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[sev]

the board is an asus P5Q-Pro with a Q9550 and a zahlman 9500 cooler (with the led shite ripped out)

The two drives are western digital 500gb 7200 16mb cache and are new, and the other two are existing and are both 7200rpm.

all are sata drives.

The GPU is the jewel in the crown, an Nvidia Quadro 4500.

TB - I agree about the PSU, seasonic all the way, they make the PSU's for the SUN Blades we use at work, so they get my vote.
Page file?

CEM, good point, and something I was wondering.  I was toying with a Velociraptor for the OS, possibly two in raid O.

It's not a gaming box, it's a working box so for me its not about Direct X, it's all about Open GL.

The other drives are a legacy of my Mac, where I had system on one, applications folder on another, and user files on another, but unix allowed you to do this very easily.  I've been told that there was no point in placing apps onto another volume in Windows, and it didn't like it anyway.

[BettyBlu]

Just my kind of topic

Just to let you know I run 2 x 1TB Western Digital Caviar Green's (WD10EADS) as RAID0 and the performance increase is worth it. Of course there is the potential for a single point of failure, but again for me the performance is worth it.
I get genuine sustained read of ~140MB/s and writes at ~90MB/s. Everything feels and is faster from this 2TB RAID0 drive.
I'm fortunate as my job gives me access to hard disks so have a 5TB NAS unit for weekly incremental backup with a refresh every quarter so the risk is minimal.

I say go for it but be aware of an increased probablilty for failure (1 drive fails you lose the whole 1TB in your 2 x 500GB example.)

The drives are SATAII by the way running over Intel ICH9 chipset (motherboard is ASUS P5E.)

Incidentally to the person rubbishing Coolermaster PSU's? You do of course get what you pay for but their PSU's are some of the best out there. They are after all made for Coolermaster by Enhance - and if that means nothing then you shouldn't really be dissing the CM's...
I don't have one (I use Enermax) but I have used them in builds over the last 12months with impressive results. Very efficient, very quiet excellent build quality (ie. typical Coolermaster.)

[TheBoy]

the board is an asus P5Q-Pro with a Q9550 and a zahlman 9500 cooler (with the led shite ripped out)

The two drives are western digital 500gb 7200 16mb cache and are new, and the other two are existing and are both 7200rpm.

all are sata drives.

The GPU is the jewel in the crown, an Nvidia Quadro 4500.

TB - I agree about the PSU, seasonic all the way, they make the PSU's for the SUN Blades we use at work, so they get my vote.
Page file?

CEM, good point, and something I was wondering.  I was toying with a Velociraptor for the OS, possibly two in raid O.

It's not a gaming box, it's a working box so for me its not about Direct X, it's all about Open GL.

The other drives are a legacy of my Mac, where I had system on one, applications folder on another, and user files on another, but unix allowed you to do this very easily.  I've been told that there was no point in placing apps onto another volume in Windows, and it didn't like it anyway.

I purposely didn't mention Sun server earlier, as I don't think their hardware is that reliable.  Their processors, particularly pre SPARC T1 ones, seem incredibly poor - replaced a couple of handfuls of them (we have a very large Sun estate).  We're on the phone every single day to Sun getting them to change hardware.  Their PSUs though, only ever had to change a few of them (except a batch that had fan blowing wrong way)

[TheBoy]

Just my kind of topic

Just to let you know I run 2 x 1TB Western Digital Caviar Green's (WD10EADS) as RAID0 and the performance increase is worth it. Of course there is the potential for a single point of failure, but again for me the performance is worth it.
I get genuine sustained read of ~140MB/s and writes at ~90MB/s. Everything feels and is faster from this 2TB RAID0 drive.
I'm fortunate as my job gives me access to hard disks so have a 5TB NAS unit for weekly incremental backup with a refresh every quarter so the risk is minimal.

I say go for it but be aware of an increased probablilty for failure (1 drive fails you lose the whole 1TB in your 2 x 500GB example.)

The drives are SATAII by the way running over Intel ICH9 chipset (motherboard is ASUS P5E.)

Incidentally to the person rubbishing Coolermaster PSU's? You do of course get what you pay for but their PSU's are some of the best out there. They are after all made for Coolermaster by Enhance - and if that means nothing then you shouldn't really be dissing the CM's...
I don't have one (I use Enermax) but I have used them in builds over the last 12months with impressive results. Very efficient, very quiet excellent build quality (ie. typical Coolermaster.)

LOL, I'm also going to rubbish ASUS as well

[TheBoy]

The drives are SATAII by the way running over Intel ICH9 chipset (motherboard is ASUS P5E.)

That is probably the bets of the cheap mobo implementations (the chipset, not the mobo!), but not a patch on a real disk controller

[cem_devecioglu]

RAID originally have 3 purposes..

1 Safety (which need level 5 or 10 which is expensive for home)

2 Sequential read-write performance increase ( with standard SATA RAID controllers anyway not very good as it has bottleneck at the controller itself)
if you go for SAS or SCSI with special raid controller cards thats ok..

3 Random read performance : it must be a server with clients ..

otherwise not worth it..

please not that:

1 * 15K rpm disk will easily beat this 2 *7200 raid 0.. already tested..
edit :

also you can use level 1 which dont bring any performance..

[sev]

I tell you what, i'm currently running an intel board, and one of the reasons why I haven't gone of it already is because I'm actually very fond of it!

If money allowed i'd prefer a supermicro or tyan tbh. but oh well...

TB I agree about the sun hardware, they're a technology sponsor of ours so we get them pretty much for nowt, but they are pretty pants.

The IT CAX guys are always griping about them!

[TheBoy]

I tell you what, i'm currently running an intel board, and one of the reasons why I haven't gone of it already is because I'm actually very fond of it!

If money allowed i'd prefer a supermicro or tyan tbh. but oh well...

TB I agree about the sun hardware, they're a technology sponsor of ours so we get them pretty much for nowt, but they are pretty pants.

The IT CAX guys are always griping about them!

The Intel desktop boards are the probably the most reliable/stable desktop board you can get.

[BettyBlu]

The drives are SATAII by the way running over Intel ICH9 chipset (motherboard is ASUS P5E.)

That is probably the bets of the cheap mobo implementations (the chipset, not the mobo!), but not a patch on a real disk controller

Hey, we're talking home desktop PC's here, not servers. If I (or anyone building a home PC) could handle the noise and of course the expense then we'd all be buying server class hardware.
I'm not denying that Seasonic make outstanding PSU's - certainly not in the server arena where 80db's of fan noise are acceptable. Indeed they also make some damned good consumer units (I have an M600 in a media PC, always silent - and an S600 in my partners PC - same again.)
And why the comparison of server class chipsets/hardware with mid to high end consumer units? You don't make sense...
I run a mixture of Dell/HP/IBM blades at work with more RAM and GHz than they know what to do with - and non of them could get me anywhere near playable framerates in Far Cry 1, never mind Far Cry 2 (or Crysis)
My gaming rig of "cheap and nasty" components is as reliable as any of my servers, doing what I need it to do...

[TheBoy]

The drives are SATAII by the way running over Intel ICH9 chipset (motherboard is ASUS P5E.)

That is probably the bets of the cheap mobo implementations (the chipset, not the mobo!), but not a patch on a real disk controller

Hey, we're talking home desktop PC's here, not servers. If I (or anyone building a home PC) could handle the noise and of course the expense then we'd all be buying server class hardware.
I'm not denying that Seasonic make outstanding PSU's - certainly not in the server arena where 80db's of fan noise are acceptable. Indeed they also make some damned good consumer units (I have an M600 in a media PC, always silent - and an S600 in my partners PC - same again.)
And why the comparison of server class chipsets/hardware with mid to high end consumer units? You don't make sense...
I run a mixture of Dell/HP/IBM blades at work with more RAM and GHz than they know what to do with - and non of them could get me anywhere near playable framerates in Far Cry 1, never mind Far Cry 2 (or Crysis)
My gaming rig of "cheap and nasty" components is as reliable as any of my servers, doing what I need it to do...

I am not comparing servers to desktops - servers make crap desktops and desktops make crap servers, thus cannot be compared.

The original debate is about the quality (or lack of) of CM PSUs - people were asking a lot from cheap PSUs (eg 4 HDDs).

As to PSU noise - servers designed for datacentres are generally 1 or 2U, thus have small fans that rotate fast (noisy) due to space constraints.  Workgroup servers are normally very quiet - I currently have a workgroup class server about 2 foot from my left lughole, and apart from the disks thrashing delivering pages for this site, its pretty quiet.

The Intel ICH8/9R is, as stated earlier, probably the best 'home use' integrated RAID controller, esp under Windows.  Your implication was disk performance was important to you, in which case you need to step up to the next level.


My views on ASUS reliability are well known, so I won't repeat again

[BigAl]

I got a nice Coolermaster UCP 1.2KW psu for my setup, mind you £200 worth of psu isnt cheap shit  

coolermaster are on my 'overprice shit' list

Is there anything you do rate - apart from stella & the mig

[TheBoy]

I got a nice Coolermaster UCP 1.2KW psu for my setup, mind you £200 worth of psu isnt cheap shit  

coolermaster are on my 'overprice shit' list

Is there anything you do rate - apart from stella & the mig

Hmmm, Stella.......

[sev]

My views on ASUS reliability are well known, so I won't repeat again

I'll look for them on the forum, I had an asus board before my intel, and I have to say it was ok. However, the reason I got this one was due to the fact that my intel board is a 975 chipset, and the asus is a P45 chipset.

I looked at the intel offering, but it only supports ddr3 ram, and i've got 8gb of DDR2.

Given that DDR3 is such a huge price difference I thought that i'd wait till it and the core i7 stuff came down in price first.

I am still tempted to return the unopened q6550 and get q6600 in order to hang on to the board a little while longer.

[TheBoy]

My views on ASUS reliability are well known, so I won't repeat again

I'll look for them on the forum, I had an asus board before my intel, and I have to say it was ok. However, the reason I got this one was due to the fact that my intel board is a 975 chipset, and the asus is a P45 chipset.

I looked at the intel offering, but it only supports ddr3 ram, and i've got 8gb of DDR2.

Given that DDR3 is such a huge price difference I thought that i'd wait till it and the core i7 stuff came down in price first.

I am still tempted to return the unopened q6550 and get q6600 in order to hang on to the board a little while longer.

For your (CAD?) uses, 8G is useable, so worth reusing what you have.  DDR3 will ultimately come down and replace DDR2 as the dirt cheap stuff, which would be a good time to upgrade

Think we mentioned on another thread, 64bit Vista may be better than XP64 for driver availability and stability

[sev]

that's what i'm going to run x64 Vista, and it's the very reason why i didn't go for any of the DDR3 boards just yet.

I figured that i'd stick with what i've got to an extent apart from a cpu upgrade, and thn when the 1366 pin boards become cost mainstream i'll build a whole new setup then, with the bonus of having W7 around.

So I suppose this build is Computer SP2 for now!