I'm building a super computer. I'm only in the planning phase at the moment and I've only got ideas so far on two 10,000 rpm serial ATA drives in RAID and a server case with a Antec True Power Blue Silent power supply. I'm going to fill the case with blue cathodes. Anyone got any other ideas before I start?
Geeks - any ideas?
by ball. 18 Replies latest jw friends
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ball.
If there's no geeks here, just drop in to say "no geeks here"
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dustyb
nono, don't go w/ RAID. go with sATA, its so much cooler and faster. if you can afford it, the Athlon 64 FX processor rox boxers, especially for future technology. graphics wise, if you do more CAD get the quadro, but if you liek games, the Radeon XT blows all out of the water. benchmark wise the nvidia series will blast the ATI cards out, but you can't beat ATI's quality in video. get an asus motherboard, DDR 400 =D dual channel, very fast. hrm.....
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dustyb
oh, and don't put any lights in it, it severely kills your performance of the computer actually. it may look cool, but when you run your benchmarks it'll kill it. instead, put fans and cooling in it, something useful...
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drwtsn32
RAID-0 doesn't usually increase performance in real world applications. All it does is increase your sustained transfer rate, but you'll find that most apps do not read huge chunks of contiguous data like that.
SATA at the moment is not really faster than PATA, but it does have a higher potential.
For the fastest hard drive subsystem nothing beats a 15k RPM SCSI drive. But you have to pay for it! I love my Cheetah 15k.3 drive and wouldn't trade it for any IDE drive in the world.
I also like ASUS motherboards but I go for Pentium 4 chips with hyperthreading instead of Athlons. I also prefer NVidia cards because their drivers are much more solid than ATI's. Both cards are so close performance-wise that you're not going to get a huge advantage with either manufacturer.
I recommend Plextor brand optical drives. They have a killer 8X DVD+-RW drive for about $200.
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pr_capone
I definately have to agree with the Asus motherboards but if you dont want to spend the extra cash for it, at the very least make sure that it has the nVidia north AND southbridge chipsets.
AMD. AMD. AMD. AMD. AMD. AMD. AMD will out preform Pentium any day of the week and they take to overclocking alot better than Pentium.... if thats your kind of thing.
I strongly reccomend either a Thermaltake cooling far (The Volcano series is by far the best I have come across) or water cooling if you want to take it that far.
Plenty of RAM will be of major importance. Make sure that it is ddr 400 with CAT 2 Latency. Crucial is great, Kingston is pretty decent.
I personally prefer ATI video cards to other brands. Honestly I think one is just as good as the other when it comes to nVidia or ATI. Make sure you have at least 128 mg of ram on the video card if you are gonna be a serious gamer.
You can get away with a cheap CD/RW. You can pick up an Lite-on 52x burner for about $30 on the net if you look around.
Lastly... if you are going to be running blue cathodes throughout your rig. Make sure you have at least a 450 - 500w power supply cuz all the aformentioned hardware we have all told you about is gonna suck a sh*tload of power.
Have good monster building!
Kansas District Overbeer
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ball.
Actually, I have a really good scsi controller, but havent considered using it as the BIOS is in Spanish and I don't understand Spanish.
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pr_capone
Oh, and if you are in the U.S., the best sites to visit to make sure you have the lowest price available are.....
You may have to copy and paste as I have not been able to get a link working on this forum for some time now.
Kansas District Overbeer
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drwtsn32
AMD will out preform Pentium any day of the week ...
Um... says who? The Intel P4 beats the Athlon XP in almost all benchmarks. Only the Athlon 64 usually scores higher than the P4. But I doubt you're talking about the Athlon 64... that chip costs an arm and a leg.
BTW, excellent advice about Newegg... that is the only place to buy components, IMO. I don't even bother with pricewatch much any more because Newegg consistently has low prices plus their service is top notch.
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Valis
Actually, I have a really good scsi controller, but havent considered using it as the BIOS is in Spanish and I don't understand Spanish.
If its a flash BIOS I don't see why you can find the appropriate flash software in English. Then flash the BIOS and all the crap you see in CMOS setup should be no espanol para tu! eheh Just look around for the chipset ID on the net or you can lemme know if I can help. Sincerely, District Overbeer