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nudone's new pc

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brotherS:
brotherS, sorry, i've just noticed you've got a Zalman Resorvator (the image was off my screen so i didn't see it before).

what are your thoughts on the Resorvator - it looks like you've got an extra pump or did that come with it?

if/when i go water cooled then i'll be looking into getting the Zalman kit but i've read bad things about the pump making a noise after a short time.
-nudone (December 12, 2005, 06:10 PM)
--- End quote ---
Err, check the URL of that image and my words there:

I'd get one ASAP if I had the cash right now :)

--- End quote ---

I can't afford that beauty right now :) And as I stated more to the top, I won't buy water-cooling either ;)

Rover:
Wow, so many items to comment on... where to start? :)

Water cooling?  No.  Bad idea.

Seagate SATA Drives are a great way to go for quiet drives.  Go learn a lot about RAID to understand the impacts of what you'll be doing.  SATA RAID is a great solution for desktop systems.  RAID 0+1 (aka RAID 10)  is probably your best best for speed.  RAID 5 is good for safety and READ speed, but takes a hit on writes.  I did a stint as a DB2 DBA and IBM's information for DB performance suggests using as many spindles (drives) as needed to make sure that every the heads have just enough time to be in place for their turn to read data.  To do that you need to calculate transfer rates, seek rates, block sizes and a bunch of stuff like that.  You can spend weeks testing for optimum performance.  Or you can use RAID 0+1 :)

SCSI is not going away... in the server world at least.  Currently SATA drives are not being built to quality spec to be used in a serious environment.  They're great for you and me to use on our systems, but when downtime and failure are not an option, you almost always use SCSI.  Check the drive specs and you'll see a difference in RPMs, bearing types, MTBF and stuff like that.

Watching TV on your new box?  I just bought an ATI X600 All-in-wonder.  I'm a lot disappointed in it's performance.  They have a know problem with dual and/or hyper-threading processors.  They're working on it, but I really expected much better performance out of my PCI-X card than my old AGP Version.  Not seeing it.  Either way, I like ATI over Hauppague (sp?).

Dual monitors... I just went dual head too.  I'm not in love yet.  I gave up a really nice 21" monitor (1600x1200 true color @ 85Hz) and went to dual 17" Acer monitors (1280x1024 true color @75 Hz).  Although my screen real estate should be much larger, it just doesn't feel bigger. 

Finally, you should google for "every OS sucks" and watch _Three dead trolls in a baggie_ perform their smash hit.  I found it several years ago and recently rediscovered it.  It's amazing how true comedy can be.

PS:  Get a couple of Gigs of DDR2 RAM at least.  With stuff like the VMWare player around, you might find your RAM needs going up a lot.  DDR2 is a nice boost in speed. :)

Hirudin:
I'm not a speed reader, so this post is being made having only read to the pic of the 24" monitor with Friends on it.
Sorry if something I say is repeating or something...

I can see you're thinking about silence. I can say that SilenX make some very silent fans! I have ~4 80mm fans in my case and I can barely hear it. I leave my comp on pretty much at all times and even though it's touching my mattress, it doesn't bother me while sleeping. The downside is they are expensive (I think mine were about $14 each...).

I don't know how well it cools, but mineral oil apparently doesn't conduct electricity. It's sold by the gallon at feed stores. I'd guess it's around $12 a gallon.

As for RAID, the only experience I've had with it (when IDE RAID was very new) was bad. I had 2 40gb drives and lost all the data on both. It's possible I could have got the data back, but I didn't feel like screwing with it at the time.

[edit]Oh yeah, one more thing. I think the chipset fan in my comp is very noisy. It's the smallest fan in there and I think it's the loudest. As someone mentioned above, passive cooling on the chipset is the way to go.

Also, for the video card you may just bite the bullet and completely disregard the built in cooling and purchase an after market video card cooler. That way you can get the card you want and the silence you want without having to comprimize. I must say that I haven't ever used an after market video card cooler, but I'd be willing to bet a quality after market cooler would be better than what comes on the card.[/edit]

nudone:
thanks all for the comments and advice.

i've now bought all the hardware, here's the list for all you geeks:

Antec P180 SPCR Advanced Super Midi Tower Case - No PSU (Black) (CA-049-AN)
Seasonic S12 600W Silent ATX2.0 Power Supply (CA-002-SS)
Asus A8N-SLi Premium nForce4 SLi (Socket 939) PCI-Express Motherboard (MB-111-AS)
Corsair 2GB DDR XMS3500LL Pro TwinX (2x1GB) CAS2 (MY-093-CS)
AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core 4800+ (Socket 939) - Retail (ADA4800CDBOX) (CP-129-AM)
Akasa AK-183-L2B Ultra Quiet 120mm Fan - 3 pin (FG-024-AK)
ThermalRight SI-120 (Socket 754/939/478) Heatsink (HS-023-TR)
Plextor PX-740A 16x16 Dual Layer DVD±RW ReWriter - (Beige) Retail (CD-031-PL)
Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Fatal1ty FPS Edition - Retail (SC-032-CL)
XFX GeForce 7800GTX Extreme Edition 256MB GDDR3 VIVO TV-Out/Dual DVI (PCI-Express) - Retail (PVT70F-UDE7) (GX-057-XF)
Zalman VF700-CU Quiet Copper VGA Cooler (HS-013-ZA)
TWO OF Western Digital Raptor 74GB WD740GD 10,000RPM SATA 8MB Cache - OEM (HD-015-WD)
TWO OF OcUK Silentmaxx Aluminium Hard Drive Enclosure (HS-000-OK)
Samsung SpinPoint P SP2504C 250GB SATA-II 8MB Cache - OEM (HD-018-SA)
Saitek PZ30AU Eclipse Illuminated Keyboard (KB-015-SK)

(total cost so far, about £2200.00.)

(still waiting for the Eizo 21" widescreen monitor to come back into stock.)

i'm half way through putting it all together - i have to keep taking a break to relieve the stress of it all. when it's all done i'll post a nice picture for you to look at.

the two raptor drives will be in raid 0 (striped) as i just wanted to feel the speed (they are inside the silentmaxx enclosures to keep them quiet). the third drive, the samsung spinpoint, will be used for storage and backup - i'll be doing regular backups of operating system and important files onto this drive and a networked drive so that's why i've not gone for raid 0+1 or 5 or any other variation.

the fans are relatively quiet (four 120mm fans, most on low spin) but i wouldn't call it a 'silent' system - oh well, i suppose that means i'll have to try water cooling sooner rather than later.

mouser:
wow sounds beautiful; looking forward to the pictures.

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