Reality Check

[Jimbo]

I'm building a computer for a Neurologist friend and he WANTS speed but NEEDS 100% uptime.
This will be a daily worker with paitent records on it. He's not really worried about money but he does not want to splurge for an all SCSI Rig.
Tell me what you think. He is not really a gamer but does enjoy the occasional flight sim. (but will live in 2D for 99% of the time) and wants full multimedia capability and wants the thing to look bitch'n.
Let me know of any flaws or improvements you would change.

Computer
Monitor: IBM G96 19" CRT Stealth Black Monitor : G96BLK
Motherboard: Intel 815 Socket 370 EAL ATX w/ LAN (BOX)
Memory: 512MB 2PAK (2pcs 256mb) Mushkin High Perf REV2 PC133 222
CPU: Pentium III 1GHZ PC133FSB Boxed
Chassis: Cooler Master ATC-200 series cases (ATCS)
Speakers: Monsoon MM-700 Flat Panel Speakers
SCSI Card: ADAPTEC AHA-2930U KIT PCI ULTRA SCSI 1-CHANNEL W/CABLE
CD Readerlextor 40X Reader 85MS 512K Ultraplex Black Bezel
CDRW: Plextor 12/10/32 Internal SCSI Black Cd-Rewriter
Modem: 3COM 56K V.90 INTERNAL PCI PERFORMANCE PRO FAX MODEM
DVD: Pioneer 16x/40x Black Bezel DVD Internal IDE Drive
RAID Controller Card: PROMISE TECHNOLOGY FASTTRAK100 ATA/100 RAID CARD 100MB/
HDD 1-4: (RAID-1-0)IBM 45.0GB 07N4775 EIDE ULTRA ATA/100 LP DESKSTAR 7200RPM 75GXP (Bare HDD-5 (Ghost): IBM 60.0GB ULTRA-ATA/100 DTLA307060/ 7200RPM 8.5MS 2MB BUFFER (Bare Drive)
Floppy Drive: TEAC 1.44MB FLOPPY DRIVE-BLACK (Bare Drive)
ZIP Disk: Iomega Zip250 IDE Black Internal 3.5" Removable
Sound Card: CREATIVE LABS SOUNDBLASTER LIVE! MP3+ PCI 5.1
Video Card: 3DFX VooDoo 5500 64MB AGP
Mouse/Keyboard: LOGITECH CORDLESS FREEDOM NAVIGATOR RF W/ITOUCH INTERNET USB/PS2


Any knowledgeable input would be appreciated.

Jimbo

 

[nortexoid]

u knwo u'll get a lot of AMD advocate replies...(such as this one)...

monitor: fine (or Samsung 900NF for a great monitor for a damn good price - aperature grill)
mobo: epox ep-8kta3 (kt133a)
mem: 512mb mushkin high perf rev2/3 is fine
cpu: amd athlon 1ghz or higher (1ghz for best bang/buck - 1.2 to easily outperform 1ghz p3)
chassis: antec sx1030B (black, all round the best i've seen yet...www.antec-inc.com)
speakers: thsoe are fine..
scsi card: fine
cd reader: fine
cdrw: fine
modem: fine
dvd: fine
raid: why ide raid + scsi?...are u only using the scsi for rom drives? - pointless...go all ide if so.
hdd: why are u buying two different sized drives for a raid configuration?...comical - u'll lose the 15gb of the 60gb drive if u're running them together striped (& redundant)...use the same size drives...
zip disk: why would u need oen w/ a fast cdrw? - use rewritable media instead.
sound card: aureal sq2500, or philips acoustic edge, or other good "6 channel" sound card..
video card: fine, otherwise any of these: g450 (for dual head)/geforce 2 mx 32mb, radeon 32mb ddr, evil kyro 64mb (my personal fav...non? - oui)
mouse/keyboard: fine.

 

[Renob]

Drop the voodoo and get a Nvidia card

 

[Jimbo]

He wants Intel and I have never built an AMD system before and I do not feel comfortable overclocking in this case. A little FUD factor happening there.
The 60MB HDD is aside from the RAID config., so I will loose nothing there.
I was thinking of going with the G-400 max or a G-450 but I have seen better performance on Combat Flight Sim 2 with other cards.
I was staying away from the Nvida crop due to 2-D Image quality.
The SCSI CDRW and ROM are good for burning while doing other tasks.
That is my reasoning so far. Keep them coming.

 

[skull]

The AMD will be better for the price and you don't have to overclock(same as intel )
You could get a Radeon good 2d and 3d.
Get an IDE plextor with burn proof and you can do other things while burning.

 

[TheNemesis]

Radeon maybe? Dunno...

 

[joeryu]

yes radeon, awesome 2d and 3d. i second the notion of getting ide burnproof drive, no need for scsi, since your hard drives are IDE anyway. philips AE for sound, and monitor, the 900NF.

 

[nortexoid]

get a drive w/ burn-proof, and u wont' need scsi (i.e. plextor, tdk, etc.)...

amd's are easy to overclock as intel's chips...and the systems are just as stable...

the radeon does have excellent 2-d image quality, as does the evil kryo...plus the kyro's image quality in 3d is much better...plus the card is way cheaper...if u're afraid of its name however, don't be...it really is scary tho...anyway, i suggest either the radeon 32mb ddr or kyro 64mb..

and a flat aperature grill ptich monitor (although the samsung 900IFT is a very nice flat shadow mask)

 

[borealiss]

if you're going for 100% uptime, that means you'll be running some variant of NT, probably win2k pro. in that case, i would definitely not go with a radeon. drivers are buggy at best, 3d is not seeing it's full potential in win2k, although they scream in 9x and ME. granted the 3d power would probably be more than enough for what he uses it for, why not get the full potential of your video card? i would definitely go the nvidia route only because they have good driver support. and i would also drop scsi and go all eide like others suggested, and get an amd. another reason to drop the 3dfx card is that they no longer exist, and support will not be there if you need it. as far as 2d quality on the nvidia crop of cards, i've seen a radeon and geforce2 gts side by side on a trinitron monitor, practically no difference whatsoever, but this is my opinion.

 

[Sir Fredrick]

It's odd to be playing games and burning and watching DVDs on a system that needs 100% uptime, but so be it. RAID will slow the computer down some, but the redundancy may be nice. Also, the fasttrak cards are a software based RAID solution, so you're going to see an even greater performance reduction.

Remember that a RAID solution will not help if his system gets a virus, or some drivers or some data gets corrupted, it will be the same on all the drives. I suggest that in addtion to using ghost with the 60GB drive (about once a week?), you make that drive removable and have him store it in a fireproof safe or a remote location. He should make frequent backups of his most important data to a CD-R (not RW) nightly. This guarantees an archive, so if you go back and discover that he's had a virus for 3 days and it's infected all of his files, you only lose 3 days worth of data.

It's impossible to make a system 100% reliable, there's always a chance of some data loss, however remote. What measures you take to counteract this chance depends on how much data loss you can tolerate, and how much money you are willing to spend.

My dad's business is tight on money and can afford some data loss, so they just back up onto a removable drive nightly, and copy their important data over to another computer on the network once a week.

 

[randomlinh]

if money isn't too much of a problem, i'd say stick w/ a scsi burner.. it just leaves less on the IDE bus.

And get better speakers.. those are a little too directional IMO.

 

[JeffreyLebowski]

Win98 and 100% uptime is not going to happen. If he is going to have that much hardware in the machine, play games and run his business on it Windoze is going to drop resources damn fast.

I've had machines w/512mb become so unusable after playing UT then ST:Armada then typing something in Word that it is fvcking redicules.
Windoze memory manager blows goats plain and simple. you'll definatly want to go Win2k.

best way to do it would be to build a linux box as a file server.

 

[Jimbo]

He will be on Windows 2000

 

[nortexoid]

why would u need to take more off the ide bus??...especially w/ a burner?...

who's constantly accessing their burning and drives at the same time?...the load on the ide bus isn't a concern...

anyway, if u're goign win2k the radeon is fine although its performance isn't exactly top notch cmopared to win98...moreover tho, i doubt there's any "real" noticeable difference between 2d quality - all the mid/high-end cards suggested have 300mhz+ ramdac and above par 2d image quality...

again, i suppose it depends on what resolutions+depth u're planning to run at - but u should be fine w/ any of those solutions...(i still wonder if i can get someone other than myself to buy a kyro 64mb)...oh, i'm still sticking w/ the kryo 64mb suggestion...but my 2nd would be the radeon, win2k regardless....and get rid of that scsi rom....

 

[R0b0tN1k]

If stability is a big factor, definitely go with an Intel CPU and chipset. Let's face it...AMD and Via products aren't as refined and perfected as Intel's.

Oh, and if 2D is going to be used most of the time...go with a Matrox card. They have the best consumer-grade 2D stuff on the market.

 

[BigLance]

AMD is NOT as good for reliability as Intel, Period. Stay Intel... Why would you fool with a tricky Athlon/Thunderbird machine when price is not that important ?

Grab Radeon or other ATI product, you said he will be in 2D mostly, well nVidea sucks ass for 2D quality compared to Radeon's... and 32bit performace of the Radeon is better than nVideo (who uses 16 bit anyway?). So go Radeon. forget Vodoo, there gone anyway

Thats about all I have to complain about Damn nice system there !!

 

[nortexoid]

nvidia uses 16-bit?...uh, that's something u can choose to set - i.e. an OPTION....

although they don't use a 32-bit zbuffer...nor do they have that retarded 24-bit option crap...but whatever, it uses 32-bit...wake up....(i'm shaking u from a disturbing dream)...

2d is crap?....don't think so...350mhz ramdac...specs aside, i truly can't notice a big diference, and it's not like this "neurologist" is some sort of part time graphics artist on the side...in other words, he's not gonna be viewing detailed pictures from his last fMRI scan on his computer....even if he is - the difference is virtually unnoticeable...

FINALLY...AMD systems based are NOT less reliable...i'm using an athlon 1st generation chipset w/ all my components running out of spec on win98SE and it rarely crashes....RARELY..that's right...probably less than your overpriced intel rig...

rubbish - AMD systems are as reliable as their intel "counter-parts"...

sorry, i had to repost that cuz my system crashed on me when i hit reply...anyway, as i was saying...

 

[nortexoid]

a case of ambiguous wording...u didn't mean that nvidia used 16-bit...my bad...

i'm sorry - deeply, and truly...caress, erm, forgive me....

 

[borealiss]

amd is not less reliable than intel is. what rubbish. it depends on what products you look at also. amd system with a good quality motherboard from msi or asus should be rock solid, able to compete with anything from the likes of intel. but there are crappy motherboards out there. intel's i820 had some stability issues, especially with the MTH. but their bx is awesome. as i recall, some of the servers that run anandtech are amd.

 

[Sir Fredrick]

I don't want to see this turn into an AMD vs. Intel discussion, but while there are some old VIA chipsets with issues, those can usually be worked out with driver updates, and the current generation VIA chipsets are fine. I built an Athlon 750 on an ASUS K7V for my parents, and once I got Win2k installed and situated with up to date drivers and let them have it, they haven't had any problems with it yet, which is good because I don't like being their tech support

Also note that Win2k will have less issues even with the older boards, Win95 is getting old and is probably the hardest to work with now.

 

[Dameon]

Please tell me I did NOT hear the word overclocked come out of your mouth Jimbo and 100% uptime just earlier.

If you even think about overclocking a box meant for stability, step away from the system right now and go have your friend buy a Dell Workstation with 4hr response contract. To me the gigaherz is overkill, but hey if that's what he wants.. so be it.

If he needs 100% uptime, I'd say you are not the person to build the system. Get something with a 4hr warranty to where if something does go out, like a motherboard, you won't be stuck saying, " well I just got off the phone with intel, they said they can have a replacement motherboard to us next tuesday."

Just mark it down right now... if this guy is putting patient records on it, you are asking for trouble if you don't have a way to guarantee that anything that goes wrong will be fixed promptly.

If it breaks and he blows up, don't come crying to me.

 

[Gunbuster]

100% uptime, patient records, and Games/DVD DO NOT mix.

 

[KFL]

Where is the backup device? The database will be large so there is a need for a good tape backup.

 

[kami]

Why do AMD owners get so defensive? :Q No one said AMD is a bad solution, but for something like this AND when money isn't a concern, I would go intel as well.

We constantly have probelms at work with our Duron and T-bird boxes running Win2k...these problems don't come up on the P3 machines (which are not running on Via chipsets...running on 815e). Now I'm not bashing Via because I run a mobo with a Via chipset myself.
I just don't think AMD is ready to have their machines be the "standard workstation." When a big company orders workstations by the hundreds or even thousands, do you think they order some Athlons or P3's? You know the answer. I'd give AMD a few more years before the business world realizes they are a good competitor.

Your system looks good but the SCSI isn't necessary...and if the guy ever wants to fill a room with some tunes, those Monsoon speakers won't do it. Very directional sound. Oh and switch to an nVidia card (GF2 or even GF2 MX) for the sole reason of drivers. 3dfx has no more driver support...so when a new OS comes out and he wants it on there, what are you going to do?

 

[CQuinn]

Jimbo, you forgot to add a UPS, preferably one with line conditioning support.
Also make sure whatever setup he is using is built to backup automatically,
or better yet automagically - with some sort of mirroring solution in place
for the data along with the periodic backup.

Striving for %100 Uptime is a noble idea, but I'd place my priorities on
the idea that with patient records on there, any glitch at all can
affect peoples lives. A worst case scenario here is not fixable with
a simple hardware swap.

I also assume you are providing some sort of virus protection for this system?