Best Gaming Rig Under $2000?

[miggs78]

Stick with P5Q-E.. You're just lacking 2 things, SATA ports, you're only using 3, you don't need the extra ones, and an extra heatpipe cooling to the northbridge, you're not not going to overclock, no point then..

[Lithotech]

Originally Posted by cwestwell

The Board you selected will support Raid 5 without a Raid Card it has a marvel raid controller built in..and I am pretty sure the Vendetta 2 still offers the best Bang for buck cooling out there..I would not change your selection unless you were looking at the more expensive Thermalright 120...

Forgive me if I am wrong, I have no practical experience harware based controller cards because the cost is still a little out of my league. It is a goal of mine though, I think such an investment would last many computer upgrades
since drive technology moves slower and a HW based controller would significantly boost the disk subsystem which is normally quite limited in performance (in comparrison). Upgrading the drives you use with it will also improve things and help lengthen it's lifetime.

However, from everything I have read on the subject, integraded mobo chipset raid 5 performance sucks. Use Raid 0 or 1. If you really want raid 5, then at least get a host based raid card, but preferably a hardware based raid card. The host based raid card will still use the cpu for all the computational raid tasks, but do much better than the mobo chipset. A hardware based raid card has an onboard processor and ram to handle the tasks and is much much faster.

The marvell controller on this board may be better though, or at least equal a host based card. Can anyone confirm?

/edit: Hey! System is look'in good!

.

[cwestwell]

Personally I am not a fan of Raid 5 outside of servers...I think its a waste of drives...but yes you are correct you will get better performance from a separate raid card depending on the card you get....however you will run into other issues several raid cards only support up to a certain level of storage in an array.. a raid card is not a future proof device it suffers the same hold backs as any hardware..They can also cost a pretty penny to get a decent one..I would just go with Raid 0 with the on board controller assuming redundancy is not the issue here it's performance..

[miggs78]

You are absolutely right Litho, I deleted my post too earlier because I wasn't entirely sure.. Onboard RAID 5 might be a little better than RAID0, but not close to how a RAID 5 with a RAID controller would do. I'd just do RAID 0 if I were you Terrance..

[Terrance]

Ok then I'll go back to RAID0, I'm not too sure about RAID5 anyway, I'll just cross my finger knock on the wood and hope none of them would die till my next system upgrade...

[3.0charlie]

And RAID 0 offers next-to no real advantage when using the latest drives. Stick a 640Gb drive in there and call it quits. You'll be quite pleased with the performance. As for the AC7 Pro vs. the Vendetta II, try to find the OCZ - it's really worth it.

[Terrance]

No real advantage? ...Now I'm baffled, I always thought that RAID0 provides at least 1.5 times more speed than single drive, if that's not true, I'll just get a 1TB Seagate 7200.11 w/ 32M cache, this one even offers more cache...

[3.0charlie]

The latest drives are that fast. Unless I use hardware-based RAID 0, I don't see myself using that again.

[cwestwell]

As I mentioned before the WD 1TB Black Edition is wicked fast...check it out.

[Terrance]

WD 1TB Caviar GP SATA II w/16M cache, is it this one? 16M cache?