Request New PC Configuration Review

I've been working on configuratons for a new PC through Puget Systems and would very much like to get reviews and recommendations from folks on my choices so far.

Please let me know your thoughts on the tentative configuration below. I've done a fair amount of research but am playing catch up since an 8 year lull in keeping up with the technology. I'm a little overwhelmed! Feel free to dumb it down for me, I won't be offended.

Intended use is for photography and maybe a little video. I plan to load Photoshop CS3-5, Lightroom, an HDR program, Canon's editing software bundle, Thunderbird, Firefox, Norton Anti-virus, and perhaps MS Office. I figure I'm forgetting software here, but these I am the most sure of.

I've upgraded my selections from previous choices of Asus P7P55D-E Pro and Intel Core i7 Quad 870 2.93 GHz in order to take advantage of future upgradability to 6 core chip and immediate increase of max RAM to 24GB from 16GB. Is this overkill or maybe not a bad idea for the future of more cores and more RAM? I certainly don't want to waste the potential of this configuration for my intended use, but I also don't want to feel restrained in a few years. I know what that feels like and it is frustrating.

The current SSD size choice is 120GB. I could go with 80 GB choice but again would like some room to grow. There are ways to optimize use of an SSD, but I don't understand them all yet, so still not sure about size needs for now and later. Is bigger better?

I'm looking for confirmation on eSATA on this config. Puget tells me that the case has one front eSATA port, and that "the motherboard comes with a eSATA bracket to place in the back of the computer for an eSATA port. It's not physically part of the motherboard, but it plugs in to the motherboard to provide that port in the back of your system." Can I assume this means that I'll have two functioning eSATA ports? I've looked at the case design and the port is there. I am unfamiliar with how they are connected within the guts of the system. I have seen recommendations to use this connection for the fastest backup to external hard drives, so I want to make sure I have at least one. I am a little fuzzy on how Puget described the port on the back and was wondering if it required me to buy another part to connect to the bracket and MoBo. I will ask them but I thought I'd ask here too.

I am unsure about the graphics card and honestly don't know exactly how to compare them for my needs. I don't know if my current choice will allow all of the advantages that photoshop now offers. I plan to purchase one of the NEC MultiSync LCD monitors with built in calibration and this graphics card offers only 2 dual-DVI and Mini HDMI - no DisplayPort for that potential 10-bit advantage that I may or may not be able to take advantage of. Is there any chance a CRT monitor also could be connected (don't laugh)?

I am also unsure about the Automatic Backup and Restore Set-up feature (I think it is from Win 7) that Puget offers to set up. Any feedback on this would also be appreciated - or for that matter, any input on a good and easy way to back up to an external would be appreciated.

Thanks very much, Nancy

Motherboard: Asus P6X58D Premium
CPU: Intel Core i7 QUAD CORE 950 3.06GHz 8MB 130W (Socket 1366 45nm)
Ram: Kingston 12GB DDR3-1333 (3x4GB)
Video Card: NVIDIA GeForce GTS 450 1GB
Networking: Asus PCE-N13 Wireless 802.11b/g/n PCI-E Adapter

Storage
Hard Drive Intel X25-M 34nm Gen 2 120GB SATA II 2.5inch SSD
Comments: Primary drive.
Western Digital Caviar Black 1.0TB SATA 6 Gb/s
Comments: Secondary drive.

CD / DVD Pioneer 22X DVD-RW SATA (black)

Case / Cooling
Case: Antec P183 (Gunmetal Finish)
Power Supply: Corsair TX 650W Power Supply
CPU Cooling: Gelid Tranquillo

Software
OS Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit OEM

Peripherals
Ext. Drive Western Digital External USB2/SATA 2.0TB Drive
Automatic Backup and Restore Set-up

Accessories
Services Warranty: Lifetime Labor, 1 Year Parts

Nancy, kudos to you on your research to this point!

flanny wrote in post #11383300
I've been working on configuratons for a new PC through Puget Systems and would very much like to get reviews and recommendations from folks on my choices so far.

Please let me know your thoughts on the tentative configuration below. I've done a fair amount of research but am playing catch up since an 8 year lull in keeping up with the technology. I'm a little overwhelmed! Feel free to dumb it down for me, I won't be offended.

Intended use is for photography and maybe a little video. I plan to load Photoshop CS3-5, Lightroom, an HDR program, Canon's editing software bundle, Thunderbird, Firefox, Norton Anti-virus, and perhaps MS Office. I figure I'm forgetting software here, but these I am the most sure of.

I've upgraded my selections from previous choices of Asus P7P55D-E Pro and Intel Core i7 Quad 870 2.93 GHz in order to take advantage of future upgradability to 6 core chip and immediate increase of max RAM to 24GB from 16GB. Is this overkill or maybe not a bad idea for the future of more cores and more RAM? I certainly don't want to waste the potential of this configuration for my intended use, but I also don't want to feel restrained in a few years. I know what that feels like and it is frustrating.

It is hard to imagine that you would need more than 16GB of RAM isn't it? Both of the i7 platforms are great for photo editing computers. If you have the budget to spend a little more for the x58 platform over the p55 than do it. The motherboards typically have more ports and are more "upgradeable" at this time. Things can always change though!

You typically want some headroom with an SSD. If you can afford the 120GB drive (or larger) then go for it. Intel makes great drives, just make sure they are the Gen 2 like Puget has spec'ed.

I checked the manuals for the case and pics if both the case and motherboard. In this case you would have both a front port and a rear port. In both cases they will take up one of the internal ports on your motherboard. So you have 6 SATA 3 ports. You would use one for the SSD, one for the WD Caviar Black, one for the front and one for the bracket on the rear leaving you two open ports plus 2 SATA 6 ports for future use.

I'm not up to speed on DisplayPort so others will need to chime in there, but the video card should be fine (and maybe slightly overkill depending on how much video work you do). At this time the software you have listed only uses the GPU for a few tasks.

In order to also connect the CRT monitor you would need to either convert one of the DVI ports to VGA (adapters may already be included with the video card) or get a second cheap card with a VGA port.

I'll assume that this is to create an image of the C:/ drive once the machine is built. A few google searches will likely show you how to do it yourself, but I'd ask Puget what they mean here.

Looks good.

IMO, you don't need the speed of the WD Black drive for storage. I would opt for a larger WD Green drive instead, but that is up to you.

Unless you plan to Overclock the CPU you do not need an aftermarket CPU cooler. The stock Intel one is more than adequate. The Corsair PSU is a great PSU. You could likely go smaller, but I doubt it would save you much for this machine.

Hope that helps!

I would personally go with two smaller SSDs rather than one large one. I would do this because then you can make an image of your OS and programs (so you can quickly restore after a drive failure or virus) without having all sorts of other gunk making your image file huge. DriveImageXML is what I use. Then again if you put cache or swap on the SSD you can just delete it before you make an image.

I would go with the black drive over the green. I did the research recently and the green had a lesser warranty, lower mean time to failure, and (I think) used an inferior method of parking the disk heads. Plus I find the disk is often the bottleneck for batch processing, so faster is better.

What specific ram is it?

The Samsung F3 is both faster and less expensive than the Caviar black.

If you plan on going past 16gb of RAM, you should be aware that Windows 7 Home Preimium only supports up to 16gb RAM. You'd need Pro/Enterprise/Ultimat​e to go past 16gb.

16GB should be enough for anyone.

Tim, or anyone

Would you please instruct me or point me to instructions on how to reply to several people in one post? I'm getting some very god info here.

I read a post where you gave some quick instructions to someon, but can't find that thread now.

Thanks much.

On the bottom right of each post hit the middle button for each post you want to quote. Then hit post reply down the bottom left of the last post.

As the saying goes, you can never have enough hard disk space, and never enough RAM. People were saying 1 TB HDD, and 4gb RAM were more than enough just a few years ago.
If you have the money, go for it. RAM is practically dirt cheap these days.

If you plan on doing video encoding, then 24gb would be useful. If not, you can always create a nice RAMDisk with 4-8 gb of the RAM for temp files, scratch files, etc. That would speed up your system nicely.

Motherboard: Asus P6X58D Premium
motherboard is very nice, no doubt here

CPU: Intel Core i7 QUAD CORE 950 3.06GHz 8MB 130W (Socket 1366 45nm)
for the price, this is the best processor out there, nice choice

Ram: Kingston 12GB DDR3-1333 (3x4GB)
12GB is OVERKILL. Even 8GB is A LOT. There was a test on anandtech and tomshardware websites, where they tested 4GB with low timings, 6GB, 8GB and 12GB and 4GB performed the fastest. Not a lot of programs require more than 4GB of ram, unless you are designing games or running a server. 8GB is MAX I would go but I'd rather buy 6GB triple channel with lower timings and it would run a lot faster and be more efficient than 12GB

Video Card: NVIDIA GeForce GTS 450 1GB
This is a nice graphics card, but I don't see a need why you need such a good one, but it's a good choice

Networking: Asus PCE-N13 Wireless 802.11b/g/n PCI-E Adapter
you should read reviews about buying PCI-E wireless adapter, because it would have conflicts with your PCI-E video card. PCI would do and I would recommend either Linksys N+ or Belkin N+ wireless adapter, used them both for past 2 years and no problems.

Storage
Hard Drive Intel X25-M 34nm Gen 2 120GB SATA II 2.5inch SSD
Comments: Primary drive.
I would recommend choosing OCZ Vertex 2, Muchkin Callistro Deluxe as both have high write and read speeds. The intel one has nice read speed, but is lacking on write speed and is rather slow. Also make sure you buy one that has adapter to 3.5inch (if you are buying 2.5inch drive) otherwise you will have trouble mounting it.

Western Digital Caviar Black 1.0TB SATA 6 Gb/s
Comments: Secondary drive.
I would rather buy 640GB Western Digital Caviar Black, because it is a lot faster than the 1TB one and buy two of them if you need to run in RAID 1 so if one fails, there is an image of your back up on another hard drive. If you have another way of saving your stuff, then you can run them at RAID 0 for performance. Also STAY AWAY from Caviar Green, or Blue, they are really SLOW.

Case / Cooling
Case: Antec P183 (Gunmetal Finish)
Nice case, I like it too.

Power Supply: Corsair TX 650W Power Supply
Amazing power supply, I have the same one

CPU Cooling: Gelid Tranquillo
Don't waste your money on this cooler. There a lot of other better companies and cool better. For example Noctua NH-D14, this is one amazing cooler. I have it and the quality is amazing and plus you get 6 Year Warranty with it. Can't go wrong with it and it is WORTH the price.


Peripherals
Ext. Drive Western Digital External USB2/SATA 2.0TB Drive
Automatic Backup and Restore Set-up
Ok I see that you have another drive for backup, it is nice. Make sure you buy one that supports eSata or FireWire, rather than USB, because it is slow when you will be transferring files through USB.

Hope this helps.

Why do you think the 640GB is faster than the 1TB? The 2TB WD Black is the fastest mainstream drive around at the moment AFAIK. No need for raptors.

I'd get a Sandforce SSD from other world computing, or an ocz vertex 2.

The stock cooler on i7 CPUs is meant to be decent.

In2Photos wrote in post #11383463
It is hard to imagine that you would need more than 16GB of RAM isn't it?

I checked the manuals for the case and pics if both the case and motherboard. In this case you would have both a front port and a rear port. In both cases they will take up one of the internal ports on your motherboard. So you have 6 SATA 3 ports. You would use one for the SSD, one for the WD Caviar Black, one for the front and one for the bracket on the rear leaving you two open ports plus 2 SATA 6 ports for future use.

I'm not up to speed on DisplayPort so others will need to chime in there, but the video card should be fine (and maybe slightly overkill depending on how much video work you do). At this time the software you have listed only uses the GPU for a few tasks.

In order to also connect the CRT monitor you would need to either convert one of the DVI ports to VGA (adapters may already be included with the video card) or get a second cheap card with a VGA port.
I'll assume that this is to create an image of the C:/ drive once the machine is built. A few google searches will likely show you how to do it yourself, but I'd ask Puget what they mean here.Looks good.IMO, you don't need the speed of the WD Black drive for storage. I would opt for a larger WD Green drive instead, but that is up to you.
Unless you plan to Overclock the CPU you do not need an aftermarket CPU cooler. The stock Intel one is more than adequate. The Corsair PSU is a great PSU. You could likely go smaller, but I doubt it would save you much for this machine.

Hope that helps!

Wow, great info! Yes, 16 GB sure sounds like a lot and many people are telling me this even for amounts over 8 GB but some opinions vary on future needs based on how far we've come with RAM needs. The mobo has 6 RAM slots, so can I opt for less with combinations in some or all of the slots (like 4GB x 2 or 2GB x 3)?
Thanks for putting in time to check things out. I appreciate your explanation on the ports and motherboard. The spec sheet does indicate that the 1 TB WD Black will connect to SATA 6 Gb/s; nevertheless, the mobo offerings seem to cover the eSATA bases.

tim wrote in post #11383742
I would personally go with two smaller SSDs rather than one large one. I would do this because then you can make an image of your OS and programs (so you can quickly restore after a drive failure or virus) without having all sorts of other gunk making your image file huge. DriveImageXML is what I use. Then again if you put cache or swap on the SSD you can just delete it before you make an image.

I would go with the black drive over the green. I did the research recently and the green had a lesser warranty, lower mean time to failure, and (I think) used an inferior method of parking the disk heads. Plus I find the disk is often the bottleneck for batch processing, so faster is better.

Good info here too. I had planned on only using the SSD for OS and apps. so maybe 120 GB is too big for just that? How about the 80 GB for OS and apps and the rest on the 1 TB hard drive? So, black over green in your opinion for several reasons. Noted.

Sp1207 wrote in post #11384064
What specific ram is it?

The Samsung F3 is both faster and less expensive than the Caviar black.

The RAM is Kingston 1333 MHz with CL9 latency - not sure what that means exactly but there you have it. Puget Systems builders have good things to say about the Kingston ValueRam (VR) line of RAM.

Ok, I'll check out the Samsung F3.

solara wrote in post #11384399
If you plan on going past 16gb of RAM, you should be aware that Windows 7 Home Preimium only supports up to 16gb RAM. You'd need Pro/Enterprise/Ultimat​e to go past 16gb.

Well thank you for pointing this out - I had no idea!

tim wrote in post #11384424
16GB should be enough for anyone.

Point taken but see what solara has to say below.

solara wrote in post #11385181
As the saying goes, you can never have enough hard disk space, and never enough RAM. People were saying 1 TB HDD, and 4gb RAM were more than enough just a few years ago.
If you have the money, go for it. RAM is practically dirt cheap these days.

If you plan on doing video encoding, then 24gb would be useful. If not, you can always create a nice RAMDisk with 4-8 gb of the RAM for temp files, scratch files, etc. That would speed up your system nicely.

So here is the flip side of the coin with regards to RAM!! This has sort of been my line of thinking all along but I have gotten feedback here and other forums that 8+ could be overkill.

Oh, thank you for bringing up RAMdisk. I need to read more about that because it sounds really useful and then I could go ahead and get more RAM!

turbo_911 wrote in post #11385363
Motherboard: Asus P6X58D Premium
motherboard is very nice, no doubt here

CPU: Intel Core i7 QUAD CORE 950 3.06GHz 8MB 130W (Socket 1366 45nm)
for the price, this is the best processor out there, nice choice

Ram: Kingston 12GB DDR3-1333 (3x4GB)
12GB is OVERKILL. Even 8GB is A LOT. There was a test on anandtech and tomshardware websites, where they tested 4GB with low timings, 6GB, 8GB and 12GB and 4GB performed the fastest. Not a lot of programs require more than 4GB of ram, unless you are designing games or running a server. 8GB is MAX I would go but I'd rather buy 6GB triple channel with lower timings and it would run a lot faster and be more efficient than 12GB

Video Card: NVIDIA GeForce GTS 450 1GB
This is a nice graphics card, but I don't see a need why you need such a good one, but it's a good choice

Networking: Asus PCE-N13 Wireless 802.11b/g/n PCI-E Adapter
you should read reviews about buying PCI-E wireless adapter, because it would have conflicts with your PCI-E video card. PCI would do and I would recommend either Linksys N+ or Belkin N+ wireless adapter, used them both for past 2 years and no problems.

Storage
Hard Drive Intel X25-M 34nm Gen 2 120GB SATA II 2.5inch SSD
Comments: Primary drive.
I would recommend choosing OCZ Vertex 2, Muchkin Callistro Deluxe as both have high write and read speeds. The intel one has nice read speed, but is lacking on write speed and is rather slow. Also make sure you buy one that has adapter to 3.5inch (if you are buying 2.5inch drive) otherwise you will have trouble mounting it.

Western Digital Caviar Black 1.0TB SATA 6 Gb/s
Comments: Secondary drive.
I would rather buy 640GB Western Digital Caviar Black, because it is a lot faster than the 1TB one and buy two of them if you need to run in RAID 1 so if one fails, there is an image of your back up on another hard drive. If you have another way of saving your stuff, then you can run them at RAID 0 for performance. Also STAY AWAY from Caviar Green, or Blue, they are really SLOW.

Case / Cooling
Case: Antec P183 (Gunmetal Finish)
Nice case, I like it too.

Power Supply: Corsair TX 650W Power Supply
Amazing power supply, I have the same one

CPU Cooling: Gelid Tranquillo
Don't waste your money on this cooler. There a lot of other better companies and cool better. For example Noctua NH-D14, this is one amazing cooler. I have it and the quality is amazing and plus you get 6 Year Warranty with it. Can't go wrong with it and it is WORTH the price.


Peripherals
Ext. Drive Western Digital External USB2/SATA 2.0TB Drive
Automatic Backup and Restore Set-up
Ok I see that you have another drive for backup, it is nice. Make sure you buy one that supports eSata or FireWire, rather than USB, because it is slow when you will be transferring files through USB.

Hope this helps.

Fabulous feedback Turbo_11. Useful ideas on the RAM again but you are definitely among the group who says I'm in RAM overkill mode.

Graphics card: choosing this has been difficult and I'm still fuzzy on all of the choices. NVIDIA GeForce GT 210 512MB QUIET (MSI), NVIDIA GeForce GT 430 1GB QUIET (Zotac) and

tim wrote in post #11385412
Why do you think the 640GB is faster than the 1TB? The 2TB WD Black is the fastest mainstream drive around at the moment AFAIK. No need for raptors.

I'd get a Sandforce SSD from other world computing, or an ocz vertex 2.

The stock cooler on i7 CPUs is meant to be decent.

Thanks Tim, I'm taking it all in. I've gotten various opinions on coolers and the needs for cooling my configuration including at least one who was not impressed with the stock cooler. I'm still sorting them out.

You all outdid yourselves.

Any more feedback?? I'm listening. I'll attempt to cut down the quoting in the future

Wired networking is faster and more reliable, if you can manage that. Not really sure how big a W7 install is.

Why would the wireless PCI card be a problem? Video cards are x16, the wireless looks like an x1. There should be plenty of room on the mobo. Am I missing something?

Since it has 6 slots, I'd get 3x4gb DDR3 (12gb) for now, then you can increase to 24gb total later if you find you're maxing out your RAM. I would not fill all 6 slots with 6x2gb because when you upgrade to 24gb later, you'd just have to throw away/sell the 2gb ones.

I have Win7 Home Premium with 12gb RAM, and an OCZ Vertex 2 60gb drive. My OS with programs like Photoshop CS5 with (Nik, Topaz and other filters), Lightroom 3, MS Office 2007, PerfectDisk 11, Nero, Symantec Antivirus, Quicken, ZoneAlarm, Directory Opus, Firefox, Canon DPP, CCleaner, jvPowerTools, and a host of other programs - all that take 18.5 gb. No pagefile or hibernation file on the SSD. So if you are good about removing useless files, you can have a very lean system. But the general rule with SSD is buy the largest you can afford. The larger the SSD, and the less data you put on it, the longer the SSD will last.

If you don't plan on playing games, a graphics card in the 100-150 range would be more than enough power. Even one between 50-100 would be fine too. Get one with 1gb video RAM.

And yes, read up on using RamDisk. I will be installing the free Dataram Ramdisk (allows Ramdisk up to 4gb in size - it's only 10 bucks to get one that has no limit on the ramdisk size). I have experimented with it on my Win7 HDD system and it works well. No real testing on speed increase, but I plan to place the Temp folder there for Windows to use, along with other cache data I don't care to keep permanently.