Spec games machine £2000

[iraiguana]

watercooling kit is a solid one there, will get good temps and all work well. the rad should be capable of the cpu and gpu easily, it would possibly start to struggle some more with the dual core overclocked and 2x gpu's (especially as the x1900xtx's run hot). I would suggest also the opty 175 or 170 if u can squeeze them in as will get much higher clocks and more stable for about the same money.

rest of the kit will be fine, i personally like the enermax psu's and think they are solid (had mine for coming up 4 years now and is as good as it was when i first got it (might open it up to clean it soon though ).

have a good pressie there mate, happy b'day.

 

[Energize]

Sorry but you are wrong. The 3gb/s transfer rates specced in SATA2 are unobtainable without raid.

It has been proved that raid0 or raid0+1 is faster, cheaper, quieter and more reliable than raptors.

They might be unobtainable without raid, but they arent reached with raid either Ive used raid 0 before and there was no performance increase whatsoever in games, wether it was loading times or...... well actually thats the only thing a faster hdd affects in games. If can show me an article from a reputable site that proves raid 0 makes a significant difference in games go ahead.

 

[Monstermunch]

They might be unobtainable without raid, but they arent reached with raid either Ive used raid 0 before and there was no performance increase whatsoever in games, wether it was loading times or...... well actually thats the only thing a faster hdd affects in games. If can show me an article from a reputable site that proves raid 0 makes a significant difference in games go ahead.

I can assure you there is a performance increase, chances are that if you haven't seen one you might not have configured them correctly as some drives won't automatically go to raid0 even if you config the mobo that way.

Benchmark wise try reading the sticky at the top of the HDD forum, which shows a 20-30mb/s + increase in file transfer rates etc with raid0 being up at 94+mb/s against a raptor at 74ish mb/s.

 

[Energize]

I can assure you there is a performance increase, chances are that if you haven't seen one you might not have configured them correctly as some drives won't automatically go to raid0 even if you config the mobo that way.

Benchmark wise try reading the sticky at the top of the HDD forum, which shows a 20-30mb/s + increase in file transfer rates etc with raid0 being up at 94+mb/s against a raptor at 74ish mb/s.

Yes but we are talking games here, not file transfer, I said raid 0 with 2 normal hdds wont beat a raptor in games and raid 0 doesnt make a noticable difference in games. I agree that raid 0 can make a difference in other uses, but people looking to improve their game performance should not use raid 0. Raid 1 offers the same benefits as raid 0 expect for the write times anyway so they should use that if anything, raid 1 tends to have a lower seek time than raid 0 anyway.

 

[BigDom]

Yes but we are talking games here, not file transfer, I said raid 0 with 2 normal hdds wont beat a raptor in games and raid 0 doesnt make a noticable difference in games. I agree that raid 0 can make a difference in other uses, but people looking to improve their game performance should not use raid 0. Raid 1 offers the same benefits as raid 0 expect for the write times anyway so they should use that if anything, raid 1 tends to have a lower seek time than raid 0 anyway.

If RAID doesn't show an improvement in games then a Raptor won't either... As typically both solutions are used on the boot device.. and games are installed on the data disk in BOTH cases games don't benefit.

 

[Energize]

If RAID doesn't show an improvement in games then a Raptor won't either... As typically both solutions are used on the boot device.. and games are installed on the data disk in BOTH cases games don't benefit.

Your right a raptor doesnt make much difference either just a few seconds even when the game is installed on it but from loading tests it, beats 2 raid 0 raptors.

 

[Mercutio]

One of the reasons raptors are so quick is very low seek time - the "real world" difference is that higher RPM = faster seek which makes everything seem more responsive. When you put 2 raptors in a raid0 the drive read heads have to sync so pulling this figure higher again and actually reducing "performance". The advantage however is one of higher sustained transfers. A single raptor can do about 70MB/sec on the fastest edge wheras a single drive will only pull around 55ish. 2x raptors = slower seek so slower response actual moving of data is faster (around 135MB/sec). In games a single raptor will give you a slightly higher FPS (if its your virtual memory drive) due to the low seek. A pair of raptors will give you faster load times.

The above applies to "normal" drives in single/raid0 config but its much more noticable on the raptor.

In my setup I have windows on the raptor for faster load times and currently my virtual memory on the fastest part of the raid (2 gb partition on the start of the raid drive, first thing I put on it). Its not as good as single raptor but dont have the space for a 4 drive setup so had to make the best of what I got.

Hope the above clears things up, the figures I quoted were only a VERY rough guess, something tells me the max sustained transfer speeds are a bit low on both raptor and normal drives (more like 74/75MB/s for the raptor and 61/62 for the normal drives).

 

[Jimbo Mahoney]

Why isnt it true? Game benchmarks seem to prove so, raid 0 made no difference. the raptors were faster than normal hdds and two raptors in raid 0 didnt even beat a single raptor so 2 normal sata hdds arent going to beat it are they?

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2101&p=10

Even in the none gaming benchmarks raid 0 offers little improvement over the raptors and if the raided drives werent raptors I think they certainly would have performed worse than the single raptor.

That 'review' is next to worthless. What stripe size and cluster size are they using? What is the median file size in the test?

 

[Monstermunch]

One of the reasons raptors are so quick is very low seek time - the "real world" difference is that higher RPM = faster seek which makes everything seem more responsive. When you put 2 raptors in a raid0 the drive read heads have to sync so pulling this figure higher again and actually reducing "performance". The advantage however is one of higher sustained transfers. A single raptor can do about 70MB/sec on the fastest edge wheras a single drive will only pull around 55ish. 2x raptors = slower seek so slower response actual moving of data is faster (around 135MB/sec). In games a single raptor will give you a slightly higher FPS (if its your virtual memory drive) due to the low seek. A pair of raptors will give you faster load times.

The above applies to "normal" drives in single/raid0 config but its much more noticable on the raptor.

In my setup I have windows on the raptor for faster load times and currently my virtual memory on the fastest part of the raid (2 gb partition on the start of the raid drive, first thing I put on it). Its not as good as single raptor but dont have the space for a 4 drive setup so had to make the best of what I got.

Hope the above clears things up, the figures I quoted were only a VERY rough guess, something tells me the max sustained transfer speeds are a bit low on both raptor and normal drives (more like 74/75MB/s for the raptor and 61/62 for the normal drives).

The acces time of the drive from a raptor at 4.5ms to the std 8.9ms of a normal sata2 drive is fairly irrelivant. If the file you're opening is 150mb for example it's the transfer speed that's more important. A raid0 config'd correctly is at 93-98mb/s which is 20mb/s faster than a raptor!

Read the sticky at the top of the HDD forum!