A Calling to the Nerdz (the awesome people)

[the_underworks]

I have Video card issues crying

I have just spent copious amounts of time and money on this brand new rig.
Tis is armed with:
I7 920 (Linsfeild i think)
Asus Rampage Gene II
3x 2gb OCZ 1600Mhz DDR3
Corsair super mega hugely lavish industrial 1000w power plant
5x Seagate 500Gb 7200rpm drives (raid5)
AND 2 troublesome 2gb Saphire *VaporX* HD4890s

The problem is that to install crossfire, i had to take off a small aluminum heat sink on one of the video cards in order to mount the card in the properer PCI express card slot below the one mounted above it (keep in mind the mobo is a Micro ATX). While running very demanding applications like Crysis, one of the video card heats up like a dog sniffing an a** (80 degrees celcius).

I was just wondering if 80 degrees celcius was a safe temperature to run a video card at on load. I know that these temperatures are unacceptable for a CPU to run at. Would it be any different for a video card? Are they made to run hotter Or did i just shoot myself in the foot trying to squeeze 2 massive video cards on a micro atx? BTW, I highly doubt it is a case ventilation problem because the case is huge and houses 5 120mm fans with one directly blowing on the 2 video cards. In the morning, i just turn the computer around and put my head in the back of it to dry my hair with the air movement it creates and the heat it displaces.  

[Rellik San]

That is kinda high for a GPU too, you might want to consider a case fan to help air flow and keep it cool, because seriously that is not a good level of heat for any card to generate.  

[zz1000zz]

Three two gig sticks, five 500 gig hard drives with raid five...

Yeah, I don't get your machine.  

[the_underworks]

zz1000zz

Three two gig sticks, five 500 gig hard drives with raid five...

Yeah, I don't get your machine.

6gb (3x2 gb) of virtual memory (ram) 5x 500gb hard drive disks working together sharing information for more bandwidth and shorter seek times (raid 5)  

[the_underworks]

Rellik San

That is kinda high for a GPU too, you might want to consider a case fan to help air flow and keep it cool, because seriously that is not a good level of heat for any card to generate.

URGH... i'm starting to think i am going to have to resort to liquid cooling for the video cards. There is already very good air circulation in the case, and on top of that, there is a 120mm fan blowing directly on the GPUs.  

[zz1000zz]

the_underworks

zz1000zz

Three two gig sticks, five 500 gig hard drives with raid five...

Yeah, I don't get your machine.

6gb (3x2 gb) of virtual memory (ram)

Virtual memory and RAM are not the same thing. Moreover, you get better returns from parallel memory sticks, meaning you usually should have your multiple stick in pairs. Having three two gig sticks is strange, as you could go with four instead. Another option is taking two four gig sticks.

the_underworks

5x 500gb hard drive disks working together sharing information for more bandwidth and shorter seek times (raid 5)

This setup makes no sense to me. The most obvious question is why RAID? RAID is good for redundancy, not much more. Using RAID 5 will give you slower write times, though your read times can be faster. The difference in the read times shouldn't be noticeable in average use, so unless you are hosting some sort of file sharing server, I can't see it mattering.

Also, it costs a fair bit to use RAID 5 (either through paying for a RAID controller or by using software RAID, which is much slower). Finally, you lose a fifth of your storage space.

I have a hard time believing this setup is a good one.  

[the_underworks]

The reasoning for three individual memory sticks is that my motherboard supports triple channel memory, so i got it triple channel memory for the thing (running in parallel).

The main reason for raid 5 setup is fault tolerance. I have once lost all me beloved movies, documents, photos, music and cad files in a raid 0 setup because of 1 disk failing. The second is obviously performance. I had plans to get a raid controller but since the two massively oversized vid cards on my micro atx blocked off the other expantion slots, i decided to make due with the onboard raid controller. I had no idea though the performance figures would be so drastically reduced on the onboard raid controller software in comparison to an actual raid controller. Thanks for the info. But the last reason was that i was looking for about 2 TB of hard drive space. I have heard 2 TB drives apparently are not very reliable just yet, 1TB drives run for about 150$ and 500gb drives run for 50$. Therefore, building a 2 TB array with fault tolerance was cheaper than just 2 individual 1tb harddrives.

I fear so much losing my files agin that on my old rig, i had 4 160gb HDDs in raid0, i removed the failed drive then formated the 3 working ones and ran them on raid 1. The read write speeds were horrible. CPU usage skyrocketed. and i had to make due with only 160gigs  

[zz1000zz]

the_underworks

The reasoning for three individual memory sticks is that my motherboard supports triple channel memory, so i got it triple channel memory for the thing (running in parallel).

I am not a hardware person, so I don't keep up with new hardware that much. As such, I had never heard of triple channel memory. Now that I know what it is, I see why you would use it.

the_underworks

The main reason for raid 5 setup is fault tolerance. I have once lost all me beloved movies, documents, photos, music and cad files in a raid 0 setup because of 1 disk failing. The second is obviously performance. I had plans to get a raid controller but since the two massively oversized vid cards on my micro atx blocked off the other expantion slots, i decided to make due with the onboard raid controller. I had no idea though the performance figures would be so drastically reduced on the onboard raid controller software in comparison to an actual raid controller. Thanks for the info. But the last reason was that i was looking for about 2 TB of hard drive space. I have heard 2 TB drives apparently are not very reliable just yet, 1TB drives run for about 150$ and 500gb drives run for 50$. Therefore, building a 2 TB array with fault tolerance was cheaper than just 2 individual 1tb harddrives.

Honestly, you would almost always be better off making backups than using RAID. RAID is good if you need runtime redundancy. If you are only worried about things like videos, pictures and other documents, you could easily just back them up regularly. That said, if you don't notice the performance difference with using RAID and the cost isn't an issue, I guess it can be a worthwhile solution.

It still seems like a really weird setup.  

[the_underworks]

Yeah, I know a gaming file server/ workstation sounds kind of funny, but it works well for what i use it for.

BTW, what would you recommend for backup . Because for the moment Cds and DVDs would be very time consuming and costly for the amount of files I have (even compressed). If i got a 2tb external disk, well , it would end up more expensive than the array.

Performance wise, in comparison to my old rig, the performance seems to have gone up quite significantly. Load times, data transfer and manipulation, even boot times have seem to gotten better... mind you that might be due to the newer more powerful hardware and not the raid array.  

[zz1000zz]

If you really wanted to know how much performance RAID is costing you, you could disable it and compare. This wouldn't be easy to do, and I wouldn't worry about it. The most severe performance hit from RAID is the write time, and I doubt you need to worry on that side of it. Unless you are running a database on there...

For backup solutions, I would probably need more information. The main thing to ask yourself is, "What do I need to back up?" Do you really need to back up your entire hard drive? In most cases, you don't. For example, most games don't need to be backed up. Why waste 22 gigabytes backing up WoW when you can just redownload it?

The simplest way of backing up files is just to copy them to another hard drive. This hard drive doesn't have to be an external hard drive. You have four hard drives right now (effectively, since RAID consumes one hard drive worth of space). You could take one of those drives out of the RAID array and use it to back up files. Of course, this would reduce your storage space, and it only gives you 500 gigabytes. If you find those space limitations are acceptable, that would be my recommendation.

If you decide that won't work for you, you may need to get another hard drive. I recommend not getting an "external hard drive." Those are basically just drives with a special mount fitted over them. You could just get a standard hard drive instead. Then, you either plug it into your computer when it is time to make your backup (you can use a device to work as an interface here, if you prefer). This should save you money as external drives cost more, and the connection will be faster. You do not want to backup a couple terrabytes over a USB connection.

Other than that, I can offer some general advice. If you have movies, you should burn them up to DvDs. It will cost you a bit more, but you only need to do it once, and it you can use it any time. For things like pictures and music, one idea is to get some older hard drives that aren't being used, and put them on there. For example, I know some people who keep 200 gig hard drives just for music.

If you tell me about how much space you expect to be taken up by what kind of files, I might be able to be more specific about my recommendations. The key thing is when you make your regular back ups, you don't want to back up things that haven't changed.

P.S. Wow, that was a lot more wordy than I meant for it to be.  

[the_underworks]

I am currently using 640gigabytes of hard drive space i have to say around 240 are made up of stuff i do not care about such as the OS, games, programs and this kind of stuff. The other ever growing 400gigabytes of hard drive space is the stuff i care about. about 200 gigabytes of this i use and manipulate on a regular basis and the rest is only used once in a while. Note that the 400 gb of hard drive space of the stuff i care about just keeps getting fatter and fatter and fatter. Most of my old stuff in the stuff i rarely use is backed up on DVDs. My prospects for 2TB of space should be around 2-3 years until i need more space(or build a new rig).

So, any ideas

PS I really do appreciate the time you devote to this. Your posts are very informative.  

[zz1000zz]

I guess the real question is, do you want to use both RAID and back ups? Because you already have RAID, you might as well. Given the numbers you provided, you probably can do it without buying anything new.

If you pull two of your hard drives out of the RAID array, it will still have a terabyte of storage. Those two drives can be used to back up the RAID array. There are two issues with this. First, it limits your main drive to one terabyte. This only gives you three hundred or so free gigabytes, which may not be enough for you. Second, your backups are in the same machine. This means if the machine catches fire, or is destroyed in its entirety in some other fashion, you will lose your backups.

Honestly though, if you are using RAID you probably won't need backups. RAID will allow you to avoid losing data if one drive crashes. Backups will do the same. The only time the two combined would help is if two drives crashed. I would go ahead and use the setup I described if the space issues won't be a problem, but if you can't, I wouldn't worry.  

[the_underworks]

Thanks for the info and recommendations. For the moment i do not know what i will do with my current machine just yet, I'm guessing i will leave it like that for the moment. Never the less, I will definitely take into consideration the discussion next time I build a machine. smile

Thanks Again  

[zz1000zz]

I'm always glad to help when I can.