What should I ''upgrade'' next??

clarity

clarity

clarity

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Hi all, last night I downloaded the new call of duty demo and was really surprised to find it plays really well on my system :). I was looking at getting another couple of sticks of this RAM http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=MY-058-GL to take me up to four Gig however im not sure thats the best option to squezze some more performance out of my setup which consists off:

e-Geforce 8800 Gts superclocked (320mb)
Core 2 Duo E2160 running at 3.2 Ghz
2 Gig ram as mentioned above
Seagate barracuda 160 gig drive
Asus P5W-DH Deluxe

My question is what should I upgrade next to get the best out of the setup above more RAM another hard drive and run Raid 0 ???

All help greatly appreciated.

Craig
 
What is your OS currently and what do you find your system struggles with? At the price it is hard to go wrong with some more Ram but a faster hard drive probably wouldn't hurt either. :)
 
semi-pro waster said:
What is your OS currently and what do you find your system struggles with? At the price it is hard to go wrong with some more Ram but a faster hard drive probably wouldn't hurt either. :)
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Im running XP, i noticed a bit of ''stuttering'' whilst playing the game I also play Flight simulator a lot and sometimes it hangs a little. What harddrive would you reccomend to replace the seagate drive?
 
Either a Western Digital AAKS drive or a Seagate 7200.10 series one, either ought to be faster than what you currently have. Have you checked to see what the Ram usage is like when you are playing FS? The reason I asked about the OS is that unless you have a 64bit OS you won't be able to access the full 4gb, it will be somewhere closer to 3.5gb. :)
 
I'd go a little beyond what semi-pro is saying and suggest going to a RAID array. After running this machine for nearly a year now on a RAID 5 array (4 disks), the speed over a single HDD is just immense.

Having said that, going from 2GB to 4GB (even though my vista 32 only sees 3.25GB) made a huge difference to game loading times.
 
You could do, only downside to two drives is that the best you can run is RAID0 or RAID1, giving you either a performance boost, or a mirrored backup respectively.

You'd need a minimum of 3 disks for RAID 5 (but would only see the capacity of two disks, as it uses one for parity). This gives you redundancy, and performance.
 
I dont think raid is really needed anymore. Single hard drives are fast enough to not really warrent the need of raid and in every day usuage you wont notice any difference. its only going to decrease the loading times of maps in a game thats all. Wont increase performance in the game that much as the fps will stay the same.

Getting 4gb will increase performance a lot more. But you will need to buy 64 bit vista, or 64 bit xp but i dont see why you'd do that.

I heard the new seagate drives are very fast but just too loud?
 
8igdave said:
I dont think raid is really needed anymore. Single hard drives are fast enough to not really warrent the need of raid and in every day usuage you wont notice any difference.
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Totally disagree, my array walks all over a raptor, would probably even walk all over two in RAID0. If you are opening programs that use a lot of swap, or just are simply large (photoshop anyone?) you WILL see a difference, however I agree its not huge.

The main reason I said go RAID (and hence why I said don't just get two drives) is for the redundancy. All too many people forget backups/redundancy and are then left screwed when their system goes down and they haven't backed up their personal documents, this is even more likely with todays "OMG letz use a friggin large single 1TB drivez0r!".

I guess working in IT i see this all more often, but I'll never run without a decent array.
 
Raid5 would be a good option since hard drives are still the slowest single part of any modern PC but it does cost a fair bit more than just buying another 2gb Ram for ~£40. There is an added layer of complication to running a Raid array as well but Raid5 at least offers some measure of protection.

All that said, Raid is no substitute for a decent backup routine, all Raid is really designed for is to provide availability.
 
paradigm said:
Totally disagree, my array walks all over a raptor, would probably even walk all over two in RAID0. If you are opening programs that use a lot of swap, or just are simply large (photoshop anyone?) you WILL see a difference, however I agree its not huge.

The main reason I said go RAID (and hence why I said don't just get two drives) is for the redundancy. All too many people forget backups/redundancy and are then left screwed when their system goes down and they haven't backed up their personal documents, this is even more likely with todays "OMG letz use a friggin large single 1TB drivez0r!".

I guess working in IT i see this all more often, but I'll never run without a decent array.
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Unless he is doing things which envolve large files he will not notice any difference. I think its important to state this to people when they are thinking about raid. Otherwize it really is a waste of money. Specialy as raid 5 requires a raid card if you dont want it to be running off the cpu. Which is more money and they may not even be aware it will be taxing their cpu.
 
I dont really use this computer for much more than playing games and browsing the net. Although I am running out of space on my current drive so a new harddrive was on the cards. Would I be ok running RAID5 with my current drive and the two noted above??
 
It is best to match drives as exactly as possible as a general rule. Raid5 would mean that you need to format your existing drive after building the array and quite possibly need to get a PCI Raid card as well unless you are happy for the additional load to be put onto the CPU.
 
Personally im a gamer as yourself. I don't have anything i really need if my pc dies and if i did id stick it on a DVD. Wouldnt really bother with raid to be honest unless your doing a lot of file work (such as suggested with photoshop or even vid editing). Just get one good quality disk, if it dies and its in warranty all you have to do is RMA, then re-install everything so not really any point as far as im concerned.

- Pea0n
 
semi-pro waster said:
It is best to match drives as exactly as possible as a general rule. Raid5 would mean that you need to format your existing drive after building the array and quite possibly need to get a PCI Raid card as well unless you are happy for the additional load to be put onto the CPU.
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Just as a heads up, running RAID5 on my motherboards (intel) RAID controller sees about 4-5% CPU load when the drives are being hammered. Its minimal with a decent onboard solution.
 
Sorry for the hijack but how can i tell if my version of xp is 64 or 32 bit? I'm running media centre edition btw.
 
paradigm said:
Just as a heads up, running RAID5 on my motherboards (intel) RAID controller sees about 4-5% CPU load when the drives are being hammered. Its minimal with a decent onboard solution.
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Cheers, I wasn't aware of the exact figures and that is a bit better than I'd expected so probably not a huge deal for most when compared to the speed gains in certain circumstances but it is a point to be aware of anyway. :)

//edit Yozz76, as a guess you might be able to find out in System Properties (Windows key + Pause/Break is a shortcut).
 
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