Latest upgrade

It's been a while since I upgraded my PC and its starting to get a bit slow when running certain things - most notably a VM of Windows Server 2008 x64 Enterprise I sometimes run for testing, tinkering and training .

So here is the current specs of my PC:

CPU:	Intel Core2 Quad Q6600, 2.40GHz Clock, 1066MHz FSB, 8MB L2 Cache
RAM:	Corsair 2 GB 5300 Twin (Dual-Channel)
Graphics card:	nVidia GeForce GTS 250 1GB
Sound card:	Sound Blaster X-Fi Platinum (LOVE my sound card)
Hard drive/s:	Seagate 1TB SATAII and 2x 500GB SATAII drives in RAID 0 (total 1TB)
Motherboard:	Gigabyte GA-P35C-DS3R (Intel P35 Chipset)
Monitor/s:	Samsung SyncMaster 2333
Mouse:	Logitech G5 Corded Laser
Keyboard:	Logitech Access Keyboard
Headset:	Sennheiser HD 465
Case:	ThermalTake Armor Jr.

The hard drives I have at the moment are starting to fail. There is twenty-something reallocated sectors on the boot disk (the 1TB) and a hundred or so on each of the 500GBs in the RAID. Obviously I don't store any permanent data on the RAID, to do so would be retarded as it only takes one drive to fail for me to lose the data on BOTH drives. It's used as a high-speed scratch-disk for video editing, VM data and other random shit that needs temporary high-speed access.

Below is what I plan on replacing some of the above parts with:

CPU:	Core i7 960, Quad core (with HT), 8M Cache, 3.20 GHz, 4.80 GT/s , supports TurboBoost
RAM:	Corsair 6GB Triple 1600 (triple channel)
Motherboard:	Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD3R (Intel X58 chipset)
Hard drive/s:	1x Corsair 128GB Extreme SATAII SSD 3x Seagate 1TB SATAII 32MB HDD (in RAID 5)

Total cost: $1,795

Probably gonna go and buy all this shit next week and put it together on the weekend.

It's gonna be legendary...

and video card on the new system?

How about a nice ati 5970!!!!

I forgot to mention that the MoBo is sorta cactus too. It doesn't boot sometimes.

The only things I am keeping is the graphic card, sound card and PSU (though I may need a new one of those too) as there is nothing wrong with any of these things and they work pretty well. It's a new system with some pre-existing parts.

If you want speed.. get max ram and look into SAS HDD's for your os and keep your data on Sata hdd's. I have a quad core 2.4ghz with 8gb and 2sata hdd's I got some sas drives and will be putting them in as soon as my windows 7 64bit turns up. I have tested Vmware on sata drives and it runs like shit. I put it on the sas and it freaking flys. the drives kick arse. mind you the drives and the raid card to run them is about the price of your upgarde

EDIT: Just saw that you had an ssd drive listed there. I have not tested the speed on those but I still like the idea of the good old mag drives. also there are different types of ssd drives. the larger cheaper ones are slower. if you want speed get the smaller expensive ones and store your data on larger slow drives. it's also depends on the amount of "fast" data you have.

SAS seems a bit expensive for (among other things) a full-duplex bus. What speed are the SAS drives you have? Quite a few of our clients at work use 15K SAS drives (one runs 16 of them in RAID 10).

Question: When you ran the VM on the SATA drives, where they the same drives you were booting off (assuming you're using RAID)? When ever I've run a VM off a boot disk it's been totally shit. As soon as I move it off the boot disk (even if it's just to an external USB drive), it runs WAY better.

The SSD I plan on getting is slightly slower than Corsair's faster equivalent, but that was about $200 more expensive I think, so fuck that. One of the guys at work has an SSD drive and says it flies. While SSDs aren't massively faster at sequential reads than HDDs, they rape at random reads... apparently.

I run with esx server for vmware and yes it was from the boot drive. Esx doesn't really like sata raids so that's why the SAS but they will still fly once I put w7 on them. I'll give ssd another year or so before I go putting that in on my pc. Just to see what problems arise from them.

Yeah wear is apparently an issue with SSD. So lots of backups.