is it worth raiding?

kgls13349

kgls13349

kgls13349

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Joined
5 Mar 2004
Posts
92
Hello,
I have been thinking about buying a second WD 74gb rapter and setting it up in raid 0 with my existing one to speed up loading, but im not sure whether it is worth the cost,

My spec:
Asus A8N-SLi Premium
Athlon 64 x2 4400+
1gb Geil PC3200
Geforve 7800gt

I dont really do all that much gaming really, but when i do play my games i hate waiting for them to load, Does raiding drives really give any noticable performance gains in games? or on day2day HDD accessing? i already have a server which i use to regularly back data up so im not bothered about data redundancy

Thanks for any comments :)
 
Depending on what games your playing, you will probably be better off spending the money on 1GB of ram.

For the last 3 games that i have actually played more than once or twice (BF2, Fear, Oblivion), the load times are all significantly reduced by using 1.5GB or more of memory in your machine.

Edit - In fact going of the specs of your machine above, i cant believe you dont have 2GB of memory (or at least 1.5GB), i had to reduce the textures in BF2 and some other quality settings when my memory was getting replaced (and i only had 1GB) because the swapping of virtual memory on the harddrive was killing its performance in game.
 
2Gb of ram is good, and the RAID definitley speeds things up. is it worth £114 or whatever? probably not unless you're a performance freak like me. btw BF2 still takes a while to load maps!
 
Not long ago they did tests, and came up with new games are better coded today and laod faster then years ago (not all) and that raid dont make as much a differnece now to game load times as in past, but yes sure it still helps, by smaller margin in these newer well coded games and better margin in older badly coded games lol.

Put it this way in a few weeks Im gonna raid 0 when I get 2nd Raptor X.
 
Sell your 1GB RAM, buy 2GB and forget about raiding them. Been there, done that, got the T-shirt and honestly, I went back to single raptors - no noticable difference really.
 
Thanks for the replys guys,
I guess i will ditch the idea of raiding two raptors, like i said i dont do any hardcore gaming, this machine spends most of its time running office apps and playing music/movies so i wasnt overly sure whether raiding would be worth it

Toytown said:
In fact going of the specs of your machine above, i cant believe you dont have 2GB of memory (or at least 1.5GB), i had to reduce the textures in BF2 and some other quality settings when my memory was getting replaced (and i only had 1GB) because the swapping of virtual memory on the harddrive was killing its performance in game.
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Well i dont think i have any problems only having 1gb, but then again ive never had more than 1gb so i dont spose i would notice any difference :D
anyway doesnt windows still use the paging file regardless of how much ram u have? obviously i know the more ram the better but i didnt think just doubling up from 1gb to 2 would make a huge difference, acording to windows task manager my memory nearly always has over 700mb free all the time

(Dont spose anyone could recomend a Good 2gb DDR400 Set?)
 
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BF2 and FEAR are the two main games to 1st want 2gig of ram ideally and also benifit from 512MB gpus, you can google this and find many reviews, FEAR took my 1gig of ram and 1.5gig page file and ate it all, I went to 2gig of ram so 3gig page file and its was fine after that, I could even let torrents run in background (we know they use resources badly) and still play FEAR.

I actually bought the new ram because of FEAR.

No site is saying you must have the above specs, but if you want to run high res and all settings maxed it can deff improve the game play.
 
Hmm, ive been playing fear on my old machine (Athlon XP 2000+, 6600GT AGP Graphics, 1gb ram) and it seemed fine to me, then again it proberlly wasnt anywhere near as good graphics or performance as it should have been, i have to admit i havnt tried fear on this computer yet.

I was thining of getting 2gb of ram a while ago but my college tutors (im studying ICT at college ) convinced me 1gb was enough, at the time i just wanted to have bragging rights of having the most memory in the class lol
 
I wont build any customers a PC today (non gamming for most of them) with less than 1GIG, thats what they get > 1GIG of Corsair non standard ram in dual channel mode like XMS or XL range.

Soft multiple office apps and photoshop love eating lots of ram and slow to open if multiple again.

A hardcore gammer today ideally wants 2gig of ram to play likes of FEAR and BF2 and future games at high res + all max eyecandy.
 
kgls13349 said:
I was thining of getting 2gb of ram a while ago but my college tutors (im studying ICT at college ) convinced me 1gb was enough....
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*Cough* that reminds me of one of my 6th form teachers who reckons a 128MB X300 is fine for playing games :rolleyes: Don't you just hate it when they think they know everything :p
 
Yeah well i should know better than listen to anything my tutors say, acording to one of them you can do gigabit ethernet with cat4 cabling, i tried not to laugh when he said that lol

and then there was the time when one of my other tutors had an argument over how many instuctions a CPU can do at a time, he swore blind even an dual core CPU could only do one instruction at a time :rolleyes: makes me wonder whos teaching who lol
 
Sometimes these guys in the pc market dont know swat, its true, they use pc every day for 20years but thats it.

Ive not heard of CAT4, only CAT5/ 5E and 6, now I know for fact and in tests CAT5E will run gig lan over short distance, not sure how far but me having 2 PC's next to each other with 2mtrs of cable it works, I know you Ideally need CAT6 though.
 
smids said:
Sell your 1GB RAM, buy 2GB and forget about raiding them. Been there, done that, got the T-shirt and honestly, I went back to single raptors - no noticable difference really.
Click to expand...

I agree ,having come from two 36 gig raptors in raid 0 having a single 150 gig raptor is faster some how.

And a lot less hassle.
 
Just migrated from [4x 36GB Raptors @ RAID 0] to [2x 150GB Raptors @ RAID 0] and I have to say that these new raptors are a lot faster and games load much quicker :), oh and windows takes just a few seconds to boot from its loading screen

(using onboard Raid-controller on my LanParty SLI-DR mobo)
 
i have looked at the spec of the 150gb raptor and somehow it is very slightly faster than its brothers, not sure why that is

Think ill upgrade my ram, then get an 150gb rapter, that should speed things up a bit

Thanks for the help ppl :):)
 
The new Raptor can sustain a higher data rate whereas it's preceding siblings would degrade more quickly.
2 in raid can reach burst writes in excess of 150MB/s thus they will random access faster than a 36Gig whatever you do to it.

The Raptor-X is about the next best thing you'll get to an SCSI rig.
 
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