Balancing features in Athlon 64 3500+ system

Post by **NeilBlanchard** » Fri Feb 25, 2005 9:07 am

Hello:

Building a computer can be a real balancing act, can't it?

I'll try to keep this as succinct as possible. I have a client who has some priorities that include:

Very dependable and redundant HD's, with plenty of storage for digital photos
Large amount of RAM -- he uses large databases with up to a million entries
some photo editing, and print of reports up to 100 pages while multitasking
DVI output for 21" Eizo LCD, with second DVI for future second LCD
and quiet & cool are important, as well

My client had gotten a proposal for a Dell dual Xeon system with five SCSI drives, and it was about $5,500!!

I'm hoping to use an Evercase 4252, though it depends on the motherboard I end up with, and how it fits the HSF. As a fall back, we will use an Antec SLK3000B. I'm planning on getting a Seasonic S12 500watt -- my client has lost two PS's in his current machine!

We want to use two pairs of RAID 1 SATA drives: a small(er) pair for the C:\ drive, and a pair 300GB SATA drives as the second RAID 1 array for data storage. At first we had considered Raptor 36GB for the first, and Seagate for the second -- both have 5 year warranties. But, I am now leaning to using two 80GB Seagates as the boot drives, because they will be quieter than the Raptors, in all likelyhood. We had considered Samsungs for the boot drives, and I guess this is still a possibility -- though they have "just" three year warranties, and their performance is probably "farthest" from the Raptors?

Now, I see that there are Seagate 7200.8's with NCQ, and I see that Maxtor DM10 with NCQ have three year warranties, but the smallest Maxtor with a three year warranty I could find at NewEgg was a 160GB...

So for the quietest arrangement is probably the Samsung 80GB's as the C:\, and either the Maxtor or the Seagate 300GB's? The call of the Seagate five year warranty, especially on the data storage drive is influencing us, though, and as the C:\ is the one running more often, the Samsung makes the best choice, there...

NCQ: is it worth pursuing? And if so, would the boot drives and/or the data drives benefit more from it?

Okay, on to the rest of the system! He wants at least 2GB of RAM, with 4GB being possible; either now or in the future. So, that kind of tilts the motherboard selection to something with four DIMM slots and either the nForce3 or the nForce4 chipset. Or, is there a VIA and/or an ATi chipset that can reliably work with four 1GB sticks of PC3200?

And the question of NCQ comes up again: if it is a good thing, then does the SATA2 "3GB" on the nForce4 support NCQ? Do any of the other chipsets support NCQ with the onboard controllers -- or would I just be better off buying a PCI SATA controller that definitely supports NCQ; possibly from Promise?

I had originally picked the Matrox Millennium P650 for it's dual DVI outputs, but this dictates an AGP mobo, like a Gigabyte nForce3 -- which also looks like it will fit the Thermalright XP-120; even inside the Evercase! I'd have to replace the NB cooler, of course.

If I need to go with an nForce4 mobo, I'm leaning towards the Chaintech, which looks great -- except for the ATX power location. And, I'd get an XFX 6600GT and stick either a Zalman ZM80D-HP or an AeroCool VM-101 on it. Depending on which one fits, or if they both could fit (not at once!

) then the better perfoming one...

Oh, and I am considering Corsair XMS Extreme Memory Speed Series, (Twin Pack) 184 Pin 2GB(1GB x 2) DDR PC-3200 for the RAM, and I will be using the Athlon 64 3500+ Winchester, with the Thermalright XP-120, wit the Zalman 7000 as teh fall back.

Sheesh -- these posts are never short, are they?

Jump right in folks! Am I on the right track, or am I all wet? Can you help me with any of my myriad questions? TIA

burcakb · Post by **burcakb** » Fri Feb 25, 2005 11:37 am

your client will obviously benefit greatly from the 64-bit windows when it gets out.

AFAIK, the VIA SATA implementation isn't very good. It's dependent on CPU power and shares IRQs with other important things that I don't exactly remember. Not a difference worthy of note on a desktop environment but this is a serious workstation we're talking about...

So you're basically in nForce terratory.

I thought the whole idea of RAID1 was safety - if one drive fails, you take it out, plug in another one. No? If I had that much safety built in, I certainly wouldn't worry about individual drive longevity. I'd be willing to pay for a new drive in 3 years time if it'll get me a quiter computer for those 3 years. For the record, the only hard drive I had fail on me lasted about 4 years. And that was a notoriously bad WD. My ancient 4 GB Seagates and Maxtors are still humming away somewhere.

Wouldn't the 3000B be a better alternative to the Evercase? You will after all be putting in 4 drives there. With the 3000B, you could suspend the cage a'la Thor, pad it on three sides with foam so it can withstand shipping and you'll have quiet as well

Nevarion · Post by **Nevarion** » Fri Feb 25, 2005 11:50 am

Why not go for Dual Opteron as they perform very well and has 64bit support. The price tag for a Dual Opteron system is really good actually, and for grafic-card i wouldn't go for a matrox as they produces a lot of heat, and if the system isn't going to be a gameplatform i would look for a ati radeon card up to 9600xt/x600 with dual dvi support.

sthayashi · Post by **sthayashi** » Fri Feb 25, 2005 12:50 pm

Why are you going with the S12 500 again? For a Dual Xeon setup w/ 5 SCSIs, I could understand, but not for an equivalent A64 3500+. That processor draws like a quarter of the power as a dual Xeon.

For the smaller pair system drive, you wanna know my suggestion? Go 15k, Go Seagate, and go SCSI. If you're willing to settle for 36GB Raptors in terms of noise, then I bet you can settle for 15k Cheetahs as well.

I'm leaning towards agreeing with Nevarion here and suggestion a dual Opteron setup, assuming your client was seriously considering a dual Xeon setup. The Tyan Thunder K8W series can actually support 2 Zalman 7000s on them, IIRC.

jack_aubrey · Post by **jack_aubrey** » Fri Feb 25, 2005 5:37 pm

If you want a PCIe dual-DVI card, look at something like a FireGL 3200. A bit more expensive than the Matrox, but it's a workstation-class card, and will be much faster than the P650 for anything 3D.

Post by **NeilBlanchard** » Fri Feb 25, 2005 9:44 pm

Hello and thanks for your answers so far,

I got an e-mail back from Gigabyte (I had e-mailed them along with ChainTech, AOpen, and DFI) and they informed me that nForce4 does not support NCQ. SATA2 does not (necessarily) include NCQ -- so that answers that! If I want NCQ, which would seem to be slightly better performance with no noise penalty, then I need to buy a PCI SATA controller like the one from Promise, that has four SATA ports and supports NCQ. [Edit] The info that I got from Gigabyte is incorrect! So, this paragraph can probably be ignored... [/Edit]

And so the RAM issue is the last thing to answer, so I can nail a mobo choice. As far as I know, all the nForce3 and nForce4 mobo's with four DIMM slots can take 4GB total, and they can do this at DDR400/PC3200 speeds, right? At this rate, I may just go for this Gigabyte model, since it has a passive NB and and an AGP slot!

I have a Matrox Millennium P650 at work, and it most definitely not a hot running card! It is great for 2D work (which is all he needs) and it will handle some 3D just fine. I'll be very happy not to have to mess with the size and possible conflicts of fitting a Zalman or AeroCool in there next to an XP-120!

I am getting the S12 500 because it is so efficient, and it is probably the best quality PS around. And NewEgg has them for sale. I could easily settle for a Super Tornado 400watt, but why not get the S12?

I had considered a dual Opteron system -- I had priced one out with fewer drives and less RAM (for someone else doing 3D renderings) for $3200 or so. But, his software won't take advantage of two CPU's, and it is a workstation, so I think the 3500+ will be great. He currently has a Athlon 1400+ "Thunderbird" with 1GB of RAM.

So, nobody has said much about the NCQ and the noise of the HD's. Should I go for the Maxtors or the Seagates? Or, just get the Samsungs on the boot drives (since they are so quiet) and not worry about NCQ on those?

sthayashi · Post by **sthayashi** » Fri Feb 25, 2005 9:47 pm

NeilBlanchard wrote:I am getting the S12 500 because it is so efficient, and it is probably the best quality PS around. And NewEgg has them for sale. I could easily settle for a Super Tornado 400watt, but why not get the S12?

Because the S12 is rumored to be louder than its younger brothers (430 and 380, I believe). It HAS to be louder because they use a more powerful fan that can cool up to the 500W power draw.

Spod · Post by **Spod** » Mon Feb 28, 2005 4:36 am

RAM - All S939 boards and CPUs should support PC3200/DDR400 with 4 1GB DIMMs. Most current S939 Athlon 64s won't support 1T timings with 4 DIMMs, whatever the board/chipset. I don't know if the latest 90nm spin of the 4000+ has the better memory controller, or if that improvement is due in a later revision. The 90nm 4000+ does have SSE3, which may help for some media-oriented tasks.

HD noise - Samsungs aren't that slow, they're faster than most Seagate ATA drives, but they're only quiet if you can get the ones with NIDEC motors. See NIDEC vs. JVC threads in the Silent Storage forum.
I understand the Maxtor DM+10 and Maxline III are fairly quiet, but the Raptor 74GB isn't particularly quiet. The older 36GB Raptor models are much louder than the FDB-based 74 GB Raptors, but even the 74 GB model is distinctly audible when softmounted in an AcoustiPacked case. Not annoying, but audible. Hard mount it in un undamped enclosure, and you may find it quite loud by SPCR standards.

HD reliability - if your client wants their data to be safe, the only solution is regular backups. RAID 1 will protect you against a drive failing, and allow you to keep working while you wait for a replacement, but it won't protect against user error*, viruses, fire, theft, file corruption, power surges et al. You really need logically and physically seperate backups, typically to DVD or tape. Dual layer DVD is cheap, but tape has better capacity (allowing you to back up all your data in one automatic job, instead of sitting there swapping DVDs).

Don't assume a 5 year warranty means a more reliable drive. And remember, no warranty includes recovery of your data if the drive fails.

*User errors include, but are not limited to, deleting the wrong file, formatting the wrong partition, deleting or messing up large portions of a file, discovering after you've saved that you've overwritten or accidentally edited out something important...

NCQ doesn't help much in single user desktop situations. It may make a few percent difference in multitasking, but it really doesn't come into its own until multiple users are accessing randomly located files simultaneously. A single user just doesn't generate the random workloads that benefit from NCQ.
That said, NCQ (as distinct from the older TCQ protocol used in Raptors and some IBM/Hitachi drives) doesn't create much of a performance hit in single user workloads, so you might as well use it if your hardware supports it.

Post by **NeilBlanchard** » Mon Feb 28, 2005 10:09 am

Hello:

Thanks for all your answers -- I am refining things as I go along. It now looks like I will be getting an nForce4 mobo (a DFI?) and, that means I'll have to pursue a passive cooling solution for this XFX nVidia GeForce 6600GT Video Card, since it has dual DVI outputs and is about hte same cost as the Matrox P650.

Is it pretty likely (or definite?) that I can use 4 of these 1GB sticks of Corsair RAM at DDR400 and SPD latencies?

I am now torn between getting a pair of Samsungs or a pair of Maxtor DM10 (or Maxline III's?) for the boot drive RAID 1 array. I am probably going to stick with the Seagates for the data storage RAID 1 array. And yes, we will be using two different USB2 external HD's for weekly backups, and one of these will be kept off site.

Spod · Post by **Spod** » Tue Mar 01, 2005 4:27 am

The Aerocool VM-101 seems the best passive solution - see the User Reviews forum thread (by Edward Ng).

SPD latencies are generally fine, but when using 4 DIMMS, you may find it won't boot or work reliably unless you specify a 2T (2 cycle) Command Rate timing in the BIOS. You can leave everything else on auto. It depends on the RAM make/model whether SPD sets the command rate to 1T or 2T.

If the boot drive won't be used for data storage, there's no major advantage to using a larger drive (though the more cache, the better). If you're going for quiet, the JVC motor Samsungs may be on a par with the Maxtor DM+10/Maxline III (a guess based on forum opinions). The NIDEC motor Samsungs are probably the quietest non-notebook drive available.

ChristianN · Post by **ChristianN** » Tue Mar 01, 2005 12:21 pm

I'd recomend going for the 74gb raptors; I find the discs suprisingly quiet for what you get. More so; your client's Dell Xenon option is far, far from a quiet machine. If you suspend and isolate the raptors properly you'll have something that works for all involved parties, it'll be fast and it'll be reliable. Noisewise I think most people will be suprised at how silent these disks are for being what they are [as in, the raptors arent 'oh hey quiet disk!' but they are imensly fast and suprisingly quiet at that].