In case you have been wondering what has sucked me away from blogging, I have been hard at work at Leo Laporte's TWiT llc. I am a technical project manager, with most of my focus being on the creation and distribution of streaming live internet television content. You can check out what results from my work by hitting play below.
My responsibilities vary quite a bit, but I do everything from systems integration, to project management, to physically building the studio.
Selecting a monitor was relatively easy. Dell monitors have become essentially standard amongst geeks and gamers as the display for their systems... and for good reason. They are reasonably priced, they are very high quality, they are extremely accurate in color, and offer great ports and expandability options. We decided to choose a single 30 inch monitor because of the fact that multiple monitor sli support is not out yet... and we are not sure when it will be coming. There are in fact two 3- inch dell monitors, one for $1,200 and one for $2,000. When comparing the specs, there are are a few differences. Often you pay more for features like height adjustability, the ability to plug television type connections into it, and to do goofy things like picture in a picture. However, in this case the more expensive monitor, the 3008WFP, has a 3000:1 contrast ration instead of a 1000:1 ratio, which made it worth the extra cash.
The keyboard and mouse selection is another place where I made a unilateral executive decision. Since keyboards and mice are entirely preference, I decided to choose what seemed to be the highest quality components that would still be somewhat vanilla. I did not want to choose anything too off the unique, because I wanted to make suer that it was as generic as possible so that whomever wins the machine could comfortably adapt.
In the end, after heavily considering many products, like logitech's gaming line, I decided upon the Razer Lycosa keyboard and the Microsoft Habu gaming mouse... which was also a Razer product. These are very high quality pieces, that have an attractive construction, great feel, and wonderful accuracy. They also have relatively generic shapes for us. My only slight complaint, is that I feel that the keys on the Lycosa keyboard are a bit too easy to press, but not bad.
- Digital Kitty
When looking for the highest performance in hard drives for gaming machines, there are two good ways to go. You can either choose one of those new fangled solid state drives, or a Western Digital 10,000 rpm VelociRaptor. SSD drives have no moving components, and as such are able to go from one sector to another when reading extremely quickly, and therefore have a fantastic response time. Their throughput is quite fast, though when compared to the VelociRaptors not that much faster or slower. However, both our audience and Leo expressed enough concern about the solid state drives' possible having longevity issues, that their hypothetical slight performance advantage were not enough to sway us in their direction... especially with their exorbitant price tags. It is somewhat of a tossup performance wise currently, though the next generation of SSDs should outperform VelociRaptors in every category but price. It is also of my personal opinion however, that very soon SSD technology will wipe the floor with magnetic drives in every performance category. Silicon is a nifty thing.
Also with the VelociRaptor decision, we decided to put the drives in a RAID 0 configuration. This stripes the data across both drives, making them act as one drive, that is almost twice as fast. Unlike RAID 5 however, this is not a configuration for stability and storage redundancy. In fact, with RAID 0 you get a great deal more performance out of your drives, but you also double the likelihood of a drive failure, as if one drive has a problem, the entire array is shot. Is it a safe idea? I wouldn't store the only copy of your taxes on it. Is it the fastest way of going? Absolutely.
We explored the option of using a high end raid controller to control the two drives, like something from Promise, however our research and audience consensus told us that RAID 0 is relatively simple, and can be handled quite well by the motherboard itself.
- Digital Kitty
The choice of the sound card is an extremely complex one. I would also like to admit that I am not an audiophile, and I feel that motherboard sound is just fine so long as there is no RF noise in the output. However, I have done as much research as I could, and I came up with the ASUS Xonar D2X sound card. For years Creative dominated the market with their Sound Blaster line. ASUS recently bought up some very advanced audio processing chips for their Xonar line of cards. We purchased the Xonar DX2 card as it seemed to offer good shielding from RF, which is important with as much going on in our system as we have in the UGM, and because it has some of the absolute highest quality chips you can buy. In particular it has extremely nice digital to analog conversion capabilities. Creative on the other hand, also offers a number of very nice cards, which have better EAX compliance... which a number of software titles can use to create nifty sound effects. The Xonar is only able to emulate EAX, and is as such slightly at a disadvantage. However, as per advice from viewers and Ryan Shrout, most people seem to agree that EAX is going out of style with game developers, and EAX is not a compelling reason to go with a creative card. Stay tuned for later posts about fitments issues with this card when used in conjunction with our massive graphics setup. You can read the PC perspective review of the card here. - Digital Kitty
Ram is for the most part a commodity component today, with only minuite differences between brands. Previously we decided that we would go with DDR3 memory, rather than DDR2, because it results in an overall performance increase when used in conjunction with three graphics cards in SLI. This of course greatly increased the cost of purchasing ram for the machine... but hey... we are going for ultimate. Speaking of the ultimateness, we went ahead and chose to install the 64 bit edition of Windows Vista Ultimate as the UGM OS. Using a 64 bit OS removes any 32 bit ram limits, and allows us to put as much ram into the machine as is allowed by the motherboard with no software restrictions.
There are a few manufacturers who offer premium quality RAM modules, howeverthe benefits of these modules might be difficult to observe or utilize. I researched to see what would be the ultimate in ram, and after reading reviews from various sites, in particular Ryan Shrout's PC Perspective website at pcper.com, I chose to go with Corsair Dominator ram.
Corsair does a great job of what is known as bin sorting. When ram and cpus are made, even from the same batch, different chips have different limits to how fast they can go and how much power they can handle. Corsair identifies for you what are the very tip top pieces of hardware, and sorts them by their limitations. This way they identify out of all the ram they make, the extra special ones can run at 2ghz, some at 1.6 ghz, and so on. When you by the fastest Corsair ram, you essentially are purchasing ram that has been tested and proven to be the best of the best.
We picked up 4 gigabytes of 2ghz DDR3 ram for the system. A few weeks later, a corsair representative came to the TWiT cottage as a friend of Ryan Shrout's, and he gave us a large quantity of 1.6 ghz DDR3 ram. I am currently in the process of deciding between the benefit of 8 gigabytes of 1.6ghz ram, or 4 of 2ghz ram. Frankly, I don't think there will be much of a difference between either of the two, but in the process of over clocking we may see some advantages.
Both of the types of Corsair Dominator ram we are using are SLI certified, which means it is expected to work well with NVIDIA nforce motherboards and can offer a bunch of goofy little tweaking features, and works well with the NVIDIA ESA software. There is a feature in the motherboard BIOS feature that even allows automatic over clocking with SLI ram, though I found that it would crash the system and have simply done everything manually and found better results.
Corsair has generously offered to help us tune over clock settings on the ram during final assembly to get the most out of it. I would also like to be clear that we chose Corsair ram based on independent unbiased reviews, and that corsair only contacted us after we had decided to use their products.
Finally we are using a Corsair air cooler for the ram. I find that despite the high speed of rotation of the small fans on the cooler, that it is actually quite silent yet moves a great deal of air. When over clocking this ram I feel that this cooling unit will help us to keep temperatures down. If I need to I can water cool the ram, though I don't think that will be necessary. This cooler is pretty cool for just over $20. I use one on my home desktop now, and works with all desktop ram setups, and requires no modifications. It simply clamps on.
- Digital Kitty
Now that we have chosen our processor and graphics cards, we had to choose a motherboard that would support our goals. We need three pci express x16 slots in order to install the three graphics cards, we need sli capability with these slots, we need a 775 slot for the QX9770 processor, and we need overclocking capabilities.
With these requirements, our choice boiled down to an nForce chipset motherboard. Our choices for tri-sli were either a 790i motherboard, or a 780i. 790i motherboards allow us to use ddr 3 ram, while 780i motherboards allow us only ddr2. The difference is speed? Well not much it seems, until you are using ddr3 in a system that is running tri-sli. In that case, the extra throughput actually increases performance, and as such we decided to go with the 790i board. I looked at different manufacturers, reference designs, after market designs, and presented two options to the viewers to choose between.
Either the EVGA 790i motherboard...
or the ASUS Striker II Extreme.
The EVGA is essentially the same as other mostly reference designs, which appealed to us because of the likelihood of offering greater stability through more highly refined and tested BIOS software. The problem however, was that we were planning on doing some extreme over clocking, and I was concerned about the north bridge overheating causing instability. I could simply add a water block to the motherboard, but I would have to cut into the complex heat piped passive cooling system on the motherboard, which would cause a reduction in cooling to other parts of the board.
The ASUS Striker II extreme on the other hand, comes from the factory with a nice water cooling setup on the board itself. However, my personal experience with many ASUS boards, and many reviews o the Striker II, showed that there might be some BIOS instability.
The question becomes, which is the lesser of two evils? Initially we decided upon the EVGA board, but I later overrode the audience's decision and decided to go with the ASUS. My thought process is, that it is preferable to fix instability through BIOS updating than though hacking apart the cooling system and adding water blocks. I am to this day a bit iffy about overriding democratically decided upon components, but hey... I am the one who has to build and troubleshoot the unit, so I had to do what I thought would be the most stable platform to build upon.
- Digital Kitty
Our next large choice was that of graphics cards. We considered ATI and NVIDIA GPU powered graphics cards, and eventually decided upon graphics cards with the then just released NVIDIA GTX 280 chips.
The only way to be ultimate of course, is to pile as many of these cards into the system as possible using SLI technology Currently only tri-sli setups are supported with the GTX 280s, though we did consider using two of the dual-GPU NVIDIA 9800 gx2 graphics chips, in quad-SLI.
However, doing so is currently a bit of a hack in the drivers, and while it would work... and be cool to say that we have four GPUs, it would not be as stable as the tri-SLI GTX 280s, nor would it be any faster because the 280 chips are much faster than the 9800 chips. We therefore went with three GTX 280s.
The question then became, which of the NVIDIA GTX 280 card builders should we buy the card from?
We had decided to go with liquid cooling already, but this makes us ask the question of if we should buy air cooled GTX 280s and then use our own water blocks... or buy cards with water blocks already on them. The construction of the the system, case choice, and cooling system were left up to me to decide upon, as it is a somewhat As such I made the executive decision to go with the pre-water blocked BFG GTX 280 graphics cards.
These cards are outstanding, while even more importantly, BFG's service is absolutely stellar. In the future I will be buying all of my personal graphics cards from BFG. What makes the water cooled BFG GTX 280 cards unique, is that they come with one of the highest quality after market water blocks around, created by Danger Den. Particularly awesome however, was the fact that this card only takes up a single slot in the back of the computer, rather than two like most high end air or water cooled graphics cards. This is important for us because we are using three graphics cards, and using dual slot cards would cover up three expansion slots on the motherboard that can later be used by other expansion cards, like high end raid controllers, tv tuners, sound cards, or anything along those lines.
These cards from a performance perspective... are top of the line. They are pre-overclocked, and include one gigabyte of on board video ram. Of course we later over clocked these cards to a higher clock speed than already enhanced settings from BFG.
The design of these cards later made my life quite difficult as I learned to set up the water cooling in tri-SLI. I finally figured out how to do so, so check back later for my posts on building to find out the secrets, and how to not make the epic mistakes that I made.
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