New shuttle build

[jameswhite1979]

Hi all,

I am thinking about building a new system. Mainly for games of course. Games like Doom3, HL2 and RPG's

This is what I have come up with so far:

CPU - AMD Athlon 64 3500+/2.2ghz L2-512kb 939p Box
Case - Shuttle SN95G5 Socket 939 Barebone NVIDIA nForce 3 Ultra chipset Black
Memory - Corsair (VS1GBKIT400C3) 1024MB (2 x 512MB Matched Pair), DDR400
HDD - Western Digital 36.7Gb 'Raptor' Serial ATA150 10,000rpm 8mb Cache ---- x 2 raid0
Graphics Card - Sapphire X800XT Platinum 256MB DDR3 VIVO
FDD - Mitsumi 7-in-1 Floppy Drive / Media Drive SM/MS/MD/CF/MM/SD

I have a dvd rw from my old Pc and a keyboard and mouse.

Just want some feedback and and ideas?

J

 

[biostud]

get a 74 Gb raptor instead of two 36 Gb (or any 7200rpm SATA disc)
I guess there's no nForce4 microATX moboards?

 

[jameswhite1979]

I was going to buy the 2 drives to run as RAID0 and reading around striping them but not sure if this is possible with it being the boot drive. I do have a large drive for capacity so thats not a problem.

No I can not find a nForce mobo in microatx size

 

[deanx0r]

Everything looks good.
I'd rather go with the new ST20G5 as it supports now PCIe, and a few more goodies.
There's an upcoming revision of the SN95G5 (v3) to support A64 E core revision.

What else... you can only stick two 3.5" devices in, so either 2 hdds, or one hdd and your floppy driver. Raptors are overpriced IMO, get something like a Seagate 7200.8 200GB.

 

[jameswhite1979]

Reading the reviews it looks like the raptors are damn fast though I really want a fast HDD for the OS and main games to run from. Are the seagates jsut as fast?

Do you think that its worth Raid0 and stripe?

Thanks so far

 

[Markfw]

get a 74 Gb raptor instead of two 36's. They are better, and raid buys you squat.

 

[deanx0r]

Anandtech did a comparaison between single drive vs raid 0 and the performance gain you get is benign compared to the huge risk involved into losing data when one of the drive crash.

On my personal experience, I had use for a raid 0 set up for a while and didn't feel any kind of improvement. I was however in deeper trouble when my array failed, and that was enough for me to go back to a single drive solution.

As for Raptor vs the other drives: well the Raptor wins hands down in the speed category. But for the premium price you are going to bleed in, it is not worth the speed gain nor the storage capacity it offers compares to offerings like the Seagate 7200.8 or the new Maxtor drives.

Personally, althought I aknowledge that the hdd might be the bottleneck of a system, I don't feel like it does play an important role in performance when it comes to games or general windows use. I am more annoyed by the computer being extremely slow and unresponsive during heavy multitasking, so I think the next major step will be dualcore: make sure shuttle doesn't screw this one.