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My first PC/DVR build Help

Discussion in 'Building a new PC' started by g0ds360, Mar 7, 2010.

  1. g0ds360

    g0ds360 Member

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    Well today I realized that I had this old dell dimension 4600 for too long. It just doesn’t have the power or the room to upgrade so I want to build a new computer. I’m new to this so whatever input I could get would help out a lot. The pc will be used for multi. so here is what I would like to do with it. Video editing, gaming, school work for online classes, xbox 360 backups and modding, multi disk burning, Dvr and a cam set up. Here is what I been looking at so far.

    Case - Thermaltake ArmorPlus(Armor+) VH6000BWS Black Aluminum / Steel ATX Full Tower Computer Case $190 newegg.com

    Motherboard - GIGABYTE GA-X58A-UD3R LGA 1366 Intel X58 SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX Intel Motherboard $209.99 newegg.com

    CPU - Intel Core i7-920 Bloomfield 2.66GHz 4 x 256KB L2 Cache 8MB L3 Cache LGA 1366 130W Quad-Core Processor - $288.99 newegg.com

    CPU COOLER - ZALMAN CNPS9900ALED 120mm 2 Ball Low-noise Blue LED CPU Cooler - $80.00 newegg.com

    PSU - Rosewill BRONZE series RBR1000-M 1000W Continuous@40°C, 80Plus Bronze Certified,Modular Cable Design,ATX12V v2.3/ EPS12V,SLI Ready,CrossFire Ready,Active PFC"Compatible with Core i7, i5" Power Supply $ 130 newegg.com

    Memory - G.SKILL 6GB (3 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) Triple Channel Kit Desktop Memory Model F3-12800CL9T-6GBNQ $164 newegg.com

    Memory cooler - G.SKILL FTB-3500C6-S Fans $ 12.98 newegg.com

    2x Hauppauge WinTV-HVR-2250 Dual TV Tuner / Encoder 1229 PCI-Express x1 Interface $114 newegg.com

    Sound card - Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Titanium Fatal1ty Professional 70SB088600002 7.1 Channels 24-bit 96KHz PCI Express x1 Interface Sound Card $ 160 newegg.com

    GPU - 2x EVGA 01G-P3-N981-TR GeForce 9800 GT 1GB 256-bit GDDR3 PCI Express 2.0 x16 HDCP Ready SLI Support Video Card $139 newegg.com

    SSD – 2x OCZ Vertex Series OCZSSD2-1VTX30GXXX 2.5" 30GB SATA II MLC Internal Solid State Drive $130 newegg.com

    HD – 3x Western Digital Caviar Black WD1002FAEX 1TB 7200 RPM 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive -Bare Drive $119 newegg.com

    Blu Ray Player - SAMSUNG Black 8X BD-ROM 16X DVD-ROM 48X CD-ROM SATA Internal Blu-ray Combo Drive - Bulk Model SH-B083L/BSBP LightScribe Support - OEM $ 84.99

    Burners - LG WH10LS30K 10X Blu-ray Burner - LightScribe Support $150.00

    Burners - LITE-ON Black 24X DVD+R 8X DVD+RW 8X DVD+R DL 24X DVD-R 6X DVD-RW 12X DVD-RAM 16X DVD-ROM 48X CD-R 32X CD-RW 48X CD-ROM 2MB
    Cache SATA CD/DVD Burner $ 27 newegg.com

    Game Drive – Kreon Drive $ 50 ebay.com

    Logitech WiLife Camera Master System (961-000288) $300 tigerdirect.com
    Total $3000
     
    Last edited: Mar 7, 2010
  2. Xplorer4

    Xplorer4 Active member

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    Video editing wise, the Core i7 860 would be a better option most likley. Save you money as well.

    Get a Socket 1156, Gigabyte,MSI,or Biostar mobo.

    Drop the Triple Channel memory for Dual Channel DDR3.

    CPU Cooler- In my experience with a similar Zalman, it was junk.

    PSU - Major over kill. Go for a corsair a 650 watt corsair.

    Memory Cooler- Waste of money.

    2 TV Tuners? Not sure the 860 can handle that. That would mean the ability to record/encode 4 channels at once. That would be insanely demanding.

    Sound Card - Unless your an audiophile, no need for it. And unless your a musician, a $50 card should do fine.

    GPU - Running them in SLI should run good, but alone there a fairly weak card.

    SSD - Go for 2x80 GB Intel SSDs. Make sure there G2.

    HD - No need for caviar blacks. Id go with 1 Caviar black and 2 Caviar greens. This way your primary storage drive as some extra power to it. The rest are likley to be storage anyways so no need for the extra power.

    Burners - 2 Blu-Ray burners? One should be fine.

    Game Drive - why? 3 disc drives is a waste of money.

    Ill put a wish list together later.
     
  3. g0ds360

    g0ds360 Member

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    Cool well I will wait to see your wish list I already have the game drive that’s just for my xbox360 backups. As for the TV tuners I guess I would ready only need one right? I’m not sure how that works really if I have one in my pc I can record two shows at once and still watch TV from my box as they record? Also I do plan on running my cards in a SLI that should be good for my 47” Vizio.
     
  4. g0ds360

    g0ds360 Member

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    I was thinking about going with one of these for the motherboard.

    GIGABYTE GA-P55A-UD4P LGA 1156 Intel P55 SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX Intel Motherboard w/ USB 3.0 & SATA 6 Gb/s - Retail $ 190

    GIGABYTE GA-P55A-UD6 LGA 1156 Intel P55 SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX Intel Motherboard w/ USB 3.0 & SATA 6 Gb/s - Retail $250
     
  5. jony218

    jony218 Guest

    Even a celeron can handle multiple tv tuners. The tuners you have on your list have the "hardware mpeg encoders", that means the cpu is out of the loop as far as recording video.
    I have 5 tv tuner cards(4x pvr150/ 1x pvr500) on my intel e2140, they all record video at the same time with no problem. Using hardware encoder tuner cards your only limited by the available PCI slots. I can be recording 5 shows at the same time in the background and be playing need for speed at the same time with no slowdown.

    My advice is for a decent DVR you need more than one tuner card, that way you can record and watch more than one show at a time. Also make sure you get some software that can handle the multiple tuner cards. I've been using sagetv for 3 years with good results, it cost me $80.00 but it was a one-time fee you get free TV listing with no further costs.

    Make sure you format your video storage drives correctly for best performance. NTFS 64kb clusters, allows for best performance on large video files.
     
  6. g0ds360

    g0ds360 Member

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    The reason I was looking at the Hauppauge WinTV-HVR-2250 Dual TV Tuner so I could save space. Do you know of any dual tuners that does the same job as the pvr150? I guess I really can’t pick out an motherboard yet till I no if im getting tuners that will use the pcie x1 or just the pci slot. Also do you no of any power video cards that use only one slot with out blocking another? It would help if I could run one of the tuners in a pcie x16 but that wont work. I did not think it would be this hard to build a computer for all types of things. I would really like to be able to record 3 or 4 shows at a time and still use the computer to do other tasks.
     
    Last edited: Mar 11, 2010
  7. jony218

    jony218 Guest

    with tuner cards you can mix and match, pci/pci-e whatever slots you have, some of the newer tv tuner cards are pci-e. The media software will usually recognize the tuner card and let you set it up.

    On my mediapc, I built it around the motherboard. I bought the motherboard (Foxconn G31ax-k) with the most PCI slots (5 pci slots/1 pci-e). I started with 3 tuner cards than added 2 more. The dual tuner cards can be problementical, my pvr500 has 2 tuners but only one works good, reading more about this card I found that this is a known problem on some systems. I would be hesitant to buy another dual tuner card. Many people recommend the different brands of dual tuner cards as more reliable but also more expensive.

    Also a large video card may infringe on one of the PCI slots, but you can always get a good thin video card, some of the radeon hd4670 models are thin but there are also some that are thick.

    more info on tuner cards
    http://www.shspvr.com/smf/index.php#13
     
  8. SweetLisa

    SweetLisa Member

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    Hi wanted to no if you got the info you was looking for about this card if so plz share it with us thankyou
     
  9. g0ds360

    g0ds360 Member

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    still building my computer could not order everything up front but you should really check out the link jony218 gave. You should be able to get more help there with tv tuners.
     
  10. kgtrain

    kgtrain Regular member

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    If you are sticking to the P55 boards, go with the P55A-UD4P.
    The only main difference is the phase power for each board. The P55A-UD6 uses 24 phase power, while the P55A-UD4P uses 12 phase. Other than that the only difference is the UD6 has 3 PCIe slots while the UD4P has two PCIe slots, and even though the UD6 has six DDR3 Dimm slots while the UD4P has four, they both still use dual channel memory! (Thats right no triple channel memory anyway)
    So unless you want to use three videocards you will be better off with the UD4P. It overclocks a little bit better, has all the main features of the UD6 and you will save yourself $60 bucks.
     
  11. g0ds360

    g0ds360 Member

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    I really been doing alot of reading not sure if im going to stay with the p55 or go with x58a. I like the x58a mobo and with alot of new things coming out I think i should stay with the x58.
     
    Last edited: Apr 9, 2010
  12. sammorris

    sammorris Senior member

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    Bear in mind you pay more in energy bills as i7 CPUs are less efficient, you pay a lot more for the CPU, board and RAM as a whole, and don't get much extra performance. For lots of video editing it's worth it, but on the whole the i5 systems are still much better value.
     
  13. KillerBug

    KillerBug Active member

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    The advantage of the I7 (the real ones, not the 1156 versions) is the PCI-E channels...if you want full-speed crossfire or SLI, then the 1156 is not even an option...even if you have a pair of x16 slots, you can only use them as one x16 slot and one x4 slot, or as a pair of x8 slots. The 1366-based boards can support a lot more, like a pair of x16 slots plus an x8 slot, plus a x4 slot.

    As for the tuners, those tuners will only work with broadcast TV. I assume you are not trying to capture broadcast TV, as it is rare to have more than one thing worth recording on broadcast TV at once...cable/satelite feeds need a cablecard tuner, and as far as I know, only the $300 ATI unit has this capability. The ?good news? of this is that it is a USB tuner; so you can have one for every USB port you have. It is available as a normal external USB device, and is also available as something that looks like a PCI-E card, but still uses USB, and does not fit in a slot (this can be handy if you have a case with more than 7 slots, or a board with fewer than 7 slots). The bad news (other than the price) is that each tuner you get will require it's own cablecard...and the cable companies charge anywhere from $1-$10 per month to rent them (you cannot buy them).

    I would not buy a power supply from Rosewill; as 650W corsair will probably make a lot more power than that POS, while also giving you much cleaner, more reliable power.

    Now for a 4-letter word...RAID. If you have 3TB of storage, you should start thinking about RAID. It is a huge PITA to backup that much to tape/DVD, and can be more expensive in the long run anyway. You would not be getting 3TB if you did not want to fill it, and I can't think why you would want to fill it, just to risk loosing your data in a few months.
     
  14. sammorris

    sammorris Senior member

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    The i7s do have better PCI express speed support, and I was concerned about this too, until I did some reading. It turns out that graphics cards are far less dependent upon PCI express bandwidth than you might think. With a P55 board running the most GPUs you can ever utilise together, four, that's 16x divided by four, so 4x to each GPU. As it turns out, that only causes a 5% performance drop, even if all of those GPUs are HD5870s, or indeed, GTX480s! Thus, it's a complete non-issue. Even for Quad crossfire, LGA1156 is fine.
     
  15. KillerBug

    KillerBug Active member

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    Yeah, it isn't a big difference, but it is detectable...and I would assume it will become a bigger issue in the near future.

    The main thing that you get from those extra PCI-E channels is the extra x4 and x8 slots...and most people don't use those slots anyway...if you do have a use for them, you probably would never consider 1156 to begin with.
     
  16. sammorris

    sammorris Senior member

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    It's not detectable, especially not for two GPUs. Remember I run four off a 16x system, and I can't tell any loss in graphics performance from my Q9550 system which was X48, performance has in fact gone up due to the faster CPU.
    The tests show a 5% loss at 4x and a 2% loss at 8x, and this goes for both the HD5870 and GTX480. I don't expect this fact to change until the next generation at the very least, hopefully by which time PCI Express 3 won't be far away.
     
  17. KillerBug

    KillerBug Active member

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    IF the test show any losses, then it is detectable...that is what "Detectable" means!
    :-}



    Still, even if there was a 10% performance drop, the I5 platform would still be a better "Bang for the Buck" in a gaming PC...and that is what the I5 is all about...a better value per dollar, for fewer dollars
     
  18. sammorris

    sammorris Senior member

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    It's not detectable to a user playing a game, was my point :p
    I always considered the i5 better value for most systems but was surprised to find just how adept it is at even the most powerful graphics systems.
     
  19. KillerBug

    KillerBug Active member

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    It is somewhat surprising; I don't think Intel intended the i5 to be used in gaming machines with 4 GPUs. The i5 can't be a top-of-the-line gaming platform...but it can get close.
     
  20. sammorris

    sammorris Senior member

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    I don't see why it 'gets close' - it can be used as a top-end gaming platform, and that's about it.
     

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