Best Gaming Rig Under $2000?

[cwestwell]

Nope....the P/N# WD1001FALS ....check it out here

NCIX.com - Buy Western Digital WD1001FALS Caviar Black 1TB SATA2 7200RPM 4.2MS 32MB 3.5IN Dual Proc Hard Drive OEM - WD1001FALS In Canada.

[Terrance]

Originally Posted by cwestwell

Nope....the P/N# WD1001FALS ....check it out here

NCIX.com - Buy Western Digital WD1001FALS Caviar Black 1TB SATA2 7200RPM 4.2MS 32MB 3.5IN Dual Proc Hard Drive OEM - WD1001FALS In Canada.

Thanks for the info, I'm almost ready to take off now, I need a working computer over the weekend, so it looks awesome, but I think I'll just stick with the easy to get Seagates.

[cwestwell]

That will also work just fine...I only recommended the WD due to cool factor. But the seagates are great I used the 640GB model for my GF's PC

[trainguy]

Well you seem to have a pretty solid setup in the works, there's a ton of experience around here for sure. When it's time to buy, I recommend Memory Express to deal with, I've shopped all of the majors around the city and they're by far the best it seems, best selection, best on site advice and if it comes down to returning something, it's very stress free and no big deal, unlike some of the other places

[Lithotech]

Originally Posted by 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.

Really?

I would assume, even with the fastest drives you can buy, two (or more) of them in RAID0 will be faster. It's not like the single drive is saturating the sata bandwidth.

I'll admit it is a hassle. If not done right, it can sometimes work out worse performance wise -- never use the default strip/cluster size unless that tests as fastest. Even done right, it can be problematic. The integrated raid chipsets are far from perfect.

A little anecdote:

My raid benches were fine, all the scores show a huge boost to performance. The system runs fine. Everything seems to load faster, the system boots faster, I was happy. I still wanted more, but that included a hardware based raid card.

One of my favorite games is rFactor. I have a lot of mods and custom cars in it. At some point I noticed it was taking a very long time to load the game -- this was back when I was running a two drive striped raid. My other racing games were fine, GTR2 also has lots of mods and cars and loads in less than 30 seconds. Yet rFactor was taking like 2 minutes.

Since I hate waiting for anything on a computer, and rFactor was basically the only game I was playing, I decided to throw two more HDs into the raid to maybe help it out loading. I already had the drives, and planned to mate them altogether anyway, so...

First thing was to back up the current state of my OS, as I didn't want to have to reinstall anything. Using another hard drive with it's own OS on it, I booted to that and archived the raid OS.

I then restored the archive to a single disk to test that it indeed worked, before blowing away the two drive raid and rebuilding it as a 4 drive raid.

It booted fine, everything seemed to be working ok with no errors or found new hardware crap. I decided to run it a few days like this to be sure. I launched rFactor and it immediately popped up the spash screen and was in the game in less than 10 seconds!

WTF???

To make a long story short, all I can say is that (I think) the game itself accesses a system file (wmiprvse.exe) that the nvraid also accesses, and it was somehow conflicting. Only rFactor has a problem with my raid, and I can't really blame it on rFactor because it is as much nVidias fault. It could also be something I have messed up with my system -- I'd have to do a complete reinstall to be sure.

So what a PITA that is! It's still a work in progress, although not a priority. I can still run the game, although I moved to GTR Evolution when it came out. I'm in the middle of swapping cases because of a video card upgrade that won't fit when I have four drives mounted in my Silverstone TJ04. So I am back to a single drive, moved to my P180 to test the fit (cramped and fits but won't fit two in SLI), will be trying the four drive stripe again (maybe), and now, screw the P180, I ordered a f'in Cooler Master HAF last week!

Sorry to appear to highjack this thread with my rant! Just sort of corraborating Charlie in the benefits of running a single drive, and while a stripped array may be faster in benchmarks it can rob you of huge time in troubleshooting problems down the road. You see, I had NO idea the slow load times were due to the raid, or HD... for all I knew, it was just the game and all the mods -- I added to the array to help it out. It was just fluke that I found it was the raid (or at least related to it)!

.

[Terrance]

Interesting, that's nice to know. I haven't tested my build so much yet, just got it all hooked up yesterday midnight... Will be back with some pics and benchmarks... Only thing confuses me is my 4850s stays at 70°C even on desktop, is this what it suppose to be like??

[3.0charlie]

They run hot; there is a thread in here somewhere to change the fan speed. It helps a lot, even if set at 80%.

edit: here - How to change fan speed for 4800.

edit1: I'm glad that Litho replied with such information. I felt that my own reply had no weight to it...

[Terrance]

Thanks, Charlie, this is very helpful, although even set at a very noisy 55%, my 4850s still having an idle temperature of 46 and 51... and one is always higher than the other, weird...

[Terrance]

CPU: Q9550

Mobo: Asus P5Q Deluxe

Memory: 2 x Mushkin XP2-8500 2GB (Thinking about 8GB)

PSU: Themaltake ToughPower 750W

Video: 2 x VisionTek 4850 - CrossFire

Hard Drive: 2 x Seagate 500GB SATA II w/NCQ - Raid 0

Case: Antec 1200

HSF: Thermalright Ultra-120



Final build list here... Thermalright Ultra-120is wonderful, my CPU is constantly under 25, no matter in game or not, I never saw this kind of temperature before except using watercooling...

[3.0charlie]

Originally Posted by Terrance

Thanks, Charlie, this is very helpful, although even set at a very noisy 55%, my 4850s still having an idle temperature of 46 and 51... and one is always higher than the other, weird...

46C idle temp is pretty good actually; as for the temp difference between the 2 GPUs, it has to do with the local air surrounding the second GPU being hotter by a few degrees.