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Please help me build my new computer, DC!

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Shades:
Whatever you do, do not buy Samsung SATA harddisks. Maybe they send better drives to the northern hemisphere, but here in South America they are worthless and very unreliable. The old IDE versions are ok. The only thing is that they are cheap while packing a lot of storage capacity.

Over here you can only buy four brands, Hitachi, Samsung, Seagate and Maxxtor (IIRC Maxxtor bought Seagate some time ago, so there are actually only three brands for sale). With the ambient temperature here, it is Maxxtor who is king performance-wise while being very reliable.

Mainboards made by Intel are the best you can buy here. Personal preference lies with ASUS/AMD though, never had any issue with them. The only time I encountered a failing ASUS board, it was one with Intel CPU (and nVidia chipset).

Whatever you want to go for, at least don't be cheap on getting a decent power supply for your desktop.

40hz:
My tuppence:

MOBO -  I've had the best luck with Intel and Gigabyte boards. MSI has been mixed luck.

RAM - I completely agree with Carol. Go Corsair and be done with it. If too $$ Crucial brand is also a good choice.

DRIVES - Maxtor/Seagate drives have been reliable.

CPU - if you're going with Intel, smart builders always do a quick spreadsheet and compare current price to speed. About three steps down from the top chip you'll usually find the "sweet-spot" CPU that offers the most bang for the money. But why am I saying this? You already do that. ;D

EXTERNAL ENCLOSURE - IMHO the absolute best are made by Granite Digital. Moderately pricey, but very well made. http://www.granitedigital.com/

Startech also does some nice externals - including basic dual drive and RAID setups. Prices are reasonable. I haven't bought very many of their products so far (2 this year), but I've heard very good things about this company. Stuff looks good - and Egghead caries their products at discount.

http://www.startech.com/category/parts/data-storage/external-enclosures/multiple-drive/list.aspx

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=2010090092%2050001762&name=STARTECH

tomos:
remember that TFTs don't look good at their native resolution
-f0dder (December 15, 2008, 05:11 PM)
--- End quote ---

I presume you meant that the other way round!?!

f0dder:
remember that TFTs don't look good at their native resolution
-f0dder (December 15, 2008, 05:11 PM)
--- End quote ---
I presume you meant that the other way round!?!-tomos (December 16, 2008, 04:14 AM)
--- End quote ---
D'oh! :)

Personally, I'd go for a single 150gig velociraptor main drive (in my current box I have 2x74gig raptors, now partially running RAID stripe) - I don't see much reason to pick two of them, unless you want a RAID mirror. If you need local data beyond that, a single terabyte drive (if you need that much :O) should be sufficient - and they're pretty fast, too.

Most NAS boxes are unfortunately pretty slow. Partially because windows file sharing (SMB/CIFS) is pretty inefficient - even on gigabit, you're probably going to hit a wall at 30MB/s or so. SMBv2 fixes this, but is only available in Vista and 2008 server - and samba only has experimental support for it, so it probably isn't going to be present in any NAS boxes right now. Even if you use FTP, consumer-grade NAS boxes tend to not be able to hit full harddrive speed. So either get an eSATA enclosure or build your own fileserver for backups. (I like having my backup/filestorage raid-mirrored and available all the time, instead of having to muck around with enclosures etc.)

As for RAM, if you go for core i7 (*drool*), keep in mind that the CPU supports triple-channel memory. So you'll probably want to go for 3xsomething modules for max performance. Perhaps you aren't going to utilize even 3GB right now, but you say you only upgrade your computer every 5 years... definitely go for 3x2GB, then.

Shades: sounds weird that maxtor is king where you live, since they've been notorious for having drives that run very hot :)

Lashiec:
I take issue with your choice of hard drives. While the VelociRaptor is OK (despite its price premium), the Segate 7200.11 is definitely not OK. It's not that it's a bad drive, quite the contrary, just that Samsung and especially Western Digital make better drives. My choice would be the Caviar Black, which although it's a bit more expensive, it performs better overall, and it has a 5-year warranty. The Caviar Green is also OK, though the performance difference with the 7200.11 is not that big.

Also, have in mind that Seagate will no longer offer a 5-year warranty in HDDs starting January 2009, so buy fast! :D

Regarding memory brands, a well-known one is OK. Kingston, Corsair, Crucial, GeiL... I personally prefer Kingston, but that's because it's the biggest manufacturer of all, and its Value RAM is everywhere, and never gave me problems.

As for the rest, my recommendations in the other thread still apply. And remember that first you choose the CPU, then the motherboard, not the other way around :)

I would not personally go for a Core i7 yet. You're paying a big premium for the CPU, the memory and the motherboard, and unless you're going to use the computer for some processor-intensive tasks, you're really burning money at this point. When the entire platform lowers its cost, it's more than recommendable, but Intel is not going to do that 'til later in 2009, possibly in the second quarter, when they'll introduce new CPUs at a lower price. The Core 2 Duo (or Quad) still will be a great choice for a time.

It would be helpful if you also tell us what you will use the computer for, whether it would be just surfing the Internet and working with it, or if you're also going to game with it, or do some other more exotic things, like graphics or video editing.

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