architeer,

i built a similar machine for the start of fall semester. I chose to get a 80GB solid state drive for my main drive (programs and windows7) and a 1TB drive for storage.

SSDs are still pretty expensive but my machine boots amazingly fast, and I can launch photoshop cs4 or rhino in less then 2 seconds.

As i understand it RAID 0 puts data on multiple disks so the computer can read from two locations at once in an attempt to increase speed. The data is redundant but if part gets lost the file is corrupt and unusable. RAID 1 writes the data in mirror. IE if you have a 100MB file on drive #1 you also have the same 100MB file on drive #2. This is for protection. If drive #1 goes down you still have a copy on drive #2.

Honestly I dont think RAID is really needed, as long as you save often, and make a few DVD backups from time to time. Also services like dropbox and google filestorage can take care of any backups you need.

Going back to my first point, i would recommend a SSD for the main drive, as big as you can afford, and then a massive single drive for storage. Be sure that only programs get installed on the C:/ drive and you will have plenty of space and a blazing fast computer.

Thank you so much for the reply!

Do you use a traditional drive for storage? External?


Now, what video card would I need as a minimum?


Dual NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 260M, 2GB – SLI® Enabled
Dual NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 280M, 2GB – SLI® Enabled
ATI CrossFireX™ – Dual 1GB ATI Radeon™ Mobility HD 4870

I used a 7200 rpm 1TB western digital hard drive...although an external could work too.

I think i ended up with a ATI 4850 graphics card. Although the cards listed are all good.

Don't bother with dual (SLI/Crossfire) video cards ... the performance gains would be minimal at best since those cards are designed for playing video games, not graphics software applications. Graphics applications aren't designed to predictably take advantage of anything other than a professional (Nvidia Quadro or ATI FirePro) video card.

If you don't know what RAID is, you don't need it / don't want to mess around with it. You're not running a file server anyways.

And yes, SLI dual cards is only useful for playing Modern Warfare 2.

Personally unless you have a crapload of money to throw away and can afford a Quadro or FireGL, consumer level boards work just fine. Any of the GTX 2xx series should work just fine. I got an old 8800GT and I can still work with 2-300 mb Rhino files.

By the way, if you are going to be doing a fair amount of rendering...I'd suggest you going for an i7-920 + LGA 1136 motherboard, + 6 gigs of ram (1136 mobo architecture is triple-channel so multiples of 3)

I had an old C2Q 2.4 Ghz...after upgrading to i7-920, Maxwell Render or Vray runs 3 times faster...huge time savings make it all worth it. Even better if you know how to overclock, nothing like watching 8-cores running at 4Ghz chewing away at renderings.