Computers & Networking

[asandwhich]

Gonna build a computer soon, wantin to know if anybody has heard of any major changes nvidia or intel might make to their higher end products soon. If so, I might wait.

[TheLexMachine]

Nvidia has it's next generation of GPU coming out very soon and Intel just released some new CPUs at the beginning of the year but there isn't anything exceptionally awesome coming from them until later in the year and that's more for the workstation market than gaming rigs. What's out right now is really as good as it will get for you until the next version of Windows due next year which is expected to be radically different in how it utilizes your multi-core CPUs.

[asandwhich]

K, thanks.  What do you predict for the ssd market, up or down? tryin to decide between dual ssds or a 15,000 rpm hdd.  I'll probably be runnin overclocked i7, but maybe if the xeon suddenly pops up with the six core i might go for it. I'm gonna make it between a gaming rig and workstation.

[seekrtz]

The only 15K hard drives I have ever heard of are SCSI; and I would stay far away from them.

SSD will definitely replace mechanical hard drives, and probably fairly soon, as they are cheaper to manufacture and use far less power; while mechanical drives are starting to hit serious areal density brick walls or the "super-paramagnetic limit".  SCSI will finally be removed from its last remaining niche in the SAS enterprise market.

WD just released a line of SSD drives recently, so the shift is starting to escalate.  I would prefer the faster random read and write performance on the more expensive Intel series drives than the Indilinx based drives.  The new C300 controller in the micron SSD drives is the fastest, but also pricier

As for SATA drives, I highly recommend the Samsung Spinpoint F3 series for cheap and fast sequence read and writes; it uses 500GB platters and a raid 10 array using four of these drives (possibly short stroked for slightly better access times as well) would be a nice alternative to a single SSD. 

In the end it, I would go with a fairly small SSD drive from Intel and use it to store the OS and a few Apps/Games.  A RAID 0/1/ 10 with SATA drives for everything else - depending on how important the data is.

*Do not be discouraged by Intel's lower write speeds in comparison to other Indilinx drives, 35MB/s-70MB/s is fine and you will not notice a performance hit unless you are backing up large files on a regular basis.  Regular programs and games do not write much except during installation  

**SSD drives in RAID configurations are largely profitless as well, essentially all it does is increase you maximum sequential reads/writes to levels that are unusable outside of benchmark programs, so unless you plan to move files from them to another raided SSD, or you host services to a large group of people - again very doubtful in a home network.

[asandwhich]

Thanks, Right now there are so many updates predicted and whatnot, I am going to save up even more and go with the next big thing.  Didu here about the possibility of the hexacore mac pro next week? Gonna be awesome.

[TheLexMachine]

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asandwhich wrote:

Thanks, Right now there are so many updates predicted and whatnot, I am going to save up even more and go with the next big thing.  Didu here about the possibility of the hexacore mac pro next week? Gonna be awesome.

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Not really. Nearly every desktop application that was CPU intensive on the Mac, mostly video post-processing, can now be accelerated far better by using add-in hardware cards that sport dedicated processors. It would be very useful on their servers which are used for video storage and editing.