Actually Building My Dream System.. Any Help?

I have A LOT of extra cabbage to spend on a computer. I recently inherited some money. I am thinking of building what I'd consider to be a top of the line system. I gave myself a 10K budget. Here is wha I've come up with. Anyone have any suggestions? I still have to add a RAID card because I plan on using RAID 5 for the Raptor Drives. And I am contemplating putting two of those video cards into the system. but that might just be crazy. Let me know your thoughts. Thanks.

Guts
Antec P180 Advanced Super Mid Tower $130
Two Additonal 120mm DBB Antec TriCool Cooling Fans $50
Antec NeoHE 550 Watt Power Supply $115
Asus M2N32-SLI Deluxe Wireless Motherboard $220
AMD Athlon 64 FX 62 Processor $1,034
Kingston 8GB KVR533D2N4K2/4G DDR2-533 Non-ECC $1,700
nVidia GeForce 7950 GX2 1GB Video Card $634
Creative X-Fi Fatal1ty FPS Sound Card $258
Four WD Raptor X SATA 150GB 10000RPM 1.5Gb/s 16MB Cache HDs $1,064
Plextor PX-755SA SATA DVD±R/RW $117
Total Cost $5,322

Peripherals
SCEPTRE X42GV-Naga Black 42" 8ms LCD TV $2,100
Klipsch ProMedia Ultra 5.1 Speaker System $350
Logitech diNovo BlueTooth Media Desktop Laser Keyboard/Mouse $199
Microsoft Xbox 360 Controller for Windows $45
HP Color LaserJet 2840 All-in-One $899
Total Cost $3,593



Total System Cost $8,915

 

I used to love Crucial. But recent reviews that I've read show that thier timing is much slower than alternative options from Kingston and Corsair. I always thought of them as a great company with inexpensive memory for a great deal. REFERENCE: http://www.hardwarezone.com/articles/control.php?cid=4&id=1683

It's a shame because I really like crucial. Memory was a big decision for me. That motherboard takes up to DDR2-800 speed RAM. But NO ONE makes 2GB sticks in that speed yet. So the most I could have would be 4GB if I wanted DDR2-800. So instead I choose to buy pairs of DDR2-533 in 2GB pieces to get a full 8GB of memory. By buying the sticks in pairs, they can fine tune the latency timings to get VERY fast memory. I'll be in heaven!

 

Well I am going to play around with this thing for a while I think. I'm going to slap on a 64-bit version of XP for now; just to get everything up and running. I plan on running a lot of benchmarks and whatnot to know just have I have.

And I was lucky enough to be one of the few that was able to download a copy of the MS Vista Beta 2 while MS had it open for download last week. So after I benchmark the system and ensure everything is working right, I may try to throw that Beta 2 on there for a month of two to play around. Then I'll go back to XP and transition that to my main PC.

When Vista comes out I'll pick up the highest end version (Vista Ultimate I think they are calling it) and I'll slap that in there. FUN INDEED!

 

Oh it's questionable. I had to call Microsoft just to make sure I met spec.

 

A few things to respond to...

The Display...
I originally wanted dual 23" LCDs from Viewsonic. I opted against this because I needed a TV anyway and that LCD/TV has a HDTV tuner as well and it's still a huge freaking display. Plus the 23" LCDs I wanted were $1300 a piece. The 42" LCD/TV is only $2100 and it's bigger. The resolution is a standard HD resolution.

Hard drives...
I wanted SATA2 drives. I don't want 15k SCSI drives. I choose Raptor drives because they are 10k RPM and have a 16MB cache. I could have chosen larger capacity drives, yes, but I wanted speed and cache and fast access times over capacity. I only wrote down that I am ordering four drives. More likely I will order 6 drives. I wanted to originally order no more than three drives. This was because the case I have chooses has heat isolation. There is space to isolate three hard drives and the power supply from the rest of the chassis. So I only wanted three drives for cooling and space reasons. But I threw that out the window. So I will likely get six of those drives to put me closer to my $10K budget and get more space. Using RAID 5, I'll have a super fast array with a capacity of 750GB. That's just FINE for me.

Raid Card...
I still need to find a raid card. The motherboard has it but I don't want to use those resources. I'd rather has a separate card do all the work. Still looking for one.

Processor...
I do not want an Opteron. It's a server processor. This will be a college system for gaming and school work. Some development and media content creation as well. I don't want to have to buy a server processor with a server motherboard with server memory... I simply won't get the performance I'm looking for. Besides the AMD Athlon 64 FX 62 is dual core anyway.

Power Supply...
Yea people try telling me that I need a bigger power supply. I have to disagree. I've called three different power supply manufactures. Two of them recommended a 500 Watt and one recommended a 550 Watt. I went with the higher of the two. And two of those manufactures have supplies as high at 800 Watts so they could have told me higher if they wanted. People generally oversize their power supplies. It's really not smart for me to do that considering all of the heat I'll be generating in this computer as it is. That's part of the reason why I bought a case specified for cooling. In fact their will be five case fans, a PSU fan, a video card fan, and a CPU fan. But I didn't want an oversized supply that would add extra noise and heat into the equation. 550 Watts is adequate.

Optical Drives...
Yea I'll probably add a second optical drive. I am considering getting two of the specified drive. That or a fast Plextor CD-RW.

System Usage...
Like I said this is a college system. I'll be doing some media creation and development. Gaming will be big also. I'll agree with anyone that it's overkill. But I have money to spend and lots of it. I figure building a system like this is a once in a lifetime thing.

 

Yea I've been looking at this. It's most likely what I'll put in there. Thanks.

 

8GBs of RAM just because I can.

Yea I am really torn still between a dual monitor setup and one huge LCD/TV. Still can't totally make up my mind.

When you say backups... I have a server at home with 4 TBs. I always have a backup of everything. Plus I am using RAID 5 so I can always lose a single drive and still be okay. But yes everything will be backed up on a central server.

And I live in an apartment; not a dorm room. Still have to worry about my place getting broken into but that's why I live here on GlockTalk. HEHE...