 40 gb for windows, and 40 gb for virtual space, aint leave u much for programs... I personally don't invest in SSD for Windows until I can get minimum 500 gb...but thats just me

[Morne]

So what's RAID 1?

RAID 1 uses 2 drives minimum and kinda useless if you want extra speed. RAID 1 creates a copy (mirror) from everything on your drive onto the other drive. So you have 2 drives with excactly the same stuff on it. If the 1 fails, you have a backup ready to go. Again, this is good for backup, but you wont get any speed increase. I still say try and go RAID5 because you get best of both worlds, with only 3 drives. There are various other RAID options but it then becomes costly (you need a bigger case, PSU all that stuff because of extra drives, you have to worry about heat etc etc). RAID5 is perfect for most situations where you need speed, backup and are limited in budget, space etc.

[davidr]

My company has been using Dell workstations for 12 years, and we've never had any problems, plus they're quiet! On the other hand, big companies get pricing you can't touch, plus the configs are pretty rigid; eg: you might want a dual-Xeon with a GTX480, but Dell (IBM, HP, etc...) will only offer it with a Quadro, which may not be good bang-for-the-buck for you, so, if you have to pay retail, I'd say build it yourself, or see if maybe Boxx or other 'boutique' builder will give you exacltly what you want, for maybe 20% more than what it would cost to build yourself (Dell is more like 100% more!). We spec fastest Xeons, Quadro5000, 12GB and 2 x 1TB cheap SATA because that suits our needs -maybe you need a faster HD or more RAM? -who knows, so don't take other people's recommendations too seriously. Good luck.

[nils_p]

We have some hp z600's with dual xeon 6230's configured with more memory and a GTX470. Works pretty nice I might say

[GLASS-CANVAS]

We just bought one of these for our office to run a Quest-based VR:
http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/2GB-G...DVI-D-Sub-HDMI

and it's awesome!
For hardly any more money than a 1GB 460 you get double the RAM, which taking into consideration VRay 2.0 and GPU rendering is an absolute bargain. Since we bought it Palit have also started making a 2GB 460 which is even cheaper (also available on Scan, who we always buy everything from)

By the way, the spec of the machine you're buying is spot on. 6-core is a great choice, ASUS make the best motherboards, and that Intel hard drive is super-duper fast (I own one myself). For an extra £35 I would go for the professional version of Win7 over the home, that way if you ever need to your computer will be able to join a domain (it might happen, you never know).

[glyph]

you sure the £150 monitor is ok ?
- seems cheap - get an IPS screen if you can - very little colour shift as you move your head (though not so good for gamers)
Dell, HP, Philips, LG used to do a few, Apple IMacs use it
most other makers go for cheap and nasty TN technology
..try: Dell 2209WA

[Saulman]

OK. Once again, thanks for all your help. I'm sure that I could go round and round the houses, researching every little component but in the end I just decided to go for it.

Here's what I ended up ordering............

Case
STYLISH BLACK ALUMINIUM TRIGON CASE + 2 FRONT/SIDE USB (Special Offer)
Overclocked CPU
OverClocked Intel® Core™i7 Six Core Processor i7-980X (3.33GHz @ max 4.00GHz)
Motherboard
ASUS® P6X58D-E: DDR3, USB 3.0, SATA 6.0GB/s, 3-Way SLI
Memory (RAM)
12GB KINGSTON HYPER-X TRI-DDR3 1600MHz, X.M.P (6 x 2GB KIT)
Graphics Card
2GB NVIDIA GEFORCE GTX460 GDDR5 PCI EXPRESS - DirectX® 11
Memory - 1st Hard Disk
80GB Intel® X25-M 2.5" SSD (34nm / upto 250MB/sR | 70MB/sW)***SPECIAL***
2nd Hard Disk
1TB SERIAL ATA 3-Gb/s HARD DRIVE WITH 16MB CACHE (7,200rpm)
1st DVD/BLU-RAY Drive
4x BLU-RAY ROM DRIVE, 16x DVD ROM (£36)
2nd DVD/BLU-RAY Drive
24x DUAL LAYER DVD WRITER ±R/±RW/RAM
Memory Card Reader
INTERNAL 52 IN 1 CARD READER (READS XD, MS, CF, SD, etc)
Power Supply & Case Cooling
600W Quiet 80 PLUS Quad Rail PSU + 120mm Case Fan (£59)
Processor Cooling
TITAN FENRIR EXTREME DIRECT TOUCH COPPER CPU COOLER (£39)
Thermal Paste
STANDARD OVERCLOCK THERMAL PASTE
Sound Card
Sound Blaster® X-Fi™ Titanium PCI Express (£66)
Network Facilities
WIRELESS 802.11N 300Mbps PCI CARD (£16)
USB Options
6 x USB 2.0 PORTS @ BACK PANEL (MIN 2 FRONT PORTS) AS STANDARD
Operating System
Genuine Windows 7 Professional 64 Bit - inc DVD & Licence (£108 )
Office Software
FREE Microsoft® Office Starter 2010 (Limited functionality Word & Excel)
Anti-Virus
NO ANTI-VIRUS SOFTWARE
Monitor
24" Wide TFT Silver/Black 1920 x1080 2MS D-Sub, DVI, 23.6" Panel (£149)
Keyboard & Mouse
Logitech® Cordless Desktop Wave™ Laser Mouse & Keyboard Combo (£48 )
Warranty
3 Year Silver Warranty (1 Year Collect & Return, 1 Year Parts, 3 Year Labour) (£5)
Delivery
STANDARD INSURED DELIVERY TO UK MAINLAND (MON-FRI)
Build Time
Standard Build - Approximately 9 to 12 working days
Quantity
1

Price: £2326 including VAT and delivery.


Your comments and crits on the spec are very welcome, though please go easy on the crits as that's my own cash I've just splashed out.

Thanks once again to everyone who contributed to this thread. I'll let you know how the machine performs.

[arobbert]

just for your info I got a fast i7 860 Vostro from Dell for £450 - all their offers seemed to converge at once so I got multiple reductions -
-ok no overclock and psu is not high power but so far very solid and fast
at that price you could get three more for a farm -
though not sure how the end result in render time would be!

Just ordered a Volstro 430 I7 870 with 8 gigs of ram, xp pro 64, 3 year warranty and 19" monitor for $1185 with tax, delivered. Will use this system for travel machine and render node.

I didn't really want the included monitor but the system was not available at a similar price with no monitor, probably paid about 90$ for it. I'll use it for a spare or auxiliary. I got a 21.5 UltraSharp IPS for $221 for the main monitor. I don't need a GPU for RT and work on relatively small scenes so the GeForce 310 should be okay. Not top of the line but way better than a similar price Laptop for working remotely.

[digitarch]

i would substitute the expensive Six Core Processor i7-980X. That diva is with 960euros three times the price right now compared to the i7-950 at 290euros. The 950 is running quite fine at 4ghz. I don´t think the two additional cores are worth that price difference. Wile working the cores are 95 percent idle, on rendertime iw ould spend the difference on additional i7-950 and use spawning.
Instead of microscopic and expensive ssd-drives I used three "old" 75gb raptor drives striping giving an average 200mb/sec. I´m also wainting on bigger ssd
drives at affordable prices.
Matthias

[arobbert]

i would substitute the expensive Six Core Processor i7-980X. That diva is with 960euros three times the price right now compared to the i7-950 at 290euros. The 950 is running quite fine at 4ghz. I don´t think the two additional cores are worth that price difference. Wile working the cores are 95 percent idle, on rendertime iw ould spend the difference on additional i7-950 and use spawning.
Instead of microscopic and expensive ssd-drives I used three "old" 75gb raptor drives striping giving an average 200mb/sec. I´m also wainting on bigger ssd
drives at affordable prices.
Matthias

The 970 does almost as well as the 880x for about 12% less. You still get the six cores.