2013 Fall Computer Upgrades
Posted on Nov 7, 2013 by
Paul WhiteA few years back I built my workstation which has evolved a bit. Even though I would love to build a brand new workstation, I feel my current setup is still plenty fast for what I do, and I am holding off until fall of 2014 before making a major upgrade.
Unfortuantely there are a few things my current setup does not have, so to keep up with the industry I am making a few small upgrades.
New Motherboard
Even though I am going to keep my current 1st Gen Intel i7 2.6 Ghz CPU. I am upgrading my motherboard. The new motherboard will be able to support USB 3.0, and
SATA III.
Bigger CPU HeatSink
For years I have relied on the stock intel heatsink, which has worked fine, but consideirng I plan on overclocking my CPU to about 4.0 Ghz, the stock heatsink wasn't going to cut it. So I purchased a Venomous X Heat Sink. and bought dual 120mm Fans for a push pull setup. This should easily drop my CPU temps by about 20 degrees over my stock cooler. Since installing this I have been able to overclock my CPU from 2.6 Ghz to 3.6 Ghz with no problems. Tried 4.0 Ghz, but after a while my system would lock up, so I had to drop it back down.
Faster and Larger Primary SSD raid array
My old setup was 3 x 60GB Vertex 2
SSD drives configured in
RAID 0. This gave me about 160GB of storage for my drive C. However these were
SATA II drives, and together would max out at about 600 MB/sec. I have decided to upgrade to 2 x 256GB Samsung 840 PRO
SSD drives configured in
RAID 0. This should give about 500 MB storage for my primary drive and about 1GB/sec read / write speeds. It should also give me a nice boost in IO performance. Even though this was my original intention. I later found that the
SATA III ports on my new motherboard did not support
RAID. I could have done
RAID using the
SATA II ports, but that would defeat the purpose of using
SATA III SSDs. So for now I am running my system off a single 256 GB Samsung 840 Pro
SSD. The other drive is installed, but its not connected.
Large Archieve Drive
My old setup was a 2TB
SATA II drive. After a near scare of loosing my data, and nearing its capacity, I upgraded to 2 x 3TB
SATA drives. These were configured in a mirror array using the Windows Disk Manager. The downfalls to using windows is you take quite a performance hit. Software
RAID is fine, but it just doesn't perfom like a dedicted
RAID card. I found a HighPoint RocketRaid 640L card off ebay for a good price. I have used this card to setup a
RAID 5 Array using 3 x 3TB drives, giving 6TB of storage, while being able to loose 1 drive without loosing my data. My next upgrade after this would an LTO6 tape drive. This would give me 2.5 TB of uncompressed storage, but unfortunately current prices for an LTO6 drive is about $2k. Obviously these are meant for enterprise and not smaller guys like myself.
Upgraded Case Fans.
I upgraded my stock 250mm case fans to faster ones which should help to move more air. A must considering I am overclocking my intel i7 920.
Why upgrade and not build a new computer.
Intel's roadmap doesn't have any huge advancements until late 2014 / early 2015. This is when the intel x99 chipset is supposed to be available, and with it a new generation of CPUs. The recent CPUs have been tiny minor improvements over the previous generation. Intel's focus has been on making chips that are just a little faster with lower power consumption, rather than trying to push the limits with some insane 5.0 or 6.0 Ghz Clock Speeds. After all most consumers still only use a computer to browse the web, in which a 10 year old computer can do that just fine.
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