New PC advice please

[struceng]

Dear Concreteok,

I only suggest overclocking and raid to expert users of computers. I think again and find no problem giving the configuration here. It is:
Intel Quad Q6600 CPU 4*2.4GHz (~160$)
Gigabyte P35C-DS3R Motherboard (~100$)
Corsair TWIN2X4096-6400C4DHX (~150$)
Zalman CNPS10X Extreme CPU Cooler (~100$)
Cooler Master Storm Sniper Black Chassis (~250$)
3*Seagate 500GB 16MB SATA2 Barracuda 7200.12 HDD (3 * 50$)
Gigabyte Nvidia GeForce 8800GT 512MB VGA (~200$)
and etc.

They are listed by their importance level. This configuration is an old one compared to nowadays parts on the market.

Overclocking this configuration is a long way to go and explain. It takes one week for me to make it stable and select the optimum configuration. Searching and reading a lot from the forums are important. You must test your system for stability with Prime95 for hours. If it crashes then you must change overclocking configuration and start the test again (this is going to repeat again and again :)). Because of that, I should only give you some useful sites and my configuration. I made my configuration from the instructions at the first link.

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You must refer to the manual of the motherboard for Raid configuration. It is simple compared to overclocking. When you read the manual you can see that the stripe size of the raid configuration is seleceted during setup. I suggest you to select default one given by motherboard. I think best performance is achieved by Raid0 with 4 disks. You must search forums and read much again. Speeds of some raid configurations are given at this link:

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My configuration:
Raid0 with 3 disks (stripe size: 64kB)
and for the CPU and memory:



Regards.

[concreteok]

Hi struceng,

Checked with my local 'experts'. Their advice (both of them knowing me and my computer knowledge well) "You?! DON'T TRY!".

However, thank you very much!

[chisom]

Hi,
From my opinion you should go with the Intel processor.Because it has more features then the others.And more importance the less price and better performance.
Thanks for sharing this information.

[antonibede]

Hello

I think PC1 has the same configuration which I am using right now.It is working just amazing.

I think you should go for PC 1.

[concreteok]

Proposed new workstation. Built for ETABS big model usage.

Intel Core i5 650 3.33 Ghz 8MB
- Intel DP55WB Motherboard
- 4GB PC1333 DDR3
- 640GB SATA HDD 7200Drive
- 1GB Nvidia G240 DDR5
Window7 Home Premium 64Bit

Heavy/expert computer user, kindly comment/advise.

Many thanks/

[PrinceOfHeartz]

Hi!
Are you looking for an advise/comment?

---

Intel Core i5 650 3.33 Ghz 8MB

Are you sure?

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[concreteok]

Dear Prince,

I made a mistake in copying from the quotation (yes, i didn't check further). I guess the processor model run precedence here.

So, i believe it will be Intel® Core™ i5-650 Processor (4M Cache, 3.20 GHz).

If can, pls comment or advise but bear in mind not using this machine for warcraft or whatsoever.

[PrinceOfHeartz]

Hi
ETABS can be very heavy on your hardware. Please tell me about your budget if you have one.
Take a look at this one :

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It lacks Hyper-Threading but still is very efficient. It is up there with the I7s.

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There are probably only two advantages the i5-650 holds over the i5-750, and for the desktop, they are negligible.

The i5-650 has an graphics core bundled in on the die but it is completely pointless as you are buying a discrete graphics card anyway.

The i5-650 will overclock higher than the i5-750 because of the 32nm technology. But it wont make much of a difference and I also know that you are not interested in overclocking which is a good thing.:yes:

Power consumption is another factor. But it doesn't matter because you're a desktop user.

Why the i5-650 won't make any sense over the i5-750?

It only has two cores vs the i5-750's four cores and hyper-threading is better than nothing, but not better than another core.

I very strongly recommend Gigabyte mobos.
A few of them are here:

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Go through the list and I will help you to choose the right one. GA-P55A-UD3 is a good option I think. I assume that you wont overclock and Graphics card is a must if you go for this one. But look into the future.. It has got USB 3.0 ports and provides newest Marvell SE9128 high speed SATA3 storage interface with superfast 6Gbps link speed. It supports CrossFireX technology also. And it is cheap.

Money is a big factor when it comes to the other components. I know that money is not a problem for you guys. But I will comment on the other components only after getting a clue about your budget because a variety of products are out there and they're all separated by a thing called money. So it's impossible to recommend one or two products.

Have a nice day!
Prince