[Turnandcough]

Putting together a decent PC in 2010 is not rocket science. I'm always surprised with the number of people who keep telling me their computer crashed.

I've built a number of systems over the years and have had very few, if any, stability problems since Win 2000 Pro and XP appeared.

I've used Asus motherboards almost exclusively and probably will on my next build also. The only other ones that I tried were an OK Epox and a terrible Gigabyte board with dual BIOS that would take forever to boot.

Good quality power supply(more power argh, argh, argh), good RAM, fanless graphics card, quiet well damped case and good quality slow turning CPU fan are always part of the picture.

I don't use a ghost but regularly backup important files on an external drive with Synctoy. When I leave for a few days the drive is unplugged and stashed in a safe location. Avoiding downloading risky files, regular maintenance and of course - good up to date anti-virus/spyware have kept my systems problem free.

[werd]

Hello

I hear all the time of failure of motherboards, ram or whatever. One of the big culprits that breaks your system is damage from ESD.  We all know when its catastrophic and the computer will not boot or even turn on. But more often the damage is very small and is intermittant, unnoticable at first. But after awhile the initial damage escalates and eventually destroys the component that the device sits on

The devices on your motherboard are in the micro-range and ESD of only a few volts can easily destroy a capacitor or pin. We only feel static at around 8000volts but we can easily pass millivolts by just touching it and not know it.

Using a anti static pad and pluging your power supply in helps in elimating ESD. Also take your time and use surgical gloves works  well in preventing ESD.

[boead]

RAID on the motherboard is rarely a good idea.  If something goes wrong, you are on the same system you need to use to recover with - too many variables for reliability, particularly since the chip/driver combination is probably unique - if you have to get a new motherboard, it is unlikely to be able to read the RAID configured drivers correctly anyway.

That is just not true. Sorry.

[jqp]

Three months after building my i7-860 system with 8GB RAM on a Gigabyte GA-P55A-UD4P...price of parts and Windows 7 OEM from newegg have not really changed in the 3 months

It's great!

This box is very stable with Windows 7 - it boots quickly and runs smoothly.

The thing I want to adjust again is the way the 4 disks go to sleep after inactivity, so that there is a delay when I want to save something or access something, while the drives all spin up - there is a trade-off between energy savings and response time after inactivity. Mostly this is software settings in power management.

[mathgeek97]

I think for this crowd, a great resource is http://www.silentpcreview.com/.  The focus is on building quiet PCs, including HTPCs and media server systems.  Why spend a fortune on electronics and room treatments just to have background noise from a computer?  Also, the forums there are very active and helpful.  If there is a new part out there, somebody has tried it, and can tell you about noise and heat that it generates/reduces.

[whanafi]

That is just not true. Sorry.

Since your contribution is restricted to a simple assertion, I am left with the choice of a schoolyard "yes it is", or, warily, the question "why?"

[adydula]

Hey, I work in this industry, the old IBM PC Company in development for 15yrs + and now with another..and I have built HUNDREDS of pc's...

At home I have 3 desktops, 4 notebooks and lots of other crap, LOL

In my 'main' system, I run an INTEL I7/920 at 4.02 Ghz on Air, 12 gbs of DDR3 memory, 3 Nvidia GTX 280 Video cards (yes 3 cards) in TRI-SLI mode, with 2 sets of SSD's BOTH in RAID 0. One for myboot and one for my stuff. The motherboard is a ASUS P6T6 Revolution. The power supply is a CoolerMaster 1100.

http://www.coolermaster-usa.com/product.php?product_id=2753

http://hothardware.com/Articles/Asus-P6T6-WS-Revolution-Core-i7-Motherboard/

The system has been up and running stable for several months!


No issues with stability...using RAID O arrays, it boots into
WIN7 Desktop in about 20 seconds etc..

The Boot Raid Array has just the OS on it, and if it dies, I replace the
drive and rebuild. with a fast system this is just under an hour for me to be up
and running. Any and all data are saved offline.

For most people you really do not need to use RAID at all in your day to day
PC stuff.

Just get your main drive up and running and back it up with CloneZilla or Acronis or Ghost
etc..name your poison. When you do your first software image load...then, take a backup for a
base..and THEN USE THE BACKUP PROGRAM TO RESTORE THE IMAGE AND TAKE NOTES..so you know your backup
works and you know how to do this further down the road if you have a drive
failure.

All the best
Alex