Couple questions about upgrading.

[bmxdave]

I will be receiving my tax return shortly and I think I'm going to upgrade my rig and I have a few questions. My current specs are:

AMD Athlon 64 +3200 Newcastle Socket 754
1GB Crappy DDR400
ASUS K8N-E Motherboard
ATI All-In-Wonder 9800 Pro
Various IDE harddrives

I'm looking to upgrade to:

AMD Athlon 64 +3800 or +4200 X2 Socket 939
2X 1GB Corsair XMS
ASUS A8N-E Socket 939 NVIDIA nForce4 Ultra Motherboard or undecided Micro ATX board
2X WD 10,000 36GB Raptor Harddrives set to RAID 0
ATI X1900XT maybe

Obviously I will see a significant increase in video performance, but from the processor side of the house is this a good decision with the +3800? Why or why not?
Also, if I use a RAID 0 setup, can I have an additional harddrive unrelated to the RAID? Thanks.

 

[mpjesse]

but from the processor side of the house is this a good decision with the +3800? Why or why not?

Yes, especially if you do other things besides gaming. Why? There are already a slew of games that support/use dual core. More and more programs are using dual core everyday. Definitely a smart decision.

Also, if I use a RAID 0 setup, can I have an additional harddrive unrelated to the RAID?

Yes. If I'm not mistaken, that board has a SI RAID contoller (which can be used in JOBD mode) and 2x IDE ports. Going with dual raptors is also a good decision, you will see significant increase in both booting windows and launching/using everday applications. Additionally the page file/virtual memory will benefit.

Overall I'd say your choice in components is excellent. Quick question though, what are the timings on that memory? The reason I ask is going from CAS 2.5 to 2 doesn't make a noticable difference. And neither will adding another GB to your system (that is unless you're doing a billion things at once). Just something to consider.

-mpjesse

 

[bmxdave]

Yes, especially if you do other things besides gaming. Why? There are already a slew of games that support/use dual core. More and more programs are using dual core everyday. Definitely a smart decision.

Ok, sounds good. I wasn't sure how much of an increase going from a +3200 would be.

Yes. If I'm not mistaken, that board has a SI RAID contoller (which can be used in JOBD mode) and 2x IDE ports. Going with dual raptors is also a good decision, you will see significant increase in both booting windows and launching/using everday applications. Additionally the page file/virtual memory will benefit.

Ok, so I would not be able to use an additional SATA non-RAID harddrive?

Overall I'd say your choice in components is excellent. Quick question though, what are the timings on that memory? The reason I ask is going from CAS 2.5 to 2 doesn't make a noticable difference. And neither will adding another GB to your system (that is unless you're doing a billion things at once). Just something to consider.

-mpjesse

You know, I'm not sure what the CAS latency is on the RAM that I already have. It was generic stuff I bought not really knowing anything about the latency. While all the games and applications I use might not use 2GB of RAM, I think its a good investment as games are becoming more and more taxing on system resources, BF2 for example.

Thanks for the advice.