Have some questions on a new build

achensherd

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Sep 7, 2006
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Hi, I'm currently building a new PC, and was wondering if I can get some help/opinions. This setup is meant to be a cheap, general-use/occasional-gaming/media machine, will probably reside in an mATX case or a minitower ATX case, and will not be overclocked.

The parts are:

AMD Athlon X2 3800+
ECS C51GM-M
Seagate 400 GB SATA II HD
Thermaltake 500W PSU

Some questions I have are:

The Seagate HD that I got is 7200.9, which doesn't have the perpedicular recording technology present in the 7200.10 drives. While I'd keep this drive anyway for secondary storage or possibly RAID, would a 7200.10 drive perform better, and if so, would it be worth it for speed/reliability's sake? One particular 7200.10 drive I'm looking at is Seagate's 320 GB SATA II HD here

The ECS C51GM-M, unfortunately, has only two SATA ports. I got this motherboard with the Athlon X2 as a combo deal at Fry's - otherwise I'd have gone for something else. In any case, as I plan to use two optical drives, a DVD-RW and a DVD-ROM, and want to future-proof them to some degree by getting the SATA versions, I'd need way more than the two ports on the motherboard, especially if I RAID multiple HDs. My question is, are the SATA PCI-adapter cards out there good for multiplying the number of SATA ports? Wouldn't there be a drain on bandwidth if, for example, multiple HDs are RAIDed through one of these cards? If not, and these cards are good, what are some recommended ones, if they're not all relatively the same?

In order to get the setup up on its feet, I'm going to "borrow" 512 MB of DDR2 533 from my Dell. However, I hope to get better RAM for it sometime soon. It looks me to me that DDR2 800 would be ideal for an Athlon X2, but as I don't have much of an understanding of FSB to RAM ratios and CAS latencies, is that really the case? I've heard some say that DDR2 533 would be good for a Core 2 Duo, for instance, even though Core 2 systems can take DDR2 800. What would be good for an Athlon X2?

Thanks.
 
Hi, I'm currently building a new PC, and was wondering if I can get some help/opinions. This setup is meant to be a cheap, general-use/occasional-gaming/media machine, will probably reside in an mATX case or a minitower ATX case, and will not be overclocked.

The parts are:

AMD Athlon X2 3800+
ECS C51GM-M
Seagate 400 GB SATA II HD
Thermaltake 500W PSU

Some questions I have are:

The Seagate HD that I got is 7200.9, which doesn't have the perpedicular recording technology present in the 7200.10 drives. While I'd keep this drive anyway for secondary storage or possibly RAID, would a 7200.10 drive perform better, and if so, would it be worth it for speed/reliability's sake? One particular 7200.10 drive I'm looking at is Seagate's 320 GB SATA II HD here

Tom's did a review of the 7200.10 and since the perpendicular technology allows a higher areal data density on the platter, it will be faster than a 7200.9, but not by a lot, so keep your 7200.9. Reliability should be the same.

The ECS C51GM-M, unfortunately, has only two SATA ports. I got this motherboard with the Athlon X2 as a combo deal at Fry's - otherwise I'd have gone for something else. In any case, as I plan to use two optical drives, a DVD-RW and a DVD-ROM, and want to future-proof them to some degree by getting the SATA versions, I'd need way more than the two ports on the motherboard, especially if I RAID multiple HDs. My question is, are the SATA PCI-adapter cards out there good for multiplying the number of SATA ports? Wouldn't there be a drain on bandwidth if, for example, multiple HDs are RAIDed through one of these cards? If not, and these cards are good, what are some recommended ones, if they're not all relatively the same?

SATA PCI adapter cards can expand the number of PCI slots, but you have to remember that the PCI bus bandwidth is a total of 133 MB/sec and a decent SATA HDD will throughput 55-85 MB/sec. So adding a PCI SATA card and putting one HDD on it is fine, putting two on it could saturate the PCI bus. You will want a PCIe SATA card but your board has only an x16 slot (and an IGP) and an x1 slot. I assume that you do not want to use integrated graphics so that you can put a good PCIe x4/x8 RAID card in the x16 slot, so I'd suggest any of the 2-port PCIe x1 SATA cards on Newegg. If you want a decent unit, then the HighPoint RocketRaid 2300 PCIe x1 card is a PCIe x1 and has 4 SATA ports on it. Since the PCIe x1 interface gives 250MB/sec, four drives on it could be troublesome, but with 3, you'd have zero problems with saturating the interface.

In order to get the setup up on its feet, I'm going to "borrow" 512 MB of DDR2 533 from my Dell. However, I hope to get better RAM for it sometime soon. It looks me to me that DDR2 800 would be ideal for an Athlon X2, but as I don't have much of an understanding of FSB to RAM ratios and CAS latencies, is that really the case? I've heard some say that DDR2 533 would be good for a Core 2 Duo, for instance, even though Core 2 systems can take DDR2 800. What would be good for an Athlon X2?

Thanks.

The Core 2 Duo has a 1066 MHz frontside bus to the chipset. The RAM is controlled by the northbridge and then the data that the CPU requested is sent from the northbridge to to the CPU over its FSB. So a dual-channel DDR2-533 setup (1066 effective) will be all the bandwidth that the FSB can handle. So any RAM above and beyond DDR2-533 will have no benefit to the CPU unless you overclock the FSB as the FSB is the bottleneck.

The Athlon 64s all have the memory controller inside the CPU, so there is a direct line from the CPU to the RAM and no bus to saturate. So you get more bandwidth from DDR2-667 than DDR2-533 and more from DDR2-800 than from either of the other ones at all. DDR2-800 is the fastest RAM that the memory controller can handle at the moment, so RAM faster than DDR2-800 will just be run at DDR2-800 speeds unless you overclock the CPU's memory controller (via the LDT "bus.")

So to put it in a nutshell, your Athlon 64 CPU will run okay with DDR2-533- just not quite up to its full potential. Also, since the clock rate on DDR2-533 is 266 MHz, it leads to a multiplier of 7.5 needing to be used to get the CPU speed to its full 2 GHz. Half multipliers default to dropping down to the highest integer value, so your DDR2-533 will run at DDR2-498 IIRC. DDR2-667 runs at 333 MHz, which goes cleanly into 2GHz, and DDR2-800 runs at 400 MHz, which again goes cleanly into 2GHz. You will want DDR2-800 when you get new memory and as always, lower latencies are better. Most DDR2-800 is 5-5-5 and some of the better stuff is 4-4-4 or even lower. The tighter timings get you better performance, but not by all that much. The less expensive DDR2-800 should do you fine with your CPU. But put that DDR2-533 in that box until you get better RAM as a computer running at 95% speed is far better than one not running at all.
 

achensherd

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Sep 7, 2006
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18,510
Thank you very much :D - that was very informative, and answered my questions clearly and perfectly. For the SATA issue, I got a new motherboard instead - an ASUS M2NPV-VM - more SATA ports, better chipset (slightly). I figure if one of those PCIe cards is going to go over $100 and take up a slot, I might as well get a $100 motherboard to (to some degree) eliminate the issue (and then some).

Thanks again :D