Buyer's Guide: High End System - May 2004
by Wesley Fink on May 26, 2004 11:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Guides
Hard Drives
Recommended: Dual Western Digital Raptor 74GB 10,000RPM SATA in RAID 0 ConfigurationPrice: $428 shipped
There are genuine performance advantages to a SATA RAID array, and a RAID 0 Array with two of the fastest SATA drives that you can buy makes for a blistering high end system. The storage capacity for two 74GB WD Raptor drives is a generous, but rational, 148GB of fast access storage. Compared to SCSI RAID solutions with similar performance, the Raptor RAID is a virtual bargain. The 74GB Raptors have double the storage of the legendary 36.7GB Raptors, an increase in speed, and the same 8MB buffer.
The 5-year warranty for the Raptor drives makes this investment in high-speed storage a little easier to handle. All drives will fail at some point because they have moving parts, but you have warranty reassurance for 5 years that attest to the quality of these WD Raptor hard drives. Previously, 10,000RPM speeds or a 5-year warranty were features only found on enterprise/SCSI drives, but they have now reached our high end system desktop.
All of the high-end recommended and alternative motherboards have built-in capabilities for SATA RAID, so it is relatively easy to enjoy this level of RAID performance. Those concerned about data security more than ultimate speed can configure the drives as RAID 1, or mirroring. In RAID 1, the drive capacity will only be 74GB, but you will have the assurance of a mirrored drive in the event of drive failure.
Alternative: Seagate ST3200822A (200GB) Baracuda 7200RPM (8MB cache)
Price: $133 shipped
While IDE drives, including our alternate Seagate Barracuda 200GB, are not as fast as the Western Digital Raptor 10,000RPM SATA drives, they are still plenty fast for most applications. Seagate offers the same 8MB cache as the Raptor drives and a very large 200GB storage capacity for a small $133 price. While the well-known Seagate drives offer impressive specifications, the most important feature of the Seagate 200GB is not something that you can see. With hard drive manufacturers reducing warranties to one year, the Seagate 200GB still carries a 3-year manufacturer's warranty. With Seagate delivering hard drive capacities at 66 cents per Gigabyte, this drive also delivers excellent value.
200GB seems a massive amount of storage, but it will be just what the doctor ordered for users of Digital Cameras, Digital Video, and digital music storage. Those are the reasons why you want this High End system, right? You certainly don't need this kind of power to write the great American novel or handle emails.
Optical
Recommendation: NuTech DDW-081 8X DVD+/-R/RWPrice: $80 shipped
The winner of the recent AnandTech Dual 8X roundup was the inexpensive NuTech DDW-081 DVD burner. It proved to be one of the fastest, most reliable, and most flexible DVD dual-8X burners on the market. It is also very affordable and an easy choice for our High End Buyer's Guide. The latest optical drives really can do everything optical, with both high-speed DVD and CD burning as well as excellent playback of most any optical media.
Listed below is part of our RealTime pricing engine, which lists the lowest prices available on storage from many different reputable vendors:
If you cannot find the lowest prices on the products that we've recommended on this page, it's because we don't list some of them in our RealTime pricing engine. Until we do, we suggest that you do an independent search online at the various vendors' web sites. Just pick and choose where you want to buy your products by looking for a vendor located under the "Vendor" heading.
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MadAd - Monday, May 31, 2004 - link
I just wish you guys would do a 'dream' system, money NO object - us geeks like to dream, even if we cant afford fibre raided flash drives and $2000 sound setups ..... it only has to be like once every 3 months or so, just for drooling rights - awww go on :)Ma10n3 - Monday, May 31, 2004 - link
This comment thread seems to be pretty dead now, but I thought I'd just tack this on...Maybe there should be a high-end gaming system and a high-end everything-but-gaming system.
A lot of newer game engines are SMP capable though, so the two may become one in the near future.
qquizz - Saturday, May 29, 2004 - link
GLARING ERROR ALLOWED TO STAND:As noted days ago in this forum, I can't believe Anandtech has allowed this error not to be changed yet in this sentence in the storage section of the article:
"Those concerned about data security more than ultimate speed can configure the drives as RAID 0, or mirroring."
Ma10n3 - Saturday, May 29, 2004 - link
I wish I could just edit one of the posts above... Anyway, it doesn't really make a whole lot of sense that the Iwill doesn't support DDR400 though because the memory controller is on the processor die. ???But, if the manufacturer doesn't claim it supports it, than it seems reasonable to go with a manufacturer that does. After all, when you're spending this much money on a system, compatibility becomes very important!
Ma10n3 - Saturday, May 29, 2004 - link
Uh, scratch the Iwill board. It only supports up to DDR333!Looks like the TYAN Thunder K8W is about the only choice.
Ma10n3 - Saturday, May 29, 2004 - link
Roostercrows, another motherboard that supports all the features listed above is the Iwill DK8X.Can't seem to find any others...
Ma10n3 - Saturday, May 29, 2004 - link
#52, If you are considering a dual-opteron setup, than I should also let you know that the only mobo I could find that uses the NUMA (microsoft.com has quite a bit of info on NUMA) configuration and has AGP8X, PCI-X, and legacy PCI is the TYAN Thunder K8W. If anyone knows of any others that have all these features, please post the info.roostercrows - Saturday, May 29, 2004 - link
#50, Yes, I did read all the posts including #39and I didn't mean to imply that you used the term best "bang for the buck". sorry if I gave that impression.
I'm building a new computer and have the dual raptor hard drives and one maxtor 200 GB, power supply from PC power & cooling, video card X800, monitor (not my white wall #51 but that was funny), case is a coolermaster stacker, I'm trying to decide which processor and mobo to use and this was the first I had heard of possibly using a dual opteron and it sounds interesting as cadcam use is part of my goal but I need to learn a lot more. Thanks for your opinion since the WinXP64 is what I'm building the system for.
Neekotin - Friday, May 28, 2004 - link
yo guys, it just hit me. this is a high-end sys... why not get a white wall and good projector, imagine your monitor as the entire wall. ;)Ma10n3 - Friday, May 28, 2004 - link
#49, Did you take a look at the article listed in post #39?Oh, and I at least never claimed a dual-processor system gives you more "bang for the buck." I do believe it gives you quite a bit more mileage out of the hardware you purchase considering the direction Windows is heading (referring to Windows XP 64-bit edition, of course). Also, the benefit of doubling the memory bandwidth as well once WinXP64 is released (because of NUMA support) should increase performance in all applications, 32 or 64 bit. The legacy PCI bus is a severe bottleneck to all connected peripherals largely due to the fact that they all have to share the same bandwidth. Most of the newer dual-processor boards offer alternatives to just a single legacy PCI bus because of the chipsets they use and features of the AMD Opteron cpus.
Considering all of the above, I don't believe an Intel dual-processor system contains enough worthwhile features to justify the purchase.
Again, as far as the hard numbers, please refer to the URL listed in post #39.