Ok, new rig coming together

[racolvin]

Ok, so here's what I ended up with:

Antec P160 Case
Enermax Noisetaker 600W PSU
Asus P4C800-E Deluxe Mobo
Intel P4 3.4Ghz 800 FSB
4x Crucial Ballistix 512MB memory
4x WD 250G SATA HD (7200RPM, 8Mb cache)
LSI Logic MegaRAID 150 (4x SATA to RAID 5 the WD drives)
Sapphire ATI X800XT video card
Zalman CNPS7000B-AlCu CPU Cooler (Arctic Silver 5 used here)
Plextor 712SA (Black)SATA DVD+-RW

So for this kind of config (and this kind of $$), I'd _better_ be able to play EQII in a pretty killer fashion 😉 The Plextor should arrive tomorrow and I'll be able to run benchmarks this weekend. Any bets on what I'll end up with, performance wise?

R

 

[loic2003]

ooh... I dunno, seems to be quite low end really. I'd suggest using windows 3.1 or maybe you could risk going for Windows 95, but it might eat all your resources up. I'd estimate you'll get about 4 fps out of EQll if you overclock it...

only kidding, it's a beast and you know it! it'll play any game there is out there no problem, and with that much RAM lying about you'll be able to alt+tab out of it and have a bunch of stuff running in the background (although I wouldn't reccomend it) simultanously.

I'd say you'll be happy with this thing for about 3 years minimum before you start craving yet more power...

enjoy. ooh and buy half life 2 for it....

 

[racolvin]

Originally posted by: loic2003


enjoy. ooh and buy half life 2 for it....

Ooooh .. hadn't thought of that 🙂 I was thinking of Splinter Cell 3: Chaos Theory but HL2 works as a good stress test as well 🙂

R

 

[Spamdini]

if ur worried about gaming y are u going with intel over AMD?

 

[racolvin]

Originally posted by: Spamdini
if ur worried about gaming y are u going with intel over AMD?

Because I've been a chipzilla user for years and I'm comfy with its quirks, etc. Never used an AMD or built one, so I didn't go that way. Known evil versus unknown evil and all that 😉

R

 

[cheesehead]

Trust me....AMD is superior, and no harder to use. A Winchester A64 kicks the P4's puny behind across the board. (check Anandtech's article). A Winchester 3000+ with some Patriot DDR500 (380$ for 4x512mb) can overclock to 2.4 with ease, and despite being nearly half the price, can kick the P4's puny behind at that speed. Sapphire's X800 line is hard to beat, though-wait until the NF4 boards are available (about a week or two) and you'll be able to use on in an AMD system. Even if you are using a P4, I would get a SP-97 or SP-120 cooler instead of the larger (But less effective) Zalman coolers.
If you're really that desperate for hard drive performance, you might want to look into some NCQ SATA300 drives. NCQ and a double-speed interface allow drives like WD's Raptor line of 10k drives to seriously outperform some of their older cousins, without having to buy an expensive card. Although you do lose the reliability of RAID 5, you can get a few 200GB backup drives to back up everything on the smaller primary disks, and still save some money. Regardless, you are'nt likely to see an improvement in gaming performance; a super-fast hard drive array is only really useful for servers and workstations anyway-instead, get a faster CPU.