The Mother Board

[mooresmsr]

I have a 2002 PC I built myself, based on info from Motherboards.org. It's lasted this long with no problems except for power supplies (3 so far) and a hard drive that bit the dust. However, it's not just over the hill, it's on the downslope and picking up speed. I need to replace it. Previous questions here have shown me that nothing will transfer, it all has to be new. Given that, I'm starting out with the basics. The things I'm shooting for are:

1. Tower configuration
2. 2 internal drives, 1-2 TB each, some external drives, maybe raid?
3. 2 optic drives
4. Video board supporting TV quality/movie quality HDMI
5. enough memory to keep processing effective
6. 802.11n network card
7. multiple processor MB
8. case with room to grow
9. power supply that will last a few years

I'm just an old-guy computer user. Nothing fancy, no game parties, no home networked to the hilt. Total budget should be $800-$1200.

First things first -- case and power supply. I don't need a case that lights up like a rave site, just a box big enough to put stuff in, with enough air circulation to do cooling. I want the power supply to be big enough to support my list above, with a little slack to expand as technology develops. I'd appreciate recommends on the case and power supply, as well as things like additional fans I might need. I searched and read some of the later entries for cases and PS, but they seem to be aimed either at the high end or the extreme budget end.

Suggestions?

SMM

[Twisty]

I bought a case recently and liked the ones from Bitfenix and Fractal designs, modern but refined.

When you say multiple processor motherboard, do you mean multiple physical processors, or multi-core CPU. If you want a multiple processor MB then that will probably mean the motherboard will be XL-ATX / E-ATX which limits the options for cases.

For general use, multiple physical processor computers are not worth the hassle and expense. The only reason to consider such a system is if you are buying something cheap 2nd hand (e.g. HP XW6600 can be found cheap on ebay), but beware of pitfalls e.g. although S771 cpu's are very cheap compatible RAM is expensive.
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- Webster -

[mooresmsr]

I mean multi-core for the motherboard. I want more than 1 thread to be able to process at a time. I'm tired of things like iTunes taking over the single processor I currently have, with not much recourse other than brute force priority management in task manager.

Maybe a different question is about the advantages/disadvantages of 2 versus 4 core systems.

Your thoughts?

SMM

[Twisty]

Right now most current encoding/rendering/specialist number crunching software and some games make use of 4 cores, quite a few general use applications still can't use multi core. In the future it is expected that more and more applications will make use of multi core, e.g. Excel 2007 and above uses multi core.

In short it is a case of looking at what processors you can get for your budget and looking at the benchmarks. e.g. if you go for the popular core i5 then they are virtually all 4 core anyway (except the 'T' processors which are not value for money).

Oh and as a side point, most people don't need dual optical drives nowadays as there is less need to copy disk-to-disk on the fly, large hard drives means movies etc can be backed up onto the HDD.
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- Webster -