New system running great but got some more money......

J

jack9800XT

Weaksauce
Joined
Jun 7, 2004
Messages
98
Ok guys first I would like to thank all of you who responded to my threads and everyone who posts in in this forum for the massive amount of information here.

You have all, indirectly, told my from scratch how to put this together and get it working, thank you not only for helping me get this working but also for the feeling of accomplishment I feel.

Athlon64 3500+
Sapphire Radeon X800pro
Asus A8V Deluxe
Antec Sonata w/380 truepower psu
1 gig ocz ddr400 pc3200 dual channel
WD 80gig SATA hd


Anyway, I now have an extra $300 I can spend on this (CDN$). Should I get mebbe a better psu or mebbe another HD ??? What would benefit me the most?
 
Another SATA HD of the same type and set them up RAID 0. This setup will greatly improve performance.


Some other things to look into:

Bigger/better monitor

Kick ass speakers

water cooling...
 
With what you currently have and a budget of ~$300, I'd look at watercooling, a WD Raptor drive, or a nice set of speakers.
 
how hard is watercooling to implement if I know nothing at all about it?

or, better question, how easy is it to ruin my new gear?

If watercooling you need a "block" for your vid card and cpu?

Also, how hard is RAID0 to implement? (am googling as I type)
 
A RAID0 setup is not hard at all. Google fishing should find that info for you.

Add....1 more vote to another HD. Your system kicks ass.. but you lack space. I mean 80gigs is a lot, but when you got your system... another 250g would own.
 
Watercooling can be extremely easy to setup if you get a kit (such as the Koolance or Kingwin's new Arctic Liquid Cooler).

For RAID 0, you just need 2 identical hard drives, plug them into your RAID controller, and follow the instructions to set up the array (well...there's a little more work to do it).

If you want to do overclocking in the future, I'd go for the watercooling.
 
blackrino9 said:
Another SATA HD of the same type and set them up RAID 0. This setup will greatly improve performance.
Click to expand...
No it won't.
 
How many monitors have you got? You can't really have too many, unless of course you run out of space or your ventillation system gets overloaded and you can't keep the room cool. You can get a nice 19" CRT for $300. A Hard drive wouldn't be a bad idea either. You don't have too much storage until your ventillation system can't handle the heat output. Maybe a Raptor? That'd give your system a nice bump up in speed.
 
I'm runnin raid 0 Alittle jump. Go for a better PSU!
Pssst...... PC POWER & COOLING 510 You don't know what your missing!
 
It does seem like I might need some more space.

Should I go for another 80gig SATA + RAID0 or a 74gig raptor?

I have 1 monitor but having 2 seems like it would be pretty handy.

If I get a raptor I should use the raptor as the system drive and the 80gig for storage to increase speed correct?
 
Met-AL said:
No it won't.
Click to expand...

Yes, it will. :rolleyes:

There is more than one type of performance...

Let me clarify.

Running RAID 0 will not make the programs themselves run faster (although there may be some small increases in programs that read/write to the HD a lot). What it will do is make them load faster.

Example, Windows booting to desktop in under 10 seconds...

Of course, to see the performance increases you will need to install Windows to and boot from the array.

One of the main areas that Windows benefits from a RAID 0 array is from the fast access to the swap file. Unless you have completely disabled the swap file, Windows will always use it, no matter how much RAM you put into your box.
 
blackrino9 said:
STUFF
Click to expand...
Rubbish, spake he.

Thank you, Met-AL, for beating me to the exact wording I was going to use. :mad: :)p)

RAID0 won't help much in everyday, because stream improvements are masked by seek degradation. As for boot time, a Raptor will eat a RAID0 7200rpm pair alive; I think StorageReview has covered this before. That, and the Raptor will ensure that anything on it will be kept around for a good while; the things are built to last. IDE hard drives are OK on their own, but with the complete lack of fault tolerance in RAID0, it gets kinda iffy.

Swap file shouldn't even be a factor with 1GB of RAM—yes, it gets hit, but not very often and not enough to matter. The kinds of swap file accesses most of us see with that much RAM are little short bumps which are more noticeable on seek time than stream rate.

I would get a 36.7GB Raptor, and then use the other $150 to get a big IDE HDD. It sounds like you've got an open channel waiting for a hard drive.

Wow, that sounded like a dirty joke.

Oh yeah, Ender: about your sig, get whichever's cheaper. They're both great boards.
 
zandor said:
How many monitors have you got? You can't really have too many, unless of course you run out of space or your ventillation system gets overloaded and you can't keep the room cool. You can get a nice 19" CRT for $300.
Click to expand...
This is the idea I would go with. Having two monitors is real nice. Once you go dual monitor, you will never go back.
 
Well, spank my ass and call me suzy :D

Stiletto, I appreciate your intelligent, more than 3 word correction to my statement.

While I knew that latencies increase in a RAID 0 setup, I didn't believe that they would increase by so much as to offset the speed benefits having a RAID 0. I would appreciate it if you could post a link to the article you mentioned in your post. It appears I have some reading to do...

I agree, 1 Raptor will do more for overall HD performance than a second 7200 RPM drive.
 
blackrino9 said:
Well, spank my ass and call me suzy :D

Stiletto, I appreciate your intelligent, more than 3 word correction to my statement.
Click to expand...
I try. ;)

I don't know if they actually had a Raptor vs. "RAID0 7200rpm Pair" review, but they did something on it. I feel from experience that the Raptor will net better performance overall, but that's subjective. Lessee...
SR Blurb on why RAID0 is pretty much useless
Anandtech RAID0 (with Raptors!) comparison

I don't feel like sifting through SR for something like the Anandtech article, but it would be redundant anyway.

Wow, I completely forgot about dual monitors. I'm running three myself! :p Raptor's $150, a nice/decent 19" CRT can be had around $200...
 
mebbe this is a dumb question but for two monitors I plug the first in normally and then the second I need a DVI to CRT converter or somethign similar?

or would it be easier to stick another vcard in there ?

or am I completely off?
 
I'd go for a 74GB Raptor over a 36GB Raptor. The 74GB Raptor is faster than the 36GB version due to the fact that it supports command queing. That is why it is the fastest SATA HD on the planet. It's the only SATA drive that supports command queing. No other EIDE drives do.

I read a review somewhere that illustrated this point.
 
Sir-Fragalot said:
I'd go for a 74GB Raptor over a 36GB Raptor. The 74GB Raptor is faster than the 36GB version due to the fact that it supports command queing. That is why it is the fastest SATA HD on the planet. It's the only SATA drive that supports command queing. No other EIDE drives do.

I read a review somewhere that illustrated this point.
Click to expand...

I will have to disagree with you based on the following:

StorageReview's review of the 74GB Raptor which states:

Though it was formally publicized over four months ago, the Raptor WD740GD still lacks accompanying controllers that would presumably elevate it to competitive status in server applications through the enabling of tagged command queuing.
Click to expand...
link

Also, in their recent article on TCQ, RAID, SCSI, and SATA, they conclude that:

2. Command queuing is meant to assist multi-user situations, not single-user setups. With the recent release of Intel's 9xx chipsets, pundits and enthusiasts everywhere have been proclaiming that command queuing is the next big thing for the desktop. Wrong. As evidenced by the disparities between the FastTrak S150 TX4 and TX4200 (otherwise identical except for the latter's added TCQ functionality), command queuing introduces significant overhead that fails to pay for itself performance-wise in the highly-localized, lower-depth instances that even the heaviest single-user multitasking generates. It is becoming clear, in fact, that the maturity and across-the-board implementation of TCQ in the SCSI world is one of the principal reasons why otherwise mechanically superior SCSI drives stumble when compared to ATA units.
Click to expand...
link

Command Queuing has little affect on single user enviroments, its benefit is seen in multi-user enviroments. This is why with tagged command queuing disabled, the Raptor is still the fastest drive for single user enviroment usage, but lags behind SCSI drives in the multi-user benchmarks.
 
jack9800XT said:
mebbe this is a dumb question but for two monitors I plug the first in normally and then the second I need a DVI to CRT converter or somethign similar?

or would it be easier to stick another vcard in there ?

or am I completely off?
Click to expand...
With a DVI LCD, nope, just plug it in. For an analog LCD or a CRT, use the DVI->VGA dongle that came with your graphics card. Or buy one for $10.
 
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