-Is the power supply and fan not included with the case or would it be best to make sure I get one without them? Is Antec a good case?
If you've got time, have a read through
PSU 101 to see how you can pick out a good PSU from a bad one. As for PSUs that come with cases, some are good, some arent. Rest assured the PSU Ive picked out is absolutely solid (running a pair of them here myself).
I assume dual hard drives is better, why is this?
- You can do neato things when you have more than one drive ... since you're business oriented you may be interested in RAID1 ...the contents of drive1 is mirrored realtime onto drive2 (so if you lose a drive, you dont lose your data). This is an (initially) cheap solution however if you want to scale this concept it becomes quite expensive (you need to buy 2x as many drives as u need space ... if you do want to look at this, consider RAID5 which needs x+1 drives). For more, look at
RAID 101
- The price jump from 250GB to 300GB (or higher) wasnt worth it ... the sweetspot (IMO) is the 250GB drive. Thus, to get more space, get more drives
Is the video card a big issue with my requirements or is having enough memory the biggest concern?
The videocard is the least of my concerns and I cant stress this enough .. dont let some customer sales rep push you into spending money here .. for what you are doing the emphasis is CPU + ram (for actually doing the editing) and then HDD (to save all this). Video card plays freaking no role. So suffice it to say, "get the cheapest compatible videocard u can"
What is the advantage to the last 2 sytems you suggested over the first one? Is it something that would drastically increase performace? I still need to get the OS, MS Office and keyboard and mouse into the equation.
- The first system is dual core ... which means your system can handle two execution threads concurrently ... but this isnt perfect ... each processing core still has to share access to memory with the other core.
- The second system is "perfect" as far as two-thread handling is concerned: each processor only has one core but has 100% access to it's own dedicated memory controller. (If you had a bigger budget and/or needed much more processing power I would have put in two dual-core Opterons ... each physical chip has the limitation as described in the previous point but you've got 4-thread handling capacity)
- The flaw in the last system is that each processing unit, in order to access memory, needs to communicate through a 800MHz system bus (the previous two solutions access the memory controller effectively directly without having to 'go through anything'). Between option1 and option3, the option3 is "true" 2-thread handling (i.e., physical processors vs cores) ... as well as, if you decided to expand, the Xeon route is much more scalable for beginners (i.e., lots of people running multi-CPU Xeon rigs ... not necesarily because they are better ... but they are cheaper/easier to scale/handle IMO).
- For more, read up in
CPU 101
Is Computer Canada the best place to buy, somone had mentioned they bought through NCIX.com and were happy.
There is no "best" place to buy really as, well, market dynamics constantly cause prices to change. I personally shop there for stuff I dont buy at computer shows but I do shop wherever prices take me (reason i used CC as an example was because i shop there enough i know their entire pricing scheme like the back of my hand thus saving me effort to search prices ... the upside is that the prices arent bad)
Symmetric multiprocessing ... having two physical CPUs
If I buy components from one supplier will they assemble it for me (again the time issue thing for me).
Depends on the store. This is why i like small one-man shops ... yes you gotta be careful so you dont get ripped off but the upside is you can walk in, order totally custom parts and for like $50, they'll assemble it for you ... no need to pick and choose parts out of a tiny list if you buy say from the bigger stores. Again, shop around.
Is it a good idea to install a card reader rather than have a free standing one?
I dunno what kind of photo editing you do (since i dont imagine CAD stuff is often done with portable storage) but I used to do digital photography + editing as a job and I didnt use any other media than compact flash (as was dictated by the camera, Canon EOS1DS) so if you're in the situation that you need to interface with a specific type of camera, have a look to see what kind of media that camera uses. If you dont have that option (or want to be prepared), have a look at the "billion-in-one" card readers (they are usually external so you can interface it with whatever PC you connect to) ... there are a bunch
here
I also want a set of speakers for moderate volume at best mostly for music play. Is it
Well theres something basic like
Logitech S100 2.0 Speakers ($13.99) or you can step it up a notch to something like
Logitech X230 2.1 Speakers ($47.00). Kinda depends on what you want
I do want this system to last for some time and at least be upgradeable.
Depending on what you mean by "for some time" that may or may not be doable.
Praetor, what part of the country do you hail from?
The land of PST. Ontario.
