Building the Ultimate System: A Discussion with Dave and Marco

When it comes to building the ultimate system, money is no object. The question on everyone's mind is, what parts would I use to create this beast of a machine? Dave, being one of the knowledgeable individuals in our community, was kind enough to share his thoughts on this very topic.

For Dave, starting with the processor is a must. He would go with one of Intel's six-core processors, specifically the 900 series, and a processor that he believes can handle demanding tasks. In particular, he mentioned the 980X Extreme processor as an option. To complement this powerful processor, Dave would add six or twelve gigs of DDR3 memory, which he feels is essential for optimal performance.

In terms of storage, Dave would opt for multiple SSDs, preferably using a RAID zero setup. He finds that with more than 13GB/s bandwidth, the gains in performance become diminishing returns. This configuration allows him to take full advantage of his system's potential and enjoy seamless performance.

Dave also talked about his preferred graphics card configuration. With two high-end NVIDIA GeForce 5870s or AMD Radeon HD 5870 Infinity Six Edition cards, he can create a multi-monitor setup that takes full advantage of his powerful processor and ample memory. This configuration provides an excellent balance between power and noise levels, making it ideal for Dave's office environment.

Moving on to the storage solution, Marco shared his thoughts on what would make up this ultimate system. For him, high performance and quiet operation are key criteria. He currently runs a stable machine with a pair of Intel Xeons, 12GB of RAM, an EVGA Classified SR2 motherboard, two Radeon HD 5870s, and a Creative X5 sound card, all housed in an aluminum case.

If money was no object, Marco would take this setup to the next level by adding more storage solutions. He believes that with ample storage, you can add more of everything – drives, cards, and even peripherals. However, he acknowledges that at some point, it becomes overkill.

Regarding his current machine, Marco feels that it's super powerful and will never be taxed until it's time to upgrade again. This sentiment is shared by Dave, who has a similar system in place.

The discussion on building the ultimate system continued as they talked about their favorite resources for finding parts and advice online. Both Dave and Marco emphasized the importance of staying up-to-date with the latest hardware developments and recommendations from fellow enthusiasts.

To stay informed about the latest trends and reviews, visit hothardware.com, which is dedicated to delivering in-depth analysis and coverage of the tech world. The website features articles, news, podcasts, and even a community section where users can share their thoughts and experiences.

In conclusion, building an ultimate system requires careful consideration of various components. By understanding what each part brings to the table, it's possible to create a machine that exceeds expectations in performance, power efficiency, and overall user experience.

**Contest Update**

A surprise giveaway is on its way! Stay tuned as we announce our next collaboration with a tech vendor. The contest details will be shared soon, so keep an eye on the official hothardware.com website for updates.

The discussion may have come to an end, but the excitement remains. With new parts and features being announced regularly, it's essential to stay informed about the latest developments in the world of technology.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: encoming up on a hot hour where we're talking about nvidia's latest move does it doom them forever a 3d notebook smartphone's taking over the world wide web and some more stuff coming up on hardware welcome to hot hardware where we talk about the hottest tech amaya zakhtar alongside dave altavilla and marco chapetta marco and video is doing something nvidia is doing something very odd there they've introduced a brand new graphics card available at best buy now this is unusual because usually they license their technology to other companies and nvidia is inside of other companies graphics cards what's going on with this deal so it's kind of interesting first of all thanks for taking everything that i was going to talk about second of all they what they're doing is you know up to this point they've always sold graphics cards branded by partners but this time around nvidia branded graphics cards actually just a geforce gtx 460 is being sold at best buy as a standalone product but why on earth do you think they would be doing something like this didn't wasn't there another company out there a long time ago that did something very similar i think it's 3dfx yeah well sort of it's not exactly the same thing because nvidia is just sort of testing the waters here with a you know with just best buy but that's exactly what 3dfx did you know they were selling their chips to partners then they they bought a company stb and started making their own boards and kind of cut their partners out of it and ultimately ended up failing so it's just everyone online is chatting about it people on our forum chat about it drawing parallels between nvidia and 3d effects it's not the same situation but it was just interesting news do you foresee nvidia just not licensing stuff anymore or do you think this is no no no way they're definitely gonna still license their chips they're you know that's their bread and butter selling through their multiple partners no license for you dave you guys got to check out a 3d capable idea pad this thing was one of the ugliest things i've seen with the big stamp on the on the cover i mean the target it's a tribal tattoo on an idea pad i don't quite get that dave what did you think of the actual device apart from its as far as i'm concerned hideousness well you know i actually think it's a good looking machine i don't think that's a stamp at all it's a nice piece of uh you know artwork on the top of it it's it's it's stylish in my opinion and it's got a classy chassis but to each his own i guess um to answer your question it's a 3d capable laptop that unfortunately we think fell a little bit short which is not common for lenovo products in our in our labs we actually are pretty fond of certainly the thinkpad brand of products and you know the lenovo generally known for for a higher quality notebook um but yeah this uh machine actually equated to a lower quality 2d display lower lower resolution 2d lcd 1366 by 768 native resolution and not so good 3d capability it actually has some bundled software that comes with it that actually called tridef that claims to be able to turn 2d content uh into 3d and it didn't do such a great job of that um you know viewing angle wasn't so good it crashed during a couple of games so it sort of fell short on the the 3d claim but then again that's sort of indicative of where 3d technology is in the marketplace right now i guess yeah i mean if your gimmick is a 3d display and you don't do that well plus they didn't bundle in a blu-ray drive i mean trying to convert 2d to 3d looks like that's going to be a mess as well i mean 3d content isn't really there is it it well it's not quite there yet um you know as a matter of fact our editor trudged down to the local um blockbuster video and he had to settle for coraline and 3d no no there's a you know a real thriller um but uh yeah so you know pop that into the dvd drive standard dvd it's you know standard definition 3d content and so you know really you need blu-ray to get high-def content um you know and and and so there's just not a lot of high-def you know 3d content out there and the displays to show it you know especially in a notebook you know it's it's not quite there yet at least you know in my opinion now marco do you think 3d works any better on a small screen like a laptop compared to something like a giant tv i think it can you know the first thing to consider is the content has to be created with 3d in mind just converting old content to 3d it's just never going to work as well as you know anyone that went to see avatar in 3d knows how well the 3d work there but as far as the screen goes the passive technology that was used in this lenovo notebook i don't think is as good as you know the active tech that's in some new uh asus notebooks that uses nvidia's active shutter glasses so you know it can be there with the right hardware and the right content you know it's just too early right now you know not everybody's supporting it not every no notebook has the right kind of screen though there's a lot that needs to happen still i don't know it requires you to wear glasses on top of like for me other glasses it just seems it seems silly plus the actual 3d is where it's at agreed uh yes i like 3d in real life let's just stick to it that way anyway let's talk about sand force you know you guys might not be familiar with the name sandforce but they're responsible for making controllers that make ssds fly they had an announcement marco can you tell us about that yeah this is very cool so anybody that's been shopping for an ssd should know who sanforce is they make the controllers in some of today's better ssds now that we spoke to the company last week they just announced it's not available just yet but they just announced a new family of controllers that use a sata 3 interface and performance is almost double the current generation drives so they're telling us that the next gen drives that are going to be based on the sf 2000 family controllers are going to be capable of 500 meg per second sequential reads and writes with 60k uh 4k random iops you know that is just huge you know anybody that's using an ssd now that has felt that performance increase that came from moving from a hard drive to an ssd it's almost like another order of magnitude increase you know double the performance of the drives today nearly double at least now this was just an announcement do we have any like release uh or timeline kind of information yeah so no official release no you know products named they did sandforce did say that all the usual partners will likely have products based on the controller so ocz corsair um what have you um we're hearing early next year they're going to start in the enterprise space and then trickle down into the consumer space so that sounds like it's going to be pretty interesting once that comes out that we're talking about really fast right read write speeds right 500 megabytes 500 megabytes per second megabytes that's not mega bits right well the other thing that's interesting you know for an enthusiast two of those in raid you know approaching a gig per second on your storage uh storage array it's gonna be awesome you know it'll be interesting to see too you noted the the sata three interface it's actually a six gigabit per second sata interface uh it will be interesting to see if the controller itself on a standard three gigabit per second you know standard uh generation two sata interface how it does with uh you know legacy motherboards and those applications as well so my little card that tells me everything says that smartphones consume the largest percentage of mobile content this is the first time this has happened considering smartphones only have a quarter in the market dave what do you think is going on here i think i need a little card that tells me everything you got one of those for me i only happen to have one you have a whole site for that it's like the easy button we all need that hey um yeah so you know if you asked us i don't know 10 years ago 11 years ago when we started this thing called hothardware.com if if smartphones were going to be that important to us we would have probably told you you were crazy um smartphones were weren't that smart back then either i suppose but uh yeah as a matter of fact um smartphones dominate uh you know they make up the largest share of um you know mobile content being consumed out there with android 17 of the smartphone uh market apple 14 rim 18 symbian 41 and uh yeah i mean it's it's just amazing the actual explosion of the smartphone in the marketplace and uh you know let's face it these days the computing power that you can hold in your hand is is pretty impressive what do you think marco i know you got a dual booting phone which sounds like a crazy idea 10 years ago that would not be something in my mind but i know you have a i think it's a windows mobile 6.5 so obviously you hate yourself because you're running that exactly you have android on the same device why don't you tell us about it a little bit that's right so actually if you know as a geek and a hardware guy this is what i find really fun i i getting a piece of hardware tinkering with it and making it something that it wasn't in the beginning so yeah you know i'm running an att tilt too it's an old phone i'm dying to upgrade but you know running custom roms i have the latest build of winmo 653 you can't even like buy phones that have this build on it it's completely modified so the interface you know looks totally different um and this phone due to you know community involvement and uh you know guys in the xda developers forum who i need to give them a plug because they're super smart i'm also able to run froyo with literally i just click an icon winmo shuts down i'm running android so it's kind of fun for you know a guy in my position who just loves technology that now i can play with my smartphone the same way i used to be overclocking my pc you know just tinkering and making it different it's it's really fun for someone like me how does how does froyo run in that thing it talks i'll shoot some video after i'm going to boot it up now so literally i click an icon winmo is going to shut down and android is going to launch it it's really really wild you'll see it start to boot there oh neat so it works it works really well it's not finished you know the camera doesn't work right making calls isn't perfect yet but the fact that some guys in a forum can you know grab the open source uh android and make an os for a different phone i think is really cool it still sounds like you're punishing yourself with windows mobile six point yeah even if it's six point five point you are a hey i'm a hater because i've used it and i got to get off my windows mobile soap box let's talk about a reader question shall we sure this one's from inspector what parts would you use to build the best system possible if money was not an issue who wants to take oh who's going first dave near you i'll go first because you're gonna one-up me for sure you already own yours but um yeah you know that that's a that's an excellent question if money was no object i would say right now uh from a processor standpoint i'd go with one of intel's six core processors uh 900 series processors probably a 980 x extreme processor um and i'd probably throw in something like six or 12 gig of ddr 1333 memory i don't think you have to you could put in some higher bandwidth memory six ddr3 1600 or or 2000 memory whatever but um you know up above 13 33 megahertz you reach a point of diminishing returns in terms of performance with the core i7 platform uh tons of ssds rated up in you know raid zero probably a sand force based raid zero array and or one of the newer pci express based ssds that are out there on the market uh actually there's a couple of interesting ones we're going to be looking at that'll hopefully be bootable and let's see what else you know 30 inch panel i think dell's got a new 30-inch ips panel that's looking pretty sweet we haven't looked at that yet but uh marco and i both run uh dell 3008 wfp uh 30 inch panels currently and would stick with one of those maybe three of them and surround and then graphics um i would say right now good question you know i'm not big on heating up my case with a ton of gpus so i'd probably go with a pair of high-end uh ati radeon 5870s or gtx 480s uh in sli and you know do a multi-monitor setup with that you know not not too far off what i'm running right now what about you marco what would you actually put into one of these beasts so if money was no object my criteria for a pc are high performance and it has to be quiet um and i don't want to heat up my office my office is stable right yeah and stable so i'm sort of running my dream machine right now because i'm lucky enough to work at hot hardware i have a pair of six core xeons 12 gigs of ram and an evga uh classified sr2 motherboard a pair of uh radeon hd 5870 ifinity six edition so two two gig 5870s i have a pair of uh crucial ssds for my os volume in raid zero a two terabyte storage volume um a creative x5 sound card you know in an awesome lian lee aluminum case now if money was no object you could go nuts and add more drives you know more of basically everything um but you know it's kind of overkill at this point something that i'm running right here is just super powerful i'll never tax it you know until it's time to upgrade again and you're all jealous i'll answer the question what parts would i use computer parts now let's talk about hot hardware all over the web i know that hot hardware is at hothard.com marco where else can everyone go to find hot hardware we are everywhere we're at dig slash hot hardware youtube slash hot hardware vids facebook slash hot hardware twitter slash hot hardware and of course you can go to the greatest hothardware.com hey we do have a contest coming up though oh yeah stay tuned we're lining up some poor sucker of a hardware vendor no no we're lining up we're lining up some good equipment um for uh our next giveaway and uh uh days away i would say maybe a week tops so some good equipment not not the lousy stuff we normally give away oh yeah okay like we don't give away killer gaming range on a regular basis related going to be podcast related that's the the hint so i'm eligible i guess i'm not eligible oh okay anyway i wouldn't give you anything anyway i think we should wrap up that on that note of hate for marco uh we'll see everybody next week thanks dave and marco and uh go to hotharbour.com that's where you can find everything we talked about and morecoming up on a hot hour where we're talking about nvidia's latest move does it doom them forever a 3d notebook smartphone's taking over the world wide web and some more stuff coming up on hardware welcome to hot hardware where we talk about the hottest tech amaya zakhtar alongside dave altavilla and marco chapetta marco and video is doing something nvidia is doing something very odd there they've introduced a brand new graphics card available at best buy now this is unusual because usually they license their technology to other companies and nvidia is inside of other companies graphics cards what's going on with this deal so it's kind of interesting first of all thanks for taking everything that i was going to talk about second of all they what they're doing is you know up to this point they've always sold graphics cards branded by partners but this time around nvidia branded graphics cards actually just a geforce gtx 460 is being sold at best buy as a standalone product but why on earth do you think they would be doing something like this didn't wasn't there another company out there a long time ago that did something very similar i think it's 3dfx yeah well sort of it's not exactly the same thing because nvidia is just sort of testing the waters here with a you know with just best buy but that's exactly what 3dfx did you know they were selling their chips to partners then they they bought a company stb and started making their own boards and kind of cut their partners out of it and ultimately ended up failing so it's just everyone online is chatting about it people on our forum chat about it drawing parallels between nvidia and 3d effects it's not the same situation but it was just interesting news do you foresee nvidia just not licensing stuff anymore or do you think this is no no no way they're definitely gonna still license their chips they're you know that's their bread and butter selling through their multiple partners no license for you dave you guys got to check out a 3d capable idea pad this thing was one of the ugliest things i've seen with the big stamp on the on the cover i mean the target it's a tribal tattoo on an idea pad i don't quite get that dave what did you think of the actual device apart from its as far as i'm concerned hideousness well you know i actually think it's a good looking machine i don't think that's a stamp at all it's a nice piece of uh you know artwork on the top of it it's it's it's stylish in my opinion and it's got a classy chassis but to each his own i guess um to answer your question it's a 3d capable laptop that unfortunately we think fell a little bit short which is not common for lenovo products in our in our labs we actually are pretty fond of certainly the thinkpad brand of products and you know the lenovo generally known for for a higher quality notebook um but yeah this uh machine actually equated to a lower quality 2d display lower lower resolution 2d lcd 1366 by 768 native resolution and not so good 3d capability it actually has some bundled software that comes with it that actually called tridef that claims to be able to turn 2d content uh into 3d and it didn't do such a great job of that um you know viewing angle wasn't so good it crashed during a couple of games so it sort of fell short on the the 3d claim but then again that's sort of indicative of where 3d technology is in the marketplace right now i guess yeah i mean if your gimmick is a 3d display and you don't do that well plus they didn't bundle in a blu-ray drive i mean trying to convert 2d to 3d looks like that's going to be a mess as well i mean 3d content isn't really there is it it well it's not quite there yet um you know as a matter of fact our editor trudged down to the local um blockbuster video and he had to settle for coraline and 3d no no there's a you know a real thriller um but uh yeah so you know pop that into the dvd drive standard dvd it's you know standard definition 3d content and so you know really you need blu-ray to get high-def content um you know and and and so there's just not a lot of high-def you know 3d content out there and the displays to show it you know especially in a notebook you know it's it's not quite there yet at least you know in my opinion now marco do you think 3d works any better on a small screen like a laptop compared to something like a giant tv i think it can you know the first thing to consider is the content has to be created with 3d in mind just converting old content to 3d it's just never going to work as well as you know anyone that went to see avatar in 3d knows how well the 3d work there but as far as the screen goes the passive technology that was used in this lenovo notebook i don't think is as good as you know the active tech that's in some new uh asus notebooks that uses nvidia's active shutter glasses so you know it can be there with the right hardware and the right content you know it's just too early right now you know not everybody's supporting it not every no notebook has the right kind of screen though there's a lot that needs to happen still i don't know it requires you to wear glasses on top of like for me other glasses it just seems it seems silly plus the actual 3d is where it's at agreed uh yes i like 3d in real life let's just stick to it that way anyway let's talk about sand force you know you guys might not be familiar with the name sandforce but they're responsible for making controllers that make ssds fly they had an announcement marco can you tell us about that yeah this is very cool so anybody that's been shopping for an ssd should know who sanforce is they make the controllers in some of today's better ssds now that we spoke to the company last week they just announced it's not available just yet but they just announced a new family of controllers that use a sata 3 interface and performance is almost double the current generation drives so they're telling us that the next gen drives that are going to be based on the sf 2000 family controllers are going to be capable of 500 meg per second sequential reads and writes with 60k uh 4k random iops you know that is just huge you know anybody that's using an ssd now that has felt that performance increase that came from moving from a hard drive to an ssd it's almost like another order of magnitude increase you know double the performance of the drives today nearly double at least now this was just an announcement do we have any like release uh or timeline kind of information yeah so no official release no you know products named they did sandforce did say that all the usual partners will likely have products based on the controller so ocz corsair um what have you um we're hearing early next year they're going to start in the enterprise space and then trickle down into the consumer space so that sounds like it's going to be pretty interesting once that comes out that we're talking about really fast right read write speeds right 500 megabytes 500 megabytes per second megabytes that's not mega bits right well the other thing that's interesting you know for an enthusiast two of those in raid you know approaching a gig per second on your storage uh storage array it's gonna be awesome you know it'll be interesting to see too you noted the the sata three interface it's actually a six gigabit per second sata interface uh it will be interesting to see if the controller itself on a standard three gigabit per second you know standard uh generation two sata interface how it does with uh you know legacy motherboards and those applications as well so my little card that tells me everything says that smartphones consume the largest percentage of mobile content this is the first time this has happened considering smartphones only have a quarter in the market dave what do you think is going on here i think i need a little card that tells me everything you got one of those for me i only happen to have one you have a whole site for that it's like the easy button we all need that hey um yeah so you know if you asked us i don't know 10 years ago 11 years ago when we started this thing called hothardware.com if if smartphones were going to be that important to us we would have probably told you you were crazy um smartphones were weren't that smart back then either i suppose but uh yeah as a matter of fact um smartphones dominate uh you know they make up the largest share of um you know mobile content being consumed out there with android 17 of the smartphone uh market apple 14 rim 18 symbian 41 and uh yeah i mean it's it's just amazing the actual explosion of the smartphone in the marketplace and uh you know let's face it these days the computing power that you can hold in your hand is is pretty impressive what do you think marco i know you got a dual booting phone which sounds like a crazy idea 10 years ago that would not be something in my mind but i know you have a i think it's a windows mobile 6.5 so obviously you hate yourself because you're running that exactly you have android on the same device why don't you tell us about it a little bit that's right so actually if you know as a geek and a hardware guy this is what i find really fun i i getting a piece of hardware tinkering with it and making it something that it wasn't in the beginning so yeah you know i'm running an att tilt too it's an old phone i'm dying to upgrade but you know running custom roms i have the latest build of winmo 653 you can't even like buy phones that have this build on it it's completely modified so the interface you know looks totally different um and this phone due to you know community involvement and uh you know guys in the xda developers forum who i need to give them a plug because they're super smart i'm also able to run froyo with literally i just click an icon winmo shuts down i'm running android so it's kind of fun for you know a guy in my position who just loves technology that now i can play with my smartphone the same way i used to be overclocking my pc you know just tinkering and making it different it's it's really fun for someone like me how does how does froyo run in that thing it talks i'll shoot some video after i'm going to boot it up now so literally i click an icon winmo is going to shut down and android is going to launch it it's really really wild you'll see it start to boot there oh neat so it works it works really well it's not finished you know the camera doesn't work right making calls isn't perfect yet but the fact that some guys in a forum can you know grab the open source uh android and make an os for a different phone i think is really cool it still sounds like you're punishing yourself with windows mobile six point yeah even if it's six point five point you are a hey i'm a hater because i've used it and i got to get off my windows mobile soap box let's talk about a reader question shall we sure this one's from inspector what parts would you use to build the best system possible if money was not an issue who wants to take oh who's going first dave near you i'll go first because you're gonna one-up me for sure you already own yours but um yeah you know that that's a that's an excellent question if money was no object i would say right now uh from a processor standpoint i'd go with one of intel's six core processors uh 900 series processors probably a 980 x extreme processor um and i'd probably throw in something like six or 12 gig of ddr 1333 memory i don't think you have to you could put in some higher bandwidth memory six ddr3 1600 or or 2000 memory whatever but um you know up above 13 33 megahertz you reach a point of diminishing returns in terms of performance with the core i7 platform uh tons of ssds rated up in you know raid zero probably a sand force based raid zero array and or one of the newer pci express based ssds that are out there on the market uh actually there's a couple of interesting ones we're going to be looking at that'll hopefully be bootable and let's see what else you know 30 inch panel i think dell's got a new 30-inch ips panel that's looking pretty sweet we haven't looked at that yet but uh marco and i both run uh dell 3008 wfp uh 30 inch panels currently and would stick with one of those maybe three of them and surround and then graphics um i would say right now good question you know i'm not big on heating up my case with a ton of gpus so i'd probably go with a pair of high-end uh ati radeon 5870s or gtx 480s uh in sli and you know do a multi-monitor setup with that you know not not too far off what i'm running right now what about you marco what would you actually put into one of these beasts so if money was no object my criteria for a pc are high performance and it has to be quiet um and i don't want to heat up my office my office is stable right yeah and stable so i'm sort of running my dream machine right now because i'm lucky enough to work at hot hardware i have a pair of six core xeons 12 gigs of ram and an evga uh classified sr2 motherboard a pair of uh radeon hd 5870 ifinity six edition so two two gig 5870s i have a pair of uh crucial ssds for my os volume in raid zero a two terabyte storage volume um a creative x5 sound card you know in an awesome lian lee aluminum case now if money was no object you could go nuts and add more drives you know more of basically everything um but you know it's kind of overkill at this point something that i'm running right here is just super powerful i'll never tax it you know until it's time to upgrade again and you're all jealous i'll answer the question what parts would i use computer parts now let's talk about hot hardware all over the web i know that hot hardware is at hothard.com marco where else can everyone go to find hot hardware we are everywhere we're at dig slash hot hardware youtube slash hot hardware vids facebook slash hot hardware twitter slash hot hardware and of course you can go to the greatest hothardware.com hey we do have a contest coming up though oh yeah stay tuned we're lining up some poor sucker of a hardware vendor no no we're lining up we're lining up some good equipment um for uh our next giveaway and uh uh days away i would say maybe a week tops so some good equipment not not the lousy stuff we normally give away oh yeah okay like we don't give away killer gaming range on a regular basis related going to be podcast related that's the the hint so i'm eligible i guess i'm not eligible oh okay anyway i wouldn't give you anything anyway i think we should wrap up that on that note of hate for marco uh we'll see everybody next week thanks dave and marco and uh go to hotharbour.com that's where you can find everything we talked about and more\n"