Building A New Computer--Need Opinions

[Mynock]

The time has come. Actually, it came roughly a month after I built my last rig and DX10 came out. What do you guys think? Am I missing anything? See anything that won't plug into anything else?

Case:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6811108190
Never heard of Inwin before I saw this thing, but holy crap it looks nice. Screened panels and optional mounting points for up to (9) 12cm fans if you take the big one off the side panel.

Power Supply:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6817171049

Motherboard:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6813188065

Processor:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6819115211

RAM:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6820220503
Only going with 6gb for now, planning on adding another 3 DIMM's at a later date (or I might just spend the extra $90 and go with 12gb right off the bat.

Hard Drives:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6822148231
Going to get 4 of these and try doing a RAID 0 array.

Video Card:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6814130590
Motherboard is SLI capable, but the more research I do the more it seems like a single beast of a card is still the best way to go. Maybe when the price drops I'll add another one.

CD/DVD Drive:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6827106289

[Aiko]

Looks fine, except... why would you want to install 4x 80GB HDs?

[dlodoski]

Looks fine, except... why would you want to install 4x 80GB HDs?

Yea, a couple 1TB or 1.5TB drives in RAID 0 would do the trick.

Also, the most recent research on video cards I did (about a year ago) showed a significant drop in returns beyond the $249 price point. I'm not sure about gaming, but I get by with $150 cards while putting some serious hi-def (video) rendering and dual monitor demands on them.

But then, for me, it's all about storage and processing.

Also, if you're going to over-clock, get some active cooling on the RAM. I usually cut in an extra 5" fan on the side panel and blast that area of the mother board.

[Mynock]

Thanks for looking guys.
The 80Gb HD's are going into a RAID 0 Array which I'm going to use only for stuff I want to load fast (OS, Games, etc). I might up that to 160Gb but I don't think I really need the extra space so I figured why pay for it? I'm not one of those people that has 50 DVD length movies in their computer haha.
Case in point, Just checked and I'm currently running (1) 80 Gb Barracuda drive and that's got 8Gb of space left on it. I have a external USB2.0 drive I use to backup/store things like movies and such.
As far as the video card goes, I can't see doing gaming on a $250 card, at least not with the graphics turned all the way up, but I'm definitely going to look into finding somethng cheaper if I don't lose too much performance. The old mean machine got me used to being able to turn all the goodies on. There's no going back now.

[Aiko]

If you don't really need the storage capacity, you might want to consider investing in data safety instead. Eg. you could combine 4 HDs in a RAID-10 array. That would give you good performance and protect your data from at least one drive failure.

Mind you that in RAID-0, if any one of the drives in your array fails, the entire array is gone. And of course, the more HDs you have, the higher the chances of a drive failure.

[Mynock]

If you don't really need the storage capacity, you might want to consider investing in data safety instead. Eg. you could combine 4 HDs in a RAID-10 array. That would give you good performance and protect your data from at least one drive failure.

Mind you that in RAID-0, if any one of the drives in your array fails, the entire array is gone. And of course, the more HDs you have, the higher the chances of a drive failure.

I've never had a drive fail on me before, and anything I don't want to lose get's backed up onto an external drive, so I'm not worried about that too much. Plus the Mobo only supports RAID 0, RAID 0+1, RAID 5, and JBOD (which seems to be as reliable as RAID 0 with the performance of a single drive....WTF that's like wanting a pet with the loyalty of a cat and the cleanliness of a dog).
RAID 5 looks kind of interesting though, looks like I'd get striping on 3 disks and a mirror on the other. Almost the same speed but way more reliable....still think I'll take my chances with 0 though. Long as I'm good about backing things up the most I'll lose are some Window's settings and saved game progress. Annoying but not catestrophic.

[Mynock]

If you don't really need the storage capacity, you might want to consider investing in data safety instead. Eg. you could combine 4 HDs in a RAID-10 array. That would give you good performance and protect your data from at least one drive failure.

Mind you that in RAID-0, if any one of the drives in your array fails, the entire array is gone. And of course, the more HDs you have, the higher the chances of a drive failure.

I've never had a drive fail on me before, and anything I don't want to lose get's backed up onto an external drive, so I'm not worried about that too much. Plus the Mobo only supports RAID 0, RAID 0+1, RAID 5, and JBOD (which seems to be as reliable as RAID 0 with the performance of a single drive....WTF that's like wanting a pet with the loyalty of a cat and the cleanliness of a dog).
RAID 5 looks kind of interesting though, looks like I'd get striping on 3 disks and a mirror on the other. Almost the same speed but way more reliable....still think I'll take my chances with 0 though. Long as I'm good about backing things up the most I'll lose are some Window's settings and saved game progress. Annoying but not catestrophic.

--<edit>--
While we're on the subject, in your opinion do you think RAID is worth it? Never did one before but the IT guy at work told me it's a great way to get awesome performance gains. If I do RAID 0 with 4 drives will it actually read/write/load stuff 4x as fast?

[Aiko]

While we're on the subject, in your opinion do you think RAID is worth it? Never did one before but the IT guy at work told me it's a great way to get awesome performance gains. If I do RAID 0 with 4 drives will it actually read/write/load stuff 4x as fast?

Well, in term's of throughput, yes, it is up to 4x as fast. But you will really only get close to that theoretical speedup when copying large files to or from the array.

And then there's the average access time. You will get some improvement there too, but it will never be near 4x as fast. This is where solid-state disks really shine.

[Mynock]

So reading/writing will be greatly affected but not so much access time....hmm...now I'm wondering if I should bother with it. I was mostly looking at it to speed up the time it takes to boot, open programs, etc.
SSD's are awesome, but they're still too overpriced to be worth it imho.

[YerK]

I think it's smart that you're getting it all from the same place. That way, you don't wind up with two companies telling you that a problem you're having is from the other company's part. You might want to see if they will assemble it for you, too. That might cure any issues about hardware incompatibility. I don't know any of the specific hardware enough any more to make recommendations, though. I used to read about graphics cards, but I just stopped once I got married. (Priorities changed)