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Building a new Vista PC for Imaging on a budget

John_Nevill

New member
After my vows that i'd never build a pc again and switch to a mac (next time around), I have totally contradicted these and decided to build (from scratch and on a budget) a new desktop dedicated to imaging.

Why?, well I desperately needed some more image storage and pondered over a dedicated Raid system and after pricing it up, I found it was probably cheaper to build a new PC with Raid.

I've gone for a modest 2.66 Ghz duo 2 core E6700 processor planted on a Asus Raid, eSATA and firewire capable motherboard with 2Gb (800Mhz) memory for starters. I've chosen an ATI radeon x1650XT dual DVI out PCI-Express 16x card. This will perfrom more than adequately for needs (I dont do computer games). I aim to use two identical Eizo 21" s2100 panels for display, so calibration will be easier.

I will be putting the OS and applications on a 250Gb system drive (IDE) and will use a pair of 500 Gb Samsung spinpoint SATAII drives in Raid 1 configuration for images.

I intend to double the memory to 4Gb and add another pair or 500Gb drives once the system is up and running and stable (say 2 months). The Asus board can run 3 x Raid 1 (mirror) pairs on its intel based controller, so I can expand these mirrored arrays to 1.5Tb of storage (based on using 500Gb drives).
As the price of 750Gb drives start to fall, I then up the total storage capacity to 2.25Tb!

Against all odds (and my own sanity) I've opted for Vista 32 home premium edition and will hopefully start the build process early next week.

If all goes well I'll post an update in a week or so.
 
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Jörgen Nyberg

New member
I've been thinkin something similar (specvise), but with a Nvidia 8800 (I do a little gaming online).
But I've been pondering, if I should wait until SSD-disks becomes availlable and use that as system drive (just for Vista and maybe PS), that would make the system fast, at least.
But I'll have to wait and see where the SSD:s end up, pricewise.
 
I intend to double the memory to 4Gb and add another pair or 500Gb drives once the system is up and running and stable (say 2 months). The Asus board can run 3 x Raid 1 (mirror) pairs on its intel based controller, so I can expand these mirrored arrays to 1.5Tb of storage (based on using 500Gb drives).
As the price of 750Gb drives start to fall, I then up the total storage capacity to 2.25Tb!

Not knowing what you run, I would say to not even bother with Vista at all unless you are going for more than 4 GB of RAM. You can run XP with 3 GB just fine. But to access 4 GB plus I think one needs a 64-bit OS (albeit 32-bit Vista may get closer to 4 GB than XP).

You might look at eSATA drives and a port multiplier external enclosure with compatible controller card. You can get up to 5 drives per eSATA port IIRC. And software RAID for RAID 1 is cheap.

some thoughts,

Sean
 

Paul Caldwell

New member
32 bit Vista will handle 4 GB of ram the same. It's a liimitation of 32 bit OS's.

XP 32 bit had a workaround via the 3GB switch. This allowed programs that were aware of the 3GB swithc (not many but CS2 was one of them) to address more than 1.7GB. The 1.7GB is again a limitation of the design of a 32 bit OS. I haven't read if Vista has a similar switch implementation.

There has been a lot written on the 3GB switch and if it really does help or not. I can state that I feel it does help some as CS2 is so memory hungry. You can address around 2.5GB in XP 32 bit with the 3GB switch turned on with CS2. BTW with a 64 bit OS version of XP you can only still address around 2.5GB of ram even though the OS allows you to see all 4GB.

CS3 from what I read is supposed to allow a great memory addressability, however I am staying away from it for now as I am Vista till some of the problems get worked out.

If I was going to build up a new machine and use 4GB or more of ram, I would consider the 64 bit version of Vista. CS3 I thought was supposed to also be 64 bit aware, but again I haven't read much about it.

Paul Caldwell
 

nyschulte

New member
Hi,

Only my 2 €cents:

If you use a raid controller detached from the motherboard, you can move your data with ease to a new system.

I am probably not telling you that with windows systems you calibrate once per graphics card and not by screen (i don't know about vista).

I might suggest a fast disk for swap/temp files (WD Raptor 36GB SATA) different from the system disk and if budget allows a WD Raptor 150GB for system/applications. These can be hooked up to the motherboard controller.

On my current system i have a 72 GB Raptor for system and 2 Raptor 36 GB in RAID-0 as temp/swap
(because i had them available from previous system)

I know that these are not budget considerations but simply some points i will consider for a new system.

Of course this will also limit the availability of some motherboards (2 Pci-e graphics cards, pci-e raid controller, ...), but

You could also just go for recycling of an existing system for storage only, and build a little gigabit network.

Nicolas
 

John_Nevill

New member
I'm 15 hours into building a new Vista PC and things have gone extremely well.

I started to assemble all the hardware and then at the 11th hour realised that my old ATX power supply was not compatible. The new motherboard requires a EATX PSU rated at >450w, so I grabbed a modular 600w EATX PSU from my local PCWorld for £70 and continued the build.

I decided to first install a 250Gb IDE drive for the OS and a DVD burner. I mounted the other two 500Gb SATAII drives but didn't connect them until the OS was up and running.
After checking all the wire, cables and plugs, I booted the machine, changed the boot sequence and then checked for POST errors. None were found, so in went the OEM Vista 32 Home Premium DVD and after a couple of minutes of a blank screen the installation began.

Approximately 15 mins later the machine had found most of the hardware, asked for the serial number, and finally requested that I create a admin account.

After another reboot the machine restarted and I checked for "unknown devices". The Gigabit Lan card was the only piece of hardware that Vista failed on. I pointed the unknown device at the ASUS DVD and the network came to life and Vista immediately went on line to register, validate and start the updates. Approximately 14 patches were applied and after another reboot, all seemed OK.

I then checked the event log and to my amazement there were no errors!

Now to set up Raid 1 array. I powered down the PC, connected up the two 500Gb SATAII drives, powered up, changed the Intel Matrix settings for Raid array and switched on the Raid boot rom.

Another reboot and then straight into the Raid configuration to set up the volume mirror and resart Vista. Vista found the array but the disks need to be initialised and formatted.
One the things I quite like about vista is that you can switch to XP classic views. These put you back into familar territory when doing computer admin functions.

I finished off the base build with an ATI display driver update and then cleaned down all the logs, rebooted and again checked for errors, although none were found!

The next step is to add printers, applications and calibrate the workflow, which will form the basis of my next post.

However, before I conclude, here's my intial findings on Vista:

- Installs and boots cleanly, no errors whatsoever.

- 2Gb is not enough memory, its a real hog and once the desktop is loaded there's less than 500Mb free, hence 4Gb is a must.

- The 500Gb SATAII raid drives are fast, the specs suggest 300Gbits/sec, this is probably achievable as a striped array, although I won't know a real figure until I've had a play with LR.

- Aero desktop is "swish", albeit too many bells and whistles

So far I'm quite impressed with Vista. It will require some under the hood tweaks to free up some ram and minimise the bling! However this new system is significantly faster and seems more stable (fingers crossed) than my duo core laptop.

Finally for those who are interested, the cost of this build to date is £675 ($1350) which includes, Asus P5B E motherboard, a E6700 processor, two 500 Gb SATAII drives, 2Gb Corsair 800Mhz ram, a HIS Radeon 1650XT gfx card, Vista 32 Home Premium OEM and an Artic 600w modular PSU.
 

Don Shreve

pro member
Hi, John-
It sounds pretty impressive that you were able to pull this off. Especially at the price. I've been configuring a system at Dell, and I can't seem to come in under $5k US. I'd like to put something together in an ASUS box. I have an ASUS laptop that's been just a workhorse. But I don't want to be a computer tech guy, I'm a photographer. How hard is it for someone with minimal tech skills to do what you've done? How much soldering & routing of wires, etc.? How did you know which power supply, etc.? I guess if I have to ask all this, then maybe I should leave the computer building to the experts. But I'd rather spend $2000 than $5000+...
 
How much soldering & routing of wires, etc.? How did you know which power supply, etc.? I guess if I have to ask all this, then maybe I should leave the computer building to the experts. But I'd rather spend $2000 than $5000+...

Zero soldering is required. Moderate routing of wires within a case is needed, but that is mostly to improve airflow and cooling.

The trick with the power supply and such involves learning to identify connector types and buying the latest power supply you can.

Builds are getting easier and easier over the years, but they still take a fair bit of computer know how (not electronics know how per se).

John,

Have you run Speedfan yet to ensure you do not have any thermal issues? For a smaller case or a mid-sized case with many drive heat can be an issue that will greatly affect the longevity of your system. I know I tend to monitor new systems for a couple months and recheck every season due to different ambient temperatures. In Summer I often monitor temps the whole season.

enjoy,

Sean
 

Cem_Usakligil

Well-known member
...Have you run Speedfan yet to ensure you do not have any thermal issues? For a smaller case or a mid-sized case with many drive heat can be an issue that will greatly affect the longevity of your system. I know I tend to monitor new systems for a couple months and recheck every season due to different ambient temperatures. In Summer I often monitor temps the whole season...
Exactly! I have been running speedfan on my "production" servers that operate 24/7 for more than two years now. The s/w is very good, does what it should and does not introduce any instabilities or unreasonable load to the critical servers/processes. Certainly recommended.

Cheers,
 

John_Nevill

New member
Sean,

Thanks for that, i've just ran it after having the new pc on for 6 hours multitasking, here's the results

System 32C
CPU 37C
HD1-3 23C
Core 0 31C
Core 1 30C

That looks fine to me, my case is a large aluminum tower with 3 case fans (2 blow over the hard drives and 1 exhausts out the rear). The new artic PSU is pretty much silent.

Personally I cant believe the luck i'm having with this build, everything has gone incredibly smooth. CS3 installed first time, as did LR, Silkpix and a host of other apps.

BTW, LR runs like train, much improvement over XP.

Don,

Seriously, its not that difficult to build a PC yourself, its all modular nowadays. Pretty much all of the connectors are different, so connecting up the hard drives, motherboard and PSU is like building with Lego. The 600w Arctic PSU is a good buy as it doesn't have a wealth of cables sticking out the back, but rather a series of connectors so you only add what you need.

Take the time to read the manuals for each component and then lay the items out, start with the case, build the motherboard with CPU, Ram etc before putting in the case, add the GFX card, hard drives / DVD etc, connect up methodically and after couple of hours your ready to load the OS.

The only tricky bit is knowing what to enable / disable in BIOS, although nowadays BIOS' are petty much auto sensing.

Don't scrimp on the case, get a decent tower case, the small desktop cases are not only fidgety to work with but lack the air movement for cooling and leave no room for expansion. The beast I have can house 4 x DVD/CD drives and 8 x hard drives. It sits under my desk and is less intrusive.

BTW, I already had the case and DVD drive, so add another £125 ($250) to the cost bringing the total to £750 ($1500). I've just checked a similar spec PC on at Dell and it would cost £1500.

Finally, once you've built your first one and got it up running, you'll wonder what all the fuss was about!
 

Don Shreve

pro member
Thanks, Ray. But I'm tempted to actually try this myself.
John, do you mind if I e-mail you off list for some advice?
Thanks,
Don
 
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