I've been thinking and working on this project since Christmas Eve, when I ordered the pile of stuff in the photo below.
To put this project in perspective, my first computer was a Northstar Horizon in 1977:
With the exception of a 1984 Mac and various work-issued laptops along the way, every subsequent machine I've built myself. As I've grown older and wiser, my build intervals have increased. I've found I can live with my creations for much longer and the leaps in technology are more impressive.
My last effort was in 2005 and held over a lot of stuff its predecessor in 2002. So I knew I was in for a treat when I sat down to spec out the new toy.
Here are my requirements...
The primary use will be music and video production. Some of the music will be recorded directly into the computer DAW in my home studio, so it must be nearly silent when operating in this mode. The secondary use will be for gaming. I don't care how noisy it is while gaming. This machine is also our primary source of video entertainment and will host the main backup storage for all the various portable computing devices that wander around the house. Since upgrading to a faster (BT Infinity) broadband connection, I no longer have a conveniently located ethernet connection, so some snazzy wireless support is also required. As a final requirement, since I don't plan to do this again for another five or six years, this build needs to be able to keep up wtih only minor modifications (swapping hard drives or video cards is okay, but I don't want to have to swap out the motherboard or power supply), so I'm going to err on the side of overkill. That approach has worked well in the past. By current machine still runs everything except the very latest generation of games (e.g., BF3) without any trouble.
Parts started trickling in just after Christmas. I'm well into the build now, but by no means finished. I've been taking a lot of pictures along the way, which I'll share shortly. For now I'll just briefly outline what I have in mind.
First of all, I've been living with a 19" LCD for over a decade. It needs to go. I need a lot of visual real estate for the music software, so I've opted for the 27" Asus monitor you see pictured above.
To drive that monitor at its native resolution of 2056x1440, I've decided to go with a pair of GTX 680 video cards. I'm going to air cool these cards because I don't care about the noise when they are active and hate the hassle of watercooling. But I'm going to water cool processor.
I've been mulling over storage strategies for a while and have finally come up wtih a plan I think makes sense. It looks like this:
SSD 1 (240 GB) for the OS and any applications that insist on being installed with the OS on the C drive. That's probably bigger than it needs to be, but i don't want to feel constrained.
SSD2 (240 GB) for music and video applications and Steam. I was originally going to keep my current projects, plug-ins and one or two frequently-played games on this drive until I decided upon the following....
SSD3 (60 GB) cache for HDD1, below
HDD1 (1 TB) working data drive holding all my own creations, game library, etc.
HDD 2 & 3 (3 TB each in RAID 1 configuration) backup for this and all other data in the house. I hate hasslnig with RAID, but I also hate the prospect of losing 3 TB of data or paying obscene amounts for a cloud-based server subscription.
I thought about high density Blueray storage, but the discs are still too expensive and will just end up cluttering up the house. But we will have two optical drives since our DVD library includes both regions 1 & 2.
More details to follow, including how I manage the sound system, keeping the case (Corsair Obsidian 800D) both cool and quiet, and experiments with both WiFi and power-line networking.
-Mifuen
To put this project in perspective, my first computer was a Northstar Horizon in 1977:
With the exception of a 1984 Mac and various work-issued laptops along the way, every subsequent machine I've built myself. As I've grown older and wiser, my build intervals have increased. I've found I can live with my creations for much longer and the leaps in technology are more impressive.
My last effort was in 2005 and held over a lot of stuff its predecessor in 2002. So I knew I was in for a treat when I sat down to spec out the new toy.
Here are my requirements...
The primary use will be music and video production. Some of the music will be recorded directly into the computer DAW in my home studio, so it must be nearly silent when operating in this mode. The secondary use will be for gaming. I don't care how noisy it is while gaming. This machine is also our primary source of video entertainment and will host the main backup storage for all the various portable computing devices that wander around the house. Since upgrading to a faster (BT Infinity) broadband connection, I no longer have a conveniently located ethernet connection, so some snazzy wireless support is also required. As a final requirement, since I don't plan to do this again for another five or six years, this build needs to be able to keep up wtih only minor modifications (swapping hard drives or video cards is okay, but I don't want to have to swap out the motherboard or power supply), so I'm going to err on the side of overkill. That approach has worked well in the past. By current machine still runs everything except the very latest generation of games (e.g., BF3) without any trouble.
Parts started trickling in just after Christmas. I'm well into the build now, but by no means finished. I've been taking a lot of pictures along the way, which I'll share shortly. For now I'll just briefly outline what I have in mind.
First of all, I've been living with a 19" LCD for over a decade. It needs to go. I need a lot of visual real estate for the music software, so I've opted for the 27" Asus monitor you see pictured above.
To drive that monitor at its native resolution of 2056x1440, I've decided to go with a pair of GTX 680 video cards. I'm going to air cool these cards because I don't care about the noise when they are active and hate the hassle of watercooling. But I'm going to water cool processor.
I've been mulling over storage strategies for a while and have finally come up wtih a plan I think makes sense. It looks like this:
SSD 1 (240 GB) for the OS and any applications that insist on being installed with the OS on the C drive. That's probably bigger than it needs to be, but i don't want to feel constrained.
SSD2 (240 GB) for music and video applications and Steam. I was originally going to keep my current projects, plug-ins and one or two frequently-played games on this drive until I decided upon the following....
SSD3 (60 GB) cache for HDD1, below
HDD1 (1 TB) working data drive holding all my own creations, game library, etc.
HDD 2 & 3 (3 TB each in RAID 1 configuration) backup for this and all other data in the house. I hate hasslnig with RAID, but I also hate the prospect of losing 3 TB of data or paying obscene amounts for a cloud-based server subscription.
I thought about high density Blueray storage, but the discs are still too expensive and will just end up cluttering up the house. But we will have two optical drives since our DVD library includes both regions 1 & 2.
More details to follow, including how I manage the sound system, keeping the case (Corsair Obsidian 800D) both cool and quiet, and experiments with both WiFi and power-line networking.
-Mifuen
