It's been awhile since I've been an active participant on these boards but I figured I would open up a discussion about building a computer tailored to run the common software we all know. This is the first rig I've ever built for myself so besides simply posting a bunch of questions about the process I figured I would contribute my research into the discussion and get some feedback on what I'm doing wrong/right. Apologies in advance as some of the stuff, hell all of the stuff I'm about to talk about is extremely boring.

First some background info, I'm a fifth year B.Arch thesis student and for the past 3.5 years I've done all my work on a frankly anemic dell laptop I got my second year in college. I've managed to produce some pretty fine projects on this thing but I'm hitting a performance wall recently and I've always been pushing the limits of what this thing can do. I work primarily in Rhino, Acad 07, and I do rendering work in Maxwell with finish work in Pshop and Illustrator, pretty par for the course. I know all the tricks to get rhino to run faster, but frankly its time to upgrade.

Originally, I was about to make the perfectly honest mistake of splurging on a new laptop, a really sweet one by MSI, tailored for gaming and at only $800 it does what computers twice its cost do.
Then I got to thinking, "is it possible to build a decent workstation for the same price as this lappy?" We've got a spare flat screen in the office my boss has offered to let me take so the monitor, which is to my knowledge a relatively expensive part of putting a desktop together. That leaves me with a $1000 to put a tower together, so here's what I came up with.

First of all, the decision to ditch the lappy option came when i checked out Rhino's system reqs and Maxwell's ideal system setup. Firstly, as we all know its practically impossible to get a laptop without vista on it and we all know how troublesome vista has been with our beloved programs. ACAD 09 is easily the slowest release I've ever come across and upon close inspection of the Rhino website I found it had big compatibility issues with vista, one of the most shocking things was finding out Vista has no OpenGL hardware acceleration support. In head to head tests, with OpenGL hardware acceleration, programs like 3dsMax run over ten times faster in bones standard XP 32bit as compared to Vista, some OpenGL based 3d programs run twenty times faster. So the laptop's true cost would be at least $900, as I would have to buy a new copy of XP somewhere and then reformat the partitioned hard drive, a major league headache. Regardless of wether or not i would actually use hardware acceleration as I will explain later, the case was made that Vista is still a non-option.

The other thing that killed the laptop idea was a little website named [url=http://www.benchwell.com/]Benchwell[/i]. Benchwell is a nifty little place where maxwell enthusiasts like myself can download a scene, render it, than post how long it took us to render. Needless to say, the chipset offered in the laptop, or frankly most any laptop on a halfway realistic budget, is so low on the listing its not even worth it and those that are aren't running in laptops they're running in rigs. The best chipsets it seems for the money are the Intel Core i7's. In fact, the little Intel Core i7 920 - a $300 processor, overclocked by 43% with 12 gigs of RAM behind it ranks in at 8th place on the benchwell chart right up there hobnobbing with all the dual quad-core processor configurations (which probably cost around 10 times as much once the motherboards [mobos] are factored in). Needless to say it is a fantastically powerful chip for the money, so it's the beating heart I decided to build my rig around.

My next step was trying to figure out if I could actually buy a workstation card on my budget, the answer as I suspected was a resounding no. For those not familiar, there are two types of 3D cards in the world (at least that matter to us) - gaming cards and workstation cards. Without getting into too much detail, what seperates the two is actually remarkably simple, software and cost. The thing is while a gaming card and a workstation card can be exact replicas of each other physically, they have different software / driver configurations. The gaming drivers feature robust Direct X support and special routines for pixel shading and all that jazz, the workstation drivers are designed to accelerate the performance of OpenGL based 3d applications, which is all the stuff we use. Video card companies exploit this to great advantage and while the physical "architecture" of a gaming card is typically an exact match to the "architecture" of its twin sister workstation card the different drivers mean that companies can get away with charging way more for the workstation card (alot of the good ones are in the $1000 range and they get more expensive from there). There are ways to hack a gaming card into making it a workstation card but its too much of a headache for me to deal with and even the hacked card may not accelerate the performance of OpenGL apps if the card isn't compatible. So, I went with a standard Nvidia GeForce 9500GT 512MB gaming card instead, which as of this writing will only set me back 65 bucks, which is good because I've got to find a motherboard and they can get pricey.

I looked around for a mobo that was compatible with the Core i7 and there is a host of x58 mobos available on newegg that would theoretically work. Originally, I was going to go with a Foxconn LGA 1366, but it gets very mixed reviews on newegg with folks pretty much split 50/50 in the love it/hate it camps. Plus, even though its on sale at $240 its integrated sound card absolutely blows, meaning i'd have to buy one. On top of that, the BIOS is apparently pretty arcane, so I went with a $249.00 ASUS P6T LGA 1366 board which got much better reviews even though it's a slightly less robust board (it only offers 12gb of RAM support vs 24gb for the Foxconn). Going with the ASUS, as its integral sound does not blow, meant I could drop the sound card, this swap actually wound up saving me 20 bucks and a major potential compatibility headache.

So now I'm starting to worry about a power supply, which is one of the most overlooked things when it comes to building rigs. Many PC cases come with their own power supplies and many of them work fine, but not in the case of the Core i7 and my mobo. I had to make sure that whatever power supply i picked would not only provide enough juice for the system, but also had the proper types of connectors and rails to interface with my mobo/hdd/etc. This meant I needed a 20+4 mobo connector and a 4+4 or an 8-pin 12v connection for the processor. This is tricky, again I'm thinking cheap and I find a case w/ a power supply that meets my power needs (to find out how much juice i needed i used this site) that comes in at budget. Although to be sure I wind up contacting the manufacturer, only to find out the case I wanted wouldn't work as it's power supply lacked the required connections. So their customer service rep told me I could try a stand alone model that would work and buy a case from them to make sure the power supply and case would marry happily together. He suggested the hec Compucase ACE-580UB 580W, so I went with that but since i didn't like any of the cases Compucase offered for the price I decided to wing it and go with a Tuniq 3 instead which upon inspection of the screw hole locations on the back panel appears to work with the power supply I picked and there is my first big question, for the most part will any given power supply work in any given case? I've gotten some mixed answers on that but it would be nice if someone could clear it up for me. It also appears the tuniq comes with a little panel where the mobo's outputs would go, I'm assuming these things are removeable, seeing how another person on newegg built an i7 system in the Tuniq case and the outputs on the ASUS board in no way match the outputs given on the stock Tuniq rear panel. At the end of the day, going with a standalone power supply and case was a more expensive option, but I am positive it will work with my setup and that is key.

The HDD was an easy pick, at the onset i picked a 320GB seagate, but it broke my budget when factored in with other stuff i was adding to the build so I've decided to go with a cheaper 250GB Western Digital instead.

All this time I had originally spec'd out only 2gb of DDR2 ram - a cheap option, but I had overlooked two critical things my thesis advisor told me of. First was RAM compatibility, I'd picked DDR2 and the mobo appears to require DDR3 ram which is faster and more expensive. I don't know if the mobo actually requires DDR3, but as the access speeds vary greatly between DDR2 and DDR3, and the overclocking options on the mobo all referred to DDR3 ram running at 1333mhz, I decided to go with DDR3. Originally I only had the 2gigs of ram spec'd out but I missed a crucial thing on the benchwell page- the memory listings. Its obvious now, especially when I get hit with virtual memory limits on my laptop, that rendering engines are major RAM whores, and the more RAM the better. Faced with this, I had little choice but to throw down on 4GB of DDR3 ram, which at $75 v.s. the $22 i had planned on spending on the 2gigs of DDR2 ram is much more money. However it should be well spent.

The discussion about memory brought me into another world of compatibility hurt - the OS. From the start, I'm going with XP, but should I get the 32bit or the 64bit version? Again the answer is mixed. The Core i7 is a 64bit chip, which I assume means it will only work with 64bit OS. The other advantage, although at the moment i'm not taking it, is that a 64bit OS allows for much more ram than a 32bit OS. 32bit XP can only use "4" (it is more like 3.5) gigs of ram, while 64bit XP can use a whopping 128 gigs of RAM. So the 64bit option is ideal right? Not really, Rhino 4.0 does not have 64bit support and runs in an emulated 32bit mode on 64bit systems, this is one reason it has issues running on Vista which with one exception only comes in 64bit flavors. Running in an emulated 32bit mode means Rhino will run slower than it would on a pure 32bit system but I'm hoping the sheer power of the i7 will more than make up for that. The other problem with XP64 is driver support, which isn't that huge a problem with software as it can run in a 32 bit emulated mode, but with hardware its a nightmare, so i had to double check my mobo and video card would be compatible with XP64 and it turns out they both are.

Throw in a $25 22x DVD+R from Asus and the build is complete. With all of newegg's rebates and combo deals (be sure to order your mobo with your CPU as a combo it'll save you money), the cost of the components comes in at $988. I haven't ordered it yet but I'm planning to by the end of the week after I get some input back from some of my friends in the IT realm. If people are interested, I'll let you all know how the whole process goes and I would really appreciate any useful advice or tips as to conflicts in the proposed setup and system building in general.