Time for a new build! Need some suggestions please

Hey guys, it's been a while since I been here cause my PC has been fine but a couple weeks ago I shut her down one evening and the next day she wouldn't even turn on This build has been good to me, it's lasted about 5 years, no hardware issues until recently when my secondary HD crashed (It's been with me since 2004) and now this issue with it not powering up. 5yrs is an eternity in technology so I think it's time that I upgrade. I've been out of the loop on the latest and greatest so I look to you guys for direction.

My goals for my build are:

Provide crisp and clean HD video
Provide crisp and clean audio
Allow me to multitask (music, surfing the net, chat, etc.) seamlessly
Allow light to moderate overclocking, nothing too crazy
Be stable!

I mostly listen to music and surf the net, with the occassional video editing session via Windows Movie Maker, I also burn dvd's/rip cd's, and stuff like that. With my machine now, when a DVD is burning there is a noticeable drop off in performance and sometimes that carries over to the quality of the project being burned in the way of heavy hesitation and stuttering during video playback on my dvd player, it's horrible. I want something powerful enough that I can have a dvd burning and still have the computing power to be able to listen to music and surf the net watching video with no problem. That being said, this is what i'm leaning towards.......

Motherboard
ASRock 890 GX Extreme4

CPU
AMD Phenom II X4 965 BE 3.4Ghz

CPU Cooler
???????

Main HD
Crucial M4 64gb SSD

Secondary HD (carryover from current build)
Seagate Barracuda 250gb

External HD (carryover from current build)
Western Digital MyBook Office Edition 500gb

RAM
G.Skill Sniper 8gb DDR3 1333 (2x4gb)

GPU (carryover from current build, will upgrade if necessary)
MSI HD4830OC (pci-e)

Sound card (carryover from current build)
AudioTrak Prodigy HD2

Optical Drive
ASUS DRW-24B1ST

PSU
Seasonic X650

Case (carryover from current build)
Lian Li PC-7B

Display (carryover from current build)
ASUS MS248H 24" LED

Now, few questions:

1.) I've never had such a small main HD and am kind of concerned that it won't be sufficient. I know I can expect Windows 7 to take up roughly half of said space so that'll leave me with roughly 25-28gb of space. My main concern is my music collection, I have over 60gb of music and will have my library stored on my secondary drive, but when I install iTunes it automatically installs of the main drive, right? If so, the music that populates it's library is also stored on the same drive, right? Is there a way to install iTunes on the secondary drive instead of the main one?

2.) I always install Microsoft Security Essentials on my machines, it's saved my tush on a few occasions already, can that be installed on the secondary drive and still work properly and protect my machine?

3.) Any suggestions on what cooler I should use, I currently am running a XIGMATEK Dark Knight-S1283V and love it but I don't think it's compatible with the AM3 cpu's. What are some good one's I should look at?

I'm not dead set on these particular products and am open to reasonable suggestions as long as they are accompanied with logical reasoning. Let me know what you think.

0. Your build looks fine. An alternative is to look at the i5-2500 processor - overclocks like a dream!

0a. If you haven't bought the SSD yet, you might just want to buy a slightly bigger one (I have 100 GB on C:) and not worry about programs. Also, do put your page file on the C drive (to take advantage of the SSD), but disable hibernation if you need the space.

1. iTunes puts your music in "My Music". Once you install the OS and create your user account, you can move all the "Music", "Documents", "Pictures", "Downloads", etc. off the main drive (search Google or come back here for detailed instructions). This will move most of your data off the main drive.

2. I would recommend most programs to be on the C drive. MSE is good (it's what I use) - I don't remember if it allows you to put it on a different drive. I would at least put the system related programs on the C drive.

3. I have heard good things about the Cooler Master Hyper 212+. I have used Arctic Cooler 7 Pro with the Phenom, it works good. I am currently using the Corsair A70, which is also good. Really, unless you are planning huge overclocks, most "good brand" coolers are within a few degrees of each other.

Hope this helps.

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If I may make one small suggestion with regards to the motherboard, if that is the one you want try and find the newer revision of it,

ASRock > Products > 890GX Extreme4 R2.0

Only difference between the two is the new one is Bulldozer compatible out of the box. Saves a bit down the road if you decide to get one after they come out.

stormy13 said:

If I may make one small suggestion with regards to the motherboard, if that is the one you want try and find the newer revision of it,

ASRock > Products > 890GX Extreme4 R2.0

Only difference between the two is the new one is Bulldozer compatible out of the box. Saves a bit down the road if you decide to get one after they come out.

Great suggestion! However, ive made a few changes to this build. The main one is that ive ditched the ASRock mobo in favor of an ASUS M4A89GTD Pro USB3....I know ASRock is a subsidiary of ASUS but the latter come with a 3yr warranty as opposed to 1 from ASRock. Also, I thought it made perfect sense to store my media library on my ssd but on second thought it makes more sense to use the ssd for running programs instead of storing media. That being said, im gonna stick with the 64gb Crucial m4 ssd for my OS and main programs and instead of running my 5yr old Seagate Barracuda 250gb as my secondary im gonna pick up a 1TB Samsung HD103SJ hdd, apparently its got dual 500gb platters and is one of if not the fastest non-VelociRaptor SATA drives around. I also upgraded my memory to 8gb of G.Skill Ripjaws X Series DDR3 1600Mhz goodness. Lastly, instead of paying the extra money for the 965BE cpu, im gonna get the 955BE which is about 200Mhz slower but can be oc'd to approximately the same levels as the 965 since theyre built on the same cpu die design. Im sure this will be a noticeable upgrade over my 64 x2 5400+ and should hold me over fine until AMD's Bulldozer comes out.

rkf76 said:

I have over 60gb of music so it would defeat the purpose of having iTunes on the SSD when all of it's music would have to be on a HDD. So the 128gb will give me more than enough space for not only the OS and all my music, it will also let me add quite a bit more music and probably all the other programs I'd need with room to spare. Then I can just use the HDD for storage/backups, etc.

Apologies for the late post, but I wanted to add: I would recommend NOT putting media data on the SSD, unless you have a very big one. The point of an SSD is to speed up your file access, and it works very well with small files or files where read/write performance matters. For large media files, the HDD reads it fast enough to play in real time, or show you the pictures, etc.

In other words, you can put the iTunes program on the SSD (faster startup time), but put the music on the HDD (no difference to read time). This is also how I have arranged things ...