How to Choose a Motherboard?

[Benedict_Arnold]

Needs:

1, Intel 3930K hex core CPU;

2, 2 x PCI-e x16 slots both running at x16 speed - graphics cards, recycled from the old PC, will be ATI Crossfires and will take up two slots each.

3, Need to cram in an already bought PCI-e RAID card, although I'm up for changing this if I can afford a RAID5 card - this one only does 0/1/10 - is RAID5 the best BTW?

4, RAM - lots of it, and then some more please.

5, Wireless - on motherboard would be nice, if not I need to squeeze one of these cars in as well.

6. RAID on motherboard for RAID10-ing of boot disk.

6, Price - sensible, more Ford Mundane-oh than Aston Martin.

This beastie will be used for 3D CAD, finite element analysis and the like, the ability to do anything else is secondary. Gaming is confined to flight simulators - cue that sketch from the "Fast Show" or whatever it was with Colin whats-his-name....

I already have all the hard disks I need (7 x Western Digital Caviar Black 1 terabyte SATA-3 units - 1 boot, 4 in RAID10 array, 1 for backups in removable caddy, 1 spare with the intention of RAID-ing the boot disk as well.

Thoughts, recommendations?

 

[cheeseboy]

do you have a case for all of this? Only reason I ask is that you're actually going to be pushed to find a case that will fit that many hard drives. I'll see if I can't dig out some mobo reccomendations for you.

 

[Dougal1331]

That's going to be a hot rig...

I would think the Asus P9X79 PRO Intel X79 will do you nicely.

Currently up for £239.95, and ticks all your boxes, although it only has 4 Sata3 and 4 Sata2 ports, you may still want to add a RAID controller.

Direct link: http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=MB-488-AS

 

[Benedict_Arnold]

That's going to be a hot rig...

I would think the Asus P9X79 PRO Intel X79 will do you nicely.

Currently up for £239.95, and ticks all your boxes, although it only has 4 Sata3 and 4 Sata2 ports, you may still want to add a RAID controller.

Direct link: http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=MB-488-AS

I have a RAID controller already - Adaptec 6405E - which does RAID 0, 1, 10 and 10E. Four of the WD Caviars are currently hooked up to it in a RAID10 array.

This is gong to be the last PC I buy (yeah, right), so ....

 

[Benedict_Arnold]

do you have a case for all of this? Only reason I ask is that you're actually going to be pushed to find a case that will fit that many hard drives. I'll see if I can't dig out some mobo reccomendations for you.

By my right knee.

With four spare internal slots....

Pics in the morning, my time.

 

[Benedict_Arnold]

That's going to be a hot rig...

Me? If you look up www.mapquest .com and look up Cypress North Houston and Jones to Louetta and 249 in Houston Texas, you'll see how far I am from Compaq (which used to have their world campus about three miles north of here...). The neigbourhood used to be called Compaq for heaven's sake...

 

[Benedict_Arnold]

I would think the Asus P9X79 PRO Intel X79 will do you nicely.

Currently up for £239.95,

240 DOLLARS here

 

[cheeseboy]

do you have a case for all of this? Only reason I ask is that you're actually going to be pushed to find a case that will fit that many hard drives. I'll see if I can't dig out some mobo reccomendations for you.

By my right knee.

With four spare internal slots....

Pics in the morning, my time.

:rofl: I've not had enough coffee this morning because I just read that as in my right knee

the mobo suggested above is a nice bit of kit, not sure I could reccomend anything better

Is it software raid or hardware raid on the current system. Reson I ask if that if it's hardware raid, you will usually have to use the same contoller, otherwise you'll lose the raid and have to start again.

 

[Benedict_Arnold]

Is it software raid or hardware raid on the current system. Reson I ask if that if it's hardware raid, you will usually have to use the same contoller, otherwise you'll lose the raid and have to start again.

Hardware.

But there's actually very little on it and I can always back it up onto a USB hard disk, reconfigure the RAID then reload the data.

 

[Benedict_Arnold]

The only fly in the ointment I see with that Asus momo is that the graphics cars will obscure both of the "short" PIC slots. Will my PCI Adaptec RAID card fit in one of the PCI-e slots and work properly?

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B005935NL4/ref=wms_ohs_product?ie=UTF8&psc=1

 

[abacus]

Use an SSD or SSD Raid for your boot disk as it will make your HDD Raid look like a cassette Tape Loader.

Raid 5 gives a good balance between security and performance, and you can set it up with as little as 3 Disks, however Raid 10 is the fastest (And also has excellent fault tolerance) but requires a minimum of 4 Disks

Hope this helps

Bill

 

[Benedict_Arnold]

do you have a case for all of this? Only reason I ask is that you're actually going to be pushed to find a case that will fit that many hard drives. I'll see if I can't dig out some mobo reccomendations for you.

I think I've found my new case, the old one being a bit battered after two years on loan to my wife's business, not to mention a trip across the Atlantic care of ParcelFarce:

www.silverstonetek.com/product.php?pid=24&area=en

100 bucks on Amazon, 180 from Sears.

 

[Benedict_Arnold]

Use an SSD or SSD Raid for your boot disk as it will make your HDD Raid look like a cassette Tape Loader.

Raid 5 gives a good balance between security and performance, and you can set it up with as little as 3 Disks, however Raid 10 is the fastest (And also has excellent fault tolerance) but requires a minimum of 4 Disks

Hope this helps

Bill

Already have RAID10 I was concerned my el cheapo Adaptec 6405e entry level RAID card (a doddle to set up by the way and highly recommended) might be a bottleneck, although I do get a sustained 10 megabytes per second, or 80 megabits per second read / write performance. I just check the spec on line and it says 6 gigabits per second on each channel, which one presumes means it can read and write 6 gigabits per channel on all four channels simultaneously, but I'm not so sure....

 

[drichardb]

The only fly in the ointment I see with that Asus momo is that the graphics cars will obscure both of the "short" PIC slots. Will my PCI Adaptec RAID card fit in one of the PCI-e slots and work properly?

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B005935NL4/ref=wms_ohs_product?ie=UTF8&psc=1

Should work fine - I use my ASUS D2X soundcard in an x16 slot so that there is more airspace around my gfx card.

 

[Benedict_Arnold]

Started ordering the parts from Amazon yesterday.

Case should be here today.

I am then going to strip out the power supply, internal cards, DVD-RW drives, hard disks, etc. from the old PC ready for the arrival of the motherboard and the rest of the parts Friday / Saturday.

I'll put some pictures up on Photobucket in case anyone is interested. Link later.

 

[Andrew17321]

Make sure it has several USB3 sockets.

Andrew

 

[AnotherJoe]

Already have RAID10 I was concerned my el cheapo Adaptec 6405e entry level RAID card (a doddle to set up by the way and highly recommended) might be a bottleneck, although I do get a sustained 10 megabytes per second, or 80 megabits per second read / write performance. I just check the spec on line and it says 6 gigabits per second on each channel, which one presumes means it can read and write 6 gigabits per channel on all four channels simultaneously, but I'm not so sure....

10 megabytes per second - are you sure? That is very very low.

I'd expect to be getting 120-160MB/s (960-1280Mb/s) from a single drive, more from raiding.

If you need your storage to be raided buy a separate NAS. Too much heat buildup if you have the storage inside the PC especially if the CPU/GPU are working hard for prolonged periods. HDDs do not like heat.

Just get an SSD for system/apps, and a large fast HDD for secondary storage.

 

[Benedict_Arnold]

10 megabytes per second - are you sure? That is very very low.

I'd expect to be getting 120-160MB/s (960-1280Mb/s) from a single drive, more from raiding.

If you need your storage to be raided buy a separate NAS. Too much heat buildup if you have the storage inside the PC especially if the CPU/GPU are working hard for prolonged periods. HDDs do not like heat.

Just get an SSD for system/apps, and a large fast HDD for secondary storage.

Lots of little files mean slow transfers, especially since I've neved de-fragged the disks.

NAS would be nice, but the PC gets moved quite often and I like everything in one box for that reason. RAID is for security.

 

[Benedict_Arnold]

Make sure it has several USB3 sockets.

Andrew

This set-up has several of everything

Trouble is, one of the memory channels on the motherboard isn't working properly, so I'm restricted to 16 gigs of RAM, In think, right now.

I have to contact the vendor and get a replacement motherboard, another 16 gigs of RAM, one more 1 terabyte Western Digital Caviar Black (to RAID10 the boot disk), and a Blu-Ray burner, and I'm all done. As is my budget - I reckon I've got nearly USD4000 invested in hardware alone right now. Could have bought a Cyrus pre-amp or a pair of ProAc Studio 140 Mark Twos for that kinf of money.

It is fast, though...

 

[Benedict_Arnold]

Motherboard swap completed. Now with 32 gigs of RAM and the BulRay burner, plus a BluRAy reader / DVD+/-RW burner.

Score 8.4 on the Windows performance index for CPU and RAM :dance: , but only 7.2 for the (old) graphics cards) and a poor 5.6 for the primary hard disk |( , which is / is not suprising considering it's a SATA 3 but not RAID'd and certainly not an SSD.

Cue "Fiddler on the Roof" and "If I were a rcih man..."

 

[AnotherJoe]

Do yourself a favour and get an SSD - it transforms windows.

Even my two generation old Vertex 2 gives a windows score of 8.1, which means windows 8 boots in just under 5 secs after the post screen.

A 128GB or 256GB Vertex 4 is only £120/£180

 

[Benedict_Arnold]

Do yourself a favour and get an SSD - it transforms windows.

Even my two generation old Vertex 2 gives a windows score of 8.1, which means windows 8 boots in just under 5 secs after the post screen.

A 128GB or 256GB Vertex 4 is only £120/£180

I'd need at least a 500 gig SSD and at 500 bucks and up, not on the cards right now |(

 

[AnotherJoe]

You only need a 128GB SSD. You only put your system and your main apps on it. Everything else can run off HDD.

Stuff like java runtime, flash, default apps for viewing media content, email etc. It gives everything a certain zippiness.

I cant believe you buy a i7 without an SSD! Its like buying a ferrari and driving along with the handbrake on.

An SSD is the probably the most significant performance upgrade - but its your money....

 

[Benedict_Arnold]

My killer apps are CAD and FEA. FEA, in particular used to use lots and lots of hard disk space (swap files) back when RAM was measured in megabytes and a 1 gigabyte "fast and wide" SCSI-2 hard disk cost a thousand quid (and would peak at 10 or 20 megaBITs per second). Nowadays, with RAM measured in gigabytes, most finite element analyses can actually be run solely in RAM with only the input and output files gracing the hard disk. QED a fast CPU and fast RAM are actually more important to me than fast hard disks. Evrything will be RAID'd just for comfort, not for speed.