Guest Chaser81 Posted March 4, 2005 Report Share Posted March 4, 2005 (edited) Okay, here is the spec of my PC at the moment: Gigabyte 7VM400M MainBoard 768MB of RAM (1xGiel PC2700 512MB & 1xTiny PC2100 256MB) ATI Radeon 9800 Pro Graphics Card (128MB) 45GB IBM DeskStar 7200RPM IDE HDD (2MB Cache) I got the feeling that my motherboard and Hard Disk were bottle-necking everything else since they are hardly state of the art, so I have now bought the parts that will allow me to upgrade my system to this: DFI LanParty NFII Ultra Infinity Mainboard 768MB of RAM (1xGiel PC2700 512MB & 1xTiny PC2100 256MB) ATI Radeon 9800 Pro Graphics Card (128MB) 80GB Maxtor 7200RPM DMAX +9 S-ATA HDD (8MB Cache) As you can see, I have changed the motherboard and HDD... Am I going to notice a significant performance increase in games with this new rig compared to the old or have I just wasted £115? :oops: P.S. And yes, I know I have a RAM set up which is hardly ideal... Next on the list of upgrades is to ditch the 256MB stick of PC2100 RAM and replace it with another Giel stick of 512MB PC2700. Edited March 4, 2005 by Chaser81 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest tudor Posted March 4, 2005 Report Share Posted March 4, 2005 Just a thought: wouldn't it be faster if you took out the PC2100 module? If you have two modules, they will be accessed at the lowest speed of the two. You may give it a try. About hard drive speed - buy another identical HDD and create a striped array (RAID 0). That would increase the performance visibly, but it basically destroys any chance of recovering data in case of a HDD failure. Best thing to do, if you can afford: buy another 3 identical HDD and create a RAID 0+1 array (a mirror RAID system of two sets of stripped arrays). This offers the advantage of mirroring for data recovery and has the same speed as a stripped array. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Chaser81 Posted March 4, 2005 Report Share Posted March 4, 2005 @tudor Yeah, I thought about that, but I am offsetting the performance loss in the speed of the RAM against having an extra 256MB of it.... I will update the RAM next month. As for a RAID array, that probably would be faster but I cant be bothered with the hassle, plus I doubt I could get a brand new DeskStar 45GB hard drive anymore, they are several years old. My Hard disk needed an update anyway. S-ATA is a lot faster than IDE though, right? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest tudor Posted March 4, 2005 Report Share Posted March 4, 2005 As for a RAID array, that probably would be faster but I cant be bothered with the hassle, plus I doubt I could get a brand new DeskStar 45GB hard drive anymore, they are several years old. My Hard disk needed an update anyway. S-ATA is a lot faster than IDE though, right? <{POST_SNAPBACK}> SATA is faster, but "not THAT fast". I was talking about 4 SATA 80GB drives :D , not about 4 of the old ones. I got a new computer at work recently and it has two SATA drives. I played with it for a while, testing RAID0 (stripped array) and RAID1 (mirror). The RAID0 configuration was visibly faster, but I ended up with RAID1, as I'm concerned about data safety for work. However, if you just do gaming and stuff that you can afford to lose or recover from a back-up, I suggest to go for at least RAID0. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Chaser81 Posted March 4, 2005 Report Share Posted March 4, 2005 I was talking about 4 SATA 80GB drives :D , not about 4 of the old ones. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Aha! I get ya! Yeah, that would probably rock, but may have to wait until I can afford a few more of them! I shouldnt really have bought the 80GB one this month, the missus is going to kill me... I just couldnt get a mainboard that supported S-ATA and not get a S-ATA HDD to go with it... It just seemed... Wrong ;) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest tudor Posted March 4, 2005 Report Share Posted March 4, 2005 Aha! I get ya! Yeah, that would probably rock, but may have to wait until I can afford a few more of them! I shouldnt really have bought the 80GB one this month, the missus is going to kill me... Get her to buy the other 3 and the RAID controller for your birthday :D Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Chaser81 Posted March 4, 2005 Report Share Posted March 4, 2005 I'd have a long wait its not until December. I could get them for HER birthday... You know that whole get them a present they'll hate and then steal it from em? :D Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Please sign in to comment
You will be able to leave a comment after signing in
Sign In Now