Where will the bottleneck be on my system?

[Dashel]

Hello all,

Just bought the components for a large upgrade and I was wondering where the bottleneck will be for my system once I have it set up.

ASUS P4P800 Deluxe mobo
Pentium 3.0c CPU (800mhz fsb)
1 gig RAM (Kingston Hyper X 2x512mb 3200)
Radeon 9700 Pro
Western Digital Caviar 80 Gb HDD (8mb cache)

Would I be right in assuming Im good for a long time to come with this set up? The only thing I can see is a year from now wanting to upgrade my video card, right? Or will the new 64 bit CPU architecture be more of a performance increase in the next few years?

 

[InlineFive]

That system is fine. The only major bottleneck is the hard drive but that is inevitable.

Make sure you have PAT turned on in the BIOS!

-Por

 

[Ionizer86]

Dashel, if you live in the US, you can get a Maxtor 80GB 8MB for $35 instead (see FW's thread for coupon codes and details) or you can get a Seagate 120GB 8MB for $60 at Compusa. Those drives are supposed to be quieter than the WD, especially the Seagate. If you're sticking to WD, note that their larger drives of the same amily are faster than the smaller ones.

 

[JustAnAverageGuy]

Pretty well rounded system there.

 

[dguy6789]

See it is good for now. But ram will be a limiting factor in intense games about 3 years from now. You should be good for about 2 years.

 

[dnuggett]

You are fine for awhile, at least until 64bit takes off and you get the itch. Otherwise the obvious inevitable bottleneck is your hard drive.

 

[EXman]

scsi baby then you golden:sun:

 

[SpeedFreak03]

Nice setup there! But your bottleneck is the hard drive. At this time, there really isn't anything much faster other than SATA or SCSI. The Western Digital Raptor series (SATA 10K RPM drives) should help a bit though. Here is the link to one at NewEgg: NewEgg. Keep in mind though, for $110 you are only getting 36.7GB, so don't use this drive to store your data (like MP3s, pictures, etc), just the OS and programs, so they will run faster. I plan to buy a Raptor and use it for my OS and programs, then use my WD 80GB Special Edition for everything else.

 

[KillaKilla]

(confused)

Doesn't the lowest speed ATA/SATA determin the speed of the entire IDE controller?as in would the slower WD 80GB ATA slow down the Raptor's transfer rates?

don't know...

 

[wetcat007]

Originally posted by: Booja555
(confused)

Doesn't the lowest speed ATA/SATA determin the speed of the entire IDE controller?as in would the slower WD 80GB ATA slow down the Raptor's transfer rates?

don't know...

Regular EIDE drives use a seperate controller from newer SATA ones, so they would not intfere with each other at all.

 

[DT4K]

HD is the bottleneck, but with 1 gig of ram, only for disk intensive things. Not for gaming or anything.
I've got a WD 800JB and I can't hear it over my 28db cpu fan.