High-end Workstation Spec - £2,000

mattoc

mattoc

mattoc

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I would like to build myself a high-end workstation. It would mainly be used for Photoshop, Dreamweaver etc, and I usually have Apache running in the back ground. I also complete lots of work using Adobe Premier and play the occasional game (Call of Duty 3), hence my need for as much grunt as possible. I have scanned the forum and have not found a current spec with similar requirements, and would really appreciate your help.

Only need the case and internals, not mouse, keyboard etc.

I would like the best Quad core extreme, but there appears to be a few variants and I am confused as to which is best/suitable.. I intend to overclock to within reasonable boundries.

4Gb Super fast RAM

Ability to run at least 3 monitors, maybe 4 ie 2 graphics cards

For the OS I was considering using a pair of striped SATAs maybe Raptors, but I am concerned about their reliability/longetivity. Therefore would also like to consider striped SCSI drives. May also have a second pair of striped disks, to use a s a scratch disk, if you consider I would get a benefit

Would appreciate as much space and SATA channels as possible for future expansion.

I had considered these:

- Scythe Ninja Plus Rev.B Heatpipe CPU Cooler
- Corsair HX620W Modular power supplies

Suggestion as to whether I would be better of running a 32 o 64 OS with this system also appreciated.

I would love some advice for a suitable spec. Budget £2,000 +/- £500

Thanks in advance.

Mattoc.
 
Here is what i have:

The Retail VISTA will be quite nice sine its got both versions in, use the 32bit for now till 64bit has establaished it self.

That ASUS motherboard is perfect for a workstation, perfect.

Two top graphics cards, which will connect up to 4 monitors.

Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium 32-Bit & 64-Bit Edition DVD - Retail £211.49 inc VAT

Intel Core 2 Quadro Extreme Edition QX6700 £652.11 inc VAT

Asus P5W64-WS Pro Intel 975X £187.99 inc VAT

2x Team Xtreem 2GB (2 x 1GB) DDR2 PC2-6400C4 £411.22 inc VAT

2x Sapphire ATI Radeon X1950 XT £340.72 inc VAT

O/S Hard Disk Western Digital Raptor X 150GB £156.26 inc VAT

2x Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 250GB £111.60

Pioneer DVR-111BK 16x16 DVD±RW £22.31 inc VAT

Sony Floppy Drive £5.86 inc VAT

Tuniq Tower 120 CPU Cooler £34.06 inc VAT

Arctic Silver 5 Thermal Compound £7.04 inc VAT

Lian-Li PC-7 PLUS Aluminium £54.04 inc VAT

Corsair HX 620W ATX2.2 £103.39 inc VAT
 
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Use a quad core instead of that dual, photoshop is multithreaded and premier probably is too.
 
This may help
ocuk27nq.jpg


You can add any CPU cooler you wish, but I would go watercooling
 
Many thanks - very helpfull so far

Thanks for your help so far, it looks a good starting spec stickroad

Thanks jbloggs, I do prefer the PCI configuration of the Asus P5WDG2

One thing I would like to explore, is the drive set up.

For the OS which is better:

1) Single 150Gb Raptor
2) Dual 74Gb Raptor in a Raid 0 configuration
3) 3 Dual SCSI 320 drives

My concern is whether the Raptors will last 3-5 years.
Also, is there any advantage in having and additional pair of striped disks, to be used as a scratch disk when importing video?

Thanks Van Diemen, just checking yours out now
 
I have pulled the best bits from each spec?

Hi,

Thanks again for all your help.

I think from the suggested specs I have pulled together a few of the best items. I have swapped back to stickroads motherboard so that I can have three video cards installed. Have also upped the main graphics card to an 8800 as I have decided to get a Dell 30" while I am at it.

This is what I have so far:

Base components

Intel Core 2 Quadro Extreme Edition QX6700 £652.11 inc VAT

Asus P5W64-WS Pro Intel 975X £187.99 inc VAT

Team Xtreem 2GB (2 x 1GB) DDR2 PC2-8000C5 1000MHz £489.72 inc VAT

30” Screen - EVGA GeForce 8800 GTX KO ACS3 SILENT 768MB £469.99 inc VAT

Smaller screens - 2x Sapphire ATI Radeon X1950 XT ICEQ 3 TURBO SILENT £387.22 inc VAT

Pioneer DVR-111BK 16x16 DVD±RW £22.31 inc VAT

Sony Floppy Drive £5.86 inc VAT

Tuniq Tower 120 CPU Cooler £34.06 inc VAT

Arctic Silver 5 Thermal Compound £7.04 inc VAT

Lian-Li PC V2000 PLUS Silver Aluminum Full-Tower £152.74 inc VAT

OCZ GameXStream 850w Silent SLI Ready ATX2 Power Supply £135.11 inc VAT

Not included in base budget

1 x Dell Ultrasharp 3007WFP 30" Widescreen LCD Monitor £998.74 inc VAT
2 x Dell Ultrasharp 2007FP 20.1" Performance LCD Monitor - Stock Code: £587.48 inc VAT

Further advice would be greatly appreciated, particularily regarding, disks and raid.

Hoping to order on Monday, promise to post a pic when done.

Thanks again,

Mattoc.
 
Maybe I am reading this wrong but,

Why have 2x 1950XT's? one has dual out. (as does the GTX). Also, it used to not be a good idea to mix ATI and Nvidia in the same system, I am not sure if that is still the case or not.

If you aren't gaming, then you really dont need the GTX's, it would be better to get a card that is for the specific purpose of rendering/whatever. If on the other hand you do want to game, I say get an 8800 GTS in place of the 2 x1950's, as they have dual out.

Indeed, you could EVEN get 2x GT(S OR X) and run them in SLI when you don't require the other screens.

*EDIT*

On top of that why are you getting such expensive ram? a 165 pounds worth of Geil 6400 ram will do you nicely. Drop in 2x that amount of 4GB, which will be far nicer for heavy rendering and the like.
 
For a proper workstation, you want SCSI RAID - RAID1 or RAID5 (or RAID10 if you can afford it) - maybe two SCSI RAID1 arrays?

Don't underestimate the important of disks in a system :)
 
Dark Angel - I wanted one dual to run the 30" and two other dual cards so that I can run 3 other monitors. Having thought about it further I think I might be better off to just have 2 cards, one to run the big screen and one to run the two smaller screens. If You say best not to mix manufactures then a can go for two of the x1950's?

If I did this would I be able to switch off the two smaller screens and run the big screen in crossfire mode if I wanted to play a game? If so I think I see what Van DieMen was origianlly suggesting?

Also, the Geil memory is way cheaper, that would save me nearly £200 :-) I think it is a slower clockspead, why would it be better for rendering?

Beansprout & joeyjojo - Regarding the OS disk system. I appreciate the benifits of SCSI but I am unsure if the MB will accept a 32bit SCSI adapter? Also, I thought I would be better going for a 2 disk RAID 0, for speed? For which I was thinking of a couple of Raptors - Your thoughts on this would be much appreciated. By the way I will be connecting to en external backup system, so I was not particularily concerned about redundancy ie RAID 5, unless there are other benefits?

Now that I only need two video slots I am considering swapping back to the Asus P5WDG2-WS, which has the following PCI configuration, this seems a little more flexible for me?

Expansion Slots

* 2 x PCI-E x 16 slots
* 2 x PCI-X
* 2 x PCI 2.2

Thanks again everyone for all your time on this.

Mattoc
 
Crossfire is the best thing for you. Under number 8 here it says 5 displays (think they mean 4 though). A master card and cheaper 512mb slave will do the job as in my spec. Very very fast indeed. I assume that when gaming, the cards will give priority to the game rather than the 2d desktops.

How much space do you need, and are you sure about not having redundancy? If its ~150 GB get two 74gb raptors or 2 80gb drives in raid 0, and use the backup system regularly. Otherwise raid10 would be awesome (striped mirrors). Fast like raid0 but mirrored like raid1.

Oh and you can overclock the geil massively :)
 
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As said, the geil ram can be overclocked. It would save you 200, so if you felt inclined feel free to buy 2 lots of the ram, for a total of 4GB.

Be sure to use either windows XP 64, OR windows Vista though, it windows will only say "hello" to 3.5GB and not reconize the other 512MB of the stuff.

As for the GPU, I would either get a crossfire solution, or get 2 8800 GTS's in SLI. (they also have 4 ports for monitors). So you could run them in SLI when you wish to game, and single if you wanted to get some work done, and enable to the other 2 monitors.

Personally though, I would consider more specialized rendering cards if you do a lot of 3d work, but if most of your work is 2d (e.g Adobe Premiere) then I wouldn't bother with such things.

Remember though, any old second card should be fine, I am pretty sure that if you wished to buy an 8800GTX for the "main" display, and then get something like the 6200 128MB for the second/third display, you should be fine. You would not be able to SLI, but the 8800GTX is fast enough for most games, even on a screen as massive as the 30". If you felt you needed more GPU power, you could purchase a second 8800GTX, and the price would have come down quite a bit. This is only an option though, I am not suggesting you take this course of action more than the 2x GPU's in either cross fire OR SLI.
 
Thanks guys!!

Thanks guys, really appreciate your help.

I am sold on both the Geil and Crossfire solutions.

Will post final spec shortly.

Thanks again.

Mattoc.
 
Final spec - including suggested storage

OS = Vista Ultimate 64

Base components

Intel Core 2 Quadro Extreme Edition QX6700 £652.11 inc VAT

Asus P5W64-WS Pro Intel 975X £187.99 inc VAT

OCZ GameXStream 850w Silent SLI Ready ATX2 Power Supply £135.11 inc VAT

2 x GeIL 2GB (2x1GB) PC6400C4 800MHz Ultra Low Latency DDR2 Dual Channel Kit (GX22GB6400UDC) £289.98 (£328.98)

Adaptec SCSI Card 39320A-R - Storage controller - Ultra320 SCSI - £278.46 inc VAT

RAID 10 = 4 x Seagate Cheetah 15K.4 36GB U320 £383.72 inc vat

RAID 0 = 2 x Western Digital Raptor X 150GB WD1500AHFD 10,000RPM 16MB Cache £312.52 inc VAT

1 x Western Digital Caviar SE16 500GB 5000AAKS SATA-II 16MB Cache - OEM £89.29 inc VAT

ATI Radeon X1950 XT-X Silent 512MB MASTER £258.49 inc VAT

ATI Radeon X1950 XT-X Silent 512MB £246.74 inc VAT

Pioneer DVR-111BK 16x16 DVD±RW £22.31 inc VAT

Sony Floppy Drive £5.86 inc VAT

Tuniq Tower 120 CPU Cooler £34.06 inc VAT

Arctic Silver 5 Thermal Compound £7.04 inc VAT

Lian-Li PC V2000 PLUS Silver Aluminum Full-Tower £152.74 inc VAT

If you could give the spec a final once over I would appreciate it.

I am a bit over budget, but guessing I will not need to upgrade for some time. I might be cheeky and see if OC will give me a discount for a volume order.

Monitors – Dell direct
1 x Dell Ultrasharp 3007WFP 30" Widescreen LCD Monitor £957.63 inc VAT
2 x Dell Ultrasharp 2007FP 20.1" Performance LCD Monitor - £543.32 inc VAT
 
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Could get the 6600 over the 6700.
Raptors are probably overkill unless you absolutely need <10ms response time.
500GB for backup I assume? Unnecessary with the 10 array I think, but you know best.
Could get a cheaper 1950. Would probably be very little loss if you got a 1950 pro. Again up to you though, not a massive saving.
I wouldn't pay 6 quid for a floppy drive :D

Looks good though. Absolutely epic system :D

Take out the links to the etailers or a mod will do it for you :)
 
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