My pc unexpectedly died on saturday, after I had just bought Call of Duty MW2 to install on it. After a process of elimination I have got it down to either the board or CPU but after 5 years of 100% reliable service Im calling it a day with the old spec:-

Abit Maxx3 skt478 motherboard

P4 3.4Ghz-2mb (clocked to 3.6)

Scythe Ninja Heatsink/120mm fan

Corsair XMS 3gb DDR400 ram

Seagate 120Gig & 80gig IDE-SATA converted HDDs

500w Silent PSU

LG DVD-RW

LianLi PC-60 alluminium case with 2x120mm & 4x80mm fans

Win XP Pro 32bit

New system Im looking to build:-

AMD Phenom X4 965 AM3 black edition

Corsair DDR3 1600mhz 6gb kit

XFX Geforce 260 GTX black edition (896mb)

Gigabyte GA-MA790-FXT-UD5P

WD Velociraptor 300gb HDD

Corsair 750w PSU

Win 7 Home Premium 64bit

The only parts from the old system I will retain are the case and DVD-RW eventually changing them for something better.

Would like to hear from anyone who has recently built a similar spec system just to discuss if the system I am building is the best mhz for my money so to speak.

Al

Edited 17 November, 200916 yr by Skoda-Msport

New spec looks good mate

Is there a reason you plumped for the Phenom over something Dual or Quad core from Intel?

It's just that I've not seen AMD really come up with anything to rival for a while now.

Steve

Why spend all the money on a velociraptor and why the AMD are my questions. The AMD for the same reasons as Steve.

sack the gfx card mate and get the ATI Radeon HD 4890 its ace or if you got the dosh get the 5870

Why spend all the money on a velociraptor and why the AMD are my questions. The AMD for the same reasons as Steve.

Is there a reason you plumped for the Phenom over something Dual or Quad core from Intel?

It's just that I've not seen AMD really come up with anything to rival for a while now.

Steve

Ive gone with intel every time and just want to try intel. I have built several systems for customers around the i7 and Phenom platforms and was really impressed with the Phenom quads, very rapid indeed.

Why a Raptor? Thought I would give it a go seeing as I havnt owned one before or even seen one in a PC, I know they are expensive but 5 year warranty cant be bad and if the benchmarks and comparisons to normal drives are to be believed the new veloceraptor should be a big improvement over normal drives.

sack the gfx card mate and get the ATI Radeon HD 4890 its ace or if you got the dosh get the 58709

Havent got the budget for the 5890 sadly, I know the 4890 has wacked the GTX series of cards in some benchmarks. Might have a look at a 4890 instead, they are similary priced so no problem there.

Intels are a bit more expensive than the equivelant AMD but there's a reason for that IMO!

Just as long as you understand about the noise that raptor is going to give off!!!

I would suggest something like this (it's a scythe quiet drive btw):

Together with doing this:

I have both

I'd be very careful about sticking a 10k drive in an enclosure.

sack the gfx card mate and get the ATI Radeon HD 4890 its ace or if you got the dosh get the 5870

I beg to differ, the GTX 260 GS I am selling at the moment absolutley ****ed all over the ATi 5870 I replaced it with, I only switched to ATi to get a displayport output.

Your facts are wrong Billy

PS to the OP, I have a virtually new GTX 260 Gainward Golden Sample and eVGA 780i mainboard in the for sale section (Blatant Spam)

I was always an AMD/ATI man till I built my last rig.

AMD had lost the plot, so I got an Intel Quadcore, and a top-o-the-line Radeon. Radeon kept crashing the system, so I got a GeForce 8800 GTX.

Didn't notice any lack of speed or graphics quality with the GeForce.

I don't think I'll go back though, as ATI were useless about the problem (it was a very well known issue!), they kept blaming MS, and MS blamed them...

Ive gone with intel every time and just want to try intel. I have built several systems for customers around the i7 and Phenom platforms and was really impressed with the Phenom quads, very rapid indeed.

Why a Raptor? Thought I would give it a go seeing as I havnt owned one before or even seen one in a PC, I know they are expensive but 5 year warranty cant be bad and if the benchmarks and comparisons to normal drives are to be believed the new veloceraptor should be a big improvement over normal drives.

Havent got the budget for the 5890 sadly, I know the 4890 has wacked the GTX series of cards in some benchmarks. Might have a look at a 4890 instead, they are similary priced so no problem there.

Benchmarks are not the whole picture though really, I have got a WD Raptor as my system drive in the PC and 2 x 1TB Samsung F1 Spinpoint's for data, in real world terms the Spinpoints virtually match the raptor for file transfers and access.

If I was doing it again, imho I don't think they are worth the additional outlay.

The problem with an ATi card is if it's for games, you will come across a lot of games with the nVidia "influence" in them and they simply don't play as well on ATi's as they do on nVidia's (Doom 3 ... anyone remember the problems with ATi's) and ATi's (and I have an ATi at the moment) are always slower than nVidia's with OpenGL based games. They claw the performance back at high resolutions, but how many of us have 30" monitors

I've also got a stripped RAID array with two RaptorX's... it's not worth it! lol

I've got a 96 disk array of 1TB 7k2 SATAII ultrastars and a 12 drive array of 300GB 15k2 SAS cheetahs on one of my desks at the moment if that helps :P

Seriously though, a 7k2 drive with a large cache can do pretty well and if you're doing sustained transfers they can actually beat the faster drives due to the higher areal density on the platters.

Say 1" on a drive is twice as dense as another drive spinning at 50% faster, then in some circumstances the slower drive will win as is passed more data in a given time. The faster drive will probably seek better and will win in other situations, but it's not clear cut as you may think.

Those Samsung Spinpoint T3's are about the best you can get these days!

Those Samsung Spinpoint T3's are about the best you can get these days!

As always it depends on what you want from a drive as to which drive will perform best.

The first thing you have to do is work out what sort of transfers you are doing?

Are they mainly small or larger?

Are they mainly sequential or random?

Are they mainly reads, writes or a balanced mix?

Do you reread the same data more than once?

Until you answer these questions then you can't pick the best drive.

Thanks for the tip and links to the drve enclosure philje123, if its painfully noisey I might go down that route if the drive ends up sounding like a 747.

I certainly wont be buying more Raptors and stripping them. Waste of time/money.

Im now going to stay with nvidia and AMD. The main reason being with AMD is the cost, maybe the phenom is slower and a budget based chip compared to the intel, but Intel loose on thier pricing.

You gets what you pays for

Thanks for the tip and links to the drve enclosure philje123, if its painfully noisey I might go down that route if the drive ends up sounding like a 747.

If you do that with a 10k drive, then I suggest you back your data up daily. Oh and check the conditions of warranty as a drive does log it's max operating temperature.

Also regarding losing on cost. Maybe per silly number, but at least to me intel wins on a price/performance basis.

Yeh guessing those 10k drives run a fair bit hotter than their 7.2k counterparts?!

Perhaps just suspend it on eleastic then without the enclosure. Will still eliminate virtually all resonance through the case and the seek noise. And will need some ventilation with it not being attached to any part of the case.

I have a samsung Spinpoint F1 and it's great! Very fast and very quiet too. Got a bit bit of cache to help it along.

Have you considered an SSD as a boot drive then something like a Samsung Spinpoint for data storage. No seek time and read speeds of up to 200mb/s with an SSD.

Phil

Have you considered an SSD as a boot drive then something like a Samsung Spinpoint for data storage. No seek time and read speeds of up to 200mb/s with an SSD.

Please don't believe the hype. It's not all sweetness and light in SSD land.

It very much depends on your data access profile as to whether it will be better, about the same or worse than disk.

Aye that's true. Not always suitable for everyone I suppose.

Have only done a bit of reading about them TBH and got confuzzled with all this talk of "trim" etc :P

Suppose the main advantage is having no seek time to access files but I imagine the data transfer rate with lots of smaller files is slower than a normal disk but faster with large continuous files.

Aye that's true. Not always suitable for everyone I suppose.

Have only done a bit of reading about them TBH and got confuzzled with all this talk of "trim" etc :P

Suppose the main advantage is having no seek time to access files but I imagine the data transfer rate with lots of smaller files is slower than a normal disk but faster with large continuous files.

Well the internal processor has to work out which chip the data is on first and which bank within that cheap. I'd actually say a large continuous file can be faster on disk, especially with a decent sized cache.

There are so many variables you can't just say one technology is better. For example flash doesn't like lots of write cycles (read date, update data in memory, erase chip section, write data, verify data).

SSD's wear-out, too.. only a finite amount of writes

Finally got all my parts and have built the system up, although havent tidied the cabling. The spec is as follows with some amendments;

AMD Phenom X4 955 3.2GHz Black Edition

Scythe 2 Ninja Heatsink with 120mm Silent fan

Gigabyte MA790FXT-UDP5 motherboard

8GB Corsair Dominator DDR3 RAM

2X XFX ATi Radeon 4890 O/C edition in Crossfire configuration

WD 150gb Velociraptor HDD

Corsair HX-750w PSU

Antec 1200 Full tower case (200mm top fan and 7x120mm fans)

Sony DVD-RW

Windows 7 64bit H/P

Edited 6 December, 200916 yr by Skoda-Msport

Only 150gb of storage?