Upgrading my Rig - Need some help...

B

bryce

Gawd
Joined
Jun 1, 2009
Messages
518
1) What will you be doing with this PC? Gaming? Photoshop? Web browsing? etc

Gaming, photoshop, surfing, music, movies, everything really.

2) What's your budget? Are tax and shipping included?

Right now if I build a new one then it's a little under $200 per month. If I can convince my mom to let me use some of the stimulus money, that's MINE which is like $200, then I can upgrade now for a little under $400 not including shipping/tax. Otherwise, I'll have to get parts each month :(

3) Where do you live?

North Carolina, USA

4) What exact parts do you need for that budget? CPU, RAM, case, etc. Please be very specific.

I'm not sure what I should upgrade, more hard drives would be nice and another GTX260, but my current motherboard has only one PCIE 2.0 x16 slot on it. If I upgrade I would like to be able to add another GTX260 down the road in SLI and have more faster hard drives (Western Digital Black 640gb are what I'm looking at)

If I build another rig, then I'll need all the parts if I keep my old one together for folding.

5) If reusing any parts, what parts will you be reusing? Please be especially specific about the power supply. List make and model.

If I upgrade, which might be cheaper then I'll keep the same CPU, RAM, GFX and Heastsink.

6) Will you be overclocking?

I overclock my Intel C2D E8400 now so yes I would want everything to be overclockable.

7) What size monitor do you have and/or plan to have?

I have a 22" Acer X223Wd now and I might want to upgrade to another 1 or 3 in the future for quad monitors.

8) When do you plan on building/buying the PC?

Now and in the coming months. Whenever I got money each month, which is around the 1st of each month.

9) What features do you need in a motherboard? RAID? Firewire? Crossfire or SLI support? etc.

RAID, SLI support, tons of sata ports, tons of usb ports, at least 2 pcie 2.0 x16 slots and a pci-express I think it is for my soundblaster augidyX2 card.

10) Do you already have a legit and reusable/transferable OS key/license?

Yes I do.



If I upgrade my current rig here's it's specs:

Intel C2D E8400 E0
GSKILL DDR2 800 RAM 4x2gb
GeForce GTX260 896mb GFX Card
Soundblaster Augidy X2 (thats the name of it) sound card
Seagate Barracuda 750gb hdd
Scythe Ninja 120mm heatsink
LG 22x CD/DVD Burner
Corsair HX520W Power Supply
Logitech X-530 5.1 Surround Speakers

I'm thinking of either getting 4x WD Black 640gb drives in RAID 0 now or getting some parts to upgrade my rig. If you can help me put together a whole new rig though I might just wait and build a new rig if you think ordering parts over a few months would be wise.
 
It doesn't look like you need to upgrade anything aside from the HDD. You could pick up one or two OCZ Vertex SSDs (RAID0 if you get 2).

Is your computer doing something slow? Is it playing any games worse than expected?
 
You could go for an i7 and sell off your e8400/motherboard/RAM if you need more CPU power.
 
I see. I'm thinking 2x 30gb OCZ Vertex SSDs and 2x 640gb WD Black drives both in RAID 0. But some people say the price of SSDs aren't yet good for the performance and I would be better off getting 4 or 5 640gb WD Black drives in RAID 0.
 
If you can, wait for the Vertex drives to go on sale. I got mine for $90AR each (30GB), so it was a bit easier on my wallet -- still too expensive for me to deploy in all my machines, but cheap enough for me to play around with. :D
 
D'oh! Hm... I'm not sure the throughput of 5x 640GB drives in RAID0 is the performance gain you're looking for, unfortunately. I guess you could sell your old board to help offset the cost, but I'm not sure its worth it.
 
What kind of performance gain are you expecting out of the 640GB drives in RAID0?
 
Here's the post I posted at another forum.

The mobo I got doesn't have RAID like I thought so instead of the 2x SSDs and 2x WD Black drives what do you think about these:

Newegg.com - ASUS P5Q SE/R LGA 775 Intel P45 ATX Intel Motherboard - Intel Motherboards - $99

4x 640gb WD Black drives in RAID 0

That mobo is the exact same as the one I got so all my hardware will be fine on it but it's got the RAID controller on it so no giving up an PCI slot for the RAID controller card.

Total is $420.

Thoughts? And then next month I'll get the SSDs.

OR I could get the following:

1x 30gb OCZ Vertex SSD
2x 640gb WD Black Drives
And that mobo

Total: $415.

And then next month just get more drives.
Click to expand...

And for the performance gain I've seen people with 4x of those drives getting close to 400mb/s or more.

I think I"m going to go with the second option.

2x 640gb WD Blacks
1x 30gb OCZ Vertex SSD
$99 mobo
 
400MB/s is great and all, but it only helps for apps that need fast I/O... basically for copying/ripping/transcoding/encoding media files. If you don't do much of those tasks, then RAID0 on the Black drives won't give you much noticeable performance difference.
 
Well, for the money it's good right? Because I am getting into doing a lot of that stuff so yea. Wanna be prepared.

2x 640gb Blacks
1x 30gb OCZ Vertex SSD
$99 mobo

And then next month get another SSD to RAID them and some more drives.
 
The thing is.... 400MB/s doesn't actually matter in practice. You're talking about slightly reduced load times and a faster initial startup for you OS.

There is absolutely zero performance gain in-game or even in most encoding tasks above a single 640GB WD Black, which is already a very fast drive.

We know the kind of numbers you can expect out of the setup. The question is, what kind of change in the experience are you looking for?

I think you'd do far better to save up for a bit, sell your current chip/board/RAM and go i7, though honestly I don't think you'd see much difference given your usage habits with that either. Certainly not enough to justify the extra cost.

If anything I'd say your best upgrade option at this point in time would be to wait for the DX11 cards and replace the GTX260 with one of them.
 
Well, I won't be going i7 for a while, it sucks for gaming and my E8400 is stable at 4.12ghz right now. I was mainly looking for a hard drive upgrade since that's really where I'm lacking before DX11 cards come out. I'll have money by then anyways for that. But talking about the now, 1x SSD 30gb and 2x 640gb Blacks and the new mobo should be fine for what I wanna do right?

I have a HUGE music collection and it's growing faster than ever. I like to save just about everything and I will usually rip my movies onto the PC for safe keeping as I hate having a ton of dvd cases lying around. This way I can put those up in the attic or some place like that.

So, the 2x blacks, 1x ssd and mobo are good then? $415.
 
Bad idea. You do not want RAID 0 for storage. Just get a couple cheap 1TB drives; they'll be just as fast in practice and much more reliable. With 4 drives in RAID 0 if any of the 4 drives die you will lose everything on the array.
 
I agree with silent circuit. Single drive performance should be good enough for what you've talked about so far, no real need for RAID0 and therefore no need for a new mobo. I'd go for a couple 1TB green drives for your music storage, no RAID. For boot/os partition, get a single 640GB black. When you upgrade your platform, or when SSDs get cheaper, then upgrade to an SSD (single or array).
 
I know the risks of RAID 0. I just want performance. I've got another couple drives that will be running auto-backups, one nightly and one weekly. So, that's not a problem.

The only thing is, if one drive dies, I know all data is lost, but do the others die as well or can they be formatted and re-used?

I'm for performance, no matter how little it is. I know the risks of the RAID 0, so yea.

Also, I've heard bad things about the Green drives, the Blacks are more bang for your money according to other hardware forums I'm a member at.

But you know what, I do want an iPhone 3g before any of this and if we can get out of out current phone contract I'm going to wait a month and get the iPhone. My computers can wait another 2 months for more hard drives lols.
 
Last edited:
The green drives are good for plain old storage... fast enough while consuming less power. If you want performance, its the black drives you want.
 
why not a true hardware raid controller and run those 5 x blacks in raid 5 you get the performance you're after and the fault tolerance and then your array can always move to your next rig with you no worries about that.

and that is true longevity out of your $
 
A true hardware controller is like $500 for a good one isn't it. I'm just going to wait a bit thanks for the help though.
 
bryce said:
The only thing is, if one drive dies, I know all data is lost, but do the others die as well or can they be formatted and re-used?
Click to expand...

No, the other drives don't die and the can be reformatted and reused.
bryce said:
A true hardware controller is like $500 for a good one isn't it.
Click to expand...
It depends on how many SATA ports you need. A new 4 port true hardware RAID controller is around $300.

If you don't mind buying used hardware with little or no warranty, you could buy a Dell Perc 5/i card off eBay for ~$100 or so plus two of these SFF-8484 to 4 x SATA Cables for ~$25. Thus, you get 8 ports and a true hardware RAID controller for around ~$125 or so. Add a battery backup unit for ~$40 and you're set in case of power outages as well up the performance. Not a bad deal considering that a new true PCI-E hardware RAID controller is around $300 (Areca ARC-1210) for 4 ports.

EDIT: As of May 2009, it seems that you can find many Perc 5/i cards with the BBU and PCI bracket for $120 and under. Excellent price!

But those Dell Perc 5/i cards are finicky about motherboards. It will take up PCI-E x16 slot if you don't have a PCI-E x8 slot.

Read these threads for more info:
Dell Perc 5/i RAID Card: Tips and Benchmarks
Finally went to a Hardware Raid5 controller...
Dell Perc 5/i - Mainboard Compatibility List
Solution for Dell Perc 5/i for Intel Chipsets
Add 8 device SAS/SATA 256MB BBU Enterprise class RAID card to your rig for about $100 w/ PERC 5i (LSI 8480E OEMed to Dell)
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top