Jus built a custom PC

[italianblaze]

holy **** @ 2 terabytes
and im not sure either but i don't think 2 8600's will be better then the 8800 i think its just what some people say but then again i wouldn't know for sure
ill probably get a 8900 in December but ill prob just stick wit the 8800 till the 8900s get cheaper

[Ender81]

Well in general an SLI setup of two lesser cards does outperform a single higher quality card. That much is true, there have been a lot of benchmarks to proove it. However wether my two 8600s are better then a single 8800 I don't know.

[Renegade_]

Originally Posted by ikozhukhin

i've heard that the 10k rpm drive's aren't very reliable because of the high rpm. and with raid if one crash's u basicly lose the info from both. just my two cents, hope it works out for u.

I bought 2 36.7 GB raptors when they first came out 4 years ago. I had the very first production run of em as well as the very first production run of socket 754 64 bit procs (clawhammer core).

Never had a problem. I RMA'd them last year because they were making some noises. After I installed the new ones I realized the drives weren't going, I was running my video card and 2 of the drives off of the same power rail. This is off of a 430w antec psu.

So technically I never had a problem with them and I run them HARD when I use them (encoding, really really big graphic stuff in photoshop, etc)

And who cares about "if 1 drive fails you lose all your data". Yeah, if you have 1 7200rpm drive and that dies you lose all your data too. See: External HD. I have yet to see a raptor actually "fail" in hardware terms.

And 2 TB is a lot of storage, but I think you could fill it up if you tried. I know if I had that much space it would be filling itself up 24 hours a day.

[mattcosta7]

Originally Posted by Renegade_

And 2 TB is a lot of storage, but I think you could fill it up if you tried. I know if I had that much space it would be filling itself up 24 hours a day.

I've got over 1.7TB of used space across 6 HDs, and that's after removing some to dvds in order to free up space. When you have tons of images/videos, especially if you're working with raw/lossless filetypes, it's not that hard to fill it.

With that said, I'm going to be upgrading my main computer in the next few weeks. Evga 680i mobo, Q6600, Vista Ultimate, and some more HD space is on the horizon for that rig (which also hasn't been on in a month, due to my lack of time to do work stationary)

[Vr-4-Life]

Uhrm.. the more cores you have the more you will run in to bottle necks somewhere around the motherboard.. i agree that the benchmarks arent impressive and that programs are already out that support secondary processing.. via Hyper threading or multiple cores.. hell even SMP systems.

the quad cores also arent HT enabled cores like the extreme editions are. and with out those threads your hindering performance.. also pay CLOSE attention to the cache levels your getting and NEVER buy a multi core CPU with shared cache. you will never get great performance out of say an average of 512k per core on a 1000+ mhz bus system.. but that is why most chips are cheap.. and thats why the Extreme editions are expensive..

as of right now the configuration i would go with is this

Dual dual core HT enabled xeons with 2 mb cache per core... NOTHING will beat that setup.. lol

as for my storage space.. 2tb is a lot however i have probably about 600 mb free. lol