The Official Graphics Card and PC gaming Thread

I have 2 WD1001FALS 1TB drives. I don't believe i've boughten a better drive. While I love my 150Gb VelociRaptor drive to death, the FALS drive has Speed AND storage. In fact, I wouldn't mind half a dozen more of the freaks! My xp machine employs one of the drives. It boots up quicker than any machine i've ever owned. The other is my main storage drive. I've had it up to 90% of capacity, and it still performed fairly well.

 

Hmmm!

Well, I guess for now I'm good with the 500 gig drive, but you guys are probably right. For sure with the new rig I'll be adding more games, and I'll need something in the terabyte range.

Jeff, I didn't quite get something you said:

I could turn one of my machines into a file server - but how do I do that and what do you mean, "fileserver from which to install" and also what do you mean eliminating my optical drive? I'm a total newbie on this subject, so if you could spell it out for me that would be helpful.

Kevin, I'm just doing some reading now on newegg about your Fals drive, since you recommend it so highly. It has two processors - I remember noticing that before as I was going through the newegg drives. It goes into a deep recovery pattern from time to time, which makes it drop out of a Raid array, so it is not suitable for Raid - but that's no problem since I'm not thinking Raid any more.

I was impressed by some stuff I read just now about the drive that said "Its mechanism ensures automatic discovery, isolation, and repair of problems which may develop in a hard drive."

That hit home for me, because I just had a 160 gig samsung, which I have owned for quite a while, but which used to be used just as backup storage in an external case for a long time. The drive was fine, until I just in the last two weeks loaded it up with games again - after thinking it had gone bad which it hadn't. (It was the ide cable.) Anyway, when I got near the end of the drive, all of a sudden it got really slow.


SAMSUNG SLOWS TO A CRAWL
Re-think really slow, cause I mean it was crawling. XP took 70 seconds to boot. Return to Proxycon, the first 3dMark6 took 63 seconds to load. When I finally finished the clone to the WD 500 that I'm on now (cloning took about 12 hours) then, on the WD, XP was back to booting up in under 20 seconds, and Return to Proxycon loaded in total of 14 seconds, 4.5 times faster.

I put the 160 gig back in service, and attempted to fix the slowdown. When I applied HD Tune to the 160, it read 3MB/sec sequential read. All of my other drives, old 40 gig, 80 gig, whatever, are at least 30 MB/sec. I thought I was reading it wrong, but I tried multiple times, HD Tach and HD Tune, plus some tests couldn't complete - they ended in read errors. The new WD 500 is 80-90 MB/sec as I mentioned before. When I ran error checking on the 160 samsung, it found a bunch of bad sectors at the end of the drive. I ran Windows scan, and check for bad sectors and try to repair - I let that run all night, I took off the games toward the end of the disk and defragged a bunch of times, deleted restore points, everything to speed up the disk, but it appears that the disk is fatally slowed down. I pulled it from the machine and put it on the shelf for now. I'll keep it as a backup for the WD for a while and then finally toss it when I clone the WD to another drive, maybe one of the sata Seagates.

So my point is, when I see the Fals say "Its mechanism ensures automatic discovery, isolation, and repair of problems which may develop in a hard drive" all of a sudden that is language that I am interested in. "Problems which may develop in a hard drive."

Let me just ask you guys. What could have happened to my hard drive that caused it to slow down to 3MB/sec sequential read rate - slowed down to crawling!! Anybody ever had that happen before? I haven't.

Rich

 

That's because it doesn't. Games are too focused on random read performance and CPU performance for loading times. The raw MB/s increase but slower response of RAID has no effect on loading times. I know because I tested this myself
The reason for all this is exactly as you say, textures and so on are compressed within their files. There are two ways of doing this, large data files (such as 1GB+ .pak files) or individual component files (some games have 50,000 + individual files on them) - for the big files, the CPU does the work. For the thousands of files, you want random read performance, as the seek time of 7200rpm drives is going to spend ages trying to find them all. RAID doesn't help in either of those instances.
By the way Rich, if you're thinking of cloning your hard drive, don't do it for the one you have your OS on, only do it for one that stores games/data - a new system will probably not boot windows off the drive due to the hardware incompatibilities with your currently installed drivers.
You have also missed the point about HD video - that's not how it works. A 1080p video uncompressed would indeed be 155.5MB/s but from where? Certainly not off the disc. The files goes to the CPU (and sometimes the GPU) to process the codec it's compressed with, and that 150MB/s output is merely shared between the CPU and the graphics card, or just in the graphics card internally, the disk certainly doesn't have to keep up with 150MB/s, only the file in its compressed size, typically anywhere between 500KB/s for low-grade HDTV rips, to maybe 7MB/s at the most for a raw bluray (and if it's a raw bluray it's probably coming off the BR drive, not the HDD isn't it?)
Graphics texture memory isn't especially big - don't let GTA4 fool you. the thing that really takes up memory is the processing the graphics card has to do. Remember the graphics card is a mini PC in itself, when it anti-aliases the textures that comes in, it uses memory to perform that operation, along with apply the lighting effects etc. Typically lighting and shaders are all GPU dependant, but textures and AA do certainly bump up the requirements. The textures themselves will be small, as they are repeated lots of times in certain areas (e.g. tree textures), and are not always in high-res state. Think about how many textures the game is not using at any one stage. In a typical 7GB game, textures are unlikely to take up more than about 3GB of the game, and yet such a game may use up 1GB of video memory to play at max settings - you certainly won't be using a third of the game's textures, maybe less than 5% of them.
I've not tested the raw read rate of my HDDs in ages, I do know my 500GB WD 7200rpm can write sequentially at at least 72MB/s as I used it to do just that with LAN file transfer.
You're finally starting to learn I think - one fast drive for the OS (has been a Raptor for me up until now - will be an Intel SSD before too long) and one standard drive for games - currently a 750GB Samsung, soon to be paired up with a 1TB Caviar Black - space is so chronic for me now I've installed half a dozen games, if not more, to my file server, and run them across the network - surprise surprise that is not good for loading times.

What we mean by eliminating your optical drive is converting games to iso files or using noCD patchers which means you don't have to put the CD in every time you want to play a game, in much the same way Steam games work. It's very handy and something I've been doing for many many years, before I came to aD even.
Rich - the deep recovery pattern affects all WD drives since pretty much ever - it is only ever a problem if the drive has a fault - assuming you have a working drive, it works fine in RAID. On top of that, you can usually patch in TLER support for the basic drives to stop the deep recovery from happening should you want.
You answered the HDD question yourself - bad sectors. Never good. Bad sectors, if not reallocated, are game over for a hard drive - have it replaced.

 

i say dont put your games on your OS drive as when you want to reinstall the OS etc, your games are gone.

personally i need a 50GB OS drive, thats why the 80GB intel Gen2 SSD seems perfect for that.

 

Agreed. I don't quite need 80GB for the OS, but the extra storage (and more to the point, the lack of performance drop-off with SSDs) means I can install a small number of my most used games and programs to it for better performance. if/when SSDs become as cheap as HDDs are now for large storage amounts, one will see use as a primary games drive.

 

Well my first drive is completely OS, programs and games installed. My second drive is local storage including all of my current projects and disk images plus storage for movies and my 80GB+ lossless music collection. My Intel quad machine is my file server. The 500GB drive is largely OS and game installs for use as a secondary gaming rig. Then I have a 1TB WD GreenPower in where I store most of my torrents and other large downloads. I want to add another one pretty soon too. Then my LAN box with my dual core AMD has my two old 320GB Seagates. One for installs and one for storage.

Having a good size storage drive in every PC is extremely handy. Like when I work with big files, RARs, torrents, direct download, etc, it doesn't use up the bandwidth of my Install drive. Ever try to copy a file or unRAR 25GB while playing Crysis? With two HDDs it suddenly becomes a normal part of multitasking.

 

Thanks Sam for confirming the lack of usefulness of Raid for gaming. When you say random reads and writes, are you saying then that a drive with low access times - like the velociraptor - would possibly be a good bet? I have a feeling you're gonna say yes.

I guess I could pick up two VelociRaptors - that's about $400 in drives with current rebates. I could put all my OS's on one, some of the programs, and the rest of the programs on the other. (Of course that puts me back to re-installing all my programs, lol.) Or I could get a 15k drive, about 80 gigs I think, for about $140, and put the OS's on that, then the 300gig Raptor for the games. That would actually hold me for a while since my games right now are only 100 gigs. (I just added Company of Heroes - beautiful! - more on that in a future post.)

Also, on cloning over the hard drive to take to another motherboard, I know there is a potential problem with xp, but from a lot of google information, I have the web sites that explain exactly how to do it, along the lines of: "Under XP you'd change it to generic PCI IDE controller (since almost anything boots with that) and that would render the system bootable (then you'd *immediately* shut down the system while attached to source hardware, then move to destination hardware, and it should be fully bootable)."

Wow, you guys really use your drives, and comparatively I don't use mine at all! LOL So if you have an SSD for the OS, then you create 2 partitions - one for XP and one for Vista? What about windows 7? Just between xp and vista, don't you have most of the 80gigs used?

I'm going to have to get the detailed info from you guys on getting rid of having to put the game disk in the ODD in order to play it. You create an iso? Doesn't that mean I need special DVD clone software? Is that kind of software illegal? If legal, where do I get it? I know I sound like a complete newb, yes, I am.

By the way, some more newb questions: when a game is running, let's say you have 2 gigs of Ram, how much disk access does XP make to keep itself going, and how much disk access is there that the game itself makes to keep itself going. Isn't most of XP in main memory, along with most of the game, at least at that particular level?

Or, am I completely wrong, and there are always a ton of random reads and maybe writes going on all the time?

Rich

 

Jeff: Lol not really, Crysis runs badly enough as it is, I tend not to try and multitask with it
Rich: Exactly what I mean, random R/W performance is what you're after, a velociraptor is good for this, but an SSD is just in a different league. When addressing a large number of small files, which isn't unusual for some games the results look something like this:
5400rpm eco drive: 300KB/s (yes, KB/s)
7200rpm standard drive: 450-500KB/s
10k velociraptor: 800KB/s
Indilinx based SSD: 10.5MB/s
Intel SSD: 36MB/s

If you're not willing to spend the $350 on an SSD (believe it or not they're much cheaper in the UK) then your best bet is to get a velociraptor for the OS, and something like a 1TB 7200rpm for the majority of games, and if you're feeling affluent, maybe get a second velociraptor to install some of the more strenuous stuff on.
I never partition my drives for dual boot, I do it the old fashioned way - two separate physical HDDs, one OS on each - choose which drive to boot in the BIOS and you're done - no worries about installation order then, and no faffing around with GParted. Not to mention it keeps the drives tidier. (Remember however if you get an SSD, don't defrag it, or you'll break it!)
With XP at least and 2GB of RAM, at the desktop almost everything is loaded into RAM when used, and the HDD isn't used much from that point onwards. With Vista/Win7, 2GB RAM isn't enough to sustain the system, and you will get a lot of paging - that will see you with lots of HDD activity. Ultimately, 4GB, or even 6GB of RAM is thoroughly recommended.
You may or may not have noticed rich that all the initial core i5 stuff has been released today

 

my brother uses 2GB on vista 32 prefectly fine. 64 need 4gb though

 

Well, there's not much point having more than 2GB in vista 32-bit, but then again, there's not much point having Vista 32-bit at all...

 

Happy days, A mate's selling me his Thermaltake Soprano to me for a tenner not the best case I know but it's better then the sh** box I have at the moment.

 

Well, better than nothing I suppose, but far from ideal :S

 

I didn't think the Soprano was *that* bad :L

 

It's very poorly made, poorly designed and poorly cooled. The CM Centurion is a better case in every way

 

If I actually was paying for one new I'd probably buy the CM 690 or is that massively wrong as well...?

 

The CM 690 is not bad, but IMO the NZXT Tempest and HAF 922 are much better cases.

 

for £10 its very good!

 

Yeah a Cooler Master Centurion would set you up right. Even the models with the 80mm intake are surprisingly well cooled. Or maybe it's just mine because it's the older model with a mesh front. Either way they are nice, simple cases with quality construction and a good layout. Only the high end Thermaltakes are worth taking a look at. But for $10 it's worth the buy if you really consider it an upgrade.

The CM690 would be great. Very well made and good cooling

 

True that.
Check the PC build thread, about to post some interesting i5 related facts.

 

Surely anything is an upgrade from a 'dabs value' case that came with a 600w PSU and was £30 new... And the plastic front pulls away from the unit when you remove things from the front USB's... And the front light strips cable quite often fall out of the molex which it isn't soldered into...