Archived from groups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage (
More info?)
Thanks for all your advice Shailesh,
You've been pretty thorough at answering my questions. I'm going to go with
the mobo/cpu/mem upgrade and possibly play around with raid later. The fact
that the games will only 'load' faster was a great help!
Thanks again,
David
"Shailesh Humbad" <noreply@nowhere.com> wrote in message
news:NHi0d.4506$_z4.491@fe1.columbus.rr.com...
> David wrote:
>> Thanks Michael,
>>
>> I'd just like to gain some extra performance - wherever it is! Having
>> read that Raid 0 makes a significant improvement but I cant say where
>> until I've tried it.
>>
>> Thanks for your advice, as I thought the mobo/cpu/mem would be a better
>> choice for speed in games like the forthcoming Half-Life 2. I've got a
>> decent graphics card if I do change the rig.
>> Only thing is WindowsXP - I rang Microsoft to see if I could transfer
>> over my copy which I bought as OEM for my homebuilt machine a few months
>> ago. They said I could change just about everything else apart from the
>> motherboard. To be honest they were a bit vague on changing the hard
>> disks as well even if I kept the old setup. They said "it's all the
>> interpretation of the licence! So it will cost me an extra £65 for
>> another copy of WinXP Home which bumps the total up to a little more than
>> I can afford. Guess I could get Win98SE cheaper but I feel cheated that a
>> copy of WinXP I've had for only a few months is now useless!
>>
>> Thanks for listening to my rant,
>>
>> David
>>
>>
>> Hence the Raid question.
>
> If you get RAID-0, you will want something to do backups. For example, a
> 120GB for backups, and two 80GB for the RAID itself. Hard drives have a
> failure rate, and two hard drives together in RAID-0 have twice the
> failure rate, so keep this in mind.
>
> You can use a 120GB with an 80GB in a RAID-0 array, but the capacity will
> be twice the capacity of the smallest drive, i.e. 160 GB. Most hardware
> RAID doesn't allow you to partition the wasted space as a separate drive.
>
> As for XP, if you upgrade the computer, it might ask you to reactivate it.
> Just call them up at the activation line, tell them you changed some
> components, and they'll give you a new number. It's painless. I reused
> my license key through about 5 upgrades before I had to actually call.
>
> Look at this chart:
>
>
http://www6.tomshardware.com/cpu/20030217/cpu_charts-27.html
>
> The Thunderbird 1.4 has a rating of 3602 on the PC Mark 2002 synthetic CPU
> benchmark. If you get an XP 3000, you'll go up to 6646. That is almost
> double the performance. If you can afford new RAM, CPU, and Mobo, I'd go
> with this before the RAID.
>
> Look in http://www.pricewatch.com/ for motherboard combos. You can get an
> XP 3000 kit with a Gig of RAM for around $250. For a bit more, you can
> get one of the lower-end Athlon 64s, and then you'll be smokin'.
>
> I have an XP 2500/Radeon 9600 pro and was playing HL2 (via the CS Source
> beta), and it rocks. On a Thunderbird, it definitely wouldn't be as nice,
> and having RAID would only make it load faster.