New processor or new hard drive?

MiG29TangentBoy

MiG29TangentBoy

Limp Gawd
Joined
Nov 2, 2004
Messages
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I've been playing with the idea of bumping up the performance of my little rig:
BioStar 6100-939 Tforce
A64 3200+ Venice @2.5Ghz
Crucial Ballistix PC4000 (2x512MB)
Enermax Liberty 500w
eVGA 7800 GT
two Seagate 120G ST3120026A hdds
LITE-ON Combo CD/DVD drive
...all crammed in an Aspire X-Qpack.

Now, to get an Opteron 165 (or an X2 3800)? Or a Western Digital Raptor X for the main drive? What would offer more of an upgrade punch? I mostly do gaming, Photoshop, Illustrator, web browsing, etc...I want to do one or the other, but I can't do both at the same time.

What would you get? All comments and advice are welcome. :D
 
You'd notice the differnce if you upgraded your CPU far more then upgrading your HD.
 
I realy don't think your going to see much of a performance with either change.

A number of reviews have pointed out that there is almost no advantage to gaming with a dual core processors currently as the games just don't take advantage of the second core. Dual cores will help with multi-tasking. I am assuming you would OC the new processor to 2.5Ghz like you have done to the old one, if you don't your probably going to see a performance decrease.

If your 120GB HD's are in RAID 0, then your performance increase will only be noticed by a benchmark, but not in actual use. If they're not in a RAID array, then you may see a performance increase but nothing much to speak of.

If I was to only pick either the Raptor or the Processor, I'd go with the Raptor. You can never have too much storage space and they are very nice drives.

My other recommendation would be to upgrade to 2GB of ram. One word of caution, if you just buy a second set of 512MB sticks, you may find that you can't OC your processor like you used to be able to. Athlon 64 / Opteron processors seem to be sensitive to having 4 memory sticks installed. You can try it, but the safest route if you want to keep your OC would be to get 2x 1GB sticks of ram.
 
Hmm. Maybe I'll overclock the hell out of an Opteron 148 instead.
Nope, no RAID here. I've seen way too much evidence that RAID just isn't worth it for everyday stuff.
I know that the 4 sticks of memory slowdown applies to double sided sticks. It bumps the sticks down to 333fsb instead of 400. My Ballistix are single sided, but I'm leery of getting more just yet. The two sticks I have now are replacements for a bad pair I had a few months ago. Crucial produced a real stinker of a bad batch of those recently, and I want to make sure those bad ones are all gone before I get more. I just thought that 2gb of ram was only really good for BF2 and the like, and that a 1gb to 2 gb jump wasn't so noticeable or as cost effective as a new processor or hdd.
 
It's true 512MB to 1GB is a much better jump than 1GB to 2GB. I game with 1GB and I'm happy with it, but there is a lot of evidence that 2GB is making more of a difference with more games. The three games that come to mind that benefit clearly from 2GB are BF2, Quake4, and FEAR. Many of the games that come out as time progresses will take advantage of 2GB.
 
Well, I thought that the Raptor would improve the snappiness of the system, especially with load times for games. I dunno, I'm just looking for an excuse to use a bit of tax refund money on the system. :p
 
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