My Latest Home Build - "El Cheapo"

Here's my newest PC home build I finished last night. (Pardon the crappy photos; I did a perspective crop and didnt feel like cloning in the missing area).

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Finally someone is listening to my rants about searching for local deals on places like Craigslist. Congrats Fedka... I'm lovin' that machine! If more of us bought our toys like this instead of using our credit cards, we wouldn't be in this economic crisis!

Only suggestion would be invest in some tie wrap straps in straighten out the cables.

ChasP505 wrote in post #7313608
Finally someone is listening to my rants about searching for local deals on places like Craigslist. Congrats Fedka... I'm lovin' that machine! If more of us bought our toys like this instead of using our credit cards, we wouldn't be in this economic crisis!

I haven't seen your "rants" but I can appreciate where you're coming from since I prefer to spend my money on glass rather than on computers. That said, this isn't something you can do if you want immediate gratification because it takes time to get the right parts together. It also helps to have some experience so you wouldn't be conned.

Tsmith wrote in post #7315003
Only suggestion would be invest in some tie wrap straps in straighten out the cables.

I do have some black cable ties and mounting bases I picked up at Home Depot; they weren't in place when the pic was taken because I wanted to make sure I had the cables all laid out and properly connected before permanently anchoring them.

The cable ties and the SATA cables were the only things I got from a store...the SATA cables were on closeout at Radio Shack for $1.60 each so I couldn't pass them up...especially when they were selling SATA II cables for $9.95 and BestBuy had them for $19.95. The only difference between SATA and SATA II cables is the L connector....the throughput is the same yet they are charging a huge premium for SATA II cables.

I've gotten a few questions about my hard drive configuration so I'll make the clarification here. There are currently four hard drives in the box....3 WD 80 gig drives and a WD 250 gig drive.

Two of the 80GB drives are configured in a RAID 0 array holding my operating system (Windows XP X64) and program files. The third 80GB drive holds my working files; the photos I'm currently processing, the Photoshop scratch disk, the Camera Raw cache, the Adobe Bridge cache, and a backup copy of the entire system.

The reason for this configuration, rather than using the RAID 0 array for the scratch disk, is that I plan to install a game that will benefit from striping. Also, in my testing with 8GB RAM, I couldn't see any performance boost in using a RAID array for a scratch disk; most of the processes so far have occurred exclusively in RAM. I even used SuperSpeed RAMDisk to create a Ramdisk and there was no appreciable speed improvement so I deleted it.

The fourth drive is being used to archive files, including a copy of my working files, and its further backed up on external drives.

FedkaTheConvict wrote in post #7315239
That said, this isn't something you can do if you want immediate gratification because it takes time to get the right parts together. It also helps to have some experience so you wouldn't be conned.

Yeah... It took me 4 months to assemble all my parts and then build the machine. I used all new parts, but some came from sources like Craigslist where a person bought an incompatible component and was either too lazy to return it or waited too long. The rest of the parts I simply shopped price online until someone ran a crazy sale on them. I paid $0 tax, $0 shipping. Takes patience. I ran slightly over my targeted $600 budget (including OS) because I demanded a specific case and power supply.

FedkaTheConvict wrote in post #7315376
The reason for this configuration, rather than using the RAID 0 array for the scratch disk, is that I plan to install a game that will benefit from striping. Also, in my testing with 8GB RAM, I couldn't see any performance boost in using a RAID array for a scratch disk; most of the processes so far have occurred exclusively in RAM. I even used SuperSpeed RAMDisk to create a Ramdisk and there was no appreciable speed improvement so I deleted it.

I think because your running a 64 based system, I don't even think your accessing your scratch disk. I use x86 based windows and I barely even notice a hit to my scratch disk until editing a large number of files or very large files. I noticed a hugh performance increase with RAMDisk as a scratch disk when editing my scanned images (600+ mb). It only takes one or two edits to see it being used. When doing the same with my harddrive as scratch it was PAINFULLY SLOW...