Newegg currently has the Spinpoint F3 1 TB on special fo $65 with this code (you may have to sign up for it to be usable) EMCYTNN25.  Free shipping.

Harm, Bill, I started building (actually ordering parts for) my new computer. I already ordered the 5 F3 hard drives from

Newegg (and they accepted the discount code). I would just need an advice on a moderately priced Blu-ray burner (LG? Samsung?) There are so many out there, and so many (non-expert) opinions, that it is difficult to choose. Thanks, Laci.

Thank you.  I purchased the system for just under 2k.  Now, how should I have the three 1T drives configured?  Just three separate drive letters or some type or raid?

As for the drobo, I have a droboelite with 12T or usable storage.  Plenty for backup and using for photoshop.  I've used external drives for photoshop for many years and it works just fine.  I don't game, AT ALL.  I play hold 'em on my phone, but that is about it.  Way too many other distractions in the world

-Kelly

Harm:

Excellent advice.  Thank you very much.

HZ

I did a lot of shopping and comparisons recently.

What's your budget?

And what programs do you intend to run?

I've become a bit of an expert on this subject lately. I own an HP workstation that went bad under warranty and got a replacement refurb that's an upgrade. I then wanted to upgrade the power supply and get specs on the rest of the machine, and looked hard at building my own machine from scratch.

There are pros and cons.

The specs of a z400 are not so bad at all: Xeon (same foundation as i7, though I don't know which level of i7), triple-channel. Not so bad. Prices are on their site and I'm sure you'd do considerably better at CDW (or elsewhere). The tech support with an HP workstation is pretty amazing in one sense: they're very accessible 24/7 with little if any wait times, will stay on the phone with you for hours without a peep and hold your hands and bend over backwards to help you in any way possible, and will replace questionable parts in the wink of an eye when you have a warranty to cover it (they recently replaced the mobo and CPU in the refurb machine -- onsite in one day -- when I had freezes even though it may have been the GPU and I hadn't even replaced that yet).

A considerable amount of their hardware is propriety, yet tech support has precious little knowledge about details/specs of various components. For instance, they told me for days -- a supervisor and three different techs -- that it's a standard ATX case and power supply and simple to put in my own larger after-market PSU... yet it turned out that it's a propriety PSU in terms of how it mounts into the case and the pin-out at the system-board plug. And, there are no larger PSU's to be had that will fit/work in the machine. To run a GTX-470, I ended up using a second, external PSU just for the GPU.

Which is actually working fine.

The case handles the cooling with that GPU just fine, as hot as the GPU is.

I looked into moving things into a Cooler Master case, until one of the more senior techs at HP told me too much is proprietary to make that feasible -- fan controls, power-button controls, etc.

Upgrading RAM to 12GB using 3 x 4GB has to be done with Kingston memory. Nobody else but HP and Kingston make compatible RAM for that machine. Buying it from HP costs over $1,500. Kingston from an online discount retailer it's about half that. It has unbuffered RAM with error correction. It's 1333 RAM running at 1066 (CPU's limit), but from all the research I've done that's a limitation that's really not that noticeable in daily operation. (I don't know how different that is with video production.)

If you want to look into it, carefully differentiate between what should come with the stock machine from HP (or Dell, which I know nothing about) and what you upgrade on your own.

Maybe in the end the savings with HP (or Dell) and even the warranty aren't worth the limitations. I'd compare costs on the base machine to see.

Building your own takes time to make sure everything is compatible, whereas you can get a stock machine from HP and easily add, on your own, a better GPU, RAID controller, upgraded RAM, hard drives (as many as will fit, which is not many in a z400 but for me it was enough -- five hard drives and an optical drive), and just go to work, even knowing you have very good warranty support if you got it with a good warranty offered by HP.

I hope that helps.

magneter wrote:

 

So how much did this Z400 originally cost you?

I can't answer that accurately because, as I said, they sent it as a replacement of a prior model (HP xw8600) under warranty which was no longer available. Also, I originally bought the xw8600 loaded from CDW (under an HP lease, making cost a secondary issue).

Note that when comparing, one advantage of buying HP is that if you get a workstation from them and decide you want a different OS (ie: to change from XP to Windows 7 64-bit), you can just ask tech support and they'll send you the discs for free under their umbrella license. It's just limited to your HP workstation(s). At least, this is how they handled it with me and how they explained it to me.

CDW says they're the largest retailer of HP machines (they say they sell more than HP does).

Here's a list of z400 configurations on the CDW site:

http://www.cdw.com/shop/search/results.aspx?key=hp+z400&searchscope=Al l&sr=1

And here's a list of z400 configurations on the HP site:

http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/us/en/sm/WF25b/12454-12454-296719-30790 7-4050763-3718668.html

Jay

If you only want mediocre performance go with the z400.  No one has yet submitted a z400 configuration CS5 benchmark but there is one z400 on the PPBM4 (read CS4) benchmarks page it is in 92nd place on the PPBM4 Benchmark Results page out of 142 results.  With no overclocking and other BIOS restrictions it would be hard to get good performance out of a Z400.  That basic HP box was in excess of $3000 (it comes with a stupid Quadro card) and he had to enhance it with several additional disk drives.  You would be better off going to some of the semi custom builders where you would get a motherboard without those restrictions. Or buy the suggested level i7 x58 machine from Scott at ADK for $2700. for a top of the line Premiere Pro CS5 ready great system

He will even properly install your CS4/5 software for you for no additional charge.

Bill,

I absolutely defer to your experience and expertise here, and that of Harm as well.

I consider myself a lot more enlightened as a result of this dialog and will look forward to building a system myself in the near future.

(I will have to decide separately about the half-dozen and then dozen machines I'll need to put in for office staff, but I'm guessing it's still better to have them built.)

(By the way, Eric, just to clarify, in my case they "upgraded" me from XP to Windows 7 at no charge. Though that's obviously not enough to tip the scales in favor of buying a machine from them.)

Jay

Gentlement, if I may ask quickly here: I do have that z400 (I'm a bit deflated now, after having recently become encouraged that it's not such a bad system at all, but that's another matter ).

Triple-channel. Four memory slots.

It came with 8GB RAM. I plan to toss it and put in 12GB consisting of 3 x 4GB (in triple channel). I found the right memory from Kingston via CDW for about $750. I'm installing CS5 tomorrow when it arrives. The machine has an F3 for the OS/apps, an F3 for swap, and three F3 drives in a RAID 5 array for data (with a top-of-the-line LSI RAID controller -- 8888ELP). GPU is GTX-470 Superclocked+ from EVGA.

I'll be using Premiere Pro for video production -- our own in-house business presentations... not a lot of non-stop production work (we're not a production company) but time sure is money for me when doing this work (and waiting on the machine).

The question is whether my going to the 12GB of RAM is a good use of funds.

Thanks.

Jay

Okay, I appreciate that... thought that's kind of one of those non-answer anwers, isn't it? I know it's a subjective thing, of course, but it can't be that illusive of a question.

Bill? Harm? Please?

(And by the way, can't anyone give me any consolation about my z400 at all? I dont' overclock anyway. Similar core as i7. Triple-channel. All the right supporting hardware that I added. How bad can it be? Is one benchmark system enough to judge, really, without taking all the other specs into account?)

Thanks again!

Jay