New Build Help!

[naeem.ebrahimjee]

Hello you wonderful community!

I am currently building two new machines. These are going to be fairly high load work orientated computers, not really designed for gaming. The computers will need to be able to some high end photo / video / web design editing work but its main day to day job will be heavy usage of MS Outlook / Word / Excel / Web browsing. (easily 200 combined tabs open at once).

At the moment I am looking at putting the following together for both machines....

Intel i7 3770K (£250)
Asus P8Z77-V (£130)
Crucial 8GB DDR3 1600Mhz (£40)
Gigabyte HD7870 2GD GDDR5 (£180)
Zalman Cn9S9900 (CPU FAN) (£40)

The last time I put together my own build was a good 10 years ago...so i've not got my hands dirty in a while...and i want these computers to last me a good 5 years.

So here are my two questions....

1) What do you think of my current core setup ideas?

2) I am looking to run RAID on both machines with a two disc sata RAID 1 array. I want to avoid software/motherboard raid and am looking for a hardware controller. Does anyone have any suggestions for a relatively budget hardware controller? I don't want one that is just a glorified PCIe "software" controller, and the raid card will need at least two sata ports, but more the merrier as long as it keeps it affordable! I don't really want to spend more then £50 - £100 per card....

Thanks for your help!

 

[DogSong]

Your build looks pretty dang good! What programs are you planning to run on this PC? Blender? After Effects? Photoshop? If you are running the following, I'd suggest going with 16GB, because Blender and After Effects use up a crap ton of memory, and it'll give you a better work environment and experience. OS?

 

[naeem.ebrahimjee]

Hi!

Will be using Adobe CS4. Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Illustrator etc

OS will probably be Windows 7. Still tossing up between 64bit or 32bit.
If I use 32bit I am limited to 4gb ram...but if I choose 64bit I will seriously push for more RAM.

Issue is backward compatibility of printers / scanners...None work with 64bit. So making that jump is a lot more expensive then just buying a different version of windows and a few more GB of RAM!!

 

[DogSong]

I have never heard of printers not working on 64 bit!! That's really odd! I was going to suggest hooking a separate router to the printer/scanner that will distribute a signal which you can attach to your main wifi network, if that's what you're using

 

[naeem.ebrahimjee]

That's true!
I also have an old Pc running xp. Might just connect all peripherals to that machine and use them through the LAN.

64bit is going to give me a much better performance....

Any tips on RAID controllers?

 

[DogSong]

That's true!
I also have an old Pc running xp. Might just connect all peripherals to that machine and use them through the LAN.

64bit is going to give me a much better performance....

Any tips on RAID controllers?

This is what I found for ya http://community.spiceworks.com/topic/201551-raid-on-a-budget-best-solution-for-a-raid1-controller

 

[naeem.ebrahimjee]

Thanks! Will Check it out!