Recommendations for PC System Builder

[eric_palmer1]

I'm building a Digital Darkroom and need to assemble a fast Intel

PC. I'm considering an ASUS P4B533-E motherboard, P4 18 or 2 BHz

CPU, Raid 1 (2x80GB), ATI 9000 Pro Video card, DVD Player, etc.

<p>

Will likely put 1.5 or 2 GB in it. I either an going to buy the

parts and assemble them myself or get the company I buy the parts

from to assemble them. Price and relability are important. I've

discovered <a

href="http://www.motherboardexpress.com">motherboardexpress.com</a>.

However they have very poor ratings on <a

href="http://www.resellerratings.com/">Reseller Ratings</a>.

<p>

Recommendations welocmed on:<p>

Motherboards or Parts Suppliers<p>

PC build Companies<p>

1.8 GHz P4 with 1.5 GB for Photoshop ~2500 x 2000 pixel images<p>

Thanks in advance<p>

Eric

[lwg]

I have had good luck over the years with <a href="http://jncs.com">J&N</a>. They will sell you the parts or put the sytem together and test if for you. The ASUS board is very good. If you don't want to play 3D games look at the Matrox 550 graphics card which supports dual monitors. If you are just manipulating small (2500 x 2000) images 1.5 GB of memory is overkill.

[emre]

For all sorts of parts, my first stop is newegg.com

[marc_bergman1]

Eric,

<p>

I'm a big fan of Newegg. They have great prices, selection, and reputation.

<p>

<a href="http://www.newegg.com/index.asp">Newegg</a>

<p>

Have you priced out how much memory will cost with this processor? It's one of the reason I went with an AMD chip. Don't some of the new P4 chips allow DDRAM? Also, have you really determined you need this much memory? I scan medium and large format slides and negatives so I do need the 1.5GB.

 

I would prefer using the drives separately. You can get some fast drive bandwidth speed from Raid 1 but I think Photoshop likes to see 2 separate hard drives even more.

<p>

Newegg also has good prices on your operating system software and MS Office.

<p>

Good luck with your PC purchases.

[carl smith]

Newegg is definately the place to go. I would probably consider building an Athlon system, possibly a dual processor system. It can be build quite affordably and several people I know have done so under my suggestion and have had great results when working in photoshop and other things. You have to have Win 2K or XP Pro to really make any use of it though.

[matt_bevers]

Where I used to work we got several systems through motherboards express. Their prices were a little high, but we never had any trouble with them and all the systems worked fine. For wintel boxes, that is ;)

[Nicholas Barry]

I'll be a third (or fourth) supporter of newegg.com. I used to buy my stuff at J&N and they are great, but Newegg is just as good and much, MUCH cheaper.

[jimvanson]

Eric...some suggestions; one make sure that the motherboard can take three or four sticks of ram at once and that the ram does not have to be registered or ECC. If it does make sure thats what you get right from the start. My first board would only take regular (non registered) ram in its first two slots...the third slot would not work without all the ram being registered. Photoshop runs much better on my machine if you use 1.5 gigs of ram. I'm not going to talk you out of Intel other then to say I would not use their cpu unless I was using RamBus ram and a hyperthreading-3.06-cpu...the costs of which are rather high at the moment. Make sure your drives are 8 meg cache drives. As someone else said, the Matrox 550 card is very good but not for gaming. WinXP Pro is the way to go. Purchase it with another component so you could get a OEM copy. Specify QUITE cooling fans! And finally after years of working without one I must say a high end monitor is a god send. Good luck...jim

[eric_palmer1]

Thanks for all the advice. I've just looked at newegg.com and validated that there prices are better.

<p>

Some additional Questions and clarification:

<br><br>Dual Monitor Usage

- What is the most common way to use 2 montitors (e.g., menus on one and image on another)?<br><br>The ASUS montherboard takss DDRam (2100)<br><Br>

Tell me more about photoshop's use of multiple disk drives. How do I configure this. The use of Raid 1 was to ensure some additional safety. I have an onstream 30 GB tape system to put into this system but have lost data through the years to disk failure and was thinking the safety of Raid was worth it. If PS needs temp space I have spare drives that I can put into the system (20 GB) or can buy a new one since they are so cheep.<br><br>

I'll configure/price out one or two AMD solutions as well as the intel one and will post the results here if people are interested.

<br><br>

Tell me more about dual CPU AMD systems. I've had dual cpu systems in the past (non-PS work) and did not see the benefit. However, this was with NT 3.51 and NT 4.0. Maybe the motherboard was ahead of its time.

<br><Br>

XP Pro is the OS of choice for this system from my standpoint.

<p>

Thanks again for the valued feedback.<p>

Eric

[chris_hawkins]

I'm not a hardware guy, so bear with me if I don�t use all the right terms. I've got a dual processor Athlon system so here are the specs and performance. The buildsheet says...

One AMD dual motherboard for mp processors - asus a7m266-D

 

Two AMD mp1900 processor

 

Two 512MB DDR 266 Mhz pc 2100 memory

 

One 64 MB Radeon 8500 AGP video card

 

One Promise Fastrack Raid Ultra DMA 100 IDE controller

 

Two 120 GB Western Digital UDMA 100, 8M cache, 7200 rpm hard drive

 

One 40 GB Maxtor ATA133 7200 rpm hard drive

 

Windows XP Pro.

 

Performance with Vuescan. It took 28 minutes to perform the following steps on 26 raw files. (Approximately 1.1 minutes / raw file)

Read the 130 to 150MB files

Clean (medium setting) � this is the dust and scratch removal algorithm.

Rotate (left)

Save at 24 bit Tiff (compressed)

Save as 8 jpg (size reduction 7)

 

If you would like to know this systems speed using PhotoShop, tell me how to test it and I�ll give you the data. I've got the Grain Surgery and Nik Sharpener Pro plug-ins if you are thinking about using these.

[jimvanson]

Thanks for all the advice. I've just looked at newegg.com and validated that there prices are better.

Some additional Questions and clarification:

 

Dual Monitor Usage - What is the most common way to use 2 montitors (e.g., menus on one and image on another?

I don�t understand the dual monitor fuss as I use Adobe Photoshop Interface Improver 2.5 at http://www.interfaceimprovement.com/photoshop.html that prog keeps the palletts off the desktop till I want them. Try it it may work for you.

The ASUS montherboard takss DDRam (2100)

DDR or PC 2100 Ram is at the point of extinction...well not really its just that PC 2700 is standard now and PC 3200 will soon be...and there is a noticable difference if the MB and CPU are matched to the faster RAM.

 

Tell me more about photoshop's use of multiple disk drives. How do I configure this. The use of Raid 1 was to ensure some additional safety. I have an onstream 30 GB tape system to put into this system but have lost data through the years to disk failure and was thinking the safety of Raid was worth it. If PS needs temp space I have spare drives that I can put into the system (20 GB)or can buy a new one since they are so cheep.

Raid 1...I use two 120g 8m cache drives in Raid 0 for speed. I use a third drive a 7200 rpm 40g drive for my photoshop cache/swap file. I have never lost anything due to drive failure, therefore have never considered Raid 1. I burn each photo I�ve manipulated on a CD. I back up everything else on CD�s. Even if a drive fails I still have the backups. If your going to use Raid 1 consider larger drives as 80 g is not all that big any more. I use 15g for XP and progs, 50g for photos, 20g for music, 10g for movies, then there is a swap files, etc, etc, etc...

 

I'll configure/price out one or two AMD solutions as well as the intel one and will post the results here if people are interested.

The AMD will be faster & cheaper.

 

Tell me more about dual CPU AMD systems. I've had dual cpu systems in the past (non-PS work) and did not see the benefit. However, this was with NT 3.51 and NT 4.0. Maybe the motherboard was ahead of its time.

I�ve not used a dualie myself because I�d have to start all over...new CPUs, MB, Power Supply, and ECC RAM. Having said that if I was starting over I�d either buy into RamBus and Hyperthreading or for the same price build an AMD dualie...the biggest reason is I milti task. I�m photoshopping, listening to mp3's, downloading a movie all at the same time...this is true dualie taritory. Will photoshop alone run faster on a dualie? I don�t know. Will it run faster on Hyperthreading? Yes about 25 percent.

 

XP Pro is the OS of choice for this system from my standpoint.

Thanks again for the valued feedback.

Eric

[chris_hawkins]

I forgot to add that the performance above was obtained by splitting the chores between two different users. I logged on under name X and did half the files and logged in under name Y and did the other half. This allows the processors to be 100% utilized. If I only log in as one user the processors are only 50 - 55% utilized and the time to do 26 files would be much longer. Don't ask me why I need to log in under two different users to maximze processor utilization. I have no idea!

[chris_hawkins]

For backing up the files, I bought an external 120GB Maxtor, 5400 rpm from CompUSA for $280. This works great and makes worries about using striped drives a thing of the past.

[jimvanson]

Chris...your machine sounds very good although the dual login confounds me (I'm going to ask a friend who is a wizard why it is done that way). There is now faster RAM & the MB's to support that and Raid controlers are built into alot of MB's today, still you have very close to cutting edge that should last for several years. Are the drives set up as RAID 0 (zero)?

[marc_bergman1]

Oops. My bad.

 

I was thinking Raid 0 when you actually wrote Raid 1.

[chris_hawkins]

Jim: The two 120GB drives are set up as RAID 0 (striped). My understanding is that half the data is written to each drive thus enabling 2x read/write speed. I bought my system in February 2002. At the time we named it "Gigabeast" because it was one the hottest systems around. Even though faster machines are becoming more common, I've been quite happy with my machine and plan on keeping it for another year or two. If you find out about the dual login for maximum speed oddity, let me know.

[scott_eaton]

<I>I logged on under name X and did half the files and logged in under name Y and did the other half.</i><P>It means what ever app you were running is not optimized for SMP (multiple processors). PS7 is supposed to have some optimized processes for dual processors....at least that's what Adobe is saying.<P>Photoshop seems to want to limit itself to having only one open application instance per session, otherwise you could just fire up two photoshp.exe's and set processor affinity to do what you want.<P>I build custom PC's on the side from time to time and have a pretty good knowledge into what works/doesn't work, and is worth buying. <P>The biggest problem I have with Eric's systems is the P4 1.8-20, which I wouldn't use if you gave them to me. Last set of trustworthy benchmarks I saw showed the P3 Tualatins still beating the sub 2ghz P4s in most application suites.<P>My advice with processors if you are buying Intel is either splurge and get the latest core 2.4ghzs or faster, or just go AMD. P4's slower than that are simply a big, fat waste of money and are best used for low end Dell specials. A 1.8-2ghz P4 is going to get it's butt royall whipped by a AMD XP2200-2400 that costs the same amount of money, and AMD based MB's are usually cheaper, and have unified chipset drivers if you go VIA (unlike Intel). The ASUS board is nice, but I just think you are wasting money by coupling it with a dog like a 2ghz P4. Either get a real Intel CPU, or go AMD, or save more money and go Celeron if you are an Intel bigot.<P>RAID 1 is fine, and will suit the task of providing seamless drive mirroring and redundancy. RAID 0 should be avoided on integrated IDE motherboards - period. Not only will I not support tape drives in a corporate environment, I'll refuse to put data on them. Get a cheap, big IDE drive and hardware mirror it. Screw DLT's - MTF rates are drastically higher than the media your are trying to provide back-up for which has never made sense to me. The only thing worse is onboard IDE RAID 0 striping wich is begging for a system re-install.<P>Newegg gets an 11 on a scale of 1-10 in my book.<P>Dual processor MB's rock, and are mandatory for heavy multitasking environments (or beating the crap out of Mac's on benchmarks). However, if you are on a budget, a dual processor system is going to be expenesive and not provide dramatic benefits in terms of Photoshop performance. A dual P4 or Xeon motherboard is going to start at about 400 bones, and a dual Athlon at about 200. With the Athlon dualie you are then forced to pay the higher price for Athlon MP's, or hack the L5 bridge on XP's and hope it works in dual mode. In theory dual XP's 1900 will work in dual mode without modification.<P>RAM speed is almost moot in terms of real world performance, and exists only as a marketing ploy to sell memory upgrades to inerperienced PC geeks. The *real world* performance benefit of DDR 2100 vs 3200 is next to nothing, and you certainly wont see it in Photoshop. <P>Photoshop wants to put it's swap file on a seperate physial disk and will gripe about at first. This is fine, provided you multiple physical disks to do it with. With two drives in a RAID 1 you'll need to use the extra ATA 100 slots on the Asus board for additional drives and CDROM/DVD devices (they usually wont work on RAID slots), and I'm not sure if it's worth the trouble. The biggest reason being the newer 80+ sized drives are faster than older 10-20gig drives negating any benefit of additional physical drives if they are older and slower. <P>With an 80 gig logical drive (two physical 80gigs in RAID 1)my advice it to set up XP on about a 10gig primary partition, throw your swap and Photoshop scratch files there, and use the remaining HD space as a seperate D: partition for data and other junk. *DO NOT* install XP on the D: partition.<P>Get a new power supply. Any of a slew of vendors on Newegg sell 400watters for less than 40 bucks, and they are worth the price. Best way to destroy a new MB is to power it with some generic, 4year old 300 watt power supply. I've replaced more systems the past year due to flaky power supplies than any other component. It's not worth the risk.

[stephen_ratzlaff]

I'd really recommend not using RAID built into a motherboard. I'd instead recommend buying a good auality Adaptec board and use this.

 

Here's the reason why. Most of the time the motherboard manufacturers tweak the RAID chipset and their BIOS to work together. If your MB goes tits-up and you have ALL OF YOUR DATA striped and for some reason using this built-in RAD functionality AND you can either no longer get this MB, or the drivers have changed significantly, or ... whatever, YOU'RE SCREWED!!!

 

You will most likely loose ALL DATA. PERIOD.

 

I cannot stress this enough. I know ... and ... don't ask how I found out. Just suffuce to say, you do NOT want to find this out the hard way. AND ... AND ... it really doesn't matter which MB manufacturer you use, from what I seen this can happen with the BIG BOYS out there. I'm not talking about some no-name el-cheapo MB manufacturers here.

 

GRRR...

 

Anyhow, now I use an upper level Adaptec card for internal drives and also have found Firewire external drives to be most useful although not nearly as fast as the RAID stuff.

[stephen_ratzlaff]

Have you used (or have info on) the dual Athlon MBs which use the Athlon XP processors instead of the MP processors?

 

I've only seen one of these, but don't know how it rates against the ones which use the "official" AMD MP procs.

 

Any info?

[chris_hawkins]

The 2x read/write speed is wonderful when working with 130-150 MB tiff files. Don't put the operating system on these drives. Use a separate small drive for your operating sytems and software. Only put your data on the striped drives. If one of the RAID drives dies, big deal, restore your data with your backup. External hard drives are cheap so why take a chance with your data. Unplug them from the power and the PC and don't worry. Use CDs for offsite backup in case of fire, etc.

 

Why I think mirrored drives are a poor way to backup data for me..... I get a lot of lighting strikes close to my house. I've got a surge protector that is supposed to be effective against lighting, but I'm worried that with mirrored drives the lighting would fry them both.

[scott_eaton]

<I>The 2x read/write speed is wonderful when working with 130-150 MB tiff files. Don't put the operating system on these drives.</i><P>Same here. I was recently involved in a heated conference call with one of those old school IT types who just couldn't get it through his skull that even RAID 5 on a $1000 SCSI

controller card had more points of failure than RAID 1 on a dedicated IDE solution, and RAID 1 doesn't incur such a nasty write handicap as RAID 5. If the controller 'hiccups' on RAID 5 or RAID 0 (and it happens more frequently than you think) you can be in very big trouble, especially if your OS is striped across multiple physical drives. With RAID 1 you can usually plug the drive (SCSI or IDE) into another controller and start where you left off because it's a physical mirror. <P>If you're going to mess with RAID 0, at least park your OS on a single drive where it's NOT striped, and this generally means working with 3 drives. Then again the main benefit of RAID 0 is becoming more and more negligible since newer HD's are already starting to saturate the PCI bus in terms of read performance. Put your money into RAM and a quick drive. Use the RAID for mirroring, or not at all. If you need redundancy AND striping on a budget, look at 3Ware's controller options. Those boys rock. <P>There's one thing I like about the ASUS board, and that's the dual IDE solution which can be found on a few other brands like Abit as well. I have found a substantial increase in performance and just plain general convenience in using MBs that have the mixed RAID/standard ATA controllers vs the standard single pair. I have two HD's and two CDROM devices, and they are much cleaner in terms of transfer speed and peformance on my KR7A RAID than having to muck with master/slave on a single IDE channel. The difference is in fact quite dramatic. I thew together an EliteGroup system with the same dual IDE solution and again, I noticed obvious cleaner IDE performance with multiple drives in play.<P>Here's a link in regards to the Athlon XP/MP debacle. I'm not endorsing these kinds of tweaks and only listing it for technical reference, but I've ran across many hardware sites using Athlon XP's in MP configurations with no problems. AMD will of course not endorse it, but neither did Intel when somebody figured out how to run Celerons in MP mode.<P>

 

http://www.cluboverclocker.com/reviews/motherboards/iwill/mpx2/

[john_merriman1]

Eric,

I just built a system primarily for digital photography, Canon D60, Photoshop, etc. after doing a bit of research. I used a Gigabyte GA-7VAXP mb - it has onboard RAID, USB 2.0, firewire, 4 IDE connections two of which can be set to Promise RAID 0 or 1. I use RAID mirror with two WD120gb hardrives with 8mb cache �very fast. The other two IDE are connected to DVD drive and CDRW each as masters. Matrox 550 for eventual dual monitors. Added AMD Athlon XP 2600+ (333FSB) and 3x512MB of the cheapest PC2700 DDR333 Newegg.com had at the time (not much more than PC2100). The system is working great and I would not hesitate to do it again. Bought most of the items from Newegg - excellent prices, great product info and fast shipping. Good luck and have fun building yours.

[jimvanson]

Eric�sounds like my box, same MB, same VidCard & drives (those 8 meg drives rock!). I use a third drive for the Photoshop swap file (with 1.5 gigs Ram that doesn�t get used much). I�m using a XP+1900 and 3 sticks of 512 Samsung PC2700. All in an Antec 1080 box with 3 stealth fans and a 460 Watt power supply. This is a fast machine that is very upgradeable and is quite inexpensive. Scott was right on the money about a power supply. They ARE the biggest cause of a flakey machine and most people overlook them. Make sure it�s at least 400 watts and quite. I do believe that it�s better to buy PC2700 or PC3200 RAM. My reasoning is three fold. The newer boards will utilize it. They WILL show better performance. Second, when it comes to upgrading the board and CPU you�ll have fairly modern ram. Third it�s about the same price. Last thing is something I can�t stress enough. If I have a choice between a very fast machine and an average monitor or a fast machine and a state of the art monitor I would not hesitate. The hi-end monitor system rules the day. Good Luck�jim

[scott_eaton]

Sorry, but I'm simply not going to budge on the DDR speed issue. If you have money to burn then buy what you want, but it wont may a lick of difference in real world performance. Luckily the price of RAM is dropping and the prices consolidating.

 

I've been spec'ing out some servers for a fairly large file migration and don't see many mid level servers that support more than DDR2100. Many servers I've deployed in the past two years are still running SDRAM. Gee, I Wonder what speed RAM is running in our enterprise AS400s. What's good for a $70 PC you'd think would offer a benefit for half million dollar hardware as well.

 

If RAM speed offered true increases in desktop performance you'd production servers competing on this basis, but they aren't. It's marketing, plain and simple. If it makes you feel like your machine is running faster that's fine with me.

[jimvanson]

Scott...I just unlocked my XP 1900+cpu. I'm running it now at 1.85ghz as I write this. Seti is blazing in the background, and Nick Cave is the mp3 thats playing. We agree to disagree cause the PC2700 on my MB contributates to the fact that the machine is as fast & stable as it is. Second a 256 stick of Samsung PC2700 is $64...the PC2100 is $60 (Vancouvers Prices CDN 1$ = .65 USD so the PC2700 is $42 compared to $40...give or take). And third look at the spec's on new boards. They all suggest PC2700 or PC3200...there is more to that then marketing. If your going to get a board spec'ed for PC2100 and dump PC3200 in it there will be very little or no change unless you O/C it. BUT you'd be crazy to buy a board spec'ed to PC 3200 and then buy PC 2100 for it...that includes boards for your home work station or for half million dollar servers.