My Turn!

[Jonty]

Hi guys

Since everyone else gets to post about their new system, I guess mods should too I'm in the process of building a new Shuttle PC, my first for years since I've always preferred laptops before.

This time I thought I'd choose a powerful desktop and perhaps buy a cheap netbook in June (for work) once Intel's Centrino Atom is available (Via put my off HP's netbook, but Dell, Acer, and ASUS will apparently launch Atom systems in June).

Anyway, below are the proposed specs:

• Shuttle SX38P2 (Intel X38 motherboard, 450W PSU)
  I know the X48 Shuttle is available in June, but the only major additions are: DDR3 memory support, 1600Mhz FSB support, dual-gigabit LAN and a fingerprint reader. None of these are must haves for me.
  
• Intel Core 2 Quad Q9450 (2.66GHz, 12MB cache, 1333mhz, 45nm)
  The Q6600 is significantly cheaper, so perhaps I'm being daft paying the extra for the 45nm Penryn technology.
  
• 8GB DDR2 RAM (800Mhz or 1066Mhz)
  I use photo editing applications and some other demanding apps, hence the excessive amount of RAM. I also want the system to last 2-3 years, so it will come in handy. DDR2 1333Mhz is rare and very expensive, so I plan to overclock good quality 800Mhz or 1066Mhz RAM to 1333Mhz to match the CPU speed. Any thoughts or concerns? (I've never overclocked before).
  
• nVidia GeForce 9800GTX (512MB)
  I know the 8800 series is cheaper and essentially the same, but the reference versions of this card are not much more expensive than the older generation products.
  
• Western Digital 500GB HDD (7200rpm, 16MB cache, SATA-II)
  I only used about 30-40GB, excluding games, so I don't need 1TB or anything crazy (I only chose 500GB because it's so cheap). There is a cheaper Seagate drive with 32MB cache, but I've never used them before. Recommendations?
  
• Blu-Ray Drive (5x Blu-ray read; 12x DVD burn)
  Since the format war is over, I thought I'd treat myself. It's expensive, but not too exorbitant. I don't need to write Blu-ray disks since I have an external hard drive for backups.
  
• Vista Home Premium (64-bit) and Office 2007 Standard
  I don't need the added features of Vista Ultimate, and I need Windows my applications, plus Office for work.

I think that's everything. Any thoughts or concerns? Did I miss something? Anything I could choose better? Thanks in advance.

Kind regards

Jonty

P.S. I could save a lot of money by choosing slightly older tech (e.g. Q6600 CPU and 8800 GT GFX) so am I being daft trying to squeeze out a little more performance?

 

[inactionman]

Ok, from the reviews it looks like a Q9450 is only approximately 10% faster than a Q6600, and you should be able to make that up via an easy overclock, which should save you a bit of money.

Memory overclocking can be problematic, as you'll have to relax the timings and increase the voltage. You are probably better off just getting some good low-latency 1066MHz ram, as it's a performance trade off between timings and raw bandwidth.

TBH you are better off getting a good overclocked version of a 8800GTS than a 9800GTX, there's no performance difference, and quite a price difference, £70 or so over here! You are looking for a 675MHz one, preferably.

500TB HD, I assume that's a typo? Best to get a drive with 32Mb of cache, the samsungs are good, seagate aren't bad (check storagereview though).

The format war may be over, but digital downloads will probably win in the end. Sure get a blu-ray drive, however you'll need to purchase decoding software if you are planning on watching any movies, AFAIK windows doesn't come with it.

 

[Jonty]

Hi inactionman

Thanks, you're a star, your reply helps a lot.

Kind regards

Jonty

P.S. Yes, 500TB was a typo That said, I heard Microsoft and Google now have petabytes of imaging data for their mapping service, so I guess some people need amount of storage

P.P.S. You're right, Vista Home Premium only comes with DVD decoding software, but no HD-DVD or Blu-ray support (although I guess it can Windows Media Player and Windows Media Centre can use third-party codecs once installed).

I'm with you on the digital downloads, especially after my hotel in Japan had free 100Mbps internet in the room, but I guess a cheap(ish) Blu-ray drive isn't a bad stop-gap until such services are mainstream.

 

[TdC]

Jonts my friend, tbh I'd get a Q6600 and overclock it to 3Ghz. It's easy and stable to do, and worth it over the penryn, though it may impede your future upgrade path. The way to make it happen is described on this very forum. This option will also set you up for 1066Mhz ram, which will lower your budget reqs slightly.

For my other point, if you can fit two drives into your shuttle, it may well be worth it to get two hard drives, and mirror them, or get an external disk (with two or more drives that you can set to mirror each other. Or make lots of images to your lovely BD drive

 

[Jonty]

Hi TdC

Thank you! You guys are slowly convincing me about the CPU. Basically, the price and performance is as follows (name, clock speed, L2 cache, FSB speed, manufacturing level, approximate price):

Q9450     2.66Ghz     12MB     1333Mhz     45nm     £210
Q9300     2.50Ghz     6MB      1333Mhz     45nm     £170
Q6600     2.40Ghz     8MB      1066Mhz     65nm     £130

I checked the technical specs and the TDP (thermal and power ratings) difference between the 45nm and 65nm chips is quite small (95 and 105 respectively), therefore I'm not gaining much in terms of power and heat savings.

As for two hard-drives, I'm not sure about this. The Shuttle can manage it, but 2x250GB is naturally a little more expensive than 1x500GB, plus I already have an external drive for backups. I've never needed to use RAID before, but perhaps I could consider it for performance rather than redundancy?

Kind regards

 

[TdC]

You could try a performance based RAID option, although this usually means that losing one disk equates losing everything with no chance of being able to rebuild. Mind that a performance option usually is very fast though. However even a mirror (RAID-1) can boost performance somewhat because you can round-robin load balance reads (depending on how smart your controller is), although you do lose 50% of your capacity.

 

[inactionman]

I wouldn't recommend RAID-1, it may give you some performance increases, however it's at the expense of reliability and simplicity. Also there's been a lot of press recently about how the reliability claims of the drive manufacturers are at best, optimistic, at worst, downright misleading.

Another option for performance increases is to use solid state storage, either by a SATA/IDE drive, or by using an internal fast USB flash drive with the OS and other things on it (this can get fiddly to configure as it's best to move page files, temp files, anything that gets written to often to the the non-flash drive to prevent drive wearout).

 

[TdC]

I wouldn't recommend RAID-1, it may give you some performance increases, however it's at the expense of reliability and simplicity.

eh? how does a mirror do that?


also, you don't have to mirror through a sata raid chip, you can tell doze to do it in your storage management app iirc. saves you a driver.

 

[inactionman]

Oops. Often get confused between RAID-0 and RAID-1!

RAID-1 may not be great from a performance point of view, as it increases write times whilst reducing read times (with some overhead if it's done in the chipset, more if it's in software).

 

[Jonty]

Hi guys

Thanks for the tips. I think I'll pass on RAID, since it seems overkill for my needs, but I guess it's always an option in the future. I did look WD's Raptor X drives (10k rpm) for an easy speed boost, but they're very expensive for the capacity, so I guess that's out. The SSD option is interesting, but I think I'll just keep things simple for now.

Regarding the CPU, after more reading it seems the Q9300 (officially the Q6600's replacement) offers better performance out of the box, but is more difficult to overclock (as you said, the Q6600 can easily reach 3-3.6Ghz with air cooling, although a Shuttle system is obviously more restricted because of heat issues). I don't plan on overclocking, but it would be nice to have the option in the future.

Hmm, decisions ... Anyway, thanks again.

Kind regards

 

[TdC]

sure Taiwan has TB sized SSD's by now? your shuttle could have a singularity in a containment field as it's PSU for all us rustics know

 

[Jonty]

hehe, you're right Teeds, Taiwan doesn't have that much of a lead! There are no 1TB SSDs, they top out around 256GB, but I meant inactionman's idea about using a small, cheap SSD for the OS. As for quantum singularities, get it patented

Come to think of it, not all hardware is particularly advanced or cheap in Taiwan. Ironically many Taiwanese companies only R&D here, but outsource production to their plants in China, so the products have to be imported back to Taiwan which means delays and higher prices.

Thankfully the local computer stores are an enthusiast's paradise, and they offer discounts for cash (goodness knows what their accounts are like, hehe). However, all in all, it's not always dramatically cheaper than the UK.

Kind regards

 

[Embattle]

Shuttle SX38P2 - I do like the Shuttle range as you know, but I've only ever had the one since I do tend to find them a bit louder than most full size PCs. Also customising them a bit, no I don't mean fancy lights either, is always harder which is something I did try with my original Shuttle.

Intel Core 2 Quad Q9450 - Ironically I got this months copy of PCPRO and they've reviewed all the recent processors based on performance and price, the only two processors to recieve 6 stars (Maximum) were the E8200 and E8400 due to low price and great performance, below is a quick mock up of the results:

E8200 - 6MB Cache - 2.66GHz - 1,333 FSB - £96 - 1.42 Performance - 6 Stars
E8400 - 6MB Cache - 3GHz - 1,333 FSB - £119 - 1.53 Performance - 6 Stars
Q6600 - 8MB Cache - 2.4GHz - 1,066 FSB - £133 - 1.45 Performance - 5 Stars
Q9450 - 12MB Cache - 2.66GHz - 1,333 FSB - £186 - 1.63 Performance - 4 Stars

As you can see the two you were looking at did fine, the Q6600 did well and like the others I totally agree that you don't need to worry about the GHz because quite frankly these processors OC very well. Take my E6700, it OCs to 3GHz easily without any issues and without getting much hotter or feeling the need to melt through to China.

8GB DDR2 RAM - Overclocking ram is fiddly imo since it can suffer from chipset issues and sometimes even good quality ram seems to throw a fit. I would make sure you do your homework before actually purchasing a particular make of ram and get some feedback if possible from actual users of your shuttle if possible via forums.

nVidia GeForce 9800GTX - Really is a lukewarm version of the 8800 with a few more stream processors and a slightly higher clock speed, ironically this card got the PCPRO treatment as well and got 3 stars the main issues being the price and fact the Radeon HD 3870 X2 is roughly the same price. They also reviewed the 9800 GX2, it got 4 stars but that one is a little bit expensive

Western Digital 500GB HDD - Well I've been using Raid 0 for ages and never (Touch wood) suffered a failure and the reality is most people are unlikely to suffer a drive failure before replacing a HD. The thing to bear in mind whether you run Raid or just a single drive makes no difference, you should always have some sort of backup system in place if you value your work. The slowest thing in computers is still generally HDs, however while there is a performance gain with using Raid 0 the fact is that most onboard solutions aren't going to give you that amazing improvement over a single good drive.

In terms of going for a good drive you must get a Samsung F1 drive (1TB & 750GB), these are very good drives in terms of speed and in some tests they beat Raptors although avoid the 1Tb because besides being a little OTT compared to what you asked it is also massively more expensive than the 750GB one.

 

[Jonty]

Hi Embattle

Thank you so much! I'm glad you had that copy of PC Pro handy It's a good point about the Core 2 Duos. The E8400 does offer great performance for the price, and it's true that games and applications are mostly optimized for multiple cores. It may be worth buying an E8400 now and considering upgrading if/when necessary.

So this leaves: E8400 (cheapest, 45nm, great performance, but possibly loses its edge in the future); Q6600 (cheap, great overclocker, perhaps longer longevity, but slightly older 65nm design); Q9300 (not so cheap, 45nm, greater longevity, but more difficult to overclock). Since they'll all provide great performance in the short-term, I guess this will come down to price.

Regarding the graphics card, the stock 9800 GTX is priced beneath the overclocked 8800 GTSs over here, so I think I'll stick with it. That said, there are some factory overclocked 9800 GTXs trickling through, so it might be worth looking at how much of a premium they carry (the GX2 is out since this Shuttle doesn't support SLI). Whatever I chose, it will be outdated in Q3-Q4 this year when nVidia release their proper G200 next generation cards, so I won't fret too much.

Thanks for the heads up about the Spinpoint F1. However, when researching it, I came across Western Digital's Caviar SE16 which some claim is even better (and cheaper), although slightly smaller in capacity (not that it bothers me).

Kind regards

 

[inactionman]

You don't need an SLI motherboard for the GX2, although I'd not recommend doing it as your PSU is a bit underpowered, and it's not the greatest product.

Interesting that the 9800GTX is cheaper out there, must be as you are nearer the start of the supply chain.

You thought about the Samsung T166?

 

[Jonty]

Hi inactionman

Thanks! You're right, the GX2 doesn't need SLI, I was thinking of something else Anyway, you're right that it's not so great considering the price, so I won't be going for it.

Just to complicate things, today I found out the 9800 GTX is 10.5" long and blocks one of the motherboard power connectors in this Shuttle. It looks like a small cut in the 9800's plastic cover would solve the problem, but I've never tried this before. Does anyone have any experience with modding graphics cards? If I chicken out, it would mean getting an 8800 GTS or 3870 as they're both shorter and avoid this problem.

As for the T166, it looks very good, but sadly I can't find it here in Taiwan (at least not in the shops I intend to buy from). I think I'll settle with the Caviar SE16, as it seems a good balance between performance, power, and noise.

Kind regards

 

[Embattle]

While I've removed the HSFs from graphics cards I've never actually cut into one, I tend to think while not impossible by any means it could be slightly risky and a tiny bit annoying without the right tools.