New home PC on the way

Well my 7 year old Dell is finally giving up the ghost. I ordered a new Dell with a quad core AMD cpu, 6 gb ram and a 1 tb drive. Still need to get a video card. I left it with the standard ATI card as I wanted to buy the card else where. I am looking at an nVidia GT220 w/1 gb ram. System will have Win7 64-bit so I'll get to work with that switch.

Reports to follow.

Happy new PC mate,

I got rid of my desktop after I sorta fell out of love with gaming but with the new titles coming out later this year and my new job working with ACAD I think another one is in order.

That rig sounds good mate and about the spec i would be going for so let us know how the Pc and GFX card performs when you get it.

Yeah it's not high-end but it is my home rig and should be fine. I am coming from a P4 w/2 gbs of ram w/ a GF6600 so it should be night and day. Funny thing is it ran ACAD 2012 just fine (for smaller files).

It's so nice to get a new computer to get rid of an old system! I finally ditched my 7yr old computer for a workhorse laptop! Of course after I make the transition, I go to grab some files off my old desktop that I forgot to copy and the desktop wouldn't boot. Fortunately I could drop the drive in an external case and grab my files. Talk about luck there!

Well it was delivered, wife is at home and confirmed it. Need to order the video card soon. Yes, the transferring of files I am not looking forward to

Well it was delivered, wife is at home and confirmed it. Need to order the video card soon. Yes, the transferring of files I am not looking forward to

Yeah after the last time I rebuilt a system in our house, I believe it was my dads, he had that much data that needed transferring in the form of mainly films and music but also documents from work etc. that it took me nearly a full day to make sure we got it all across. Now I have set up a NAS hard drive in the house which has all of the data on it that me and him use which removes this problem and gives us more space on the internal drives. It also removes the problem I use to have day in and day out when I get something new and he insists that he must have a copy on his PC, now we only need one copy.

Quite handy for the films too as the PS3 is connected to it so we can watch movies off of it without them having to be moved anywhere

I thought about using an older PC running FreeNAS on it.

http://www.freenas.org/

Installed Acad 2012 and Inventor Fusion last night. Both seemed pretty fluid in their working after the install. Acad Arch. and maybe Revit 2012 tonight. I have the Revit suite so I have access to them all. I have plenty of space so I might as well install them.

The system came with a Radeon HD4200 video (on-board) so not terrible but a dedicated card will be installed.

Yeah after the last time I rebuilt a system in our house, I believe it was my dads, he had that much data that needed transferring in the form of mainly films and music but also documents from work etc. that it took me nearly a full day to make sure we got it all across. Now I have set up a NAS hard drive in the house which has all of the data on it that me and him use which removes this problem and gives us more space on the internal drives. It also removes the problem I use to have day in and day out when I get something new and he insists that he must have a copy on his PC, now we only need one copy.

 

Quite handy for the films too as the PS3 is connected to it so we can watch movies off of it without them having to be moved anywhere

I did the same thing at my house. While I was at it, I upgraded the wireless router to N with a Gigabit connection. I assembled my own NAS and used Windows Home Server.

I thought about using an older PC running FreeNAS on it.

http://www.freenas.org/

 

Installed Acad 2012 and Inventor Fusion last night. Both seemed pretty fluid in their working after the install. Acad Arch. and maybe Revit 2012 tonight. I have the Revit suite so I have access to them all. I have plenty of space so I might as well install them.

The system came with a Radeon HD4200 video (on-board) so not terrible but a dedicated card will be installed.

I was planning to use FREENAS and had it installed. Then I realized that the latest version did not have the ability to stream built-in, torrent client and something else. Anyhow, I decided to purchase Windows Home Server because my hardware was too new for the previous version. It does automatic backups of our laptops for us nightly while being able to stream movies/music/pics to our computers and game console. If you do decide to get FreeNAS, I've read the previous version is not as stripped down.

Did you splurge for an SSD drive? If not, I would splurge for one as a primary drive because of the nice boost in performance. I don't actually have time for a pee break if I try to start AutoCAD 2010 from it!

I'm pretty handy with computers having being building and programming for years but one thing i have never really done is anything to do with networking so I just got an off the shelf NAS drive and plugged it in to the router. Seems to do the job although i think I need to upgrade my router as sometimes streaming from it can be a bit laggy, but only on the odd occasion.

Having an SSD would be no use for me . . . I use the time it takes for CAD to boot up to do exactly what you say, ehwn else would I find the time

I did see a couple of months ago when the SSD's were fresh on the market a group had put together the (what was then) fastest computer in the world which had loads of the hard drives set up and took ridiculous times to boot and open up stupid amounts of programs. it was very impressive, definitely gonna have to have a look at one when I build my new PC.

If you're using NAS consider RAID Level 1 with two HDDs, then you don't lose all of your data should the HDD go down. I have two at work and two at home (my wife is self employed and doesn't want all her busness stuff getting mixed up with our private stuff ) and I'm extremely satisfied with them.

I'm pretty handy with computers having being building and programming for years but one thing i have never really done is anything to do with networking so I just got an off the shelf NAS drive and plugged it in to the router. Seems to do the job although i think I need to upgrade my router as sometimes streaming from it can be a bit laggy, but only on the odd occasion.

 

Having an SSD would be no use for me . . . I use the time it takes for CAD to boot up to do exactly what you say, ehwn else would I find the time

 

I did see a couple of months ago when the SSD's were fresh on the market a group had put together the (what was then) fastest computer in the world which had loads of the hard drives set up and took ridiculous times to boot and open up stupid amounts of programs. it was very impressive, definitely gonna have to have a look at one when I build my new PC.

I shopped around for a laptop with one in it. I didn't care much about hard drive space because I knew I was building a NAS to take care of that issue. I love how quick it opens up, so I definitely will be utilizing them in the future.

If you're using NAS consider RAID Level 1 with two HDDs, then you don't lose all of your data should the HDD go down. I have two at work and two at home (my wife is self employed and doesn't want all her busness stuff getting mixed up with our private stuff ) and I'm extremely satisfied with them.

I definitely recommend a RAID setup as well for important files. My WHS has a software RAID built in called Drive Extender, which basically pools the drives together as one huge drive but I can setup shares to duplicate automatically amongst my drives (2 x 2TB & 1 x 1TB). Then I perform a manual back up to an external 2TB drive.

I screwed myself thinking my NAS mobo had USB 3.0 but Newegg had mislabeled it and I didn't do further research to verify it. So I don't get the fast write speeds to my external; which is OK with me for now...lol.

I definitely recommend a RAID setup as well for important files. My WHS has a software RAID built in called Drive Extender, which basically pools the drives together as one huge drive but I can setup shares to duplicate automatically amongst my drives (2 x 2TB & 1 x 1TB). Then I perform a manual back up to an external 2TB drive.

I'm not worried about the torrent stuff (our internet connections are SLOW and EXPENSIVE!!!! - it would be cheaper (and faster) to have a CD delivered from Amazon than download the music / video), so FreeNAS is probably good enough for me.

Yep! Most NASes have some form of software RAID (e.g. FreeNAS's ZFS filesystem actually has it built-in as an option. You could always go with a HardWare RAID, they're sometimes a bit faster, though there's one problem: All the HDD's you put into the box needs to be EXACTLY the SAME (size & speed, probably make & model as well). That's what makes the software raid so much more "usable". I know the ZFS allows for hot-swapping HDD's in its software RAID, does WHS's Drive Extender allow the same?

 

I'm not worried about the torrent stuff (our internet connections are SLOW and EXPENSIVE!!!! - it would be cheaper (and faster) to have a CD delivered from Amazon than download the music / video), so FreeNAS is probably good enough for me.

I did read in to FreeNAS a lot but was disappointed for the lack of features that were not in it and that I wanted. Since I purchased WHS, I doubt I will look in to FreeNAS for another few years.

WHS 1 (not the new 2011) is the only version that has Drive Extender built in. The 2011 version is supposed to have a 3rd party alternative because MS dropped it. It will allow you to add additional drives at any time. I'm not sure if you can remove them without much fuss. I hope I don't run in to that any time soon. lol. I know when I added the 2TB external, I had to go through some prompts that asked if I wanted it as a backup or add it to the pool. I keep it out of the pool so I can perform manual backups to it daily.

Sorry to hear about the internet connection. I had to look at your profile to realize you over in South Africa.

I had to look at your profile to realize you over in South Africa.

That was one big plus for me when we moved back to England. The internet connection in SA was awful although I have heard it has gotten better (when I was over there we were on ISDN. Ring . . . . . Ring . . . . . 'Mom don't answer the . . . ' your download has been cancelled, please reconnect and start again )

Yes, it's gotten "better" since the bad old ISDN days. Only in the last few years have "HellCom" upped their ASDN lines to 1mb/s (±R800 a mnth with 3gb cap) though you seldom see that speed in actual practice. I'm on my cellular actually ... strange how our wireless networks are cheaper and faster than the wired versions from our telecoms monopoly! Though not all that much cheaper

Yeek! You guys got it bad there.