building a new pc
 

i'm putting together a new pc and after doing some research for it i have decide on this config

intel qx6700 quad core cpu
intel s975xbx2 (bad axe) motherboard
Nvidia quadro FX 4500 graphics card
4gb DDR2 ram
2x 250gb sata HD

just wanted to know what you guys think and any suggestions you might have.

why 2 hard drives. why not 1 bigger one. it should work put cheaper. how much thiis all going to cost

might be for raid...

i am actually going to have 4 hd's in total , I like to split them up since all HD's will fail eventually at least I have some chance of saving some stuff.
still waiting on the exact cost but somewhere in the region of $6000

oh but that's what DVD-Rs and DVD-RWs are for! (or even their cd equivalent...)

striped hard drives may make recovering from a crash or losing data easier, but backing up said works onto even a flash drive costs a bit less imo.

Neo of course you are right but I have this real phobia against large HD's it's seems to me that they fail much more often.It's only recently that I have gone with anything over 160gb, just me I know but I feel happier btw I do back up to dvd-r but sometimes not everything on the pc.
Any suggestions on maybe an improvement on the hardware?

honestly as no (bus) speeds have been posted and i haven't cared to keep up since i can no longer price a PC without pulling the dust moths out of my pockets, i can't see any bottlenecking problems with your choice of processors, ram, and video card. a raid array is certainly the safe way to go because if you lose data it can be rewritten or recovered if nothing ever happened, but at the same time if you've got 2 250 GB drives in a raid array you're only getting 250 GB of drive space... not so bad since HDs are getting cheaper, but still... you COULD have 500 GB of space like tweetytunes said. at the same time, without the raid, there's nothing wrong with an installation HD (for your programs and windows xp/vista) and a media HD (for your batch renders, after effects compositions, etc.) that would usually ensure less complications due to installed programs and the like.

technically, i think you're going the safe route and nobody should bash ya for that if you pump out quality stuff. if you're still practicing and learning, though, it's not REALLY that big a deal if you lost the model you were working on, cause you learned a lot about the process and could even speed up your modelling AND improve upon it if you had to do it over again.

I got a terabit ext hard drive with fiberwire and usb2 for £250 the other week and all my maya/photoshop/premire/flash work has found a new home there. I have 2 300 gig sata drives inside my pc with the first split in half. Never have any problems got the exturnal for moving file for home to work. I know a terabit is a bit much but for that price who cares.

just make sure ur first primary hd only has ur operating system on and nothing else
install all programs on another HD
and save all work to another

this way ur boot up and general performance will be optimised as it wont have to search for system files in 160gb on unrelated data

Sounds like a really fast set up, I'd like to see some benchmarks when it's built. Do you plan to overclock it?
Just out of curiosity what monitor do you use? ;)

About bottlenecks, I'm not saying that there is defantly one, but having four cores share a 1066 MHz GTL+ bus sounds a bit performance limiting to me. How much L2 cache has this processor got and has anyone seen any memory benchmarks?

it has 8mb L2 cache (2 x 4mb)

http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/...6700/page2.asp

right now I am using 2 x 19 inch Samsung Syncmaster 910T they seem to serve me well for enough space.

This is just my opinion but having four cores with 2 MB of L2 each connected to a 1066 MHz FSB sounds like that the processor isn't going to run at peak effiecientcy.

I'm just wondering, have you thought about the CSI based Xeons with 16 MB L2 that are supposed to come out sometime in the 2nd half this year?

With a budget like yours, I'll choose to get a Mac Pro.

im not sure the quad core is gonna have enough horsepower. you sure you cant find anything with some more kick?!!! perhaps something that runs on diesel?

man id love to have a quad core pc.