Finding the Parts

It took me a couple of weeks to decide on the parts for the new system. First I decied to go with 8gb of Corsair Dominator ram.

Graphics Card

Another factor in my design was the fact the Photoshop CS4 will now support some sort or graphics card acceleration using OpenGL. So I decided that I wanted to include a powerful graphics card in the system. The new Nvidia 260 card ended up being my choice. It is a really fast card but with a desent price point, about $250. I ended up with the Asus ENGTX260/HTDP/896M.

The CPU

I also wanted it to be a quad core system. So I chose the Intel Core 2 Quad 9550. It is the price point for a quad core chip right now and it runs at 2.8 Ghz.

Storage and Speed

Fast hard drives were also a priority. I thought about solid state drives but they are still way to expensive. The Western Digital VelicoRaptor 150GB hard drive is about as fast as they come, so I got 2 to but in a Raid-0 (stripped) array.

Because the data on a Raid-0 array is not that secure and I also wanted some data storage, I got 3 500gb Westen Digital drives and put them in a Raid-5 array.

Motherboard

After I decided all of this I had to pick a motherboard. This was by far the hardest part. I decided on the Intel P45 chip set and the Asus Maximus II Formula. It has 6 usable internal Sata points which worked for the hard drives well. Also you can put up to 16gb of ram on it, but I went with 8gb mainly because the 16gb ram is just not as fast of ram modules as the 2gb ones I could use to get to 8gb. The last thing about the motherboard is that it is really easy to overclock without getting into all the settings in the bios that could screw you up.

Case and Power Supply

Lastly I wanted the system to to quite and the ablity to overclock it. For this reason I choose the Cooler Master HAF case. This one has plenty of airflow and all the fans are big and quite. I got a Zalman 750 Watt modular power supply to power the whole system and cut down on cable clutter.

The Heatsink!

The heat sink and fan for the cpu are by far the best I have ever used. I got the Thermalright Ultra-120 eXtreme with a ultra quite Scythe S-FLEX SFF21F Fan. This thing is awesome. I choose it because Anandtech had it rated as the best cpu cooler out there, and I don’t dought it. With this I was able to get the 2.8ghz cpu to 3.5Ghz without even trying hard!

Overclocking

In the bios of the the Asus motherboard it detects what cpu you have and displays choices of the higher speed processors of the same line of chips. I started with it set to the extreme edition chip and it was stable at 100% cpu usage and the temp only hit 38 degrees Celicus. I then set it to the crazy setting. This overclocked the 2.8 Ghz chip to 3.5 Ghz! It was stable and only at 41 degrees at full load! I have yet to go further mainly because I will have to start messing with stuff in the bios manualy and I want this system to be quite and stable without pushing the edge.

Hard Drive Speed

I did some testing with the raid arrays with HD Tune. First up was the 2 Veliraptors in a raid-0 on the motherboard. I got a average speed of 171 mb/sec with a access time of 7.1 ms.

The Raid 5 array of 3 Western Digital 500gb drives tested 76 mb/sec and a access time of 12.2 ms.

I am very impressed in the system so far. I can’t wait for CS4 to come out so I can really test some of the new features. This thing screams at Lightroom!

• 21 Megapixel Full Frame Chip
• Automatic sensor dust cleaning
• ISO 100-6400 with expanded 50 – 15600
• 3.0 Frames per second
• Raw (21mp), sRaw1 (10mp), sRaw2 (5mp)
• 3″ Lcd Screen
• 1080p 30fps movie mode
• external mic connection
• New Battery
• UDMA Compact Flash Support
• Price $2699

There are some great features to it. First is the price per megapixel. Its hard to beleave that the 1ds Mark3 released last year at $7500 has just a few more megapixels that this camera. Also the ablity to shoot in the smaller sRaw modes if needed is great if you don’t require the big files for a certain job.

The ISO is supposed to make this camera the most low light senitive one that Canon makes. This will be good for some shots like football, but I wish it was a little faster in the fps. 3.9 is ok, but 5 would have been much better.

The video mode looks to be killer. It can shoot full HD video at 1080p at 30fps. This is much better than the Nikon D90 witch is only 720p. The 5D will only record up to a 4gb file in video mode. This works out to be about 16min of full resolution video Canon said. Also you can still fire the camera while you are shooting video. I wonder if this will affect the video in any way. The camera also has a stereo mic input jack. So you can use a beachteck converter to hook up any mike.

The video mode seems a great addtion to the camera and will be great at weddings. The only problem is that it will increase what you need on your wedding bracket. Now you will need the camera, off camera flash, video light, and shotgun mic.

I can’t wait, I got to have one or two! They are saying November for a release on the camera.

DPReview has a full preview of the camera.

The presentation is here.

They are trying to set a world record for the most downloads of a product in history, but it does not seem to be going well. As of writing this the Firefox site is down for repairs. Looks like they overloaded the servers.

Update: Looks like the site is up, I just got it to download.