Should I go with a 1000W power supply instead of an 850W?
Although I do not currently know the cost difference in power supplies:
One
Based on hard earned quantitative experience I purchase power supplies which are rated a minimum of 50% more W than I believe that I will need as these larger power supplies will last much longer.
Two
Qualitatively I also believe that the larger the power supply the better the line conditioning which is provided.
Three
Even with a larger power supply you may want to consider purchasing a UPS.
Even the less expensive UPS' provide line conditioning.
Although I do not implement this feature on the work stations many UPS's will interface with an XP operating system through a USB port in order to generate "a controlled shut down" when necessary.
Four The executive summary of Five below, which you may enjoy perusing for entertainment,
1)is that "back in the old days (1980's to late 1990's) you bought into the highest technology available when upgrades were appropriate even at 50% or more of the cost as hardware evolutions occurred on an approximate 3 year cycle and the current hardware was typically 3 to 8 times faster than the hardware of the previous evolution but
2)today the general course which you are pursuing I agree with completely. Hardware cycles are now 3 months instead of 3 years. "Back in the old days" speed was critical due to work efficiency but now speed is basically a function of personal satisfaction except as I set forth in a previous post.
Why not get 80% of the speed at 40% of the cost?
3)An extreme example of 2) above would be the procurement of a prototype Xeon quad core processor (which probably would fail several times a time), fiber channel hard drives and fiber channel network cards and cables.
Should someone decide "to haul off and do this" they have just spent 30X$ for only twice the speed of a 300GH P5 processor, a 1G network and a Raid 5 drive array.
I have provided Five for anyone's enjoyment of humor as will as of history.
Five
Although the following will take several paragraphs maybe my hard earned experience will hopefully provide you with a few "pearls of wisdom".
Part One - Personal Background
I had some heavy iron experience in the early 1970's at UT Austin on a very high end CDC and subsequently "got into PC's" in the early 1980's not to be with the fad but due to
1) the efficiency which even a very rudimentary PC and software could provide;
2) I somehow sensed that even more efficiency was "coming down the pike" with respect to CAD (where the D represents Design and not Drafting) and
3)GPS was coming on line and WGS84 had been defined (this is a locative coordinate system which is still the basis of virtually all GPS positioning).
The equipment was unbelievably expensive and what is termed "vector post processing" could only be accomplished with heavy iron but
once again I somehow sensed what was coming "down the pike".
Please note that in the following paragraphs
1) the generation descriptors are mine and would probably not be very widely accepted
2) I am certain that the dates which I reference are "off some"
Part One - 1st Generation Technology
In the early 1980's
1) the 8088 chip (an XT computer) was virtually universally purchased with a B&W monitor due to the cost of a 80286 chip (an AT computer with an EGA monitor) [XT=$10,000 and AT=$20,000] (just for humor please note that you could splurge with these machines and purchase a whole 640K of Ram and a 16Meg hard drive which added another several $K to the cost);
2)Dos 2.2 was just being released and
3)Bill Gates was personally working very hard on Dos 3.0 but would not release it until the current version of Lotus would not run under it.
4)Writing custom software "was pretty much a joke" (although was necessary due to the efficiency derived therefrom).
The driver program was written in Microsoft basic with calls to Assembly Language functions for computational intensive tasks.
Part Two - 2nd Generation Technology
In the early 1990's
1) 80386-33 chips were the norm (the cost was approximately $30,000 but you got a whole 80M Seagate MFM hard drive, 1M of memory, and a SuperVga monitor with a very, very rudimentary graphics accelerator card.
2) The 486 chip was just coming on line and was a 25MH chip.
a) I purchased a prototype 486 from a company in Longview Texas (Cheetah);
b) The machine was only $30,000 but included 4M of Ram and a 250M SCSI hard drive (By now Dos in it's 4X generation could actually partition out a hard drive of this capacity but only in 32M logical drives) and
c) I actually wrote some of the bios code which was included into their production machines (very little but also very useful)
d) a side note is that when I ran my Acad benchmark program the 486-25 was 8 times as fast as the 386-25. I was "hopping up and down".
3) By then C (developed by Dennis Ritchie who also developed UNIX as well as the TCP/IP protocol) was the driver for custom software but still with calls to Assembly Language functions for computational intensive tasks.
In addition fluency in Lisp was necessary as Autodesk had standardized on this language in order to implement extensibility for Acad.
Please note that attempting to use the extended (ie. 32 bit) registers in the 386 architecture in order to increase throughput was a real joke.
4) Windows 386 was out there but was just a time consuming kludge.
5) As a side-note along about this time I did see a best of show exhibit at Comdex which was a prototype PC Limited 486 (now known as Dell which is a long story in itself) the production of which had been joint ventured with Intel with what was then termed a side bus which was clocked at approximately 0.25 of the CPU bus speed and in which a "souped up chip set was installed". I was hopping up and down again at the speed of the graphics but could not purchase it even though I had my check book in hand and out and was visiting with the vice president of marketing for Dell.
By now you have realized that what I was viewing was the precursor of the PCI bus.
Part Three - 3rd Generation Technology
You are familiar with this generation and I will therefore be "short and sweet".
1) The hardware included a P5 chip, 2G SCSI's which could actually be configured in less than two days, 1G of memory, a high end ATI graphics accelerator card and a 27" CRT monitor (both supporting 1280x1024) - $10,000 per workstation.
3) Tape backups had gone from 80M ($4,000) to 800M ($4,000).
4)Windows had gone from 3.1 to Windows 98 and a rudimentary, although efficient, client server topography could be established.
5) Visual Basic is now entrenched "as the weapon of choice" for "quick and dirty yet very efficient coding.
Major commercial applications are being ported to C++ although OOP is still not well defined.
Part Four - 4th Generation Technology
You know what this is because you are living it.
Additional comments though:
Yall cannot believe the joy of being able to boot from virtually anything out there (ie. Floppy, HD, CD, memory stick, external USB drive etc)!
Also the joy associated with devices knowing their operating parameters and XP being able to retrieve and then know their operating parameters!
I will generate another thread with a poll which will indicate how many old dinosaurs such as me are on the Forum.
TR
. Sounds great. I'm more of a Mac guy because of the work I do. Good luck!
Maybe I'll do that with the 8800 gtx that Frog suggested. If the price for the Ultra drops considerably when build time comes around, I'll try a pair of those. Either way, this system will be able to plow through just about any game I throw at it. 