Upgrading, advice and recommendations welcome

DamoKen

Hi, fast running out of space with my existing storage so looking into buying another bigger sata drive. However, I'd also be of a mind to tweak my other existing components by way of cooling etc to improve performance. Don't think I'm going to be buying new cards etc as this would involve a major outlay due to the fact I've got an Asus AV8 Deluxe AGP mobo.
So firstly looking into getting a CPU heatsink and graphics card cooler to replace the stock coolers which have been bugging me for a while with noise.

Also on more recent games such as Fear and the latest to act up Prey there has been an increasing tendency for my machine to hang, the game sounds continue though I'm looking at a frozen screen. Alt-tab out of the game or Ctrl-alt-delete results in a screen of interference, messed up horizontal lines of color streaking across the screen with a repetitive crackling coming from the speakers. The only option here is to reboot.

My card at the moment is an X800XT PE and my processor is a AMD64 3500. I've noticed of late that other games which used to play without a hitch such as Rome Total War can now sometimes freeze mid battle. This starts with a general slowdown of frames and artifacts appearing so with this warning I sometimes manage to exit in time before a general reboot is required. Not sure if this is the card on it's last legs or an overheating issue though so advice on this would be welcome. The card isn't that old, just under 2 years and I've never overclocked so would be more than annoyed if it's on it's way out given the money I paid for it!

Anyway, parts I'm looking at would be as follows:

For the processor the Scythe Ninja Plus Heatpipe CPU Cooler -> http://www.scythe-usa.com/product/cpu/006/scnj1000p.html

For graphics card Arctic Cooling ATI 1 Rev.2 -> http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/ArcticCooling/ATISilencer4_Rev2

Additional Hard Drive Hitachi Deskstar E7K500 500GB SATA2 16MB 7200RPM -> http://www.komplett.ie/k/ki.asp?sku=310965&s=sc.
A question on adding another sata drive. I currently have a 74gb raptor and 200gb Barracuda installed through the VIA Sata controller. This leaves the Promise Controller with 2 Sata inputs available. Would there be any problems attaching the new drive here or is it as I hope a simple matter of enabling the PRomise Controller in the Bios and attaching the drive through the Promise Sata1 and restarting the machine?

Additional components I was thinking of were rounded IDE cables for the dvd drives and floppy to improve airflow such as these -> http://www.overclockers.co.uk/acatalog/IDE_Cables.html.

So that's it for the moment, was also thinking maybe of updating my processor to a AMD64 4000 or similar as they seem to have really dropped in price, would there be an appreciable performance boost in doing so?

Anyway if you've managed to read this far thanks! Any thoughts on what I've listed here, better components, other ideas for improvement or other reasons why I've been getting problems with certain games please let me know.

By the way, I've recently updated my bios, soundcard and graphics card drivers to the latest versions. The problems were occuring before this and still are, though I've found other bugs in certain games to have gone.

8T8

Graphics card cooler sounds like it could be failing so if you are getting a new quieter cooler anyway that should hopefully kill two birds with one stone.

The Arctic coolers are generally well regarded though Zalmans is as well and is worth checking out.

As for the CPU cooler I've seen Scythe recommended by some but still the benchmark to beat are again Zalman with the 9500 series still one of the best.

As for the HD Hitachi are good no complaints there, as for hooking it up to the Promise controller you should not have any trouble it should work in the manner you describe. Do a dry run and hook up your second 200GB HD to it and see if it works, you will of course need to get the driver for the controller, also in the bios it "may" have a setting to operate in IDE or RAID mode or similar sounding words basically IDE mode = standalone hard drive not in a RAID array. In the unlikely event it doesn't work because it's one of those oddball & very annoying controllers that are RAID only then you dodged the bullet so get a PCI SATA controller as well.

From a single Core A64 3500+ to a single core A64 4000+ not worth it for a 200Mhz increase get an X2 4200 instead it wont be faster single core wise vs your 3500 because of the same clock speed but it will make the machine much more responsive with dual cores.

DamoKen

Hi 8T8, good to hear from you. Sound advice as always, and as always much appreciated.
I was looking for Zalman coolers for the card as well, to be honest I didn't see anything that seemed to be made with the x800 series specifically in mind, the artic cooler seemed from the reviews I read plus overclocking sites one of the coolers of choice for this type of card.
Looked into the Zalman cpu cooler going on your recommendation, really good reviews and as it's available from sites I'd generally buy from whereas the Scythe is out of stock or not listed on them, I think I'll go with the Zalman.

Was planning to do that tonight with my secondary drive, that is hook it up with the promise controller and see how it goes. As to loading the promise drivers, intially when I was setting up the machine I used the asus makedisk utility to create drivers for both controllers. Just wondering, at what point would I be prompted for these, would it simply be a new hardware detected message after installing through this controller and then insert the disk?

As to the processor upgrade, been out of the loop for the last year or so on development so haven't paid more than cursory attention to the dual core development. Just wondering, would the performance increase justify the extra outlay? Main resource intensive usage would be games & dvd encoding, for the encoding I've managed to live ok with the 3500, a noticable boost would be nice, but unless it was significant I might just go with the cooling for the moment.

cheers

8T8

The Promise controller drivers will be requested when you boot into the Windows and get to the desktop through the usual found new hardware wizard.

You can acquire the latest drivers from Asus website under the downloads section for your motherboard.

Dual core in gaming only makes a small difference at the moment as there are only a few titles that make use of multithreading but the number that do are increasing.

Currently the biggest benefit for dual core is in general usage of your operating system it makes running multiple programs a lot smoother and video encoding does get a large boost though it depends on the program if it is multithreaded but many video encoders are.

DamoKen

Hi 8T8, checked out the options on the Promise Controller in bios last night and it looks like it can be used in a stand alone mode as well as RAID mode by switching the option to IDE mode. Tried this and switched the sata cable from what I thought was my secondary drive to it. Unfortunately I used the primary cable by mistake, forgot SATA1 is the second input from the top, not the first , was detected straight away by the promise controller though and it attempted to boot into windows. However it started going into a loop then coming back out to the post screen and retrying.
So I turned off the machine and switched the cable back to the Via controller, however now I'm getting a message stating NTLDR missing, press CTRL-ALT-DEL to restart.

I figure I must have screwed up either the boot sector on the drive or maybe corrupted the NTLDR and/or the NTDETECT.com file. Would this be the case or are there any other likely reasons.

The primary drive is definitely detected by the via controller though as when I remove all connectors I get a message stating no storage devices found. Is it then a simple matter of booting from my copy of WinXp on cd and going through the recovery console running fixboot & fixmbr?

cheers

8T8

If you have the XP install CD-ROM boot it to get access to the recovery console.

Run these from the command prompt
fixboot
fixmbr

then type exit

That should fix it, don't worry it's not gone there is another way to fix it listed here if the above does not work.

Also another way from here

Windows XP users

1. Insert the Windows XP bootable CD into the computer.
2. When prompted to press any key to boot from the CD, press any key.
3. Once in the Windows XP setup menu press the "R" key to repair Windows.
4. Log into your Windows installation by pressing the "1" key and pressing enter.
5. You will then be prompted for your administrator password, enter that password.
6. Copy the below two files to the root directory of the primary hard disk. In the below example we are copying these files from the CD-ROM drive letter "E". This letter may be different on your computer.

copy e:\i386\ntldr c:\
copy e:\i386\ntdetect.com c:\

7. Once both of these files have been successfully copied, remove the CD from the computer and reboot.

DamoKen

think we might be using the same search engine . Going to try those tonight starting with the recovery console and take it from there

cheers

DamoKen

just an update for anyone who may experience the "ntldr is missing" message. Fixed it simply by booting from the WinXp cd, going into the recovery console (if you have sata drives have the drivers floppy to hand and load same as you would with a new install). Press 1 and then whatever your admin password is when prompted, then just copy over the following files like so:

copy e:\i386\ntldr c:\
copy e:\i386\ntdetect.com c:\

where e is your cd drive.

Initially tried the fixboot & fixmbr which didn't solve the problem, in fact may have contributed to a boot.ini config error i.e. "Invalid BOOT.INI file, loading From C:\Windows" so try the above first.