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I am so tired of it

P

pcslookout

Lifer
I need stuff to load faster. I already have a 150 gig raptor 10,000 rpm hard drive and I installed windows and games online on it but sometimes the games just don't load fast enough at first sometimes when they are precaching, loading the games, etc. I know for Counter Strike online it depends on the server speed when downloading maps but is there anyway to download it all at once online instead so you don't have to ever worry about it again once your in CS ? Now for other games I am talking about like single player for the most part. I am guessing there is really no way to get games to startup quicker when getting into a level inless I get a SCSI or solid state hard drive right? Like Quake 4, Unreal 2004, Doom 3, etc. My system isn't very old I just hate waiting for the levels to load sometimes.

Here are my current system specs:

Intel Duo 6420
4 gigs of ddr 2 ram
WD Raptor 150 gig 10,000 rpm hard drive
Hitachi 500 gig 7200 rpm ide hard drive
200 gig Maxtor 7200 rpm ide hard drive
Geforce 8800 GTS
pci tv tuner card
Four 80mm case fans
dvd-burner
Enermax 400 watt Liberty power supply

What should I add or change so I can get games to load into their levels a lot quicker that will actually be worth the money ? Inless there isn't anything. The only thing I can think of is a SCSI hard drive, solid state hard drive, or even a ram drive. Is it worth even worrying about and just instead just deal with the small annoyance ? I mean I can but I rather be able to make load times in games as quick as possible. Even if its only possible to cut load time in half. Would be nice if you could cut it down to a second or less but thats never going to happen with games like Doom 3, Quake 4, and never CS because its a online game and you can't speed up online games inless you buy all of the servers and upgrade them to the fastest internet backbone ever.

 
Originally posted by: MagnusTheBrewer
T1 ftw! Or, you could just stop whining since your box is pretty nice compared to most already.
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Yeah I just wish there was technology out that would help decrease game load times a lot. I don't think anything I could buy would help much.
 
Originally posted by: pcslookout
Originally posted by: Blain
RAID up some more Raptors. :laugh:
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Will that really make a huge difference and really be better than just going to a 15,000 rpm SCSI hard drive ?
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I'm almost 100% sure that won't make a lick of difference, RAID increases bandwidth, but at least doubles access times.

You mentioned precaching, I assume you have Vista? If not, get it, that's the only thing that'll help short of going to an iRAM and installing everything there. And don't be so whiney about it, it's just a load screen, take those ten seconds to crack the blinds and look outside for a bit 😛
 
if you go scsi go a fujitsu max series 15k drive but don't forget about a scsi card - u160 is fine and you can find them for ~$25 or so - lsiu160, adaptec 19160/29160/39160.

even though the seagate 15k.5 has faster str, the fujuitsu has better firmware for games and regular computer work.

the difference is there but not that much (i run 2x15k scsi hdds - 1 out of a hp server that i think is a fujitus and one 15k.5 and have used raptors in the past), even w/ the best 15k hdds over the raptor as it is geared toward gamres so the drive firmware is tweaked for that usage.
 
yep as you are limited by the 32bit pci slot that has at most a max theoretical bandwidth of ~125MB/s. the only currently available drives that have a str over 100MB/s are the seagate 15k.5 but w/ my congested pci bus i have a burst and str on my 15k.5 of ~98MB/s.

u160 = 160MB/s and the fujitsu is ~90MB/s or so so you would be fine in that respect.

and sadly i haven't seen any single, regular pci-e cards - i mean the ones that are just able to connect drives, not multi-raid setups. i had contacted lsi about 6mos ago and they said they were working more w/ sas than scsi so who knows. i haven't looked but still 98MB/s is still good for a single drive 🙂
 
Three possible solutions come to mind (I currently use all three in my desktop):

  1. 1. Put 4GB in your box (have 3+ show-up in windows) and allocate 1GB or more to ramdisk for installing applications into Ramdisk by Superspeed, mine works great, I put MS Office on mine for instance Excel and Outlook opening

    2. Raid-0 a couple i-RAM drives together, I raid-0 2 of them for 8GB total, put my OS installation on them (stripped with nLite), has ran 100% fine since Nov 2006 i-Ram by Gigabyte

    3. Create a raid-0 array on an Areca PCI-E raid card but use only the first 75GB (or less) on each Raptor drive to ensure the array's effective latency remains low while the bandwidth increases, also add 2GB of cache to the card, be sure to get the raid cards with the IOP341 chip and not the ones with IOP331

Hope these options provide you with enough info to get you thinking about your choices. Like I said I have all three implemented in my desktop because access and latency is killer for my applications (finance modeling).
 
a quick question: have you ever defragged? it can lower load time. i have a program called Vopt that automatically defrags my drives every night. my computer starts up very quickly and loads games pretty quickly. and it is only an AMD Athlon XP-M 2400 on an ASUS A7N8X-X with 768MB of ram.
 
Originally posted by: Idontcare
Three possible solutions come to mind (I currently use all three in my desktop):

  1. 1. Put 4GB in your box (have 3+ show-up in windows) and allocate 1GB or more to ramdisk for installing applications into Ramdisk by Superspeed, mine works great, I put MS Office on mine for instance Excel and Outlook opening

    2. Raid-0 a couple i-RAM drives together, I raid-0 2 of them for 8GB total, put my OS installation on them (stripped with nLite), has ran 100% fine since Nov 2006 i-Ram by Gigabyte

    3. Create a raid-0 array on an Areca PCI-E raid card but use only the first 75GB (or less) on each Raptor drive to ensure the array's effective latency remains low while the bandwidth increases, also add 2GB of cache to the card, be sure to get the raid cards with the IOP341 chip and not the ones with IOP331

Hope these options provide you with enough info to get you thinking about your choices. Like I said I have all three implemented in my desktop because access and latency is killer for my applications (finance modeling).
Click to expand...

Those are some Ultimate solutions! :thumbsup:
 
Originally posted by: Idontcare
Three possible solutions come to mind (I currently use all three in my desktop):

  1. 1. Put 4GB in your box (have 3+ show-up in windows) and allocate 1GB or more to ramdisk for installing applications into Ramdisk by Superspeed, mine works great, I put MS Office on mine for instance Excel and Outlook opening

    2. Raid-0 a couple i-RAM drives together, I raid-0 2 of them for 8GB total, put my OS installation on them (stripped with nLite), has ran 100% fine since Nov 2006 i-Ram by Gigabyte

    3. Create a raid-0 array on an Areca PCI-E raid card but use only the first 75GB (or less) on each Raptor drive to ensure the array's effective latency remains low while the bandwidth increases, also add 2GB of cache to the card, be sure to get the raid cards with the IOP341 chip and not the ones with IOP331

Hope these options provide you with enough info to get you thinking about your choices. Like I said I have all three implemented in my desktop because access and latency is killer for my applications (finance modeling).
Click to expand...

How would you say the performance increase in with ram drive? almost instantenous?
 
Ram drives are incredible! I tried a small one for the internet and it even made anandtech load up quicker. Strange because I didn't think it would make such a huge difference. Though I tried this a long time ago and forgot how to do it. It puts certain files on the ram drive from your tcp/ip stack I believe. Its a little confusing at first.
 
Originally posted by: epidemis
How would you say the performance increase in with ram drive? almost instantenous?
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Yes, quite literally. It is the sole reason I would consider Vista x64 loaded with 8GB of ram, to convert 4GB into a ramdisk which I would then install all my applications onto.

The ramdisk program I use even has this cool feature where it automatically saves the ramdisk contents to hard-drive everytime you shutdown or reboot the computer. Haven't lost anything yet in the 6 months of usage thus far.

It is literally become so routine I don't even think about it anymore.
 
Originally posted by: IsLNdbOi
Is RamDisk compatible with 64-bit Vista?
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Not the one from Superspeed, which is the one I use on winXP, but they are claiming they will release Vista compatible ramdisk in July.

However Superspeed does not have a monopoly on ramdisk software and I am sure a google search would turn up many Vista compatible alternates.
 
Originally posted by: Idontcare
Originally posted by: epidemis
How would you say the performance increase in with ram drive? almost instantenous?
Click to expand...

Yes, quite literally. It is the sole reason I would consider Vista x64 loaded with 8GB of ram, to convert 4GB into a ramdisk which I would then install all my applications onto.

The ramdisk program I use even has this cool feature where it automatically saves the ramdisk contents to hard-drive everytime you shutdown or reboot the computer. Haven't lost anything yet in the 6 months of usage thus far.

It is literally become so routine I don't even think about it anymore.
Click to expand...

Wow you are now making me want to get rid of my four 1 gig sticks and get four 2 gig sticks of ram. It may be to late though. Ram prices are going up I think now. To bad we are limited to 2m gig sticks and only 8 gig total on most motherboards now.

The 4 gig ram drive won't solve my gaming load time problem though 🙁 4 GB is barely big enough for one game install. I really don't think programs load up to slowly its just games. Have you tried loading a game that was 4 GB or less on the ram drive just to see how much it would speed up the game load time ? If so which game and how quick was it?
 
I know, I know, but sure looks more solid than the iram, can address more space, and has auto backup and restore functions (to a separate pata drive)
 
whats the problem here OP, is the 15 seconds of server changing in CS taking too long for you? or is it the 1 minute of Windows boot up time too long?
 
Pcslookout, you are freaking insane. Seriously, I think the latency is now some sort of psychosomatic symptom of a desire for ever-increasing speed. Your PC already rocks, I have no idea what more you could want. You have to expect things to have loading times no matter how much RAM you add or megahertz you squeeze out. Games need to load not just data from hard drive/iRAM/whatever into memory, but they actually do stuff with that data. Rendering textures, precaching resources, configuring shaders and whatnot, these are things you're just going to have to do any time you load a new map. I say calm down and be happy with your load times that are maybe half that of most people's. Jeez.
 
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