So clearly I've changed my tune on a Mac. I've now decided to keep my current case and some parts, and upgrade the major components.

So far I'm settled on:

- Core i7 920 CPU (a little overclocked)
- Arctic Cooling Freezer XTREME Rev 2 HS/F
- DDR3-1600 Corsair memory
- Western Digital Velociraptor 300GB
- MSI X58 Platinum motherboard

I have ideas for the rest of the components, but I wanted to ask some questions of you folks:

1) first, a question about memory. I know about the limit of <4GB for 32-bit operating systems. So what is Windows 7? Is it a 64-bit OS? I can't seem to find any info on this. And I assume that these Core i7 CPUs are 64-bit? Essentially, am I going to get any benefit from 6GB of memory?

2) What I really want to ask you good folks about is video cards. I haven't been following the market for a few years now, so I'm not sure what the situation is. Here's what I have to consider:
- I'm not looking to get the most FPS out of Crysis or anything like that. I play a few games, but nothing very taxing on hardware.
- I'll be using the computer for video editing and conversion.
- I have a 30" monitor.

From the research I've put into this purchase, the conclusion I've reached is that for the above conditions, when it comes to graphics cards I should be focusing more on memory than GPU speed. Is that correct? It seems to me that Windows alone prefers to have a good amount of memory to drive a 30" monitor. I've been looking at cards with 1GB or more of DDR3 memory. Is that where I should be looking?

3) What should I be looking for in PSUs? I don't feel any need to go for a 1KW unit, but I think I'd like at least 600W. I mean, I won't be putting a lot of drives in the box, but I figured that I'd need a decent amount of power to drive that CPU, graphics card, 10K RPM drive, and a few optical drives.

Thanks for any help, folks. I'm pulling the trigger on this on Mondy, probably

Are you going to try amd make this PC quite? Then get Seasonic powersupply. The size really depends on what video card you get. I would get a 550W PSU if the video card you get needs to power connected to it. Again if your trying to have the PC stay quite get one of these.

If your not going to try and keep the machine quite get a Geforce GTS or GTX 200 series card.

Excellent question. I'm actually aiming for a bit of a balance between noise and cooling. That's why the Arctic Cooling HSF. I've heard they're pretty good at cooling, and pretty good with noise levels, while maybe not the top of the line in either (but also not breaking the bank like some HSFs can do).

I don't know how much you're intending to hang onto from your current system, but it sounds like not much.

Given that, I'd buy a complete system from someone. Probably Dell. The me from five to ten years ago would think I was an idiot, but, honestly, these days the prices for pre-built systems are usually very competitive, the components are quality, the system has been verified to be internally compatible, the noise levels are usually very good, using custom-made components that you can't really duplicate on a homebrew, and the support tends to be pretty solid. These things definitely did not use to be true.

There's not really a 4GB limit on 32-bit operating systems, but a 4GB limit on 32-bit non-server-class Windows operating systems. That may be the same thing to you, of course. There will be an x86-64 version of Windows 7, but there will also be an x86 32-bit version. And, yes, the i7 is 64-bit.

I have no information on video cards or power supplies; sorry.

You make a good point, and its something I've been thinking about recently as well. And for people who ask me, that's what I tell them, that they're better off buying a Dell or something. But:

1- I freakin' love my case. The computer has been non-functional for about a year now, but I still have it sitting prominently in my office, obscuring the cheapo Dell that I got for $50 from an office. This is purely a personal, non-logical reason, but it's a reason.

2- The prices are not quite as competitive as you (or I) thought. Plus, you don't get quite what you might want. I just put together a fairly plain Dell Studio desktop together (without a monitor), and a comparable system would cost about $1020. That's pretty much exactly what I was planning on spending, and...

3- The Dell has a lot of things I don't need: an optical drive (that's not as good as mine), Vista (I have my own OS discs), and a standard 500GB hard drive (I have plenty of storage, I want a fast OS drive, and there's no option for the WD Raptor).

4- It's fun to put your own system together. Granted, there are some headaches, but I've always enjoyed it.

Both. I'm running the 32-bit build on my Intel Atom-based netbook. My MSDN subscription lists both x86 and x64 DVD images.

In short: get the extra memory.

A pair of WD Raptors in RAID0?

I meant that there's no option for the raptor drive in the Dell machine. My point was that at this moment I have four unused SATA drives sitting on my desk, so have no use for an additional 500GB drive if there's nothing special about it, and that factors into whether the Dell actually is a better value. It isn't, it's about the same, and all things being equal, I'd rather get what I want than get convenience.

Yeah, I know -- I was a bit quick off the mark.

What I meant was: if you want a fast OS disk, you could get Dell to put a pair of disks in and run them in RAID0. If you're building your own, put a pair of raptors in RAID0 configuration. If I could afford it, and if I used my desktop PC as much as I used to, this is what I'd do. To be honest, I might save up and rebuild it like with a pair of Raptors when I rebuild it with Win7 RTM.

While, personally, I build my own PCs (because it's slightly cheaper, you get the bits you want and it's fun), for most people, I just recommend that they get something from Dell.

Forget the Raptors, and install an SSD instead. Preferably Intel.

EDIT: the anandtech site appears to currently be offline, but the link should still work once they get things working again

-ml

There are two basic reasons for memory on a video card. The first is for the frame buffer for the display, and represents the uncompressed image size to cover your resolution and color depth. To calculate this for your monitor at 2560x1600 and 32 bit color is simple:
(2560x1600x32)/1024/1024=125MB of video memory needed for one frame.

The other main use of the GPU memory is for 3d acceleration, usually for storage of textures. With the exception of a few high end games with settings turned all the way up, 256MB of texture memory should allow for a decent experience during gaming.

One last thing to keep in mind is many video acceleration processes and 3d rendering tend to maintain a front and back frame buffer. This means you will need to double the frame buffer memory usage for these situations.

So, 256(textures) + 125(front frame buffer) + 125 (back frame buffer) = 506MB of RAM would be an ideal minimum for your video card assuming you will be playing games.

GPU speed is also important for gaming to provide the processing power needed to support your very high resolution. The other option is of course to set the game to a lower resolution to lower the burden on the card. If you don't plan on gaming with the system much, still consider they type of GPU carefully to get one that may help accelerate video processes. I don't know the state of this on the Windows side these days, but do know specific apps in the Final Cut Studio do use the GPU pretty heavily to assist in real time previews of effects and such.

That's a good point. What application are you going to be using for video editing? That might have significance on your choice of video card.

Close. That's 125mbits of video memory, or little under 32MBytes, per frame.

Edit: the original calculation also seems to be over by a factor of two. 2560 x 1600 x 4bytes(32bits) = 16MBytes / frame, not 32Mbytes.

High quality hardware playback of video likes to have at least 5 frames available for temporal/spatial deinterlacing algorithms, so that's about 80MBytes minimum for video playback, plus whatever the desktop wants.

In practice, Linux/Myth users have discovered that 256MBytes is not quite enough in total, but 512MBytes seems to be plenty.

Cheers

Ahh, thank you, forgot the bit vs byte conversion, something seemed a bit high with those numbers.

Thanks a ton guys for your explanation. So it sounds like 512 is plenty, even for that high a resolution. And no, I probably wouldn't play most games at that resolution, as some of the ones I play probably don't even go that high

This seems like a really silly question (and it's related to one I've asked on this board before), but what should I be looking at to also make sure I have optimum full-screen flash video playback? I would have thought my current setup would be enough for that, but if I play any flash video from ANY site, and make it full-screen, my PC starts whirring up and the video is still super low framerate (like 1fps). It seems weird to be building a computer with flash video in mind, but as that's only one thing I'm thinking about, I don't feel quite as weird about it

Does it have NVidia video hardware? If so, then ensure it has PureVideo drivers (or VDPAU for Linux) installed.

Cheers

Well, I finally bit the bullet, pulled the trigger, whatever, and ordered the parts. In case anyone is interested:

Motherboard: MSI X58 Platinum - over the Pro version for SLI, in case I ever want to get a second card
CPU: Intel Core i7 920 - bought at Micro Center, where it was going for $229, a full $50-60 cheaper than anywhere online
Memory: 6GB (3x2GB) Corsair DDR3 1600
Video Card: EVGA GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 - I figured, what the hell, might as well It's about as high as you can go before the price curve starts getting really steep
Hard Drive: Western Digital Velociraptor 300GB
Power Supply: Corsair 520HX - I had gravitated towards this one already, and read a very favorable review of it on Tom's Hardware, which put it over the edge. I'm hoping that 520 will be sufficient, which it should be...
Replacement HS/F: Noctua NH-U12P - I ended up going with this one over the Arctic Cooling model for a very silly reason - Newegg had it. Plus I read an extremely favorable review that made it sound like it even better compromised between cooling and noise levels, by doing both almost as well as any other air cooler on the market

The following are the carryovers - not much, but that's what happens when your motherboard and PSU get fried and the rest of the parts are cannibalized
Case: Lian-Li PC-75 - This case is enormous - far larger than I need by about 11 drive bays - but I still love it
Optical drive: some high-speed SATA Plextor drive
Monitor: I love my Dell 30"

So that's it. I'll take a few shots of it when I get it running, and give my impressions of the performance. I'm hoping to overclock it a little bit, maybe get it above 3GHz, but I'm not going crazy with it.

You're going to have to upgrade your PSU if you do SLI. 520W to run two cards is a bit low.

Thanks. That makes sense. Most likely I won't have to worry about that for a while though. I can't imagine needing more than that card will offer me for a long time.