Upgrade Advice

Conanius · 29 Oct 2006 at 14:16

Riteo, Current spec is

AMD64 Winchester [email protected]
DFI Ultra D Nforce 4
2 Gig GSkill DDR3200
ATI x800SE
200 Gig Maxtor SATA (Sata1, 8mb cache)

now, BF2 and several other games are taking quite some time to load, so...

Im planning on getting some faster drives for raid 0, stick all my stuff like MP3's on the Maxtor I have now, and use the new drives for windows and games.

Im not sure what I plan on getting exactly, but I quite fancy a 4 drive raid 0 array for some serious speed.

GFX wise, I only play in 1024x768, and my frame rate seems ok, plus, I dont think thats gonna be slowing me down !

currently i've only got the onboard sound, which seems fine, but if thats costing me any performance, id consider upgrading that, dont need anything insane, but i've heard that some of the newer cards are really rather good...

so, what do you recommend I get !

Hamoodii · 29 Oct 2006 at 16:12

OK, new graphics card

-7900GTO
-X1900XT 256MB

Your mobo and CPU are fine for the moment. Not sure about the rest.

Conanius · 29 Oct 2006 at 16:14

dont see that improving load times much

semi-pro waster · 29 Oct 2006 at 16:53

Raid0 generally only improves performance when working with large files so for instance something like video editing would benefit, I'm not so sure about the benefits for loading games. You might be better getting something like a Raptor (or two if you are committed to Raid) as I suspect they would have more of a benefit.

Conanius · 29 Oct 2006 at 16:55

semi-pro waster said:
Raid0 generally only improves performance when working with large files so for instance something like video editing would benefit, I'm not so sure about the benefits for loading games. You might be better getting something like a Raptor (or two if you are committed to Raid) as I suspect they would have more of a benefit.

Im honestly not sure if RAID will help either, I just cant see anything other than my current SATA 1 7200 RPM Maxtor drive thats potentially slowing things down load wise..

Conanius · 29 Oct 2006 at 17:05

I just did a HD Tune Benchmark, scary results !

HD Tune: Maxtor 6Y200M0 Benchmark

Transfer Rate Minimum : 29.0 MB/sec
Transfer Rate Maximum : 55.1 MB/sec
Transfer Rate Average : 45.0 MB/sec
Access Time : 16.4 ms
Burst Rate : 102.6 MB/sec
CPU Usage : 7.5%

am I safe to assume somethings not configured correctly?