Sophocles, I normally read the Storage review site becasue they seem to know HDs better and have more HD based tests for checking you choice of HD against the database. I noticed mistakes in the testing. 4kb clusters are needed for booting in XP. They used 128. I assume this means they weren't booting from raid or using a swap file on the raid drives.
Hmm! I thought that the article made exactly the point of real world use. If you look at the gains that the RAID0 74 gig raptors made over a single version of itself using ipeak winstone business 2004 hard disk performance, it averaged a 22.5% gain (found the percentage of each and took their average) and these were its best showing throughout the test, most of the other tests were washes. The 150 gig Raptor averaged a 21% gain over a single 74 gig Raptor across the board. Below are the tests methods used and more than half of the benches are office related tests. Note: Anadtech has a reputation for no bull sh*t testing.
Should I go with the Opteron 175 or 180?? I'm looking to upgrade here next month...thanks Looks like they overclock to FX speeds fairly easy.
elusiv1 I might be the wrong person to answer that question since when faced with the same choice I chose the Opteron 175. Then again, maybe not.
Hey siber, Good to see you darkening our door once again. Opteron 175, best bang for the buck. Use a good mobo, good RAM, a well ventilated case, and a good cooler and you can OC to match the top end processors at less than half the cost and not have to resort to liquid cooling. I've been paying attention and doing my homework. LOL That's what I'd go with.
elusiv1 As I pointed out elsewhere, you're paying about $300 for the 200MHz difference between the 175 and 180. It's just a matter of where you want to start. Sophocles has his 175 clocked to 2.67GHz and running stable with air cooling. How much higher will a 180 OC and stay stable?
Thanks, all of you, that is exactly what I needed to know. 64026402, I even went to check quickly what you could have meant with 'better binning'. I think I understand.
Thanks brobear and Sophocles, I have chosen the 175 becuase of "bang for buck" as you guys mentioned earlier. I've got a good motherboard, memory, cooling...etc.etc I need some help with a CPU cooler, any help would be appreciated. My bios is flashed to 1014, what bios are using Sophocles?? I figure anything above 1011 and you should be fine...thanks
elusiv1 I'm using Bios revision 1016. siber When a particular core of a CPU is manufactured they all come off of the same assembly line. A Core of a make such as venice are all the same regardless of their rated speed but their individual quality might vary. In the beginning as the chips come off the assembly line they are tested for their tolerance and ability to hit high clock speeds. If the do well then their clock multiplier is adjusted to make them the top of line but if they do so so then they are adjusted to fill the niche at the bottom of the line. The Opterons are basically the very best of the Toledo cores with supposedly superior silicon as well. They're core name is Denmark but I'd bet the same architecture goes into both the Toledo and Denmark core. Binning is just testing the same chip for variations in indvidual quality within a given line.
Sophocles, I was just pointing out that the Raid tests were setup incorrectly and used mostly tests that would benifit very little from the extra transfer rate of a Raid array. If those benchmarks represent what you do with your computer then you wouldn't get much from Raid 0. If they had setup correctly and used benchmarks that would tax the array it would have been more informative. As for Anandtech, I read their stuff but the articles are annoyingly bad somtimes. I do things that benefit from the higher transfer rates so I use it on 1 machine. My real world is obviously different from theirs.
Thanks again, Sophocles. I'll check in with you guys from time to time. Always really interesting. In this threat I don't think I am going to read much from the really 'temperamental' transient members of AD, if you know what I mean. Over and Out.
Thanks for all the opinions. In an ideal world, I would go with the raptor and another caviar, say 160GB or 200GB, but to be honest I'm not sure that I could afford it, I'm lookin at £1399 as it is. At the moment unless prices dramatically drop I think I'm going to go with the single Raptor 150GB, and split into one 20GB partition for Windows, and the other for installing games, and storing media etc. Hopefully the speed loss won't be too severe with two partitions. I can forsee needing 88MB/s to load Vista, and/or the later big games on DVD9s.
Siber, Noticed no one answered your cooler question. I have a good one listed in the shopping list I posted. The Zalman's are good, but they're a bit on the large side. So, always make sure you have space, especially for the larger ones. Newegg has some listed. Theonejrs put one on his "firecracker" Prescott and tamed it well enough to do some good OC(ing).
I'd beware of that term for a processor, you never know what might happen... Hehe. It's difficult to strike a balance between quiet, powerful and low-profile. Unfortunately I prefer all three. Usually means ££££.
If you're referring to "firecracker", it's appropriate for the Prescott P4s. They're known for running hot, as in fire, and if OC(ed) without proper cooling, they tend to blow out, crack. Therefor, firecracker is appropriate. But with good cooling, they make a good performing single core processor that benefits well from performance tuning of the system. Theonejrs showed that with his.
64026402 We're probably not far apart in our thoughts and I do in fact play games, when I find the time to get away from you guys. But I've read other reviews as well that suggests that Anadtech has it right. Besides running business applications and games and running an actual server, how many other types of use are there? Video encoding? Faster hard disks do provide some encoding gains but not as much as one might think considering that a 7200 RPM hard disk can provide transfer rates that are many times faster than our encoders are capable of processing. Then if one takes into consideratiion the 2 gigs of high speed memory that I have there is plenty of room for read ahead and as a result the hard disk is being used considerably less for Paging. If you remember the first article that I posted the 150 was compared to the best server drives out there and all though it did a respectful job in the tests the scsi are better for large data transfers. But the article also suggested that WD has awakened to the fact that it is the enthusiasts market that has been driving their sales and as a result they've adapted to market demands. But in their conclsuion storage review had this to say. This last statement from storage review directly correlates to the one made by Anandtech on single disc use although Storage Review weren't testing RAID 0's.
Brobear, If you a looking for a good water cooling system that doesn't take up to much space, Look into the WaterChill Brand Systems By Asetek...
Gottawin With the processor I have all I need is a heatsink and let the case fan do the cooling in stock condition. OC(ing) a Northwood 3.4 to 3.8GHz is just a moderate change and easily accomplished with air cooling. A good fan-heatsink similar to the one I listed in my shopping list would be more than adequate for the job.
