When most of us buy a computer, generally some bright person somewhere has designed the components to all work well together - but this is not strictly true, I've seen some pretty half-baked computer systems the came off the store shelves.
Designing a computer system is really an exercise in compromise. A good system will have the fewest compromises possible, and all the components will work well together as a whole. Some of the main factors I didn't want to compromise on were: motherboard, graphics cards, file system, power supply, and cooling system.
Power Supply - I really did not want to some day add another component to my computer system and find out there was not enough power available. In my case I ordered an Enermax Galaxy EVO 1250 Watt. This is about the most powerful power supply you can get for a tower PC system. In particular it it has a 24-pin connector for a high-end motherboard like mine, and two 8-pin connectors for each CPU, again for a motherboard like mine. Additionally it has more than enough PCI Express 8-pin connectors for two top-end graphics cards, and the cooling system I want. It has way more disk drive connectors than I will ever need. Finally, this power supply has a really large fan, which means it is relatively quite.
A funny thing I discovered. The power supply I really wanted was the Enermax Evolution 85+ 1250, but it is not sold in North America. This is one of the most efficient power supplies available - over 85% efficient (i.e. wastes less power). For some reason they could not get it approved in North America, so they took the very same power supply, and tuned it down to about 82% and then they were able to get it approved in North America. Go figure? I actually could have gotten the Evolution 85+ from Australia, but it only supports 220 - 240 Volts, and that can be hard to find in Canada in some places. On the other hand the Galaxy will run from 115 - 240 Volts which gives me more options. I still plan to run with 240 Volts, because that is more efficient than 110 Volts, but who knows where I will end up or where I will want to take my computer to.
File System - Most PCs these days have one disk drive, generally with a C: and a D: partition. Historically the C: partition is for your operating system, and the D: partition is for your data files. In some computers C and D are actually separate disk drives. In general you want your C drive to be as fast as possible because that is where the system boots from - and I hate waiting for my system to boot, or reboot. Also, that is typically where you run all your applications from, so again you want it to be fast. Finally, often people run their page-file on the C: partition, and that needs to be fast too.
One thing I have noticed recently is that some system builders use a really fast drive for their C, like a Western Digital VelociRaptor or an Intel X25-A SSD. These drives sacrifice storage space for speed. Then people will use a slower but much larger disk for their D drive. This seems like a good strategy. Some extremests will actually run a RAID 0 array of SSD for some intense speed.
More recently a new technology is becoming popular, sold state memory on a PCI-Express card. The beauty of this technology is that you can get the same performance as a RAID 0 array of SSD (or better), but all on one PCI card. Currently my favorite is something like the ioXtreme from Fusion IO. My strategy is that I would use this for my C drive, and then use a big RAID 5 array for my D drive. This would give me the best of both worlds - honking fast boot, reboot, paging, and application start-up; and massive storage for music, pictures, videos, etc. The only draw back is currently you cannot boot from a Fusion IO board, but they are working on it.
As I plan to build my system in phases I will build the RAID 5 array first and boot from it. When I get a bootable Fusion IO board I will then switch to booting from that. Additionally, I plan to backup my Fusion IO board to my RAID 5 D drive - so everything fits together nicely. I would even keep my RAID 5 array bootable, for emergencies.
Graphics Cards - 4 Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) is about the maximum you can put in a computer. Fortunaly ATI/AMD make some graphics cards with 2 GPU per card. In particular I'm waiting for the new Radeon 5870 X2 to become available (they were just announced recently). These cards use a lot of electrical power - which is why I ordered the power supply I did. All that power has to go somewhere so these cards generate a lot of heat. My plan is to water cool the cards using a CoolIT Systems Boreas chiller. This thing is actually like a mini refrigerator because it uses thermocouples to make the water very cold, consequently removing even more heat from the GPUs. This will come in very handy if I want to over-clock my GPUs. Since the GPUs I want are not for sale yet, I've decided to go with a more modest GPU during phase one of building Gemini.
Motherboard - I've already talked about the Intel S520Sc motherboard I've ordered so I won't go into to much more detail except to say finding a way to cool the CPUs was tricky. Originally I was going to use the Boreas to cool the CPUs, but this motherboard does not support over-clocking, so the Boreas would sort of be wasted. Lucky for me CoolIT Systems just came out with a new water-cooled radiator, the Domino WS 240. The advantage of this is that it will give the CPU better cooling than stock fans, and it fits in the top of the computer case, and leaves the Boreas for some hot GPUs.
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