View Full Version : Greatest Performance Increase?
which of the following would increase system performance most(based on system spec listed in signature that is):
Gainward Geforce 4 128MB (£256)
Maxtor Atlas III 10k 73.4GB SCSI hard drive & U160 SCSI CARD (£800!! roughly)
Athlon XP 2000+(£320)
2x Western Digital 800JB(8MB cache) drives in RAID 0 (£200)
Another 512MB PC2100 RAM (total 1024MB) (£119)
Epox 8K3A & 512MB PC2700 RAM (£280 odd)
which of these would offer the greatest performance increase for gaming and other things(3dmark score could be considered as apossible factor to improve)? and which would be the most cost effective?(not jsut the cheapest if its not gonna make no difference?
Also, could i run my present system and any of the possible upgrades listed with that Quiet PSU?
deja
[ 23 June 2002: Message edited by: dejavu ]
from experience I would say the video card is the main factor in improving performance. For instance a xp2k with a g2mx seems slower than a xp1600 with an ati 8500 so if you were me I wound spend the spondoolys on the v/card first then the next thing would be memory......
i got a couple of bottles of my mothers wine in me so excuse th spelling!!!!!
The Pimp
23-06-2002, 09:30
Originally posted by scottie:
<STRONG>i got a couple of bottles of my mothers wine in me so excuse th spelling!!!!!</STRONG>
Ouch!!! That sounds painful (in best Graham Norton voice) :D :D :D :D
TBH the biggest bottleneck in the PC system is the HDD's transfer rate. Synthetic benchmarks such as 3DMark mean next to nothing in real world performance as if a card doesn't support a certain function, it's score is dramatically reduced & you probably would never use that function in any of the software that you are using anyway.
I would personally get another HDD of each that you already have in your system & RAID 0 them as 2 striped config's. You would see much better performance straight away. I have 3 of the Seagate Barracuda IV 7200rpm drives in this system here (2 of them striped in RAID 0) and the performance difference between the RAID array & the single drive is very noticable.
The processor would be my next upgrade as the GF3 is more than ample for today's games & with Doom 3 coming up quite quickly, even the D3 team are saying that ATI gives better performance than the nVidia cards on this game. I would wait until then to decide upon a new gfx card.
£320 for a XP 2100+ is very expensive though as you can get these for less than £160 inc VAT!!!
right, well i was quoting most prices from a kustom price list, may be a bit out of date though :)
and i hear that seagate barracuda IV's hate RAID, dunno why but apparently seagate openly admit this fault, i found western digitals were a lot better for RAId and the 8mb cahce version(special edition) are fast even on their own
The Pimp
23-06-2002, 16:08
No problems here with the Barracuda IV's on RAID, because these are the latest firmware & BIOS revision drives from Seagate. The original Barracuda IV's had an issue, which is why the other one of the 3 is on the standard IDE channel & not on the RAID :D
The way I lok at it is why should I buy one WD drive when I can get 2 Seagate's & run them in a RAID array for less & get the same capacity (or more) & performance??? Having 4 drives in a RAID 0 array will increase read/write & seek times more. The price on the Seagates at present is so low that they are almost giving them away at the price I pay for them.
Graeme*Kustom*
23-06-2002, 19:13
watch you didn't look at athlonMP - they are more expensive, designed for dual cpu systems....
The Pimp
23-06-2002, 20:46
Originally posted by Graeme*Kustom*:
<STRONG>watch you didn't look at athlonMP - they are more expensive, designed for dual cpu systems....</STRONG>
worth it though if you are an overclocker as the vast majority of them are multiplier unlocked straight out of the factory :D :D :D :D
well im not sure if i got the latest seagate barracuda IV's how do you tell? after a certain date of manufacture or a thing on the hd?
Rim Block
25-06-2002, 18:41
Ok,
Graphics card. Do you notice any slowdown with games at the moment ?
Hard Disc's, do you have an U2W Scsi card at the moment (or U160 / U320). You will need one of these if you want to use a 10k drive at full speed. I have 3*36Gb Cheetah 10k drives stripped and they run quite well if a little noisey. £800 for a 73Gb drive just seems like a waste to me (and I bought a 2nd generation 9Gb 10k drive for £500 when they came out). I have just bought two Maxtor 120Gb drives and stripped them. They are only 5400rpm but after they are striped it is not so much of an issue (they are also only used for storage).
Basicly if you need to capture video / are rendering or using a very heavy disc intensive bit of software then use Scsi, if not then don't unless you have moeny to burn and if that is the case don't waste it, just send it my was :D .
Adding memory. What do you use the 512Mb for ??. I have 512 in my 1.333Ghz machine and rarely hit 300Mb in use (even with a few big programs that are very memory intensive like zeonews pulling articles from 16 different news servers).
I would suggest getting a reasonable size U2W+ 15k Scsi drive would probably make the biggest impact. 18Gb 15k drive = £225 & Adaptec U2W card from e-bay = £75. Stick your system on it and most used games, use the other disks for storage and less used bits & pieces.
The processor would also make an impact but probably not as much as you would expect. I usually wait until the processor I am using is half the speed of the latest model and then get one model down from the top.
Another suggestion if you have got money to burn is to get something like an Ati AIW based card so yuo can watch tv on the P.C. (saves needing to have a seperate tv in the computer room) and capture video to burn onto vcds etc.
You also don't seem to have a dvdrom drive listed in your spec's so you may want to get one of those.
Just MHO. ;)
Rims.
Oh like your monitor. Got one when they first came out and it is still going strong.
:)
Mr_Nemesis
10-07-2002, 06:37
I'd go for SCSI myslelf... HDD's are the main bottleneck on most systems these days.
My next system has a SCSI planned (Adaptec card in a 64 PCI slot along with a U160 Seagate Cheetah) which I'll just install my OS's on... A friend of a friend has an all SCSI system (he spent £3000 on the bugger), and the HDD performance is so abominably fast... it might not give you stupidly high benchmark performance, but with any program that uses virtual memory or lots of swapspace you'll see a significant performance boost.
Mmm... dual MP 1900's on a Tyan Tiger with SCSI... :D
My personal setup will be a 10/20 GB SCSI with the 40 GB Barracuda IV from this box with a couple more big-and-reliable-but-slow RAID 1 drives for my documents, then I should be able to store all my music and vids on the comp... luvverly.
OK, me stop drooling now.
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