in what universe is raid a declining technology? You're seriously trying to suggest that both industry (inc all of the major internet servers), SSD manufacturers (since many internal SSD controllers use r0 to improve speeds) & enthusiasts attempting to get that extra bit of speed have suddenly decided to turn away from raid? Okay, i'll fully accept that a 2 drive r0 array (which isn't technically raid since there's no redundancy - the 'r' in raid) is half as reliable as a single HDD/SSD, however any other form of raid is more inherently more reliable than a single drive as there is data redundancy if a drive fails... ...&, i'll fully accept that a backup (esp an off-site one) of critical data on separate drives is better than raid (though it's obviously also important to backup data on a non-raid drive).... ...but that does not mean that raid does not have it's uses or that, if they are declining at all within the low end prosumer market, the usage will not pick up again once SSDs fall in price. Now, using my example of a raid card, something like the lsi 9260-8i card has a max read of 2,875MB/s - so, whilst noting that's something that will effectively be unattainable until SSDs improve beyond where they are now (though it's a SATA/SAS 6Gbps card so it has the potential to be used in this way), since pci-e 1.0 provides 250MB per lane, in order to attain that speed would require using a 16 lane slot. Whereas using pci-e 2.0 (which it does), it only uses a 8 lane slot - hence leaving more of the total lanes free for other purposes. Since, naturally, SSDs will continue to improve, you will need fewer & fewer to saturate a card such as this - either requiring 2 cards to be run in tandem (using double the slots & double the lanes), pci-e 2.0 16x cards (using a 16x slot & using double the lanes) or moving to pci-e 3.0. Then, moving onto your charts, i'm not entirely sure what you're trying to prove here...(?) Well, comparing the 2560x1600 b/marks (as the point of the 5870 cards is to game at high resolutions so these are the ones that actually matter) then, for example, in the first chart the difference between X58 pci-e x16 (16.2 fps) & X58 pci-e x8 (14.3 fps) which halves the bandwidth equates to a 13.3% improvement which would indicate that there is value in using pci-e 2.0 over 1.0 (since, likewise, 1.0 has half the bandwidth). [NB that happened to be the one i randomly chose - the other single card 2560x1600 b/marks show 11.6%, 8.4% & 10% increases between 16x & 8x which gives an average of greater than a 10.8% increase) Having said all of that, i can't instantly find the article on Tom's Hardware so i've no idea what these results were intended to show or if they're representative of any others they have on there (i'm not saying that you've cherry picked ones with what might appear to be a minimal difference btw)...
Your CPU won't give you ground breaking performance but your biggest limitation for general game playing at the moment is your RAM and GPU. If you don't have the money for a fully fledged upgrade (i5 or i7, DDR3 RAM, GPU & m/b) then see what you can do cheaply with what you have. Buying a new graphics card will not be a waste because you can always transfer that to a new build in future.
I think ill get a new card and ram,that will carry me until the new socket comes out then transfer the card over and maybe SlI? Thanks for the advice Fingers66
No worries, get a new card and some RAM. If you can't get RAM identical to the stuff you have already, buy another 4GB kit and see what you have now along with your existing CPU, you should come out of it with a RAM & GPU upgrade for a much cheaper price. Once you have that sorted, see how your rig performs for your specific requirements. If you still want more then you are looking at an i5 or i7 or one of the new sockets, depending on how long you can make your current rig last.
