your opinion on computer parts

[Brad.G]

one of the appeals to water cooling for me is reduced noise as my main rig is in the bedroom and would be nice to leave it running overnight without having to adapt to the whirring noise. I did contemplate cooling towers which pump the fluid to the top and allow it to flow back down cooling it on the way. that sounds like a good no fan option.

Then there was the thermaltake vaporchill... basically a fridge clipped on to the CPU which seems like overkill as i do not plan on over clocking yet. may play with that in the future but not confident enough in fear of frying something.

Raid i have looked at in the past but i was under the assumptiont hat if all drives are classed as one, and if one was to fail the other ones would be unreadable for instance. im most probably wrong with this but i would need to do alot of research about raid before even thinking about going down that road.

Interesting post about the new socket type for intel coming out in the new year. I just dont want to buy a motherboard which has a socket type on which better processors are not going to be made for it in short times ahead.

I got a new lease of life when ATI released the X9150 PRO for AGP which gave my computer a new breath of fresh air. just now i know im getting bottle necks because of the rest. so a new system build is in order. with although a good card being obsolete on socket type, il donate it to my wife and get myself some on PCI-e

Alcom i wouldnt limit myself because the U Engine doesnt take full advantage, as i use my pc for alot more than just UT3



Vidiot Any ideas how that would work? ive seen motherboards with four memory slots on them but they are different colours. from what i heard from a while ago the colours indicate different memory speeds and to use both would result in the memory running at the slower speed? again, could be wrong.

[Benfica]

For your Hard drive/s I highly recommend you use a raid 0 setup.



Tested on Vista 64 (80gb Vista Partition)

4 x 320 GB Seagate 320gb Single Platter (ST3320613AS) in Raid 0 on the Intel Matrix Storage and I use Paragon for all my backup needs.
No greater chance of losing my data on this raid system then if I were using a single 1TB drive and it died, in truth less of a chance considering the workload is spread over 4 drives instead of one.
The good thing is that if 1 of my 320's fail then I still have three left, if my single 1TB drive failed then its off to the shop immediately. The bad thing is that four 320gb's will cost more then one 1TB but the speed increase is well worth the extra cost and the comfort of knowing you have more then one drive if one were to fail.

4 drives in RAID0 costing 260€ that are owned by a single 80$ one on random accesses? And IMHO you should have a drive contention free, used exclusively by just an hand-picked game or app.
Unfortunately your drives can have the absolutely worst performance known to mankind. I mean waaay slower than 5400RPM or PATA drives:
http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/3...ttern,674.html

About reliability you are generalizing they are as reliable as just one, based on your single experience? The drives are also one of the less reliable available, ok maybe it was just a bad batch, still you may be interested in these 89 reviews from Newegg costumers: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...pk=ST3320613AS
Which kinda contradicts everything I said about the 640GB Seagate... It's just that the Newegg buyers aren't having any problems with this one, they just love it! http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822148335
It's like this:

Rating 320 GB  640GB
5       40%    89%
4        6%    3%
3        9%    4%
2        7%    1% 
1       38%    3%

And guess what, the WD 640GB costs now 75$. Are they crazy? I guess someone stole their medication


I completely agree or at least see a lot of merit with all the rest you are saying though I still find RAID tempting, can't avoid to have mixed feelings about it. Making a small partition is excellent, having multiple drives available makes much more sense that a single large one, and top quality backup software is a great investment.

[Cobi^^]

Vidiot Any ideas how that would work? ive seen motherboards with four memory slots on them but they are different colours. from what i heard from a while ago the colours indicate different memory speeds and to use both would result in the memory running at the slower speed? again, could be wrong.

Usually, the ram banks have two colors (channel 1 and 2) for the dual-channel memory setup. The speed the (DDR2) memory is running with is determined by the cpu/mainboard. For example: if a cpu can handle 333 MHz and you use a multiplicator of maybe 7, you will have 2.33 GHz on your CPU. Without going too deeply into details, the clock-speed on your memory is 667 MHz then. For a stable system, you need RAM which can handle 667 MHz. You can plug in maybe a twin-pack of ram with 667 and a twin-pack with 800 MHz (capable), but all 4 memory-sticks will run @ 667 (not because the slower ram used here has 667 MHz max, it is because the system runs with 667). If you would use 4 sticks which can handle 1333 MHz each, theyd still run with 667 (mine can handle 800, but I only use 667, because I did not overclock higher).

For the operating systems: the 32bit OSs are limited to somewhere between 3 and 4 GB (dont knkow the exact value). To use more than 4 GB, you need a 64bit OS.

I am no tech-guru, and I tried to explain as good as possible. But I think you will get the point.

[gargorias]

4 drives in RAID0 costing 260€ that are owned by a single 80$ one on random accesses? And IMHO you should have a drive contention free, used exclusively by just an hand-picked game or app.
Unfortunately your drives can have the absolutely worst performance known to mankind. I mean waaay slower than 5400RPM or PATA drives:
http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/3...ttern,674.html

About reliability you are generalizing they are as reliable as just one, based on your single experience? The drives are also one of the less reliable available, ok maybe it was just a bad batch, still you may be interested in these 89 reviews from Newegg costumers: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...pk=ST3320613AS
Which kinda contradicts everything I said about the 640GB Seagate... It's just that the Newegg buyers aren't having any problems with this one, they just love it! http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822148335
It's like this:

Rating 320 GB  640GB
5       40%    89%
4        6%    3%
3        9%    4%
2        7%    1% 
1       38%    3%

And guess what, the WD 640GB costs now 75$. Are they crazy? I guess someone stole their medication


I completely agree or at least see a lot of merit with all the rest you are saying though I still find RAID tempting, can't avoid to have mixed feelings about it. Making a small partition is excellent, having multiple drives available makes much more sense that a single large one, and top quality backup software is a great investment.

Depends where you want to look. Tom's hardware again!
My Barracudas are only slightly outdone by the Velocity raptors in Average Read Transfer Performance and Average Write Transfer Performance
And they beat the raptor in Maximum Read Transfer Rate and in Maximum Write Transfer Performance

Not bad for a drive costing 4 times less!
They are whisper quite and come with 5 year warranty unlike the WD's which only have 3. No problems with any of the 4 I purchased and IMHO they are fantastic bang for buck and I'm getting burst speeds in excess of 550mb's a second on my raid setup! I realise these drives are bit sluggish on a workstation due to there slower RA times but for a desktop PC where IMHO sustained read-write speed is more important these things will rock your socks off in a raid 0 setup! So go on, get back on the raid 0 bandwagon, you know you want to!

[Benfica]

Brad.G, this is THE drive to buy: http://www.scan.co.uk/Product.aspx?WebProductId=886317
WD6401AALS 640GB 57£, it is a Caviar Black with 2 platters with the same density and performance you see on the benchmarks, with 5 years warranty instead of 3, 32MB cache and so on. http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.asp?driveid=551

Create a partition with the size of a Velociraptor, and you have the same or even slightly better performance, same warranty, almost the same theoretical reliability, twice the storage and 1/3rd of the price.