Building Your Own Graphics Workstation, Part One
Page 3 of 4
Ok, we've covered the CPU, the motherboard, and the video card, the Holy Trinity of a graphics workstation. But wait, there's more. One frequently overlooked issue is that of memory. Not only how much memory to get, but what kind and from whom.
Good RAM is crucial to a stable system. Plain and simple. I would rather spend my money on quality than I would on quantity or speed. Now, there are two different kinds of memory you can get for P4 systems, RDRAM and DDR RAM.[an error occurred while processing this directive]
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RDRAM is really fast, pumping at a high cycle rate and giving you fantastically wide memory bandwidth for your system. DDR RAM is memory that has its clock cycle doubled to increase its data rate and bandwidth. I have already committed us to DDR RAM with the Soyo motherboard I've specified, and the reason for that is pretty simple.
While the bandwidth of RDRAM is superior to that of DDR, I find it's not enough to justify the price difference between them. DDR right now is widely available in three speeds, PC1800, PC2100, and PC2700 (200MHz, 266MHz and 333MHz respectively). The fastest DDR speed rivals that of RDRAM, but the prices are lower, so DDR it is. The Soyo motherboard supports the highest of the speeds (though Soyo currently says that it can support only two sticks of the PC2700 speed, a fact I seem to have confirmed in my own system).
Now comes the question of how much memory to get. I wouldn't recommend anything under 512MB unless you're looking for a punch in the kidney. Ideally, I would say get 1GB. If you'll be doing a lot of compositing, I'd suggest 1.5 to 2GB, though that would mean getting at least one 1GB stick, which is quite expensive right now. But what kind of memory and from where?
Lemme tell you a story. It's a story of a cost-conscious little man, short and stout, who wanted to increase his home PC's paltry 256MB up to 1GB. He searched and searched, looked high and low for the best price he could find. And he found it. Happily, he whipped out his credit card and bought himself three sticks of memory from this no-name dealer on their web site for their no-name memory. A week later, he had 1GB of memory, cheap as hell, and a big smile on his face. But little did he know of the dark clouds that were forming above his PC's case or of the great tragic drama that would unfold.Over the next three months he noticed a lot of weird system crashes and freezes. Windows' blue screen of death haunted his dreams and became his computing nightmare. Over three times he had to reinstall Windows 2000 and all his applications, numerous times he imaged and restored his "C" drive with Norton Ghost. His girlfriend began to get bitchy. His car started to shimmy and shake. His feet were getting flatter.
The crashes continued, even after he had replaced almost every component in his system, from the motherboard to the power supply. Finally, he stumbled on the now more than obvious answer of replacing his memory, but this time with a name brand from a reputable online dealer.
Well, that solved it all. His PC never crashed again, his girlfriend started being nice to him, and his car ran fine, though his feet remained pretty flat. And at the risk of making this sound like a commercial, it was because he got name-brand memory (from Crucial.com). He should have known, he should have paid attention to his fortune cookie, the one that read, "The fool who buys cheap RAM, will crash many time."
So drawing from this poor, flat footed sap's unfortunate experience, I contacted Crucial.com, and they kindly sent me 1GB of their PC2100 DDR memory. As of then Crucial did not make PC2700 memory in 512MB sticks, but I didn't mind that fact at all. Crucial has a solid track record (with me at least), and I didn't want to fool around with potentially bad memory. The memory bandwidth differences between PC2700 and PC2100 would barely be noticeable, if at all, when I'm running the system anyway, and according to Soyo, this motherboard, and as I've learned most SiS 645 chipsets, have a problem running three sticks of DDR PC2700 anyway.
Next come the hard drives. The first choice here winds down to picking SCSI or IDE. Basically, SCSI drives are faster than IDE. They can have higher rotation rates, their transfer speeds can go higher, and the SCSI controller offloads more of the processing of data transfers off the CPU, more so than bus mastering IDE. All these things make SCSI the hands-down professional choice, but also the more expensive solution. I figure the professional solutions can be left at work, the speed advantages for a home workstation won't justify the cost. So unless you work at home compositing or editing and need to move video and audio around a lot, then 7200rpm IDE running at ATA/100 or ATA/133 is the answer for you. And it will save you a few hundred bucks at least over Ultra320 SCSI.Now the designations of ATA/100 or 133 means the hard drive can burst data at a rate of up to 100MB/s or 133MB/s respectively, but it doesn't mean it will maintain that speed constantly. The standard has pretty much become ATA/100, but our clever little Dariush has gotten us the Soyo motherboard that supports ATA/133, a full third faster, with really no increase in price.
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It seems that most manufacturers are waiting for a new ATA standard called Serial ATA to debut (I hear Godot's coming with it when he shows up), so not many have adopted the ATA/133 protocol. Maxtor -- the originator of ATA/133 -- makes a variety of ATA/133 drives, while the other big hard drive manufacturers (Western Digital, IBM and Seagate) stay at ATA/100. So, for our little rig here, I've bought myself two Maxtor drives, one at 20GB for the system and OS files and the other at 80GB for applications and data. I'll also be adding more storage with an ATA-100 7200rpm 100GB Western Digital drive for rendered images, captured video, MP3s and junk.
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