About my new system

[Negatyfus]

Hiya. Hopefully I can get some quick answers before I go buy this system this afternoon.

My current choice is:

Tagan TG480-U01 480W power supply
Asis A8N-SLi nForce4
AMD Athon 64 3500+
1GB DDR400 PC3200 RAM van Twinmos (dual-channel setup)
Maxtror DiamondMax 10 SATA 200GB
Aopen Aeolus GeForce 6800GT-DV256

- Does the power supply give me enough juice to overclock some and in the future add another 6800GT for SLi?

- My 200GB has only 8MB cache, while I saw that the 250GB version has 16MB. Will this significantly affect performance and should I go with the 250GB?

- Is 1GB RAM enough for today's gaming market? I thought it wasn't very much memory, but I can easily upgrade 2 GB in the future. I don't want to run out of memory with my new system NOW, though. My current system has 448MB and it swaps like mad.

Thanks a lot if you can answer me. BTW, any comments on my choices are welcome as well.

 

[stevty2889]

1 gig of ram is plenty for today's games, maybe if you play EQ2 you'll need 2 gig, but for anything else 1 gig is plenty. How much more is the 250gig than the 200gig? It won't have a huge impact on performance, the 16mb cache drives are fairly new, and are pretty nice, but not worth it if it's a lot more expensive, and won't affect FPS in games anyway, 7200rpm 8mb cache drives are plenty good enough. Not sure how much power you would need for a pair of 6800GT's, but I ran a 6800GT, with a 350w enermax, so I would think a 480watter would be enough, as long as it has a decent 12v rail.

 

[Arcanedeath]

Thats an Excellent Power supply... I'd suggest going w/ a 1 GB stick instead of 2 512's if you want to upgrade to 2 GB in the future, the current A64 doesn't play nice w/ more than 2 dimms @ PC3200 speeds

 

[Negatyfus]

Thanks for your replies.

stevty2889, the 250GB ones are a big step up in terms of price, so I guess it's not worth it. What I am still undecided over is whether to add in a 36MB Raptor drive... it's an additional 100 euros, but it may be worth it to throw the OS/apps/games on there. But whether it will really be a huge difference... I don't know.

Arcanedeath, if I go with one stick, I won't be able to dual-channel, right? That sucks, if you're right about the 4x512MB problems with A64's. Do you have a source for that?

 

[Arcanedeath]

AMD is the source for that info and the Mobo makers, for example most of the 939 boards will drop to PC2700 speeds when 4 DS dimms are used and you need to force it back up to 3200 speeds also you lose your 1T command rate when using more than 2 dimms. Check out the DFI motherboard reviews that were just posted recently on the site for more info. also just as an FYI dual channel at most provides a 5% performance boost in memory intensive apps so even if you don't use it at first it's not a big loss.

 

[Negatyfus]

For real? I though dual-channel made much more of a difference. Makes me think about going with the 1 stick of 1GB. Thanks for that.

Also, I'm playing with the idea of going with Raptors, possibly two with RAID0. Wonder how stable that will be, though.

 

[fuzzynavel]

The 36GB Raptor, although a nice drive, doesn't give that much of a performance boost over a 7200 RPM drive....maybe save about 2 seconds loading a Half -Life 2 map... IMHO you would be better dropping down from your 200GB drive to 2x 160GB drives and stripe raid them for extra speed.....
Also with todays games and programs....36GB will not last long if you download a lot of games/movies!!!

On the RAM front.....I would stick with the 2x512MB sticks for the dual channel.....you will most probably see a small performance drop with 1x 1GB stick....and by the time you need to upgrade you will probably need to upgrade the whole system...i.e..may be away in the future somewhere!!

 

[Negatyfus]

Hmm, the 160GB DM10 is only 4 euros less than the 200GB... so that would not be worth going down for. Maybe 2x36MB RAID0 Raptors => 72GB would be okay, but still I'm too paranoid to go RAID0, I think. And too lazy to make daily DVD backups to protect myself.

 

[PurdueRy]

in RAID 0 that would still be 36 GB not 72

 

[Negatyfus]

Actually, no. RAID 0 does utilize all of the hard drives' capicity, but it spread it over them equally to improve performance.