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My (Somewhat Realistic) Dream PC - Is it necessary?

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f0dder:
I have never set up a RAID and I don't plan on doing that. I know I probably ought to but I just can't stand the idea of having two 1TB drives but only being able to use 1 TB because everything is mirrored onto the second hdd. I know this is wrong, but it just feels like such a waste of space.
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You'll stop feeling this way once you've had a taste of major data loss... and then you'll be regretful :)

I figured I might need the thermal compound for the Thermaltake CPU cooler. Speaking of which, are there any opinions on whether or not I'd need the beast of a CPU cooler? I don't ever mess around with overclocking my machine, but I do play games which tend to make things run hot. Is the stock Core i7 cooler sufficient and/or is the Thermaltake upgrade necessary?
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Personally I'd just go with the stock cooler (they sucked in The Olden Days, but are fine now) - you can always replace if it turns out it isn't adequate, or if you want to overclock or whatever.

You both said that 12GB is overkill, and yet, f0dder, you said you'd go for it anyway, which surprised me. Last I'd heard, there weren't really any applications out there built to handle more than 2GB of RAM, even on a 64-bit OS. Out of curiosity, are you running a 64-bit OS? (Vista?) How much of your 8GB are you using for ramdisks? And, erm, what is a ramdisk and what are the benefits and drawbacks of a ramdisk?
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Indeed there aren't many individual applications that can take advantage of huge amounts of RAM, but if you run a lot of individual applications it helps... and it's always nice to have a large filesystem cache (but 12GB would be overkill for this).

A RAMDisk is just that - a virtual disk drive that exists solely in ram. The benefit? read/write speeds of several gigabytes per second, and seek time measured in nanonseconds rather than milliseconds. With 12GB of ram, you could affort to keep a several gigabyte ramdisk enabled at all times, and run your applications out of that. Necessary? No. Nice? Yes :)

You both bring up a good point. Is the Core i7 necessary? I can tell you I would notice an advantage from my current single-core machine. But is there a noticeable difference between a Core 2 Quad and the Core i7? I don't know the answer to that.
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Depends on your needs, really. I certainly wouldn't mind a core i7, but my current Q6600@3GHz fits my needs. Most of the time, I could go with a decent dualcore - but sometimes I run heavy transcoding, and some of the recent games are starting to utilize more cores.

This is another one of those "I can't stand to see the space wasted" problems. I can't stand the idea of spending $100 for a 74GB 10k RPM drive when I could buy 1TB 7.2K RPM drive for the same price.
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For typical workloads, you don't really get that much advantage from a 10k RPM drive anyway - lower seek time, sure, but you probably need to go from 7200rpm->SSD to notice an advantage for desktop use.

Don't know for sure as I do not speak of experience, but when comparing with 7200RPM drives, do 10000RPM and/or 15000RPM drives generate a lot more noise? Or a higher pitched noise (more "penetrating" effect)?
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I don't noice the "spinning" noise from my 10k RPM raptor drives at all - moving the read/write heads are loud, but that's only really noticable if I stress the drives with multiple access streams, and it isn't an unpleasant noise (compared to the spinning whines of my first 5400rpm drive, for instance).

As for SLI/CrossFire... it does enable you to run higher resolutions at a higher framerate. But afaik there is (or at least there was!) trouble distributing shaders across SLI - and modern games are more shader- than fillrate-heavy , so SLI might not give you all that much bang for the buck. Go for a decent mid-end card, they're plenty fast. Running 4200x4200 with 16xFSAA is only a penis thing, it's not that much more enjoyable than, say, 1680x1050 with 2xFSAA :P

Dormouse:
I've gone off RAID. Only really see the value of mirroring now.
Even then, I'd mostly want to rebuild after a HDD loss and it is only all the data I want.

What I do find useful/comforting is using a HDD caddy, so I can just swap HDDs in and out.
Gives an extra easy layer of reduncancy.
So I have:-
Duplicated on another HDD in machine;
Duplicated on NAS drive;
Duplicated in HDD off site;
Duplicated over the net.

Lashiec:
Okay, so I'll be honest here and say I don't know much about SLI/Crossfire. All I know is that two GPUs can connect together but I don't really know what the benefits of that happening are. Can someone explain to me what purpose SLI serves and go into some detail as to why or why not it's worth having SLI? Also, Lashiec, what sort of SLI-induced headaches are you talking about?
-Deozaan (May 10, 2009, 03:21 PM)
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In addition to the issues mentioned by f0dder in his first post, one of the problems of running two cards in SLI or Crossfire is they take some good space on the motherboard, and depending on how the layout is set up in the one you're using, they might render all the PCI and PCI-e ports unusable, it could be less of a problem for you as the cards you chose are not double-wide. Also, they might cover some the SATA ports in the mobo, again depending on where they are located (in some boards they are moved upwards or turned 90 degrees to the right to avoid this).

Then there are the inherent problems with these setups. AFAIK, for a game to take advantage of SLI and Crossfire, the drivers you're using must have specific profiles for them. It seems the problem it's no longer as big as it was, but you still encounter a game from time to time that does not support these setups. And the problems with load balancing that f0dder mentions sometimes result in games that have lackluster performance in comparison with the results you get with a single card.

There used to be problems if you were using SLI with multiple monitors as well, but nVidia fixed them a while ago.

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