Which to buy?

[leegroves86]

They are both close to the same price. Which one would give me the best performance? I do gaming (WoW, BF2, UT04) , photos, music, internet, LAN parties. I really want a system for ETS 4: Oblivion. Both are great additions but which one?

3800 X2:
I can't get my 3000 to overclock and if i buy a x2 then I'll fell pretty good about my CPU power.

Raptor:
I'm leaning towards Raptor because: it will not be replaced soon like most cpus and I like the idea of having a fast primary HDD and using my current 160GB for backup. For all you raptor OWNERS: how much of a difference did you see from ur old 7200 HDD?



System specs:
3000+ at stock speeds (can't get overclock for nothing)
asus a8n-e
1 GB ram
7800gt
160 seagate 7200.9

 

[crispy2010]

3800x2!!!!

 

[leegroves86]

coming from an intel man

 

[stevty2889]

How bout a 3rd option..upgrade to 2gb of RAM. That will make a bigger differance than either for newer games.

 

[Gamingphreek]

Raptors are worthless. If you are going to blow some money get a SCSI drive. The current Seagate and Samsung offerings keep up with the Raptors (yes even the Raptor X) just fine.

I would HIGHLY recommend the X2. 2 Gig of RAM wont be bad, but odds are unless you play BF2, you wont notice much of a difference. With the X2 you WILL notice a difference in EVERYTHING.

-Kevin

 

[bamacre]

Keep your money, or get another 1GB of ram.

I game with a GTX and a Pentium 630. CPU means little in gaming compared to video card performance. A raptor is a waste. Dual core cou's just aren't beneficial to gamers, yet.

 

[jimbob200521]

Originally posted by: leegroves86
They are both close to the same price. Which one would give me the best performance? I do gaming (WoW, BF2, UT04) , photos, music, internet, LAN parties. I really want a system for ETS 4: Oblivion. Both are great additions but which one?

3800 X2:
I can't get my 3000 to overclock and if i buy a x2 then I'll fell pretty good about my CPU power.

Raptor:
I'm leaning towards Raptor because: it will not be replaced soon like most cpus and I like the idea of having a fast primary HDD and using my current 160GB for backup. For all you raptor OWNERS: how much of a difference did you see from ur old 7200 HDD?



System specs:
3000+ at stock speeds (can't get overclock for nothing)
asus a8n-e
1 GB ram
7800gt
160 seagate 7200.9

I noticed a pretty decent difference, mainly in level load times and when multitasking. Windows just feels snappier. But youve got to think: is a snappier windows and a few seconds in level load times worth $300?

 

[saltedeggman]

Originally posted by: Gamingphreek
Raptors are worthless. If you are going to blow some money get a SCSI drive. The current Seagate and Samsung offerings keep up with the Raptors (yes even the Raptor X) just fine.

-Kevin

Please elaborate....!!!

The new raptor tops the old raptor by a huge margin....

EDIT: Quote from Anandtech Review

It offers the best single-user performance of any drives that we have tested to date along with the safety of owning a drive designed for 24/7 operation.

 

[Gamingphreek]

Originally posted by: saltedeggman

Originally posted by: Gamingphreek
Raptors are worthless. If you are going to blow some money get a SCSI drive. The current Seagate and Samsung offerings keep up with the Raptors (yes even the Raptor X) just fine.

-Kevin

Please elaborate....!!!

The new raptor tops the old raptor by a huge margin....

EDIT: Quote from Anandtech Review

It offers the best single-user performance of any drives that we have tested to date along with the safety of owning a drive designed for 24/7 operation.

Ok:

10,000 RPM will allow for faster random access seek times, but will increase noise and power (thereby heat) levels. Difference MAY be noticable in some insances.

10,000 RPM will allow for faster data read/write ops. Will be marginally better in large file transfers.

NCQ: Standard feature, all new nice drives have it. Just "rearranges" tasks in an order so one rotation of the platter covers all the tasks, and it doesn't have to spin multiple times to accomplish another task.

SATA 150: While still not saturated, in large file transfers and what not, you can see higher burst and sustained transfer rates with SATA 2/2.5.

The new raptor tops the old raptor by a huge margin....

HARDLY.

Link 1: Faster in synthetic benchmarks, and, as expected ~4ms faster in random access times. Probably not noticable unless you click you open and close random programs all day and time each one.

Link 2: Nothing bad by any means, but SATA II has an arguable lead (Samsung drive). Either way probably not noticable on either drive.

Link 3: More synthetic garbage. Means virtually nothing.

Link 4: Averaging <2 seconds faster, and sometimes slower.

Link 5: Averages 1-4 seconds faster than the leading 7200RPM drive. BARELY noticable, and well within the margin of error.

Link 6: Runs hot and loud. Nothing horrible, but 10,000RPM does have some cons. And unlike the pros which we went through earlier, the cons are very tangible.

$300 price tag, 150GB capacity

I can get an extremely quiet and cool Samsung 160Gig SATA2.5 160Gig HDD for ~90. That means i can get ~3 of them before i approach the Raptors price point. Keep in mind that the Samsung drive, stays right with the other drives in performance, and being SATAII bests it in burst and sustained write speeds.

The Raptor is nice, and it is fast, but it is arguably IMO worthless. For that amount of money you could just go SCSI, which IS tangibly faster. Or, for that money you could get one huge HDD which keeps up just fine with the raptor.

-Kevin

 

[saltedeggman]

IMO, the raptor 150 is nothing near "worthless", the oriented buyer is not even in the same segment. True the price/gigabyte ratio of the raptor is pathetic, but the OP is looking to spend either on the raptor or the A64 x2.

Look at this, if the OP is looking to buy a BMW 5series or Mercedez E320, then it would make no sense to make any suggestion to get a Honda S2000.

Just my 0.02

 

[Gamingphreek]

the raptor 150 is nothing near "worthless"

Any evidence to defend that statement? I just showed all the benchmarks and there is virtually no tangible difference between that and a standard 7200RPM drive which has MUCH more space, consumes less power, outputs less heat, and outputs less noise.

I dont see a reason even if you had money to spend to get a Raptor. Like i said, $300 is approaching, if not in the low end SCSI sector where there are tangible benefits (Still has the same cons though).

-Kevin

 

[saltedeggman]

Linktake a look at the review at Storage Review

See how it perform with the SCSI drives in Single-User section... no doubt SCSI will kill the raptor in Multi-User performance (server)

Edit: the OP isn't likely to use his PC as a server, thus making the comparision in multi-user environment argument "not-to-the-point"

 

[jimbob200521]

Originally posted by: Gamingphreek

the raptor 150 is nothing near "worthless"

Any evidence to defend that statement? I just showed all the benchmarks and there is virtually no tangible difference between that and a standard 7200RPM drive which has MUCH more space, consumes less power, outputs less heat, and outputs less noise.

I dont see a reason even if you had money to spend to get a Raptor. Like i said, $300 is approaching, if not in the low end SCSI sector where there are tangible benefits (Still has the same cons though).

-Kevin

For those with the money, the Raptor is the fastest single SATA drive out there. It's faster than the 74gb Raptor, it's faster than any 7200rpm drive. Link From those benchmarks, it shows that the 150gb Raptor holds its own against SCSI drives, and beats all other SATA drives tested easily. Link From this set of benchmarks, the Raptor beats even SCSI drives, not to mention SATA drives. Gaming Performance Link In gaming, the Raptor beats most of the benchmarked drives, and, once again, p0wns the other SATA drives. Noise/Heat These test show that the Raptor is quieter than SCSI drives, and, to be fair, louder than most SATA drives. The Raptor is among the lower power usage drives tested; it uses less than several of the tested SCSI drives, and is higher for the tested SATA drives.

Noise, power usage, and heat are not usually the deciding factor when buying a hard drive, at least not for me. I look at performance first. And unless there is some glaring flaw elsewhere, like unbearable loudness, performance is all I will look at.

For a main hard drive, that 150gb Raptor is, imho, unbeatable. I for one do not store anything other than my OS and programs/games on my boot drive, never have, never will. I have always had another drive for the storage of files.

Also, what is so great about SCSI? Personally, I wouldn't use it on a desktop. I'm not saying there is something wrong with it, but it was just not designed to be used in a desktop enviroment. Another thing, SCSI is expensive (one of the arguments against the 150gb Raptor, I know) and puts out its fair share of heat.

PS Sorry for the legnthy post

 

[saltedeggman]

jimbob200521, i entirely agree with you

look at the my previous post, i posted the same link to SR.

 

[saltedeggman]

Originally posted by: Gamingphreek

the raptor 150 is nothing near "worthless"

Like i said, $300 is approaching, if not in the low end SCSI sector where there are tangible benefits (Still has the same cons though).

-Kevin

What the tangible benefits ?

 

[Nocturnal]

I'd get the CPU.

 

[saltedeggman]

right, sorry to get side-tracked OP

I'd get the CPU too, i just got my opteron 165 running, the system does feel more responsive (coming from a 3200+ venice)

 

[kyparrish]

X2!!!!

 

[jimbob200521]

Originally posted by: saltedeggman
right, sorry to get side-tracked OP

I'd get the CPU too, i just got my opteron 165 running, the system does feel more responsive (coming from a 3200+ venice)

QFT

 

[SamurAchzar]

Get the X2, definitely. The Raptor won't do **** for you. Don't expect to get honest opinions from Raptor owners - how many guys are there around here to admit throwing their money at the wind without having the technical knowledge to understand there are no real performance gains to be had.

Even if you put aside the speed of current 7200 drives - with system memory nowadays the HDD isn't used too much to begin with. Only in game loads, or any other usage which does not follow a certain pattern (and thus cached to the RAM).

Now the X2 - that should be an entirely different ballgame. Should make your system much more responsive, not to mention the huge boost for multitasking. As some wise hardware reviewer once noted, "if you enable it, [dual core] they will come [the users utilizing two cores]".
Besides, it's only reasonable to predict that more games would be multicore-native in the future. I'm sure all the publishers are rushing to that, competing on the bragging rights of writing the first "dual core native" game. Not that it should make a whole lot of difference, unless the gameplay is considerably different, but still.

And just to seal the deal - you can't O/C your 3000 (like me and my 2800) - there's a good chance you might O/C the 3800.

It's not even a fair comparison. Now go get that X2.

 

[saltedeggman]

Originally posted by: SamurAchzar
Get the X2, definitely. The Raptor won't do **** for you. Don't expect to get honest opinions from Raptor owners - how many guys are there around here to admit throwing their money at the wind without having the technical knowledge to understand there are no real performance gains to be had.

Even if you put aside the speed of current 7200 drives - with system memory nowadays the HDD isn't used too much to begin with. Only in game loads, or any other usage which does not follow a certain pattern (and thus cached to the RAM).

Now the X2 - that should be an entirely different ballgame. Should make your system much more responsive, not to mention the huge boost for multitasking. As some wise hardware reviewer once noted, "if you enable it, [dual core] they will come [the users utilizing two cores]".
Besides, it's only reasonable to predict that more games would be multicore-native in the future. I'm sure all the publishers are rushing to that, competing on the bragging rights of writing the first "dual core native" game. Not that it should make a whole lot of difference, unless the gameplay is considerably different, but still.

And just to seal the deal - you can't O/C your 3000 (like me and my 2800) - there's a good chance you might O/C the 3800.

It's not even a fair comparison. Now go get that X2.

welcome by me <-- Raptor 74 owner

 

[SamurAchzar]

WHO SAID THAT! Oh... sorry

But really, the gains are quite small, and you pay for it big time in capacity.
But OTOH, in terms of bling, the Raptor is king... and that reason enough is good enough for 95% of the people, 95% of the time (myself included )

Thanks, BTW.

 

[narutofan36]

the new cpu!

 

[bamacre]

I still say neither.

By the time dual core cpu's become beneficial for gaming, they'll be faster and cheaper. Stick with what you got. Definitely don't get a Raptor.

 

[alimoalem]

Originally posted by: SamurAchzar
WHO SAID THAT! Oh... sorry

But really, the gains are quite small, and you pay for it big time in capacity.
But OTOH, in terms of bling, the Raptor is king... and that reason enough is good enough for 95% of the people, 95% of the time (myself included )

Thanks, BTW.

no it's not and i certainly hope it never will be. ever heard of 15k SCSI goodness in 147gig quantitites? that is king.

Originally posted by: leegroves86
coming from an intel man

lol

totally agree with stevty on the 2gig upgrade. that's the only thing u should upgrade for now imo

agree with gamingphreek on the SCSI

agree with bamacre on the gaming. you need gpu performance, not cpu for what you want (gaming)

gamingphreek, awesome job with the linking action for the raptor. you really can apply your money elsewhere, OP, before you get yourself a raptor. and you still will never need it cause if you've maxed out performance everywhere else, you definitely have enough cash to bust out with a RAID5 full of SCSI 147gb Maxtor II drives. believe me, no raptor setup will compare