The (new) Official PC building thread!

Your PC's not even that bad GTR, I wouldn't worry about it. Most of the stuff i want to spend money on is quite trivial really, more disk space, and primarily, quietness. It doesn't cost much to make a PC fast these days, but it's still quite expensive to make it quiet.
We have a 360 (co-owned), a Wii (owned by Nick), a PS2 (owned by me) and a Gamecube (owned by Phil), and I enjoy using the older consoles every bit as much as the newer ones. The only reason I would want a PS3 right now is GT5, and that's too much money for one game, especially when it isn't out yet lol.

Pepp: Nice, that's an admirable storage array. How much did all those drives set you back? A lot of my drives are a couple of years old and so set me back a lot. The 37GB Raptor, four 250GB drives, a 400GB and a pair of 500s collectively cost me £580. Can you say "ouch"? You can get ten 500GB drives for that money now.

 

Sam - the 250 came with my last computer - one 500 was a christmas present but I think £58 was paid, one 500 was a kick back from a supplier about 2 odd years ago so was free (retailed at about £150 at the time if I remember rightly) and the final 500 one I bought in January for £70 (is eSata external).

 

well i just got me a PCI exspress card so i can add another IDE cable. gonna hook up my 100gb seagate hdd make that my master with the OS on it. then use the 250gb sata as slave. seeing its sata do i still need to change it to slave and the ide drive as master? or can i have the ide drive and sata working together?

 

A PCIe card for IDEs? That's one way of doing it I suppose. Are all your PCI slots full, or are you saving them?

 

Shouldn't the Sata drive give you faster performance on your OS?

 

well with this mobo i only have 1 ide connector. and yes i have both my ide ODD's hooked up to that.

im sure the sata would be faster for the OS but not by much? im not really sure. they both ar 16mb cache. so i dont realy know how much faster the sata is over the ide???

with me doing it this way. im just gonna hook up the 100gb hdd install xp on it. do i have to format the sata drive or can i leave it alone as a slave drive take the stuff off of it then format it fresh like?

 

I'm sure he meant PCI card not PCI-e.

What's funny is that I bought one today too. lol. NOT for an HDD but for Optical drives. As you guys might know the DS3P only comes with ONE IDE connection and I have this obsession with ODD's and I need to be able to hook up more than 2 ODD's with IDE capabilities sometimes.

Sam I picked up one of the 120mm AeroCools too. linky to fan Do you know if they will run with less than 10v? The specs indicate @ 10v-14v operational range but I know most fans will operate from 5v to 14v. tia.....

.....gm

 

no i think i ment PCI-e??? here is the linky to it...lmao

Linky to PCI-E

@greensman
whats going on here we thinking along the same lines here the past couple days???

 

Yup that's PCI-E.

You know what's funny? I've been mixing up you and GM for the past few posts lol.

 

CINCY---Thats a good use for a PCIE 1x slot, good price for extra IDE and SATA ports. Maybe I should do that instead of spending extra on the Gigabyte GA-P35-DS4 Rev. 2.0 with 8 SATA ports--- I already have 5 SATA devices with 3 500GB Samsung Spinpoints (which I plan on experimenting with RAID 5, the board supports it) and 2 Lite-ons

 

i dont know if i should put in my new red 120mm antec tricool led fan, or mess with my hard drives first???

 

The DS4 has better cooling.

 

I'll be honest with you lot here, i don't see a storming difference between IDE and S-ATA hard drives for OS performance, the access times are very similar. The only innate benefits of the architecture anyway are that the drives are newer tech, and that only seems to give benefits for size, transfer rate and noise. Actual performance loading XP off an old 160GB IDE versus a new 500GB drive isn't really that much different. You have to get a Raptor to really bring down the OS times, it's all about the transfer rate.
CincyRob: Unfortunately that's the way with things these days, people just don't expect you to use IDE much now. I hardly ever use an optical drive and all my HDDs are S-ATA so I rarely have call for even one connector.
You can install XP with a data drive attached, but you can't install XP to a drive that already has data on it. Hope that helps.

Greensman: I thought about that, but chose not to make that assumption, and it turns out I was right. Why not a PCIe controller card? They make PCIe RAID cards, they're the only version really worth buying!
On the Aerocool fans, they should spin up reliably at about 7-7.5V, that sort of region. Although they will stay spinning if you drop the voltage to about 4, fans need a much higher voltage to start spinning than to stay spinning, if you get my drift. Running them at 5V all the time isn't advisable, Running them at 7V all the time would probably be fine. With higher rpm fans (the 140mms are only 1000 or so I think) the required voltage drops. Deltas will, unsurprisingly start reliably at as little as 3V, so you could run them off a pair of AA batteries! lol
I don't think I've ever seen a fan with as many blades outside a graphics card, but with that many and at 1800rpm that fans going to make a high pitched noise, it'll not go un-noticed. Scaling it back to 7V should give you about 1050rpm, which should render it as quiet as the 140s, if a little higher in tone.

Jeez, three more posts in the time it took me to write this.
Deadrum: It is a cool use, it's time to find me some S-ATA equivalents to boost how many drives I can have in my server.
Rob: Why not both? Installing a fan is simple, so do that, and then mess with your hard drives - it'll keep them cool during the install lol.

 

LOLZ...

My bad, I wasn't even thinking of the 1X PCI-e cards. I agree with DeadRum on the card rob. Nice buy and I wish I had the option of that card instead of the one that I purchased.

You got a 120 Antec RED LED fan?? Nice, where did you pick it up? hehehe. You get any other goodies??

....gm

 

Heh, are you going to be pleased with me Rob, The red version of my case should arrive tomorrow for me to stick my server in, three red LED case fans hooray! Probably going to stick some Lazer LEDs in there too for added effect.

Sorry to disappoint Gm, but I turned down the green version, it was very limited in stock and £15 more...

 

@deadrum33
when i was at microcenter i had a different card in my hand before i got that one. it didnt have the sata connectors but had 2 ide connectors. so you could hook up 4 total ide devices. it was $2 more.

@sam
yea i know i cant install over a data drive.
what i was trying to say was.i am going to hook up the IDE hdd as slave. reformat it(wipe it clean). then take out the sata drive set it as slave. then put the IDE HDD as master then install xp on it. then just plug the sata drive in(as slave) copy the info i have on it to the 100gb ide drive and then format the 250gb and hopefully it will get all 250gb of the drive back..

i know once i format the 100gb and take out the sata drive i have to change boot up order to disc drive, to instal xp.
once thats all done go back and change the bootup to HDD. now the 100gb drive being master, it will see that, and boot to it and not the sata drive?

i gotta find a longer ribbon for this PCI-E card i dont think this one that came with it is long enough.

and for another question. i hook up this HDD to the ide card i have a empty spot on the ribbon. can i hook up a ODD to it? or can it only be another HDD seeing i allready have a hdd on that ribbon?

ok im done..docTY where you at buddy i got one of your post going here...lol

 

@sam
thats way to cool. you have to take a pic and post it with all those red lights going...lol

@GM
you want one of them PCI-e cards?
yea got a few other goodies with that fan.couple disc with some info on them. a boat sized power plug...lol


edit:
ok im done here going to play with the bigREDmachine...lol

 

Isn't there a limitation of four IDE devices for a PC regardless of whether you have a card? Or is it only a max of four per chipset?

As for your plan, it'll work, as long as you've only got say 80GB of stuff on the 250, for obvious reasons!

You can hook up two drives on the same cable, regardless of what they are. It's supposed to reduce transfer speeds, but I never noticed.

You have my word on the pic, there'll be one here when they're setup - both cases together.

 

as of right now i only have about 20gb of stuff on the 250 right now. thats what im hopeing to fix with the newer XP install to be able to see all of that drive.
ok gone now.

bbltr