Best gaming system

[hachiman]

What do you think of this as purely a gaming system?

I'll be using XP Pro.
I suspect the Ram is 266FSB.

Motherboard:Gigabyte GA7VA VIA KT400
Processor:AMD Athlon XP 2800
Memory:1GB (2 x 512MB PC2700 DDR)
Graphics Card:ATI Radeon 9800 PRO 8x,128MB DDR,TV OUT,DVI


Or the same system'but with


Processor:AMD Athlon XP 2600 (200 less MHz)
Gigabyte GA7VAXP Ultra Raid

Thanx

<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by hachiman on 07/21/03 02:19 PM.</EM></FONT></P>

 

[shadus]

Shrug, looks fine.

Course the 2.4c intel would be faster and cheaper.

Shadus

 

[hachiman]

Ok

But which one of the 2 options is best?

 

[shadus]

A motherboard generally isn't going to make a massive difference in speed unless one is dual channel and one isn't.

Either looks fine, the first would probally be faster.

Shadus

 

[TheMASK]

PC2700 RAM is not 266 FSB. It is 333 FSB. And the processors are both Bartons right?

Either is a good set up. The RAID on that mobo is S-ATA RAID or P-ATA RAID? If it is P-ATA RAID, i wud go with the Ultra RAID model with the 2600+ Barton.

<b>still</b> thinking of a good sig. till then...

 

[Crashman]

I wouldn't give VIA a dime of my money, and you don't have to, with all these superior nForce2 chipset boards on the market.

<font color=blue>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to a hero as big as Crashman!</font color=blue>
<font color=red>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to an ego as large as Crashman's!</font color=red>

 

[HardWareBoss]

For gaming go with Intel 2.4c one heck of a Cpu for overclocking. Mobo Abit IS7 or Asus P4P800. with at least 2 x 512 of Ram.

 

[hachiman]

I like Athlons so i'll stay away from pentiums'but thanx for the advice.

How about one of these Mobo's instead?

Motherboard:MSI K7N2 Nvidia Nforce2 8x AGP
Processor:AMD Athlon XP 2800
Memory:1GB (2 x 512MB PC2700 DDR)
Graphics Card:ATI Radeon 9800 PRO 8x,128MB DDR,TV OUT,DVI
WIN XP PRO


Or the same apart from

Processor:AMD Athlon XP 2800
MSI K7N2 DELTA SATA RAID 8x AGP

 

[ChipDeath]

I like Athlons so i'll stay away from pentiums'but thanx for the advice.

I like athlons too, but don't let it make you blind to a better deal. <b>Do</b> seriously look into how much it'll cost you, bearing in mind that a 2.4C P4 will probly beat a 2600+ at virtually everything.. does cost more though, but if you OC it, you'll end up with a beast of a machine that'll destroy any AMD based rig you can build today.

however, for a cost-effective AMD rig, you can't beat a Barton 2500+ based system. good at stock speeds, not too expensive, and a good overclocker. Pair it with a good nforce 2 board (Epox 8RDA+ is great and fairly cheap ATM) And You've got a pretty decent system.

There's no point getting a RAID board unless you plan to use it...

---
$hit Happens. I just wish it would happen to someone else for a change.

 

[hachiman]

Thanx

By the way i am still fairly new to this.
So a stupid question.
What exacly is RAID??

Thanx

 

[ChipDeath]

It's a feature that some motherboards come with, but you can get add-in cards for it too.

a full explanation would take ages... but:
RAID allows you to use multiple hard disks as one, in many configurations, e.g:

you can set it so it 'shares the load' between two disks [well, 2 controllers really..] - this increases performance by a small amount, but if one HDD dies, you lose <i>everything</i>. Windows would see a single drive which is the size of both drives added together (if they're the same size) This is known as 'Striping' or RAID level 0 [zero].

Or you can set it so one disk 'mirrors' the other one - whenever something gets written to disk, it writes the same to the other one. the advantage of this is that if you lose 1 disk, you still have everything, exactly as it was. Useful for servers - that sort of thing. the only problem is you pay for 2 HDDs but effectively only ever see one of them. ( the other is kinda 'invisible' to the OS)

You can set up arrays for loads of disks - e.g. you can use 4 disks and set up a combination of the two above (RAID 0+1), so you get the best of both worlds...

And then with SCSI there's loads of other weird RAID algorithms, for splitting data over 5 disks with redundancy.

That's kinda a quick beginners guide, and while perhaps not technically perfect, gives you some idea of what RAID is for.

---
$hit Happens. I just wish it would happen to someone else for a change.

 

[shadus]

Here's an explaination with a bit more depth:

Raid 0: Striped Disk Array (Not Real Raid, Faster Disk access) [Min 2 Drives]
Raid 1: Mirroring and Duplexing (Basic Redundant Raid) [Min 2 Drives]
Raid 2: ECC (Doesn't really exist) [Min 3 Drives]
Raid 3: Parity (Not Very Common, but occasionally used.) [Min 3 Drives]
Raid 4: Parity Blocks (Not Very Common, lousy performance.) [Min 3 Drives]
Raid 5: Parity Across Disks (Long Rebuild, Good System.) [Min 3 Drives]
Raid 6: Extended Raid 5 (Shrug. Unused AFAIK.) [Min 3 Drives]
Raid 7: Proprietary Crap (Shrug, proprietary, 'nuff said.) [Min 3 Drives]

Then you have hybrid raids...

Raid 10: Mirroring and Striping (Raid 1 Degree of Redundancy) [Min 4 Drives]
Raid 0/1: Striping and Mirroring (Raid 5 Degree of Redundancy) [Min 4 Drives]
Raid 53 or 03: Raid 3 Array of Stripes (Fast, Large Disk Useage) [Min 5 Drives]

Honestly, I've done 0, 1, 5, 0/1, and 10... the rest I know functionally nothing about other than what I've read.

<A HREF="http://www.acnc.com/04_01_00.html" target="_new">http://www.acnc.com/04_01_00.html</A> is where i pulled most of the info on the ones I wasn't familiar with from.

Shadus

 

[HardWareBoss]

Just to give you Intel choice. Your welcome.