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billbenson
11-20-2009, 04:16 PM
Didn't know where to put this thread, so here it is. Just in case someone is thinking about buying a powerful pc.

I'm building a new PC that I intend to last for 5 years. I frequently have 30 or more browser tabs open, memory intensive programs, etc. For that reason, I want a beefy PC as well as something that will last into the future.

It's pretty easy to to keep selecting components that are slightly more expensive than others and end up with a much bigger price tag in the end.

I wanted intel as it's top processors perform better. I settled for the v7 920 at $270. Going up in price from that didn't make sense as you get a little more performance for a lot more money.

Motherboards: I want to put 12G or more of RAM into the motherboard. That limited my options. I narrowed it down to Intel or Asus. Intel seemed to be lagging so I picked an Asus board for $370. There are a lot of new interfaces etc coming out, most of which I don't know what they are, but this board had all of them. I could have gotten away with a board for about $300.

The motherboard supports RAID 1 which mirrors your hard drive to another hard drive. This is something I have wanted to do. So I bought 2 1T hard drives for $90 each. Nice little automatic backup feature. Still should backup, but can be a life saver in the event of a HD failure.

I wanted a box that was quiet and had good cooling. I also wanted a mid tower as I don't need a huge box. Read a bunch of articles on noise. You want large fans if you can that rotate slowly. Also, a bigger fan in the power supply helps reduce noise. I found a box that has a 400 mm fan on the side of the box. The noise rating is 12 dbA vs 27 dbA for the common 120 mm fans. Big difference. I read one bad review on the box and a bunch of good ones. We'll see. I paid $94 for the box, free shipping.

I bought a quiet 750 W power supply with a 140 mm fan and claimed to be quiet for $110 or so. About $30 more than the other $750 W supplies. It didn't make sense to go to a supply with lower power ratings as the cheaper 750's were about $79 and a 500 W supply was only about 10 dollars less. I paid the extra money for the quiet factor and some quality.

The one thing I'm not sure about is the video card. Researching that one right now. I want dual monitor capability and TV would be nice. The motherboard supports 3 monitor cards, so I don't know if I should buy one card that does all or 2 cards? There are also some new technologies in monitor cards that I'm not familiar with, so I need to do some research.

So, I bought the box, PS, DVD and HD's last night for about $450. Still have to buy about $1100 in parts for the motherboard, processor, ram, and video card; so this isn't cheap. I'm going to wait for a good order or two for the rest.

So the whole thing isn't going to be cheap. VG in a post says he paid $3k or so for a laptop. For something I spend 12 hours a day in front of, and without I earn no money I think its worth it. I could cut a few corners and save $300 or so, but I think I'm making the better choice for my application.

Just thought there might be people interested in building a good pc out there. It's really not that hard. Plenty of instructions on the internet.

nealrm
11-21-2009, 12:04 PM
Assembling a computer is rather easy. Most of the connections are dummy resistant. Avoid petting the cat or spilling your soda on the electronics and you should be OK. The hardest part is getting hardware that works well together. A good internet search will help with that.

The system above looks to be a good layout. I suggest you go with a good 1G internet card or N-Band wireless. I'm guessing by the time you through in the extras (Software, keyboard, mouse, cabling, monitor, etc) your project should be in the $2000-$2500 range. But if you get what you want and enjoy the process, it's not that much more than a high-end off the shelf unit.

billbenson
11-21-2009, 02:37 PM
Thanks, nealrm. I have all the extra stuff. I've built them before so I'm not concerned about that part. I'm being particularly careful with component selection so everything plays together. I also need to be sure they play with Linux as thats my main OS.

Right now I only have one PC that I built about a year ago. It makes me nervous not having a hot standby computer. If I don't have a working computer, I'm not making money. The intent was always to have the current computer as a hot standby / backup pc. Its a duo core duo with 3G of ram. That's not enough ram for what I am doing. It'll be fine for the backup pc though.

Just did the math. Everything is going to cost me $1488.

rezzy
11-21-2009, 06:11 PM
Having a good computer for a computer based business is paramount. I think its money well spent. As far as video, the best choice for linux is using mythtv.

Its a full media software, that includes a ton of features. There is also boxee, which works on windows and macs as well. Boxee essentially is a aggregator, which means it indexes videos from all over the net into a single pretty interface and makes it "tv" friendly.

nealrm
11-21-2009, 06:14 PM
What are you doing that requires so much memory? I'm assuming it's more than posting comments on forums.:D

I'm assuming you are going with the 64 bit version of Lenux?

billbenson
11-21-2009, 08:03 PM
64 bit system.

By the end of a week I'll have upwords of 30 FF tabs open. Flash on those is the biggest memory hog. I might have eclipse or gimp and some other stuff open as well. 12G is probably overkill, but I'm really tired of having to reboot because of the 3G I have on my current machine.

nealrm
11-21-2009, 10:03 PM
I was think some type of video editing not 30 FF tabs. 12G is probably overkill. Just to see what would happen I opened 49FF tabs. Some were flash heavy, some were not. Memory did not appear to be a big issue. On a 4G machine I still had 1G left. (Vista 64bit operating system, 2 dual core CPUs). I did notice that the cores were running about 50-70% of max.

Does the mother board accept 2 dual core CPUs?

billbenson
11-21-2009, 11:09 PM
Does the mother board accept 2 dual core CPUs? - On my current machine I max out at 4G Ram, one CPU either duo or quad.

Flash is buggy on Suse 11.0 64 bit. I here its better on 11.2 which was just released. I may upgrade Suse but it makes me nervous with only one machine.

Might be a memory leak issue as well, but after a few hours of work, if I try to play a video, all the flash banners etc disappear. I'm really not sure if it's software / hardware/ memory leak...

vangogh
11-22-2009, 12:17 AM
Bill I've noticed with FF that when it does get slow and seems to leak memory that it could be your profile. If you create a new profile it works better again. Of course your new profile won't include all your extensions and bookmarks, etc, but you can import them over one at a time until you find which is causing the problem. For me it seems to be my bookmarks. I've imported them into other browsers so I may just wipe the bookmarks from my FF profile and then reimport them to see if that helps.

If you're not concerned with all you have saved just create a new blank profile. It's pretty easy and should make FF run better.

There's plenty of info online about how, but if you can't find anything let me know. I think I have a few things bookmarked to let you know what to do.

Cool about building your own machine. It's something I've always wanted to do, but have never done. It's one of those one of these days things for me. I guess it's gotten easier to do over the years. Like Neal mentioned the hard part now is matching up all the components so they work together.

billbenson
11-22-2009, 01:41 AM
I've often thought of writing a bookmark script. It should be easy to do, stick it on a site somewhere and you never loose your bookmarks. One of these days.

I'll keep that in mind about profiles.

It's not bad building a pc. I'm spending more time researching to be sure all the parts play together and with Linux than I'll probably spend building the thing. Its nice because you can set it up exactly the way you want.

Well, I think I'm going to update my OS now. Just finished backing everything up. If you don't see me for a few days you know what happened.

billbenson
11-22-2009, 03:31 AM
Well, updated the os to suse 11.2. Failed the first time and had to do a disk repair, but it's up now. Breathing heavily for a minute though.

rezzy
11-23-2009, 03:26 PM
Actually I use a bookmark syncing add-on. Called "X-marks". Its currently set to sync back to my server. It automatically syncs my bookmarks when even i add or remove something.

I have memory leak issues with FF also. Usually works for me just to close and repoen it.

vangogh
11-23-2009, 07:36 PM
I don't use x-marks myself, but I hear great things about it. Delicious pretty much handles my bookmarks now. I realized I didn't need most things to be bookmarked in my browser. I now tag things at Delicious in a way I'm likely to search for them later and it's not too hard to get back to them when I need too.

Some things I'll always bookmark locally, but I've considerably reduced what's bookmarked directly in the browser and am always pairing them down.

FF gets faster when I restart too, but it doesn't take long before it slows down again.

nealrm
11-23-2009, 07:51 PM
What versions are you guys running?

vangogh
11-23-2009, 08:00 PM
3.5.5, which should be the latest version. This has been going on for me since before version 2. I'm pretty sure it's my bookmarks that have become corrupt in some way and are slowing things down. When I create a new profile it usually runs pretty well even as I start importing parts of my old profile over. I'm sure I have a few extensions that slow things down, but it's mostly the bookmarks.

billbenson
11-23-2009, 08:48 PM
I'm on 3.5.5 as of this weekend when I upgraded my SUSE Linux to the latest version. SUSE works better with the upgrade, but it doesn't solve my memory problem. After a few hours I'm down to 100M of available RAM and videos and Flash don't work.

It'll be interesting to see what happens when I get my new PC built. I'm waiting for a couple of good orders to buy the rest of the parts.

nealrm
11-24-2009, 09:16 AM
Interesting, I appear to be lucky. I leave FF up all day and many times over night. I have not had an issue with memory.

dynocat
11-24-2009, 10:11 AM
Nothing to add about your pc build, Bill. Just want to thank you for posting this. It's fascinating read. I'd never consider attempting it myself. Hopefully you will have exactly what you want. I sounds like a dream machine.

As far as FF, I've had problems with it since version 3 came out. I've read a lot about the memory leaks, but nothing about bookmarks. I'll try weeding through mine. I use Kaspersky AV and the past month it seems to be slowing everything down when downloading updates. Haven't found a solution for that yet.

vangogh
11-24-2009, 02:27 PM
Glad you're lucky with it Neal. Some people are. FF does have memory leak issues, or at least had them. I believe it was version 2 (maybe 3) that was supposed to have taken care of them. Unfortunately for many of us the problems are really in our profiles so we need to create new profiles to start fresh. Most people don't want a completely fresh profile though, since that also means starting over with bookmarks, extensions etc.

I've created new profiles and moved things from my old profile one at a time into the new one. That's how I was eventually able to isolate my problem to the bookmarks. They work fine, but when I move them to the new profile everything slows up. I didn't want to lose my bookmarks though so I pulled them in anyway. I'm now thinking I could either do away with those bookmarks or rebuild them in a way that doesn't require using them from the current profile.

billbenson
11-24-2009, 02:57 PM
In the case of Linux, I think the memory leak is far worse in the 64 bit systems. Flash is 32 bit so I think they play games to make it work.

Your system 64 bit or 32 VG?

vangogh
11-24-2009, 05:13 PM
Used to be 32 bit and now it's 64 bit. I'm not sure I've noticed a difference, though if there is one it's FF being even slower.

nighthawk
12-11-2009, 02:58 PM
why exactly do you need to have 30 FF tabs open at any one time, surely you cant be using them all at once? Cant you bookmark them and open them as needed?

Sure, spending money on a decent system is well worthwhile, but $1400+ just seems overkill. I just recently built a new system myself, and it cost less than $500, and im pretty sure I could easily open 30+ FF windows with ease (ubuntu 64bit and 4gb memory.

A small tip for windows users (I just tried it on Ubuntu and it doesnt appear to work the same, but may) - Applications only use memory if they are active, as soon as you minimise a window, it frees up memory and uses virtual memory instead. Try it, open task manager, and look at, say, Firefox. It will be using 80mb of memory, minimise it, and that will drop considerably (while the virtual memory will increase, if you have opted to show this). If you are no longer using an application, minimise it, rather than just switching to another application, leaving it running behind.

As for building your own PC, I had one major issue with mine that I had never considered - the motherboard was too large for the case! Oops!

I also had issues with setup - the machine was crashing constantly (every 5-10 minutes) despite everything appearing to be set up correctly in the BIOS. I downloaded SiSoft Sandra, which immediately told me all the voltage and frequency settings were wrong, the BIOS was under-reading everything!

billbenson
12-11-2009, 04:12 PM
why exactly do you need to have 30 FF tabs open at any one time, surely you cant be using them all at once? Cant you bookmark them and open them as needed?


I generally have an open instance of FF for web design stuff I am working on. It could have a number of tabs open. I have another instance for sales stuff. Someone calls and I put some stuff into a quote generator. I may need some more information so I email the manufacturer for more info. That tab stays open until I get the info. Sometimes I'm waiting on the customer for more info. I may have forum tabs open. I glance at the forums or cnn when I take a brake for several minutes. I will usually have several excel sheets open.

I get about 40 customer calls mostly for orders or quotes a day. Some on top of each other. I also get a bunch of emails. I prioritize what I need to quote when. I leave unfinished quotes open until I finish. Yesterday was extremely busy. I worked until 6am getting all the quotes finished. Thats not normal, but 2am is pretty common.

Some of the tabs are also searches for information on products, product demonstration videos. I easily had 40 tabs open at one point yesterday. I opened a big pdf and the computer froze. I'm running Linux with 4 G of ram (64 bit).

The 4G of ram is nowhere near enough. As soon as you start getting a lot of ram, everything starts getting expensive.