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I'mpresently in the market for a new PC.. I'm going to set my budget around $7500.00.... I've looked at Alienware, Voodoo, Falcon and Dell...My preference is a Monster liquid cooled system that can handle Multimedia tasks, serve as side ended home theater system, (cause I'm getting ready to purchase a system in that area too!!..), and a High end Gaming Machine..Looking at the configuraton wizards offered on each site, right now Alienware seems to give me more bang for the buck.. But my main & primary concern is the service side.. Any comments concerning the praises, woes and pitfalls of service issues they've had with the aforementioned companies, PUHLEEZE feel free to post a response..Also if anyone has any other Custom PC manufacturers which provide liquid cooled systems they'd like to mention that I can take a Look-see at; any comments would be greatly appreciated..TIA
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Like erdons said building it yourself is ALWAYS the best. That being said I think ibuypower.com has at least one liquid cooled model.
Never understood the attaction of LCing myself though. -
The ultimate liquid cooled PC
http://www17.tomshardware.com/2006/01/09/strip_out_the_fans/
Like others have said, buy the bits and build it yourself -
visit a site called overcool.com. I've purchased over half a dozen liquid cooling systems from them and can highly recommend them for anyone looking to piece together a custom chiller.
I'd agree with the others, for the amount you want to spend I'd build your system without the help of overpriced alienware or some other rip-off artist looking to make a buck off an uninformed consumer. When building yourself you don't have to purchase what someone else thinks you should have. You get to choose each individual part and customize your system for your needs. At $7500, I'd spend about $4500 on a good server based system and about $3000-$3500 on a nice large HD plasma display.
On the service side, Dell has probably the best but that's not saying much especially when you need service on high end custom built systems. Alienware is by far the worst on your list. Their customer service is horrible and that's if you can get a competent english speaking person on the line. You'll definitely want to avoid all those you've listed and go with a pick and choose custom built. You will get alot more for alot less and when it comes to service you will be dealing with direct manufacturers for each part instead of someone at some large facility who doesn't now much of anything about your components. -
If you're really going to spend that much money I may be able to put together a list of parts you may want to gather up. That was my budget on my last video workstation (which some parts overflowed into my file server as well). I think by substituting some of the SCSI hardware I had on my list with some higher-end graphics, sound, and PVR you can have what you're looking for. However if that $7500 quote also includes a huge LCD monitor, well then you better choose that first so you know how much is left for the PC.
FB-DIMM are the real cause of global warming -
I'm with the homebuilders all the way. However, which ever way you decide to go, absolutely do not get a pre-installed XP with only a recovery disk, or worse yet, only a recovery partition on the harddrive. Be sure to purchase a retail version of XP and have it installed. The first time you have to do a repair reinstallation you will bless the day you did.
And if you can swing it, get individual drivers on a separate CD to your peripherals (eg: mainboard and chipset drivers, soundcard drivers (even if integrated sound), definitely video card drives, NIC, etc.). If you ever have to wipe the disk and reinstall, that's another day you will bless that you have them on separate disk for install rather than a restore disk. -
I'd recommend keeping any discs in their sealed packages and visiting the manufacturers website to download the latest drivers / versions of software. Most software packaged with hardware is out of date. Sometimes it's not compatible with your choice of OS. If you do this that's the day you bless as you first bring your machine online with up-to-date drivers/software.Originally Posted by ranchhand
It also gives you some critical data to test your burner with.
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Thanks for the many replies...I'll be the very 1st to admit that I'm a moron when it comes to building a PC, Not certain I want to undertake the task..I can plug stuff in and pull stuff out, but when it comes to setting up the controllers, the BIOS, and the other stuff, I'm lost..Especially since I want to get a High end top of the line system...I do like the overcool.com site, got alot of stuff there, but it's all mind boggling as to the wide choices and variety there..Wouldn't know where or what to begin with... But the money saving prospects of building my own system does sound like the best way to go, real more bang for the Buck...where would be a good site to go to study up or get guidance on how someone would undertake the task of building a liquid cooled PC?
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there are literally millions of guides for building PCs. Type building pc in your favorite search engine and watch the blistering array of results. You might also want to visit your local library or media store and pick up a book on general PC building. Building a PC has become quite easy these days. If you can follow directions you can build a PC. All hardware comes with directions.
The hardest part of building a PC today is hooking up the front panel connectors. Alot of cases come with very vague material on this subject and sometimes your motherboard manual doesn't do a good job of explaining this either. Forunately, the worst thing that can happen if you switch the reset and power button or hook up + to - or otherwise the worst that could happen is you have a PC that doesn't boot up or (don't laugh) a reset button that powers up the PC while the power button re-boots the machine. As long as you don't start connecting these connectors to other motherboard pins besides the front panel pin outs all will be good until you get it right.
Processor placement or more to the point heatsink attachment used to be one of the most difficult processes in building. Most newer processors (ie. Socket 939 and 754) use a lever system instead of the latch n' lock system. The ZIF sockets for CPUs have also made this process a breeze where only someone who is doing things haphazardly(really haphazardly) could screw it up.
Even USB headers now come in one piece as opposed to the 9 pin assignments of yesteryear. A PCI express card won't fit in a standard PCI slot, SATA cables don't fit in PATA Connectors, RAM can only be inserted in one direction, and so forth.
It's really become quite easy to build you own PC these days. my advice though is to find someone you might know who has some knowledge of PC building. I don't mean a slot-jockey but someone who has experience bringing a new CPU to life. Ask for some advice or pointers. You may find this person will actually help you out if you buy the pizza and cold beverages. I've been building PCs since the early 80's and I still get a warm fuzzy feeling inside everytime I hear a new CPU whir to life. Once you experience this you will truely appreciate the components of your PC. -
$7500 for a pcOriginally Posted by RDS1955
I hope it can cook, clean, and is good in bed because thats what I'd have to sleep with if my wife ever found out I paid that kind of cash on a pc
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That is correct; most of the time it is best to use the updated drivers. That wasn't what I was trying to say. My point is to have the peripheral drivers, whatever version they may be, on separate CD for installation.I'd recommend keeping any discs in their sealed packages and visiting the manufacturers website to download the latest drivers / versions of software.
As a side thought, I like to install the drivers that come with the hardware first; get the unit up and running, then worry about updating the drivers later. I also always keep a version of the older drivers available. Especially with video cards, drivers are notoriously fickle, and (in particular ATI) many folks have had to switch back to older drivers to stop driver system conflicts and BSODs after updating.
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OK, for that much of a budget you get to go crazy. So for a gaming rig that will also slam multimedia into order:
Tyan K8WE running two Opteron Italy 275s. With that board and what you plan on doing I'd say 2GB of memory is enough, or 4GB if you enable the ECC. At any rate get these sticks to put in it as the combination of Mushkin's ECC reg memory and the Tyan board will work well together. To power all this, as well as the SLI graphics, I'd leave nothing to chance and get the mini-mammoth (since the 1kW is just silly and should be redundant anyway at that point) 850W PC Power & Cooling PSU. So right there your core system has already eaten half your budget. Minty 8)
Now for video cards everyone has their favorites. I'm not hip on the PCI-E cards just yet but for a gamer with a powerhouse SLI rig you have no choice other than two 7800GTXs. I prefer anything but XFX and BFG video cards. I guess it's your own preference on that, but I'd take a quality manufacturer first. If PNY made 490 clock 7800GTXs I'd get those. And I think two of them with 512MB of VRAM each is a bit much. Two with 256MB of VRAM is going to be plenty.
Hard drive configuration will be a tough choice. When I put together the above core system (not those gaudy gamer graphics cards though) I'll probably get the 2895 with the onboard SCSI controller and run four 36GB 15k Raptors in nested RAID. RAID 0 or 1 are for noobs and have no place in a system such as this. Your arrays should be a minimum of 4 disks. Since the nForce 2200 chipset doesn't support nested arrays you could get away with four 74GB Raptor SATA drives in RAID 01 (aka 0+1). That's the safest bet, though you lose any room for storage drives. If I were going to go sans SCSI I would use a single Raptor for boot, maybe a second for extra room for applications (especially if you like to leave lots of games installed), and the rest of your SATA for the big 16MB cache 300GB SATAII monsters. That way you get good performance AND plenty of storage space.
So that still leaves about $2000 left to spend on your case and peripherals. With a rig like that I don't know if I'd mess with water-cooling. The Opterons run plenty cool without massive sinks so the only noise will be from your video cards and hard drives. For a case I'd recommend the big Lian Li one which will keep things cool and look good. Kinda large but since it's all aluminum it's very light and so you're really only concern is weight of components. If you want to use it as a media center too you certainly have the ability. Throw a Hauppauge PVR-500 in there and get an OEM copy of Windows Media Center for your OS. Media Center is basically XP Pro so you'll still be able to run all the latest games with it. And with all that processing power behind it I think you'd be able to game and record shows without any hits to performance (as long as you're recording to a seperate hard drive than your game is installed on of course). You may also want to get the latest Sound Blaster Audigy card so you can get some great EAX support for your games. I'm kinda partial to the old Audigy 2 ZS Platinum Pro just cuz I like breakout boxes. There's a new one out now but I haven't heard if it's any better or not.
Still may have a grand to sink on an LCD display? For the money I'd be hitting the Apple Store for whatever cinema display I can afford.FB-DIMM are the real cause of global warming -
OK I just read that system setup I just posted and got kinda aroused. I think this should be a monumental sticky until something new comes along to take the throne as the most powerful Windows system.
FB-DIMM are the real cause of global warming -
Whew!!! I'm getting curious...I think I'm gonna give this a try..... Gonna got to the Configuration sites, jot down the top end of the stuff I was looking for, go to some hardware sites and price out everything, compare it, and maybe give this journey a whirl to see how much I can save over the online specialty builders..two sites I'm gonna look at are newegg.com and pricewatch.com.. anyone have anywhere else they shop for hardware at??
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Buy the parts and get a geek to assemble them
With that budget, why not get two systems. One based on the FX60 (Dual Core) for gaming. Load it up with a single 7800 video card (all you need right now) on any decent Nforce mobo (ASUS A8N-SLI Delux SLI) with 2 gig 500Mhz (to over clock later) and one Western Digital 150 Gig 10,000 RPM SATA Raptor (for booting) and a basic 300 Gig SATA 7,500 RPM. For cooling, forget the big and inefficient radiator water coolers or the costly and massive phase change coolers - get a Freezone CPU Cooler from http://www.coolitsystems.com/
With the 2nd box you could setup a media center/Video Box with a generic HD tuner and a Hauppauge PVR-500, 1 gig memory, SATA drive etc. Base it on the AMD X2 3800 and a ATI AIW video card. -
thats some budget, i could build several nice computers for that price. can i have your old one?
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You need to get out-n-about abit more m'friend...Originally Posted by rallynavvie
On a more serious side;
I appreciate the effort and time you took in writing that all up..Has been a really good guide for me to try and design what I want. Also appreciate the links provided. I think I'm gonna get just about all the stuff from Newegg.com. Gonna give it a try and see what I can do.. If it's succesful, I'll post some pics and the trials and errors I ran into in geting everything and up and running..If not, I'll go hide under a rock... -
My "Old" one is less than 6 months old and I'm having some serious problems with it..It's an AMD 64 +3500 on an MSI motherboard with two SATA hard drives, 250 GB each, 1 GB of RAM, and an ATI All in Wonder 9800, I had someone build for me for about $1000. Keeps on losing it's array, and boot-on properties..I've re-installed the system three times, and still have the same problems.. Once I get the new system built and up-n-running, I'm open for offers...Originally Posted by isogonic
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Thanks for the input..Gonna give this a try..Probably save myself bout $2000 or more doing it myself, that much more I can put towards buying my 70" Hi-def DLP JVC Wide Screen & Home theater system..Originally Posted by ROF
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In your 'Old' computer, are you using RAID 0 to join both drives in a array and using that as a 500GB Boot/single drive? If so, I wouldn't recommend that setup.
Just drop the array and use the drives individually. Most RAID controllers will let you do that. RAID boot can be problematic. Two separate drives may be the best usage.
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I'll be building a screamer PC this week for a guy. I'm a computer specialist by profession which means I get to do this a lot.
What I'm doing for this guy is,
AMD 64 X2 3800
Asus A8R-MVP motherboard, supports the ATI Crossfire
2 gigs memory
ATI X1800 XL video card (only one at this time)
That's the jist of it and there certainly is room to go higher with the CPU.
Even with the rest of the parts it's only going to run him $1650 for the PC. I don't know if I could even spend as much as you are without hitting the ceiling of current technology. Ok, I probably could, like quad CPU's and 8 250gb hard drives in raid 0, 4 gig of memory for example.
My own PC is water cooled and under full load goes about 15 degrees F over ambient room temp. I'm encoding video as I write this as a matter of fact.
Basically what you could build on your own with people's help compared to what you'll pay at Dell, etc. is incomparable.
I'll say though, installing a water cooling system does take a long time, but you need to spend time thinking about how your water circuit is going to run. -
I've had it setup in RAID 0 Striped array, my understanding is that allows me to use each individually and seperately, one for boot, the other for storage. Correct me if I'm wrong. But sometimes it shows as 250 GB, other times it shows as a 500 GB harddrive, but half of it not being accessable..But today, it won't even boot, tells me the array is'nt there, etc, etc..Probably going to gut it tomorrow and rebuild it all over again and make certain all the conections are tight and right..I dug out all the documentation to it today, and I'll start going over it all tomorrow...not certain if the problems I'm having are due to Faulty parts, connections or if the guy who built it for me actually didnn't understand what he was doing..Originally Posted by redwudzIn your 'Old' computer, are you using RAID 0 to join both drives in a array and using that as a 500GB Boot/single drive? If so, I wouldn't recommend that setup.
Just drop the array and use the drives individually. Most RAID controllers will let you do that. RAID boot can be problematic. Two separate drives may be the best usage. -
If you had two 250Gb drives in a RAID 0 array, they would show up as a single 500Gb drive. The problem is if one drive fails, all data is lost. If the array fails, then you can generally repair it. Raid 0 is not fault tolerant, that's why I don't use it for boot.
There are other ways to set up a RAID array. One is RAID 1, which will keep two copies of all data. But it will just give you a 250Gb drive and is slower than RAID 0.
If your RAID setup is causing a lot of problems, just delete the array and use the individual drives. The gained stability would likely be worth the loss in transfer speed.
If you want to measure the transfer speed of RAID VS Non RAID, try a program like SiSandra:
http://www.overclockersclub.com/downloadcenter/download.php?action=file&id=12
Some general RAID info:
http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/R/RAID.html -
@Zenguitar
I put together a A8R-MVP board based system together last week. Make sure to visit the Asus website and download the latest drivers. Asus updated both the chipset and LAN drivers after the first of the year. The disc supplied with my motherboard obviously didn't have those and the sound drivers on the CD weren't for the sound chip on my A8R. The drivers at the Asus site were the correct ones.
A nice board with plenty of room for expansion. I like how Asus has switched from the normal vertical IDE to horizontal slot configuration. Having them on the edge of the board and in that direction adds a few precious measurements when you have to stretch a cable. Plenty of USB and firewire support as well. -
My problem is that I'm an SMP junky. For my own business at home I have as much budget for equipment as I allow myself to have, which roughly works out to a new $5000 system each year. At my day job I'm forced to coax antiquated systems to run the latest design and enterprise apps with no possibility of hardware upgrades in the near future. Building a hefty system like this is a lot of fun for me.
However if you're having issues with that current system you may want to think twice about jumping into a monster system like the one I posted. Spending more money on a system will not solve all your problems. It'll be wicked-fast, but you have to know how to maintain a system in order for it to keep running well. Think of your current system as a learner system. Get to know all of its available features and what's good/bad about them. RAID is bollocks, and if you read that bit in my big post you'd keep away from it. Even with a budget as large as yours it just isn't needed for what you plan to do with it.
@zenguitar
$7500 may be near the ceiling for a desktop system but wouldn't get you a very good quad-CPU setup. You're looking over $10k easy for that. Single dual-core systems are kind of an odd beast. I don't recommend them just because folks don't know what to do with that sort of processing power. Games won't see both cores, you're really just aiming at encoding and design apps that'll use all that processing power.FB-DIMM are the real cause of global warming -
While most games don't support dual core, many will soon and patches have already been released to support them in some games (i.e. Call of Duty 2)Originally Posted by rallynavvie
Another point that should be made is that up to now AMD cpu's could not handle multitasking at all well. In fact they were pretty poor compared to the p4. Now that serious limitation is past - the AMD FX60 and X2 64 cpu's can handle multiple non smp aware processes at the same time. I can predict that few will be buying single core cpu's after December 2006. -
Honestly what I would try to do is a dual cpu setup with dual core cpu's and 2 gigs memory .
Because yes, you have to buy a monitor and that's going to cut into the pc budget of course.
Yeah, not all games support that but they will, so why limit yourself now? This is a video site anyway and that's where you really want the power right?
ROF,
Yeah, I always download the recent drivers for everything. Can you tell me how that PC is performing and what video card did you choose for it? -
Which is exactly what I was recommending in my massive post just because a budget like that could afford it.Originally Posted by zenguitar
We are a video site, yes, not really a gaming one. 2D video doesn't need any fancy cards, just one that supports the resolution you want to runOriginally Posted by zenguitar
FB-DIMM are the real cause of global warming -
yeah, that is what you posted but I didn't say it wasn't or anything. I suppose I changed my mind, although I would still go a different route that what you said but I really don't see anybody being wrong with their suggestions.
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