I have not built a system for a long, long time. My primary requirement is for Photo Editing, but I will be using a flight sim as well.

This is what I have come up with.

When WD's new VelociRaptor drives are released, I will add one (or two in a RAID-0 config).

Any missing items, gotchas, incompatibilities or just plain old 'that will never work'... ?

Thanks for looking,
Craig.

1) Chuck that PSU...that brand isn't quite the best and the wattage is way ovrkill... get the Corsair 550VX instead. $70

2) $380 is too much money spent on CPU...get the Q6600 for $200 instead. It overclocks really well too.

3) Ditch that cooler...the XIGMATEK HDT S1283 is the new boss out there right now. $36

4) Get the Corsair 4GB DDR2 800 for $85 instead.

5) Get a better GPU...the Radeon 3870 or Nvidia 9600GT ...both for ~$140

6) Rather than that Samsung, get the faster Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 ST3750330AS 750GB HD for about $5 more.

All that should save you a heck of a lot of money and give you a blast of a performance.

^^^ Totally. The 9600GT OEM was under $100 after rebate. Somebody must've snapped up 2 of them for a budget SLI build.

The Samsung F1 is the 3-platter drive? It'll be fast. Mine aren't the 320GB platters, but it's pretty fast already. The only thing is 3 year warranty vs 5 from Seagate.

Graphics card now : EVGA 512-P3-N861-AR GeForce 9600GT 512MB ($140).

CPU - I want the 3Mb per cpu L2 for compute intensive application (photo editing).

HDD - Speed for this drive is OK. Remember that the main drive will become the WD VelociRaptor when it is released later this month.

Memory - I'm not sure on this. Will research more.

PSU - OK. Will research further. What wattage range do you recommend ? Would I need more than 1 12V rail ?


Thanks,
Craig.

mihirkula has given you some pretty good advice there. If you choose not to follow good advice, well you are wasting your time here.

Of course, in the end it's up to you what you want to do with YOUR money. You can spend it on **** fights and booze for all we care.

Mushkin makes good memory, I replaced my Corsair XMS Pro with it and have been very happy. In fact the Mushkin did one thing the Corsair couldn't do. That was allow me to run 4 2gb sticks without having to tinker with settings. The Mushkin just went in and was detected at its EPP settings in dual channel mode. Had to manually set the timings with the Corsair XMS and then one failed within three months. One nice thing about Corsair is service, three day turn around on the one I had to RMA. I haven't had to RMA any Mushkin yet. You really can't go bad with either one for that matter.

Skip the RAID 0 array. Modern SATA 2 hard drives are fast enough that any increase in real world performance using RAID - especially chipset RAID - really isn't cost effective. And with RAID 0, you lose either drive and you have lost everything on both drives.

Thanks for the constructive advice.

Now if folks would back up what they say with WHY instead of just 'replace a with b' I may be more inclined to pay attention.

Thanks, I was planning on installing a single WD VR and seeing what the performance was like. The move to raid 0 would only happen if I really thought it would make a difference. I understand about losing the drives and backup accordingly.

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I am not building a gaming PC. I'm building a photo editing PC, hence the $1000 monitor.

I currently have a P4 3.2GHz Hyperthreading with 2Gb ram. The CPU goes to 100% and stays there for long periods of time. This is by far my biggest bottleneck, followed by HDD access speed.

Thanks,
Craig.

Oh, and I've also been hearing some not-so-good things about Vista 64 bit, so I'll be sticking with XP 32 bit for now.

Craig.

That's bogus. Nothing wrong with Vista64. Old people like their old things. Those same peope said those same things about XP when it came out years ago.

Actually, Nikon has not released a CODEC for Vista 64, so this is a moot point.

Craig.

Do you mean driver or codec? Just use ffdshow codec for video playback. It handles everything.

Mate i included the WHYs very clearly in my post.

Except for the RAM...now for the reason is obvious...lots of firepower for a considerable comparative cheap price.

What apps do you use for photo editing that justifies a One Grand monitor?

The monitor is for color fidelity and for color/luminance that does not shift when you change position in your chair. Most LCD monitors use TN panels which are not good for photo editing. Try raising and lowering your head while looking at a color image on your monitor - you should see what I am talking about. The NEC uses a H-IPS panel. I use a colorimeter to calibrate my monitor.

To answer your question, the apps I use are Adobe Photoshop and Nikon Capture NX (NX is the main cause of my performance problems), It is also my primary raw conversion and editing app.

BTW, I do thank you for your earlier response. I do however, have to apply due diligence to all responses, as I do not know who you are or what your credentials are.

Back to the memory - will the DDR2-1066 allow easier overclocking than the DDR2-800 ? If not, why not? I thought that was the point of the higher spec memory.

Thanks,
Craig.