Need advice on a special build please

Soldato
Joined
5 Nov 2006
Posts
3,133
Hi all,

Right here goes. My Brother in law has asked me to build him a new system.
His needs are as follows:-

He is a programmer, and does lots of intensive database work, and he also wishes to have good graphics for gaming as well. He would like Raid 5 on his storage drives which I think will probably be 3 x WD 2TB Black drives. Operating system will be placed on a 256Gb ssd.He wants the system to be as quiet as possible so it will be a custom water cooling build - preferably both cpu and Gpu, all built in a mid tower(think this could be a restriction as far as water cooling goes), but the case is up for choice as yet.

The real crunch for me is I think he wants a SAS controller card for the raid 5 storage - any advice on this please gents as I have no experience in particular about SAS controllers.

What I have chosen so far is:-
Asus P9X79 WS board
Processor 4930K - will be modestly over clocked
32Gb of reasonably fast Ram - to be decided, maybe 16GB may be enough?
A Nvidia780GTX Graphics - also to be over-clocked by a bit.
PSU - either seasonic 760W platinum or 860W platinum to allow upgrade for the future(maybe a seccond graphics card?)
SSD 250Gb samsung evo?
Good quality sound card - your suggestions here?
Fan controller- probably Lamptron

The budget for all this needs to be somewhere around the 2K mark, give or take. At the end of the day he wants a quiet and very fast system.

Your thoughts and suggestions are very welcome as always - what do you think guys?

Mark
 
If he wants a SAS controller he will want SAS disks which means big money. SAS is the disk interface technology used for servers. He will use his entire budget just buying one SAS SSD.
Why 32GB RAM? What's he doing that needs that much?
 
As above, I'd look at:

* 4 SATA disks in RAID 10 (faster writing than RAID 5, but you only get half the total capacity. Also see http://www.baarf.com/ !). No features of SAS will be useful in this system.
* 16 G memory, unless he KNOWS that he will frequently exceed it.
* The performance of 4 core chips versus the 6 core above in his applications. Depending on the work he does it may not be that parallelised, and dropping down to a 4 core chip (even one with hyperthreading) would save money for elsewhere.

He really hasn't given you enough information to go on as it stands.
 
I agree with the above, does he use VM's?, are the databases Seqel, Orcale etc? (I'm guessing Sequel), what kind of SQL Server load is he going to using on it?, what kinda SQL licensing if using SQL is he using? (Web, Developer, Standard, Business Intelligence, Enterprise?)?, Will he be using an IIS or .NET framework to act as a front end?, what the size and growth expected to be like?, Will he be using a Sequel "Core"?

So many questions :(
 
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Thanks for all the input guys - some of which has gone above my head as I dont have enough info as you suggest. I will pass on these comments to get more info.

Mark

Edit
Been giving this some more thought guys - think 16gb will suffice on memory. I am now considering maybe a dedicated raid card, and Raid 10 for the storage setup.
Think this would achieve the required results. Awaiting more info from Brother in Law.
 
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