I come seeking assistance from the Banzai hardware gurus, because it's time to help 'Card build a new rig. Again.
Description:
At this point, I've built a bunch of machines, and while I'm not exactly an uber-geek or anything, I'm reasonably confident about most of this stuff. The problem? I just don't stay on top of hardware issues and trends at all. I try to, but unless I'm actually in the process of building something, reading Tom's or HardOCP articles just makes my eyes bleed. So since I don't stay on top of it, when I try shopping for parts my knowledge is completely out of date.
Challenge:
If you were me, knowing what you know and having the same parameters listed below, what would you build? The person who describes the system I end up building will get a free sig image, for this forum or any other, this game or any other, with whatever callsign you choose. (I'd probably do that anyway if you asked, but it's about all I have to offer in terms of incentive)
Parameters:
1. All parts will be ordered from NewEgg, so when you post your build if you could link me to the relevant items on NewEgg that would be really helpful.
2. Don't worry about the case. Like my current machine, I'll be building it in another rackmount server case ('cause I just think they're cool as hell) and I'll choose that myself, but anything that will fit into a standard case will fit easily into a rackmount unit, so don't worry about that.
3. You have $1500 to work with. Total cost will be around $2K, but $500 of that will go towards case and monitors, so you have $1.5K just for parts.
4. Most rackmounts don't come with a power supply, so please include one in your build.
5. I've got keyboards, mice, surround-sound speakers, etc. - so don't worry about all of that stuff.
Guidance:
I'll do a lot of photo editing with it, so lots of RAM would be nice. 2GB is kind of a minimum, but more would be better.
About the only games I'm playing right now are Combat Mission: Shock Force (which would run on a Commodore 64, I think) and Flight Simulator X (which would really benefit from a good video card) but in the future I probably wouldn't mind trying Quake Wars, so something that would run that smoothly would be nice.
If given the option, I generally prefer two hard drives over one big one. I need a pretty fair amount of space. My music library alone is somewhere up around 60GB, and my photos are pushing that point too. (you use a lot of space when you start playing with RAW files)
As far as the OS is concerned... Vista doesn't move me, but I've got it on my laptop and for the most part it's indistinguishable from WinXP so I don't really care. Either one is fine.
I need a lot of USB ports. My printer needs one, my Blackberry needs one, my MP3 player needs one, my cameras need at least one available, and my mouse and keyboard each need one. Oh, and my weather station needs one too. See? That's seven right there and I haven't even mentioned any gaming peripherals.
Having several old-fashioned PCI slots on the MOBO would be good too, if possible. I've found my triple-monitor set-ups work best with simple and cheap PCI cards for the secondary and tertiary displays.
...and I guess that's about it. Any questions?
