Newbie advice................

[bone'ed]

Hi all,

My first post so go easy on me.

I have recently got the gaming bug back and went out and bought a new PC.
I Got a Packard Bell iPower X8620, spec as follows:-

Intel Core 2 Quad Processor Q6600 2.4GHz, 1GHz FSB, 8MB Cache
500GB Hard Drive SATA
2GB Memory DDR2 533/667
2X NVIDIA GEFORCE 8600 GS Graphics 512MB

I have just ordered some bits to upgrade:-

Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Platinum Fatal1ty 7.1 Champion Series Sound Card
2 - Western Digital Raptor X 150GB 10000RPM SATA 16MB Cache - OEM
OCZ 2GB (2x1GB) PC2-6400C4 Dual Channel Platinum Revision 2 XTC Series

I want to set up a RAID0 system with the 2 drives, here goes……

I was hoping to be able to plug the drives in and just turn the system on and configure..Can I?
Can it run from the SATA on the MB and does Vista Home Premium have software to control it or do I need to buy a controller card?
Didn’t get a Vista disk with my machine so how can reinstall the OS on the RAID0?

As far as the RAM is concerned, do I swap it with the original memory and then put that in the second (b) banks? The original is not Dual Channel as far I know but the new stuff is, is that okay?

Soooooo many questions, but this will do for now, would appreciate any advice/pointers etc.

Thanks

 

[Dureth]

The original stuff will be dual channel, there will be 2x1GB sticks in there running in dual channel mode. Just drop your stuff in the 2 spare slots available, no need to swap them about.

The hard drives should just plug into the motherboard however it depends if the board has built in RAID or not depending on how cheap HP were trying to be. If they have not included RAID then you will need a controller card.

HP have a restore partition on their PC's that can be burned into recovery disks by the HP backup software. These can be used to restore your operating system onto any drive you like so you will be able to install it to the RAID drives once they are setup unless they require a SATA RAID driver to function in which case you might need to contact HP about getting original OS disks sent to you.

 

[bone'ed]

Thanks Dureth,

The board is an ASUS A5N-E SLi i think