Anyway, with the advent of PCI Express and some of the new advances that have been made in other areas (dual-core, anyone?) I started looking into it, especially as my income doubled a few months back (yay credit for other people's sales!). I've finally got some cash to kick around, and I'll be selling my motorcycle soon (which will just be that much more green stuff I don't know what to do with), so I was looking with a different perspective at high-end systems. I've already got a bunch of stuff I'm happy with, that is all non-on-board peripherals (i.e. monitor, storage, etc), so it's not a full-on system build, just mainly a replacement of the ol' CPU/mobo/RAM/Video. This helps a bit, because I can nudge myself up a little further into the higher end of the spectrum without feeling too much like an idiot, because that's money I don't have to spend on other stuff.
I looked into the Athlon FX-57 at first and then decided that, while I certainly liked that extra edge when it came to gaming, I'd like something that comes really close in gaming but cranks out unreal benchmarks in day-to-day stuff and heavy-duty operations, so I ended up deciding on the Athlon 64 X2 4800+ (appropriately cooled of course). I wanted to mount that on an MSI K8N Neo4 Platinum SLI board. I also decided I wanted more than 1GB. Hooray for memory-hogging MMOs! But I wanted looow latency stuff. I also wanted to buy a video card that, yes, may be $150 more than you should really be spending, but that would last me forever, allow me to tack on a second one in SLI later, and give me some reasonable bragging rights in the mean time
So I figured what the hell and went with a 7800GTX.And, after all that, I decided that since I've all all these new SATA ports open and available, I should really go ahead and realize my dream of two 74GB WD Raptors chained together in RAID0.
Fun to play with all that, isn't it? Here's what the cart looks like. Scroll to the bottom for the price.
AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800+ Toledo 1GHz FSB Socket 939 Dual Core Processor Model ADA4800CDBOX - Retail *COMBO DEAL WITH:* MSI K8N Neo4 Platinum SLI Socket 939 NVIDIA nForce4 SLI ATX AMD Motherboard - Retail (1 @ $1,032.00 total)
THERMALRIGHT XP-120 Heatsink - Retail (1 @ $68.99) & VANTEC SF12025L 120mm 2 Ball Case Cooling Fan - Retail (1 @ $11.99)
CORSAIR XMS 1GB (2 x 512MB) 184-Pin PC3200/DDR400 with 2-2-2-5 timing (2 @ $183.00)
MSI NX7800GTX-VT2D256E (Lite) Geforce 7800GTX 256MB GDDR3 PCI Express x16 Video Card White Box - OEM (1 @ $465.00)
WD Raptor WD740GD 74GB 10,000 RPM Serial ATA150 (2 @ $183.00)
Subtotal: $2,309.98
Yeah, that's right, with overnight shipping, that works out to around $2350 (shave $20 for "Express Saver", but why snivel over $20 and take that much longer to get your shit when you're already out over two grand?). Yeesh. Can I afford it? Yeah. Is it really the responsible thing to do? No. Would it make me happy? Yes. Can I cut a healthy chunk out of that and still come away with a decent upgrade? Yes. Will I do it? I'm not really sure at this point. I think I may wait until I sell my motorcycle and use some of that money for this purpose, I don't know.
On the 74GB Raptor drives versus a new, large-capacity 7200rpm SATA II drive with NCQ, I actually did a little research into it, and they do approach the overall performance of the 36GB Raptor, but they still can't make up for seek times, and the WD740's performance numbers remain out of reach. Additionally, the WD740 does support TCQ (Tagged Command Queuing), which is allegedly supported by the Sil3132 controller that comes on the K8N Neo4 Platinum SLI board that I'd get and is officially supported by the nForce4 SLI chipset on which the board is based, though it's not the buzzword these days as manufacturers sort out the implementation roadmaps and such with SATA II, so it's not advertised as heavily.
See the article on Tom's Hardware entitled Can Command Queuing Turbo Charge SATA? for performance comparisons between the 7200rpm NCQ drives and the 10000rpm TCQ Raptor. The results may surprise you:
And regardless, I don't want or need the storage, really, as I use my system drive for OS, apps, and games installation, and nothing else. I have drives for storage handled separately. My old 80GB ATA-100 WD SE drive I'm using now is still overkill as far as storage capacity is concerned. So in my case, it seems like the pair of WD740GDs in RAID0 would be the most effective, performance wise, though not the pinnacle of frugality.Seagate's advertisements for the Barracuda 7200.7 with NCQ purport major performance improvements. First, the hard disk is supposed to work as fast as other drives at 10,000 rpm, such as Western Digital's Raptor. However, the company's ambitious claims are not realized regarding access time, data transfer rates and I/O performance.
Meanwhile, it can be said that Command Queuing offers improvements for the application benchmark Winbench 99 2.0, which simulates access of typical business and high-end applications. In this case, Seagate's hard drive actually is only slightly behind WD360.
In any case, no current SATA hard disk is ready to hold a candle to the WD740. The data rate is too high and the access times are too short. Thanks to TCQ, it is possible for the big Raptor to beat the WD360 based on IOMeter benchmarks as well.
