Opinions requested new Intel build - Page 2

Sorry man, don't get dishearted, I'd like to say sorry because I was a bit mean there and I didn't need to be :-(, however lets go through were you made your mistakes

PSU - Yes, a good choice however the x750 is $99.99 on sale at newegg at the moment, still $150 is too much to be spending on a rig of this calibre, try to keep it at $100 or less. You have a number of options like the Corsair CX and TX series, the seasonic 620w I think it is and the Antec PSU's.

GPU - Yes the 7970 has a bit more horsepower than the 680 but a lot of it comes down to games that it's running. Borderlands 2 works better with the GTX680 for example. Also if they are folding you need to take that in consideration as the GTX600 series pretty much obliterates the 7000 series in that fashion. Why you may ask? They were designed for it. Also go with the GHZ edition when recommending

Motherboard - Again, not a bad choice but very entry level, The p8Z77 Pro isn't much more and with the money from the PSU you saved you can put that towards it.

Hard drive - Again, good choice however for the use it's too much, it's being used as a storage drive and whilst the Blacks are pretty much the fastest on the market it's overkill. The blues would have been a better option as they work well in raid, cheaper and are great little storage drives (wouldn't recommend one as a system drive though)

SSD - 100% right, however you could give him the option of two 64gb drives in RAID0 for ultimate performance, but fine recommendation none the less

CPU - He's already said he wants the Hyperthreading. Nothing wrong with your recommendation at all, it's 100% true, however I'd work on the theory he could be utilising HT with applications etc.

Memory - 100% no problem.

However that all being said, before you start making comments about RAID functions and what's best, you really need to do a little reading. I'll break them down just to make sure you know

RAID0 - Striped array, minimum 2 drives 100% performance increase, 0% redundancy
RAID1 - Mirrored drives, no performance increase, 50% of your drives can fail.
RAID5 - Striped array with parity, you loose around 30% - 40% of your usable space with parity information, give or take that is it depends on drive sizes etc. Minimum 3 drives
RAID6 - As above but with double parity, 2 drives can fail
RAID51 - Raid 5 and Raid 1
RAID61 - As above but with RAID6 -
RAID0+1 - A mirrored stripe. The Stripe is created as in a RAID0 array and then mirrored. 50% of drives can fail depending on drives. 100% performance increase. Extremely expensive, used mainly as file servers or database shares.

There are a few others but those are the ones that are most frequently used in the enterprise environment. You can also make a RAID0+1 with 2 drives as a stripe and a single drive for the mirror, This is dirty and wrong and I hate it when people do it.

Comps
Edited by compuman145 - 11/9/12 at 2:26am

Well thanks for the info on RAID arrays and such, I kinda had the feeling of

when I was typing up the part about the single 2TB Caviar Black being better than the two 1TB drives in RAID.

However, I just wanted to say sorry and break it down for you where you were correct and where you made your mistakes a normal rule of thumb is RAID is normally better than a single drive with the exception of RAID0 which has no redundancy and an increased rate of failure.

RAID0 is interesting since it has no real limit on the number of drives you can have in an array (I think the most I've seen was 30 drives, it was on youtube) however with the increased number of drives the issue of array failure gets compounded.

I.E the more drives you have the higher the risk.

This can be offset by using a RAID0+1 array which again gets very very expensive.

EDIT - I was wrong it was 24.

Edited by compuman145 - 11/9/12 at 2:44am

If you are going to get a SSD, just get a Samsung 830. You can pick up 128GB ones for $90, sometimes less, and you'll never notice the performance difference of any faster (in benchmarks) drive.

You will if you RAID0 them, hence why sometimes it's best to go with two 64gb drives.

Either way the Sammy's are fine

You still won't in normal use. The headline numbers will be bigger, but it won't be noticeable.