New video editing workhorse - Build input please

[Peter Telian]

I think I'm getting closer. And I'm liking the idea to go with avadirect (thanks Mark, I wasn't aware of them). For $150 (inc tax+shp) more I can get 3 years parts and labor and it all put together and tested for me.

Here's the build at this point. Randall, thanks for the mobo info. I switched to the P6T Deluxe. I wont have room to expand storage (except for the eSATA on the back), but I don't think I'll need to. Also, this build has the GeForce 285 (which I can blame on Dave).

Case: COOLER MASTER HAF 932 (RC-932-KKN1-GP) Black Tower Case
Power: CORSAIR CMPSU-850TX TX Series Power Supply, 850W
Mobo: ASUS P6T Deluxe V2, LGA1366, Intel® X58
Processor: INTEL Core™ i7-930 Quad-Core 2.8GHz, LGA1366
RAM: CORSAIR 12GB (6 x 2GB) XMS3 PC3-12800 DDR3
Video: XFX GeForce® GTX 285 648MHz, 1GB GDDR3 2484MHz
Boot: SAMSUNG 500GB SpinPoint F3, SATA
Raid 0: SAMSUNG 1TB SpinPoint F3, SATA
Raid 0: SAMSUNG 1TB SpinPoint F3, SATA
Final render/misc: SAMSUNG 1TB SpinPoint F3, SATA
Optical: LITE-ON DVD±RW
OS: MICROSOFT Windows 7 Professional 64-bit Edition
Warranty: Silver Warranty Package (3 Year Limited Parts, 3 Year Labor Warranty)

$2494 including shipping

[Steve Kalle]

Peter, if Microcenter is near you in CA, they have as good or better prices than newegg, and they will even match newegg if their prices happen to be higher. For example, Microcenter has the i7 920 for only $199.99.

It appears you are biased towards Western Digital. For Raid, the WD Black should be avoided because WD changed the firmware to spin the drive down as much as possible which causes problems with Raid controllers. When a drive doesn't respond within several seconds, most Raid controllers think the drive is bad and 'drops' the drive from the raid array. In the case of Raid 0, all data will be lost even though all drives still work. WD used to have a function called TLER to combat this but they essentially crippled it on their Caviar Black drives in order to get people to buy their 'RE' Raid Edition drives which cost 40-50% more. I became aware of this issue from reading newegg's reviews, focusing on the 1 & 2 star reviews.

Another reason I don't like the WD Blacks is that they tend to have a high pitch sound, which I learned after building a workstation/server for someone last year. Its somewhat funny because the 2 10,000 rpm WD Velociraptors in that PC are much quieter than the 1TB Blacks.

Also, the new 6Gb/s drives don't provide any sort of performance improvement over 3Gb/s drives.

Disclaimer: I am not a Seagate/WD/.. fanboy. In fact, even though I have 11 Seagate drives in my PC, I am looking to get several Samsung F3 1TB drives because 1)they are the fastest available; 2) only cost $85; 3) have the best reviews for hard drives I have ever seen on newegg, which means I can trust them. Furthermore, I just had a 3rd WD Raptor die within the last 8 months (the first 2 died within a week of one another). I actually like my Raptors dying because WD has been sending me Velociraptors (anyone know how I make my other 5 Raptors die? :p

[Peter Telian]

Thanks for the reply Steve.

The closest Micro Center is about 3 hours away. I have never been. Do they have a good inventory? I got the components for the last computer I built at Frys Electronics...Micro Center is likely similar.

I'm not necessarily biased for WD. I'm more just being consistent. And looking at the overall review score they seemed good. But that is great information about the Raid compatibility (I love this forum!). I've actually been running Raid 0 with 400GB Maxtors for the last 3 years without a problem.

I don't have the 6Gb/s drives on the list anymore. But that's interesting information.

Based on your recommendation, I'll switch them to Seagates. Or Samsung?

[Steve Kalle]

Another couple comments:

1) that case will not be quiet due to the large fan/opening on the side and the WD drives. I don't how much noise you can live with; however, if you prefer as little noise as possible, here is what I know: Antec and Lian-Li cases are both high to very high quality and many of their cases use sound deadening material. I had the Antec P180 (new version is P182/P183) and it was very quiet, which is why I had bought it to go next to a tv. That workstation/server I referred to in my prior post was with the P180. I say this because I could still hear the WD Blacks.

I have been using a Lian-Li PC-V2100 and can't say enough good things about it.
http://lian-li.com/v2/tw/product/upl.../V2100-(3).jpg
http://lian-li.com/v2/tw/product/upl...0/V2100a02.jpg
It is even quieter than the Antec P180.

Many of us here love our ASUS motherboards (I have the P6T). I like the new P6X58D because it has USB 3.0 built in as well as Sata 6Gb, which is only good for upcoming SSD's.

If you want to overclock, you will need a better heatsink/fan. One of the best is the Noctua Newegg.com - Noctua NH-U12P SE2 120mm SSO CPU Cooler - CPU Fans & Heatsinks It is rather quiet and extremely efficient at removing heat. I had a Zalman 9700 (a $60 heatsink/fan) and it was about 20% more efficient at removing heat then the stock Intel fan, and then I went to that Noctua, and its far better. For overclocking tips, find Harm Milliard's posts because he has an i7 920 clocked at 3.6-3.8GHz using the same Noctua heatsink/fan. His i7 920 @ 3.6GHz temp at 100% load is essentially the same as stock 2.66GHz with stock Intel heatsink/fan.

I assume you use Adobe CS4, including Premiere, but what about After Effects? If you use AE a lot, I would consider 18GB or 24GB. Actually, if you plan on getting Adobe CS5, consider getting a 12GB kit of ram with 3 4GB sticks so you will have 3 slots free to add more ram when you get CS5 - why? Because Premiere CS5 and AE CS5 will both be 64bit native, which means they can take full advantage of all that ram, and the more ram, the better.

EDIT: if the Samsung F3 is in stock, I'd go with them for the 1TB drives but maybe stick with the 640GB WD Black or Samsung F3 500GB for the boot/OS drive. FYI, I bet a single 1TB Samsung F3 is faster than your 2 Maxtors in Raid. The 1TB F3 averages roughly 115MB/s.
Yes, Microcenter has a very good inventory. Check their site, and at the top, select the closet store to you - the site will then show you only what is in stock at that store.

EDIT1.1: Take a look here at the F3's performance: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...it,2528-7.html

[Randall Leong]

Originally Posted by Steve Kalle

It appears you are biased towards Western Digital. For Raid, the WD Black should be avoided because WD changed the firmware to spin the drive down as much as possible which causes problems with Raid controllers. When a drive doesn't respond within several seconds, most Raid controllers think the drive is bad and 'drops' the drive from the raid array. In the case of Raid 0, all data will be lost even though all drives still work. WD used to have a function called TLER to combat this but they essentially crippled it on their Caviar Black drives in order to get people to buy their 'RE' Raid Edition drives which cost 40-50% more. I became aware of this issue from reading newegg's reviews, focusing on the 1 & 2 star reviews.

Not only that, but they crippled TLER on all of their recent consumer SATA drives. (This includes the Caviar Blue and the Caviar Green as well.)

Originally Posted by Steve Kalle

Another reason I don't like the WD Blacks is that they tend to have a high pitch sound, which I learned after building a workstation/server for someone last year. Its somewhat funny because the 2 10,000 rpm WD Velociraptors in that PC are much quieter than the 1TB Blacks.

Also, the new 6Gb/s drives don't provide any sort of performance improvement over 3Gb/s drives.

And not only that, the Blacks run noisier and hotter than most other SATA hard drives.

Originally Posted by Steve Kalle

Disclaimer: I am not a Seagate/WD/.. fanboy. In fact, even though I have 11 Seagate drives in my PC, I am looking to get several Samsung F3 1TB drives because 1)they are the fastest available; 2) only cost $85; 3) have the best reviews for hard drives I have ever seen on newegg, which means I can trust them. Furthermore, I just had a 3rd WD Raptor die within the last 8 months (the first 2 died within a week of one another). I actually like my Raptors dying because WD has been sending me Velociraptors (anyone know how I make my other 5 Raptors die? :p

I've also read negative reviews on the Samsung hard drives. Historically, that brand has been among the least reliable of all brands of hard drives. And the Spinpoint F-something series have not been in use for a long enough period to judge reliability. WD's reliability has also been all over the place. And Seagate has been having more problems than usual with their 7200.11 series drives; however, the reliability data is inconclusive (meaning not enough repair or replacement data) with their newer 7200.12 and XT lines. And Hitachi has never been renowned for its reliability, as well.

All this means is "you get what you pay for." In fact, you might have to spend at least twice as much money per TB today (as compared to the current average street prices of the consumer 1TB SATA hard drives) for a hard drive that's suitably reliable for long-term continuous operation since none of today's consumer SATA hard drives are meant to be used continuously for more than eight hours.

[Peter Telian]

As far as cases, I really want a full tower...I really don't like to be cramped. And the airflow potential that those fans supply. But at the same time...the quieter the better. Thanks for the recommendations...I'm looking into them. Do you think all I want to put in it will fit and still be roomy?

I was wondering about getting an after market CPU heatsink. If I do overclock this, it would be my first time.

I occasionally use AE, but not a whole lot. I think 12 GB is enough of an upgrade for now (coming from 4!).

[Steve Kalle]

Randall, the number of overall positive reviews on newegg for the Samsung F3 are better than any other drive within the last 3 years. Considering that newegg has been known for poor shipping & handling plus very few 1 star & 2 star reviews for the F3 series, I can't come to any conclusion other than they are very reliable.

Furthermore, all hard drive manufacturers have a very similar failure rate under identical conditions. A couple years ago, Google released a detailed report of their hard drive usage and failure rate. I recall that the most significant factor in failure rate was the operating temp. Above a certain temp, the failure rate increased exponentially every x# of degrees. In fact, Google relies heavily on cheap 'consumer' hard drives because they found that they were a far better return on investment compared to 'enterprise' drives (WD RE3, Hitachi Ultrastar, Seagate ES.2).

Heck, my own experience supports Google's conclusions. Out of 8 Raptors, 'enterprise' drives, 3 failed in 2-2.5 yrs of use; while none of the 17 Seagate drives (6 7200.10s, 3 7200.11s, 8 7200.12s) have failed and my PCs are always on 24/7.

Peter, what about these cases:
Newegg.com - LIAN LI PC-B70 Black Aluminum ATX Full Tower Computer Case - Computer Cases
^this B70 has sound insulation material on the sides, has very nice hard drive trays that use rubber to reduce vibration and uses copious amounts of rubber throughout to reduce vibration. It costs a bit more than the others, but the case should last you numerous years; thus, it really is an investment.

Newegg.com - LIAN LI PC-A71F Black Aluminum ATX Full Tower Computer Case - Computer Cases
^similar to B70 but no sound insulation material and far less rubber; however, it has a door, which helps lower noise from the front 2 fans (although the fans are large and run at very low speed. the larger the fan and the lower the speed both contribute to lower fan noise)

For the money, this Xigamtek CPU cooler works great and will allow you to overclock to 3.4-3.6GHz very easily. Besides lower temps, good aftermarket cpu coolers are quieter than the stock Intel cooler. Newegg.com - XIGMATEK Intel Core i7 compatible Dark Knight-S1283V 120mm Long Life Bearing CPU Cooler - CPU Fans & Heatsinks

[Randall Leong]

Originally Posted by Steve Kalle

Randall, the number of overall positive reviews on newegg for the Samsung F3 are better than any other drive within the last 3 years. Considering that newegg has been known for poor shipping & handling plus very few 1 star & 2 star reviews for the F3 series, I can't come to any conclusion other than they are very reliable.

Furthermore, all hard drive manufacturers have a very similar failure rate under identical conditions. A couple years ago, Google released a detailed report of their hard drive usage and failure rate. I recall that the most significant factor in failure rate was the operating temp. Above a certain temp, the failure rate increased exponentially every x# of degrees. In fact, Google relies heavily on cheap 'consumer' hard drives because they found that they were a far better return on investment compared to 'enterprise' drives (WD RE3, Hitachi Ultrastar, Seagate ES.2).

Heck, my own experience supports Google's conclusions. Out of 8 Raptors, 'enterprise' drives, 3 failed in 2-2.5 yrs of use; while none of the 17 Seagate drives (6 7200.10s, 3 7200.11s, 8 7200.12s) have failed and my PCs are always on 24/7.

Those reasons (along, as you stated, with the incompatibility of recent WD consumer hard drives with RAID configurations) are exactly why I chose two 1TB 7200.12 drives instead of two WDs for my RAID 0 auxiliary array. (Of course, a 1TB Black is currently utilized as my system drive.) And note that "auxiliary" does not mean little-used; in fact, an "auxiliary" RAID 0 array is used frequently as either a source or an output ("render to") drive for my video edit work depending on which drive the source video is located on. Plus, the Seagates have a higher sequential throughput than the 1TB WD Black because the 7200.12 uses two platters and four heads to attain 1TB while the Black uses a three-platter, six-head design. (The WD Black does offer a drive with 500GB platters - but only the 2TB version of that drive currently uses such platters in the Black line.) I could not find Samsung F3 drives in stock anywhere in my area (if they carry Samsung at all, they carry only those designs that are one or two generations old) especially since the nearest Micro Center is more than an hour's worth of commuting from where I'm at.

[Ervin Farkas]

Any drive can be used in RAID configurations, provided you use appropriate software.

Where "green" drives might give you trouble: if you have source clips on several drives AND you are printing to tape. Since tape will not stop to wait for the green drive to wake up from sleep, the operation will fail.

[Randall Leong]

Originally Posted by Ervin Farkas

Any drive can be used in RAID configurations, provided you use appropriate software.

Where "green" drives might give you trouble: if you have source clips on several drives AND you are printing to tape. Since tape will not stop to wait for the green drive to wake up from sleep, the operation will fail.

The problem is that all recent WD consumer hard drives are unsuitable for use in a RAID array due to their firmware permanently enabling the power-saving spin-down feature (this feature cannot be disabled at all). And when those drives spin down due to the lack of sufficient activity, the drives take much too long to respond; thus, the RAID controller will report the WD drives as "bad" and will drop the array completely, resulting in a loss of all data in the array (as Steve Kalle has stated) even though the drives are still good (the loss of data becomes permanent, requiring super-expensive professional data recovery methods). If you choose WD, you are now required to purchase the enterprise (RAID) versions of those drives at a significantly higher price than their corresponding consumer versions.

In other words, the WD Caviar Green and Black are not incompatible with RAID; it's just that they are unsuitable for use in a RAID array due to their permanently enabled power-saving features. There is a difference between compatibility and suitability. RAID actually requires that all of the drives in the array spin continuously at full speed at all times. Unfortunately, the WD consumer drives, especially the Green and the Black, don't - and they cannot be set to spin continuously at full speed (and they spin down completely after just a few minutes of non-access, just like their consumer MyBook external hard drive kits).

The WD Caviar Blue drives don't count because they have not been updated since the introduction of the 640GB model, and no new drives are currently being developed for this series. In fact, WD wants to make the Green their mainstream series and the Black their performance series (and yet neither of these two series is suitable for use in a RAID array, as I and Steve stated several times). 1TB and 1.5TB versions of the Blue were produced - but they've been used only in the company's MyBook Home Edition (which was compatible with both Windows and Mac due to it being formatted with the FAT32 file system) and Studio Edition external hard drive kits; the former series was discontinued late last year (and now there are currently no Windows-compatible out-of-the-box WD external hard drive kits which use anything but USB) while the Studio series is Mac-specific (it can be used with Windows, but must be reformatted and the appropriate Windows-compatible drive software must be downloaded from WD's site).

[Randall Leong]

Originally Posted by Randall Leong

That's the P6T that the folks here have been talking about (and the one one of the regulars in these forums, Craig Coston, uses). Unfortunately, it's not the best choice if you have more than one PCI-e x1 card that you want to use with the system: It has only one PCI-e x1 slot. Period. Three other PCI-e slots are for graphics cards only. And it has way more legacy connectors than what I consider a modern motherboard, and such legacy connectors eat up all the space that could have been used for more modern features: It has one floppy port, two PS/2 ports, two legacy 32-bit/33MHz PCI slots, even a PATA (IDE) port. At least it did away with the onboard serial and parallel ports. Plus, like most motherboard manufacturers, Asus opted to disable the ICH10R's dedicated Intel LAN controller connection in favor of using up one of the ICH10R's six PCI-e lanes for a Realtek LAN controller. (Perhaps because the Realtek PCI-e LAN controller chip costs Taiwanese motherboard manufacturers less money than an Intel LAN controller chip designed for the ICH10R's dedicated LAN controller connection?) Now this would not be a disadvantage since the P6T offers only one PCI-e x1 slot; however, Asus manufactures other motherboards based on the P6T design which include a lot more add-on controllers (namely the USB 3.0 and SATA III controllers) which eat up additional PCI-e lanes (you see, the ICH10R offers only six PCI-e lanes on top of the 36 offered by the X58 chipset's IOH). And although the P6T offers eight SATA ports and one eSATA port, only six of the internal SATA ports are directly controlled by the Intel ICH10R. The other two SATA ports are controlled by a separate Jmicron controller while the eSATA port is powered by the same Jmicron controller which also powers the motherboard's sole PATA port.

It's a good board, despite the disadvantages that I noted above. It would have been a better board had Asus eliminated most of the unneeded legacy features on it.

Actually, Craig uses the P6T Deluxe v2, not the plain P6T. It costs more money due to its use of more expensive, higher-quality components (such as larger capacitors and resistors and a thicker circuit board with more layers) and the use of dual Marvell LAN controllers (instead of the single Realtek LAN controller that's used on less-expensive Asus motherboards). The P6T Deluxe v2 might cost more and have fewer features overall than the plain P6T - but the extra cost goes into a motherboard that offers better overclocking performance and stability. In other words, the pricey P6T Deluxe v2 is one of the very few 1366 motherboards that I'd recommend if you're going to overclock your i7-920 or 930 processor to 4.0 GHz and beyond (with the proper CPU cooler), while the plain P6T would suffice if you're just doing stock clocks with your processor. (The Intel reference motherboard I'm currently using falls in between the two in terms of overclocking performance and stability, petering out at around 3.8 GHz - at 4.0 GHz, my system booted into Windows, but crashed in Prime95 after an hour.)

[Steve Kalle]

Randall, whomever said that all the PCI-Ex slots (besides x1) are for graphics cards , is wrong. I have 2 Raid controllers in mine in addition to a gfx card.

Also, tomshardware.com tested the overclocking capabilities of the P6T SE, P6T & P6T Deluxe. There was little to no difference between the top 2 boards - I think the only difference was the Deluxe used slightly more power.

[Randall Leong]

I have known that. I should have said "PCI-e 2.0 lanes," not "graphics-dedicated PCI-e lanes." (I had used that incorrect term solely due to the length of the slots that are associated with that bus.) However, the truth is that any device installed in the full-length PCI-e slots is routed to the PCI-e 2.0 bus, not the PCI-e 1.x bus.

And, of course, the "bandwidth sharing" is dynamic. This means that the full bandwidth of the PCI-e bus is available if none of the devices using it are operating at their full bandwidth. But when one of the devices on the bus maxes out its bandwidth, then yes, the available bandwidth will drop.

[Craig Coston]

There goes Randall again, calling me out and then beating around the fact that he was flat out wrong =) Dude... PCIe x1 can be used in any PCIe slot... you aren't out of luck if you have more than 1 PCIe x1 card. Just take a look at my system! I'd rather have 4 PCIe x16 slots (like some of my boards have had) than a bunch of PCIe x1 slots... it gives you more options. Given that NLE's don't take advantage of SLI or Crossfire, there is NO reason to run more than one graphics card in a system, so that leaves all the other x16 slots for whatever else you can throw on them.

Reading specs and understanding real life usage are two WAY different things.

[Peter Telian]

Ok. The final build!

Case: ANTEC Performance One P193 Black Mid-Tower Computer Case
Power: CORSAIR CMPSU-850TX TX Series Power Supply, 850W
Mobo: ASUS P6TD Deluxe
Processor: INTEL Core i7-930 Quad-Core 2.8GHz
CPU Cooler: COOLER MASTER Hyper N620 CPU Cooler
RAM: CORSAIR 12GB (6 x 2GB) XMS3 PC3-12800 DDR3 1600MHz CL9
Graphics: EVGA GeForce GTX 285, GTX 285 648MHz, 1GB GDDR3 2484MHz
Boot: SAMSUNG 1TB SpinPoint F3
Raid 0: SAMSUNG 1TB SpinPoint F3
Raid 0: SAMSUNG 1TB SpinPoint F3
Render: SAMSUNG 1TB SpinPoint F3
Optical: LITE-ON iHAS124 Black 24x
3.5" Reader: SABRENT CRW-UINB 65-in-1 Card Reader
OS: MICROSOFT Windows 7 Professional 64-bit Edition, OEM

AVADirect Total: $2479.14

Thanks for the suggestions everyone! Have any more? Better get them in quick!