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This is my rig... Definitely not cheap
Corsair Force Series GT 180GB Sata3 SSD
16 GB GSKILL dual channel DDR3-1600
I7-2600 CPU
Gigabyte GTX 570 1.2 GB memory 917 Mhz core clock, 1.8 Ghz shader, 1.99 Ghz Memory *Changed to keep manufacturer of mobo*
18 TB storage with 8 3TB drives in RAID 6 *Edited due to my general typing incompetance, said 15 but is 18*
Intel PT-1000 server pci-e network card
Corsair Gaming Series 800W PSU
Cooler Master HAF X full tower.
Gigabyte Tech P67A-UD5-B3 Motherboard *Changed due to unavailability of the EVGA board*
ARC-1882IX 8x PCI-E SAS RAID controller
I have been debating whether I should upgrade my motherboard to quad channel memory and a socket2011 intel extreme processor but I'll do that at a later date when I need that extra power.
Before you guys rip on me saying that's far too much for a gaming rig. I also run VMware server, hosting different virtual machines that remain running and the system is my NAS as well. I figure it's easier having everything in one station instead of having a bunch of external components to move around.
The unfortunate thing is that my mobo doesn't have enough PCI-E lanes to run everything at full speed, so I'm stuck in x8. *USB 3.0 turbo disabled as it uses 8 PCI E lanes*
Comments
Um, Merry Christmas?
lol, Merry Christmas to you too
Nice rig. I think the psu is pretty weak for all those drives. Why not a 580? I think the point of a nas is the simplicity and convenience. I like not having to remember what computer has what movie and if that computer is on.
Obviously a 15 TB RAID 6 array and a dedicated RAID card is overkill for a gaming rig. I have no idea if it's overkill for your NAS purposes, but if you need a 15 TB NAS, then whatever you get there will be overkill for a gaming rig. But that's fine, as it's not purely a gaming rig.
Few programs will see any real advantage from the two extra cores of Sandy Bridge-E or the four memory channels. Gaming won't, and a NAS surely won't in the foreseeable future. If you have enough virtual machines running, then that is one application that can make use of many cores. It's plausible that you're the sort of customer that Sandy Bridge-E is meant for. Of course, it's also plausible that you're the sort of customer that two processor workstations or servers are meant for. So if the NAS or gaming are slower than you'd like, the processor and memory aren't the problem. If the virtual machines are too slow, then Sandy Bridge-E might have helped. Maybe.
One thing I will say, though, is that if you're going to spend that kind of money on a system, I'd have gone with a higher end power supply. Corsair's GS series is hardly bad, so it's not the sort of thing that you need to run out and replace immediately. But it's not that great, either. Basically, their hierarchy goes AX > HX > TX V2 > TXM > GS > CX V2. (The TXM series is modular and the TX V2 series is not, but the TX V2 series is higher quality on the power delivery, so as far as I'm concerned TX V2 is better than TXM.)
If you haven't assembled it yet, then I'd worry about whether it has enough SATA power connectors, as the power supply has 8, and by my count, you need 10. Maybe you can get a molex -> SATA adapter or some such; that shouldn't be dangerous, as a molex connector can deliver far more power than a hard drive could plausibly need. You're also one of the rare people who has to look at hard drive power consumption to avoid overwhelming the +5 V rail on your power supply, but it should be fine unless you found some unusually high power hard drives.
800 W should be adequate. Consumer hard drives are generally < 10 W each, and sometimes a lot less. He'll probably never draw 500 W from the power supply.
800 seems real low. Lets not forget case fans, roms, usb devices, and capicitor aging.
Anyone and his slightly retarded aunt can make an expensive rig... The trick, the kind of little tidbit that show some actual knowledge is to create a really good rig at a good cost. Throwing money into the air, anyone can do that.
"This is not a game to be tossed aside lightly.
It should be thrown with great force"
no quad sli? You could of got a nicer video card or two. With all the money you spent on HD's and SSD, thought you would of spent more on the vid card.
I like throwing money at computers. Im an enthusiast. I agree with you though. The caveat is that this does not appear to be a gaming computer at all. This is some sorta home workstation.
Case fans rarely take more than about 3 W each, and sometimes take a lot less than that--such as if you're running them slowly. The USB 2.0 standard only requires a USB port to deliver up to 2.5 W. USB 3.0 bumps that to 4.5 W, but USB 2.0 or earlier devices (which includes nearly everything except for a handful of external hard drives) have to stay within the 2.5 W limit. Anything that comes with a long cord (e.g., keyboards or mice) isn't going to come remotely near that 2.5 W limit, either.
For most systems, in determining how much power you need, I say take the TDP of the processor and video card, and estimate 100 W for everything else. That's usually a huge overestimate for everything else. For this system, I'd pull the hard drives out of the "everything else" and toss in 100 W for the hard drives and RAID controller. That's probably still a huge overestimate. A quick and dirty approximation would give:
Processor: 100 W
Video card: 250 W
Storage: 100 W
Everything else: 100 W
Total: 550 W
There's enough generous overestimates built in there that I'd regard it as unlikely that he ever pulls 500 W from it, and not entirely shocking if he never pulls 400 W (though he could readily do the latter if so inclined).
Unless, of course, he's going to stick waterblocks on everything and overclock it as far as it will go. In that case, 800 W might be cutting it tight. But at stock speeds, it's plenty of power.
Thank you for answering all these questions for me and saving me typing lol.
As for the poster about the Quad-SLI. There is no god damn reason why that's ever needed unless you're a high level graphics designer and maybe radiologist that needs that kind of power for rendering, compiling and processing. Having 4 cards doesn't mean 400% power boost, it would be more like maybe 250% if you're lucky. You would be better off having maybe a tri-sli but duel should be more then enough with a dedicated phys-x card although that's not even really needed.
I don't plan on overclocking unless it was truly needed, I voted for the Corsair GS PSU due to my infatuation with glowy things and that PSU has built in LED's and I didn't really think I needed more power then that PSU offered. I have a bunch of extra peripheral to sata power connectors for the extra drives. Although I never did think about the possibility of choking the PSU's voltage supply, although with it giving so many sata and peripheral connecters I didn't see anything to worry about.
Network attached storage devices are used for more then just knowing where your stuff is. It will be my backup machine for all of the devices in my house, which is about 6 different computers and a shitload of other things. On top of that I will be hosting a domain controller as one of my virtual machines on that computer which all of the systems capable of utilizing it will be running their profiles from that location. Instead of everyone being locked to being forced stuck with their profile on one machine, they could login to any machine in this house and have the same access to their stuff and the same desktops wherever they go. That also includes outlook settings and PST files.
Yes a server motherboard with duel CPU's would be a benefit for me, but once again I need to worry about licensing limitations with VMware and windows. As well I don't feel like spending 5 grand on Xeon processors and even more money on ECC ram to accomidate that board's memory Dimms. This is why I stuck with a well made home computer running enterprise hardware.
Considering I am saving myself about $10,000 in software licensing and another possible 10k in hardware required for a server environment to run what I'm in the process of running on my computer I think I've done quite well in that department. Because I've stuck with a single processor and kept it simple I do not have the enterprise license limitations. Most corporations run a similar setup just with far more ram, duel cpus or more but because they are corporate they have to pay per core and amount of ram for their windows/vmware licensing.
I honestly am not sure if this rig will be strong enough for all that I want to do with it, it should be but only time will tell... Because I got a standalone raid controller, that takes the burden of running a software raid that can bog down your cpu and with that powerful graphics card there will be hardly any overhead for my cpu. Think of the raid controller like a graphics card but made just for processing data between your hard drives instead of your cpu doing it.
something so few people would benefit from, but you might be the exception:)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10_Gigabit_Ethernet
You don't really need to spend 5 grand on Xeon processors and quad channel with a dual proc server board. You can get a socket G34 and 2 Bulldozer chips for under 2 grand. This is the environment that Bulldozer was built for and Xeon has flubbed on for the past few years.
The problem is that Valencia or Interlagos aren't good gaming chips, and it will also be used as a gaming machine.
Have you considered Oracle's VirtualBox instead of VMWare? Or a distribution of Linux instead of Windows? Both are open source with no license limitations. Also look into the Mono Project (open source initiative to bring the .NET framework to UNIX-based platforms). I used MonoDevelop for a short while to develop and debug an ASP.NET website on a Linux client.
That's about 180W worth of hard drives alone (18 hard drives is a lot, they are about 10W each peak). You may want to consider a small separate power supply just for all your RAID drives, or even just putting them in a separate box all together and connecting them via SAS, 1G/10G ethernet, or eSATA to the main case.
The CPU will be about 100W give or take, the 570GTX is 250W~ish, I usually budget 100W for everything else, you may need a bit more though because it's a bit of an unusual circumstance.
180 + 100 + 250 + 100 = 630W peak.
Now it would be rare to hit that peak - you'd have to be doing something like gaming while rebuilding your array (so that all the HDs are thrashing at the same time), but it's possible.
As far as licensing goes: even with VIrtualBox, you'd still run into limitations: if you require support for anything (and may companies do require some form of support, warranty, or some such - mainly as a liability issue, but could also just be that their IT department says "Thou shalt run this software" for uniformity or compatibility. As far as not running Windows: I hate Windows as much as the next guy, but there isn't a lot of getting around it if you need it.
There is also the big hazard of open source software, even that sponsored by major companies: there's no promise that it will be updated or supported in the future. That possibility exists for all software really, but less so in commercial software with a well publicized road map and an income stream - much more so for software that relies on the goodwill of individuals and corporations to exist.
And there is the fact that Open Source does not equal Free - VirtualBox is actually under a PUEL license (Personal Use and Evaluation License) - you can use it personally or for academic or non-profit use, but if you are a corporation wanting to use it commercially, you still need to pay for it. Open Source just means you need to make the source code available if you make changes - not everyone has the ability, patience, or tools to recompile binaries from source, and companies are still allowed to make profit off compiled binaries and distribution.
https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/VirtualBox_PUEL
Yea I know what you're saying. He stated earlier in the thread that this super computer he's building is for his home network. Sounds like personal use on his own network. But I may have misread something.
I agree it might not be a good choice if this computer was being used in a business or corporate environment, but I'm not sure if that's the case here. Maybe the OP can verify if he will be under corporate policies or his own. Will he be using it commercially or be generating income? if not, then almost certainly no need to worry.
I was just throwing that out there anyway. I've run into a lot of IT professionals who have never heard of open source software.
It's 8 hard drives, not 18. It's an 18 TB RAID 6 array, with eight 3 GB hard drives.
Your correct, I misread it as 18 drives in a RAID 6.
It's still going to be 80W worth of hard drives, and stacking 8 hard drives is still a lot of physical space.
you planning on gaming in HD while streaming ,while encoding,while recording?it is the only use i can find for such a beauty!
RAID 6 is mostly for reliability. It's basically RAID 5 with an extra drive's worth of protection, so you could theoretically lose 2 drives in the array and still be able to rebuild.
Most places call RAID 5 good protection. RAID 6 is a step up from that.
It's not really for performance, as it's not as fast as RAID 0 (but close for disk reads), and SSD's would only see marginal speed benefits from it; although it is on average a bit faster than a single drive or RAID 1 for traditional work loads. For work loads with lots of random writes (something like rapid database updates) it's poor, because of all the parity checks that have to be calculated and written across all the various disks.
Why not a 2600k for better O/C? The 2600 O/Cs like a champ (up to 5.0GHz stable, in my experience). I won't leave it there because it just feels wrong but I run 4.2 frequently.
People who use RAID 6 tend to be rather more interested in reliability than people who overclock a processor to the maximum that seems stable.