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Modding Best memory for....

Discussion in 'Modding' started by rarich, 20 Mar 2005.

  1. rarich

    rarich What's a Dremel?

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    An AMD 64-55 setup with an ASUS A8N-SLI MOBO (nforce4 chipset)? I am looking at either 2-1 Gb sticks or 2-512K sticks in a dual channel setup.

    Also should I go for the pricey Raptor 74G HD's for a raid setup (550$ for 2), or go for The new Seagate 400G HD with the 16MB buffer that has benchmarks almost as good(600$ for 2)? Maxtor is also making a 300G model that has nearly matching specs.(600$)
     
  2. metarinka

    metarinka What's a Dremel?

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    Raid 0 doesn't have too many speed advantages in a single user desktop platform. I am running 2 of the old 36gb Raptors in Raid 0 and the most significant advantage is in boot time. I suggest opting for one of the 70 gig raptors to use for OS and applications and then other cheap drives to fill the rest of your storage requirments. But if money is no object and size isn't a huge factor than 2 70 gig raptors in Raid 0 should perform fairly well
     
  3. rarich

    rarich What's a Dremel?

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    I am looking for a lot of capacity with the best performance I can find.
    What about the memory? I know I am limited to regular DDR with an AMD processor, but which ones are best for the price?
     
  4. Jumeira_Johnny

    Jumeira_Johnny 16032 - High plains drifter

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    Where are you buying the 74Gb raptors at? $550 is a lot to be spending on them, Newegg lists them at $182 each, which brings you to $364. And I, like some people here, really don't see the point in raid 0. I think that 2 raptors is a nice idea, either as stand alone drives or in raid 1 for fault tolerance.

    If you are looking for storage space, the seagate 400Gb looks nice. But it doesn't have the 16Mb cache. That is the maxtor 300Gb-16Mb cache and NCQ. I have heard a lot of good things about the maxtor, basically that it is big and speedy. At $190 it seems you really can't go wrong. In fact for the $600 you were budgeting you could get 3. To bad that nForce 4 doesn't support hardware raid 5 or else with your budget you could go that route and be swinging with a monster array. All your friends would bow down in awe.

    I would recommend getting one raptor @ $182, one maxtor @ $190, and a nice 120Gb NCQ drive which are hovering around $90+, like here . Use the 120Gb for your OS, the 74Gb for your games, and the 300Gb for storage. And all that for under the $550 you thought you were going to be spending. All SATA, All NCQ, All live, All the time.

    For the CPU and memory, the first thing everyone here wants to know: will you be over clocking it? That make a difference, both in the way your questions are answered and in the advise you'll be getting on the mother board you chose. I think if you are willing to blow $550 on 2 drives, you can't be all that cash strapped. But I might be very wrong, at least I saved you some money that you can then point at a CPU. Your first post mentioned an FX-55, which I think is a nice little chip. I certainly want one. So I don't think you went wrong there, especially as they are dropping in price lately.

    If you aren't over clocking, I think most people would go with 2x1Gb since they only make up to PC3200 in that size anyway. Just pick a nice vendor and make sure you do some research first. OCZ make some nice memory, but so do Crucial and Corsair. I think that this is a good deal, good reputation and service. Get 2 for 2Gb of dual channel lovin'. With no over clock, you may also want to look at Geil, however I have no first hand knowledge of them. If you are planning to over clock, I suggest talking to some of the other guys around here. The rule of thumb is that with over clocking you want 2x512Mb. And you want to get nice fast memory that can take extra voltage. Again, my experience tells me OCZ is a good name to stick to, but we all have our favorites. I really suggest hanging around the hardware section and looking at what others are running.
     
    Last edited: 21 Mar 2005
  5. Da Dego

    Da Dego Brett Thomas

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    I agree completely with the hard-drive synopsis above.

    Raid 0 is not going to be all that useful, unless you want to do that totally for your games, which can take the most advantage of it. But that costs a lot of money for very little performance increase. You WANT the 16mb buffer, though, so the maxtor is a nice way to go for storage.

    As for ram, my personal experience has been with ocx and geil. I like them both, but truth be told I'm happier with the geil platinum than I was with the ocx gold, and it saved me a bit of money.

    Non-overclocking, buy the gig sticks and try to get fairly low timings.

    Overclocking, you may wish to splurge a bit on the ram, buy 2x512, and get the lowest timings god will allow. An AMD system makes timings rule far more than FSB speed, so keep that in mind. Don't buy cheap ram for this.
     
  6. rarich

    rarich What's a Dremel?

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    Thank you both. Raid 5 would have been nice, but the budget won't allow it. I was mainly thinking an 0+1 setup, until budget intervened. With the prices you gave me I might make it after all. I do not have a "money is no object" budget. The budget is a 'Buy as you can afford it' type, with the best basic components I can find to allow getting a real monster system in about 2 years time. I bought the best monitor I could buy in 1980 for my P90 and I am watching it as I type, an LCD is going to replace it as soon as the ghosting problem on those is fixed. I am apparently using some outdated magazines as reference for pricing, I do expect the prices to be cheaper when I start shopping.

    JJ what is NCQ? I see it but haven't found a definition.

    I will probably try overclocking in a couple of years when the systems performnce starts lagging. I guess I will get 2 sticks of 1 Gb and upgrade when it comes time to overclock, with luck the AMD Bios will be supporting DDR2 by then?
     
  7. Kipman725

    Kipman725 When did I get a custom title!?!

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    native command queuing
     
  8. rarich

    rarich What's a Dremel?

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    ????what does it do/apply to?
     
  9. Jumeira_Johnny

    Jumeira_Johnny 16032 - High plains drifter

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    Native Command Queuing basically lets the drive sort out the data requests to improve efficiency rather then accept them in the order the CPU sends them. It takes into account the swing of the seek head and the rotation of the platter and allows the drive to read 1-4-3-2 if that is faster then 1-2-3-4. It also lowers the CPU overhead needed to run the drives.

    The WD raptors use Tagged Command Queuing which is similar to NCQ and is also supported by the nForce4 chipset. IIRC, NCQ is an out growth of TCQ.

    You are in the US, so shopping around isn't that hard for you. Newegg.com is a great place to start and their customer service is 2nd to none. But they don't always have the best prices. They also price dynamically, so one day it may be $5-$10 more or less expensive, depending on demand. I saw massive price changes on the FX-55 over the last month and a half. $825 up to $1090, then they went out of stock. The same with 6800 Ultras. So while it's a great place to shop and get an idea for the prices, you do have to look around.
     
    Last edited: 27 Mar 2005
  10. <A88>

    <A88> Trust the Computer

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    Anyone gonna move this to hardware? :sigh:

    <A88>
     

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