What do you think of this System?.

Shamie

It's selling for IR£3600.

Supercell

£3600 and they give you Maxtor's hmm, wouldn't be my first choice.

Shamie

IR£3350 for that one.

Maxtor DiamondMax 80s are the best Hard Drives around.

Trojan

I don't see much point in supplying a raid card with only 2 disks, particularly at level 0, you need to do mirroring to get any practical use from the card and that defies having the expense of 2 disks...

Do you plan on working on disk-intensive tasks? Or is immediate data recovery or down-time that important to warrant the expense? If so, you probably need to add in at least one more drive, otherwise I think you should drop the raid card and upgrade something else if possible.

Al.

Hecate

Imho there isn't much point in having raid in a home system, and looking at the configuration thats what it seems to be; as Trojan said it's only really useful for mission critical stuff. You would be better off with scsi.

Sonic

Over the past 3 years out of 7 maxtor drives i have put into machines 5 have failed. in work we bought 12 dell dimension 4100's with 20 gig maxtor drives, after 6 of these drives failed i got dell to come out and replace the drives with IBM GXP's.
As you can imagine i dont think much of maxtor. Gerry whats your opinion on this

po0k

Am, scrap the RAID, go for one sufficiently big Ultra-3 SCSI 160 spinng at 14000rpm, and a SCSI CD burner or better yet, a DVD burner. Why would you have RAID ina ahome system?
More money then sense...
Why modem? why not ISDN or cable (if your in the area)?
Also, get a Athlon too, waaay out performs P4s at same or even higher clock, and get some of that new 300Mhz DDR ram, the stuff above 266 Mhz. And a decent mobo to support it.

While your at it get a 40" Plasma Wall-mounted screen too, seems like you have the cash.

JustHalf

Yes. Go ask Micron can you have some of the RAM they're only sampling now. Go on, I dare you.

BTW, that system's pretty expensive. Want me to try sort out a cheaper one?

llatsni

I build an almost identical system to that athlon 2 months ago for less than IR£2000, Specs:

Athlon 1GHz @ 1.33GHz (10x133, soon to be 10x140)
Quantum 40GB (7200, 100)
Abit KT7A Raid
Internal ZIP 250
Creative 5.1 Platinum
Geforce 2 GTS
Yamaha 16x,10x,40x
AOpen 16x DVD
512MB PC133 Crucial
Sony 19" Trinitron
Keyboard, Intellimouse, Ratpad
And a few other goodies...

So emm £3400+ is, let me say it politely, Crap.

JustHalf

From OC:UK ->
Shopping Cart (Prices in British Pounds)
Enermax EG465P-VE 431W ATX Power Supply x1
Corsair 256MB DDR PC2400 CAS-2 x1
Corsair 256MB DDR PC2400 CAS-2 x1
Pioneer DVD-106 Region Free! - OEM x1
Plextor PleXwriter 24/10/40A Burn-Proof CD-RW - Retail x1
AMD Athlon Thunderbird 1.4GHz "AYHJA" 266MHz FSB (Socket A) x1
Abit KG7-RAID (Socket A - AMD Thunderbird/Duron) x1
IBM 60GXP 41.2GB UDMA100 x2
3.5" Floppy Disk Drive - OEM x1
OcUK Super ThermalRight SK6 (Socket A/FC-PGA) x1
Arctic Silver II x1
Asus V8200 GeForce3 Deluxe (AGP) - Retail x1
Delta 80mm Fan x1
Delta 60mm Fan x1
Chrome Fan Guards - 60mm x1
Chrome Fan Guards - 80mm x1
Hercules Game Theater XP - Retail x1
Microsoft IntelliMouse Optical USB/PS2 Mouse - OEM x1
Microsoft Natural Elite USB/PS2 Keyboard - OEM x1
Creative Modem Blaster 56 External - Retail x1
Rounded Ultra ATA100/66 IDE Cable (0.9m) - White x2
Rounded Floppy Cable (0.6m) x1
Subtotal: £1,333.63
Shipping: (Parcelforce Euro 48) £93.00
VAT: £249.71
Total: £1,676.34
= £2094.30 Irish, including delivery

You still need:
A monitor, speakers, case, OS

ITDirect are selling the monitor you are looking for here:
CPD-E400P Sony Trinitron CPD-E400P 19" Monitor .24dp IR£406.17(ex VAT) IR£487.40(inc VAT)
CL20001798 Creative Labs Desktop Theatre 5.1 DTT2200 IR£91.65(ex VAT) IR£109.98(inc VAT)

You can pick up a full tower case from Maplin or the like for around 80 quid (with a PSU, though you don't need that one) and if you're a student you can get the OS cheap with Microsofts student deals.

I'll guess 180 pounds for these two, leaving you with a grand total of:
-> £2871.68 - and that's Irish.

Add to that these facts:
* This system is better than the system you listed... better RAM, better hard disks, and probably better graphics card (I doubt the deal includes a v8200 Deluxe, probably the "pure" card)
* Even this probably isn't the best deal you can get... but I'm not your personal shopper! look at www.dabs.co.uk, www.overclock.co.uk, www.overclockers.co.uk, www.scan.co.uk and compare prices. Remember that the delivery charge for the monitor and case will likely be a lot (I was going to get a 19" Diamondtron from OC:UK, but the delivery was over 100 quid sterling).

JustHalf

Sorry, forgot about the printer.. but it's still unlikely to be over 600 quid for it

Supercell

Originally posted by Shamie
Maxtor DiamondMax 80s are the best Hard Drives around.

I'm sorry but the words "Maxtor" and "best" in the same sentance is stretching credibility to the limit. Perhaps they get pretty good benchmarking figures at the moment but as anyone who has ever had to support them will tell you, don't expect this to last...sooner rather than later expect the clicking sound of death from them.

Maybe Maxtor have turned things around but time will tell and a LOT of people won't touch them, particularily in a raid 0 config, yes this is going to be damn fast but twice as likely to fail, which is a pretty awful thing given Maxtors reputation.

Don't say we didnt tell you 12 months from now (which i really really doubt the two of them will last..)

IBM have a solid reputation, have had for some time and still do...would be a far better choice IMHO, in any scenario raid zero is a fast config but a very risky one..you need more drives for reliable, fast and safe raid.

JustHalf

RAID 5 with 4 disks!

astrofool

Raid 5 uses a logarithmic way of backing up, i.e 3 disks, and if either goes down, all data is safe, data amount is 2/3 of total drive space, + it's slow

speed wise the best is raid 0, 2 disks acting as one, bandwidth is about 70% higher, and equals and betters alot of scsi devices

Raid 1 is for mission critical data

Raid 0+1 is the best of both worlds, but not quite as fast as Raid 1, + needs minimum of 4 disks

Use a Raid 1 2 x 60gxp here, best thing I ever got, load times of everything are tiny, have a 75gxp as a 3rd hard drive to back up data to, best of both worlds

those prices are hugely inflated, have built an A1.33 512 RAM abit board, server full tower case for under a thousand

po0k

to repeat the point raised earlier,
Why do you need RAID?
Who is paying for this system?
Why spend the guts of 4 grand on something that will be outdated in 6 months and worth about a quarter of the current price?
Then again, if you have the money(and consequentially no soul), go for it.

BTW, about the ram, I was exaggerating, I know its only being tested, but like those 'Best PC ever?' threads, you might aswell have a bit of fun.

astrofool

hard disks cost about 100 for a 40 gig drive, so u can RAID them to 80 gig's for 200 (60gxp's btw) A fast hard disk system can make more of a difference to the system then going up a couple of speed grades chip wise, and can be a relatively cheap big performance boost.

U only need it if you need a fast computer

JustHalf

Astrofool, I want to know if you know the answer to these two:

How will it speed up your system?
Will it speed up your games faster than a faster chip/GFX card/RAM?

po0k

RAID , imo, is really on neccessary for ppl with moire money then sense (*ahem* above *cough*), webservers, Storage blocks (see SGi, Sun, Cisco etc.), or database machines/intense number crunchers/research PCs (and even for databases an ScSI3 drive will do fine).
Its a waste to get a RAID for a home system. A bit fo good ram is a far, far better investment atm due to the prices (which can only feasibly go up soon - less chip makers go out of business), and if you give a game/ap enough RAM, it should never need to use a swap file (OS and software requirement issues aside).
Ohg, DiVXing is about the only home use I can think of to use that much space and data bandwidth for a disk.

astrofool

hehe, k, easy answers if needed....

A computer's speed is quite often determined by the slowest link in the chain. If the computer is reading from the hard disk, then the speed of the entire system will be determined by it's speed.

Windows uses a swap file alot, nt or 9x, reading to and from the swap file (thrashing) is where alot of the performance in windows goes to, despite fast chips and graphics cards, it goes to the slowest variable, the hard disk. A Raid offers you about 70% more performance from the slowest part in the system.

This won't help when the programs are already loaded, but loading times are cut in half quite often, graphics work as alot easier (a detailed graphic will fill all the RAM + more by itself) allow you to do more things at once, without slowing to a crawl due to thrashing.

It can then depend on the game, for an fps probably not, these games feed all the data into the cache on the cpu, and run out of there, adding buckets of RAM makes virtually no difference to these.

Any other type of game, generally yes. Strategy games, with stats stored on the hard drive, or need a huge swap file (like Unreal Tournament, an fps I may add....) Championship Manager type games, anything bar fps basically.

Windows will load faster at boot saving time, maps for these games will load faster allowing you first person in alot of the time.

RAM beyond 256 adds nothing to games, a faster hard disk or a RAID will. RAID's are now cheap, built in controllers + cheap hard disks mean anyone can afford them, u add about 80 quid to the price for double the capacity + faster hard disk system, not too bad really.

Apps will ALWAYS USE THE SWAP FILE, it's the way windows works multi tasking, in reality running a couple of programs at once or graphics work takes up huge amounts of RAM space, u'd be talking about 2 gig's of RAM or more, before you might not need a swap file.

RAID IDE is alot cheaper than SCSI drives, and are generally faster, a single scsi drive can cost as much as 4 IDE drives...

try setting the windows swap file to 0, see how far u get...

Boston

Mine cost over a grand less then that, and id benchmark mine against yours anyday. I'd Win!

Supercell

I'd add video capture to the list of things that home users often do that is greatly improved with a cheap ide raid solution.

JustHalf

Longfield:
Yeah, but how many do that?
Personally, if I was doing that, I'd buy a PCI RAM disk for my swap file/scratch disks. Very nice - and SCSI RAID card with appropriate (hot-swapable) drives, and maybe some sort of silly long-term storage solution, like paper.

'fool:
Ha! Show me one benchmark that shows a 70% sustained increase in speed for varying filesizes. If you're doing home graphics work, maxomg out your RAM (a decent board should give you at least 1.5Gigs worth of room) and have a decent performing drive and you're sorted. If you're going to be doing professional work, you should have a professional set up. IDE Raid isn't the best solution, and for this application at least, choosing it as the solution is like choosing a GeForce2MX for all your gaming needs. It's half-assed.

BTW, this is classic:
"RAID IDE is alot cheaper than SCSI drives, and are generally faster"
This is quite general, and allows you to argue that you are correct no matter what... class.

astrofool

have a read of this article explaining RAID:

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.html?i=1491&p=1

particularly the real world benchmark scores:

There is no question that a software RAID 0 IDE array will make your computer run faster, as the Content Creation Winstone 2001 scores clearly showed. Performance gains on the order of 13% are not negligible Just be sure that your software RAID chip is set to use its optimal stripe size, which we found in previous sections. The difference between a good stripe size for your card and a bad one can mean the difference between being faster than a single IDE drive or being slower than it.

the highest score being 43, 13% higher than the standalone IDE, in real world usage, thats about 4 speed grades chip wise higher to get that type of performance enhancement, maybe more due to the cpu i/o mismatch in systems

Read that and say RAID ain't worth it

cost of IDE RAID assuming you want 80 gigs of space for example

Standalone 80 gig drive 7200 rpm deskstar 75gxp cost: around 180 last I saw

Raid add on for motherboard: 20

Ide 40 gig: 90 60gxp
Ide 40 gig: 90 60gxp

cost is 200, now for 20 quid more u get a 13% boost to system performance, and thats not good value??

Course as you want less storage, RAID costs more obviously, but as with most things in computers, more is better, and 80 gigs is always nice to be able to use

SCSI drives require a SCSI controller, usually £100+, extra if you want one that can do RAID or uses ultra 160, the drives themselves are significantly more expensive than IDE drives, going up to £1000 or more for an ultra 160 10,000 rpm 6ms 4mb drive storing 80 gigs or more.

SCSI costs more because they are less used, genersally only being used in server's. IDE has become the dominant standard because it costs less in chip real estate to implement, that and the fact that as the cpu gets faster, so does the IDE system, as the cpu is doing all the work, RAID can take more cpu cycles if done in software, however seeing as the computer will be doing nothing while it waits for the hard disk information anyway, the cpu cycles are being used more efficiently.

Gerry

I'm on holidays, nice to see the board so active. Just a couple of things..

astrofool, windows nt/2k only uses the swapfile if you run out of ram. So more ram is better, however it only makes programs run faster after their initial loading, also the other programs do not have to be swapped out. I don't agree with your idea that running a few programs will take up 2 gigs. If you had 1 gig of swap on the go, your machine would be crawling. Most people would add more ram at that stage, if they were doing serious work. I have seen a machine with a gig of ram (in win2k) basically running everything from ram, ie windows was using the ram correctly, and after a few days, only user data was being read/written to and from the disk, all the programs were in ram.

More ram is far more beneficial to games than a faster hard drive, up to around 256 megs. If a game stops to read something for the hard drive, in the middle of a level/race or whatever, it doesn't matter how fast your hard drive is, it will still pause your game momentarily. And yes, a faster hard drive will benefit games, but only in terms of loading levels faster. More disk intensive games may benefit more I guess.

I do know the difference a fast hard drive makes, since I got an IBM 75GXP very soon after it was launched. It is very cool, since I would always be the first into a level. I don't think ide raid is the best solution though. Raid 0 is twice as unreliable as a single drive, and if you have a maxtor it's asking for trouble. Maxtor make decent enough drives, and they are improving, but their reliability is still not good enough. It is well worth splashing out on a fast hard drive, I just don't think raid is necessary for most people.

RAID 0, with 2 IBM 60 gxp's for example, is very useful if you are doing work which requires sustained reading and writing to disk. For example, professional graphics, and video editing. The striping is not so effective for small transfers, so you won't notice it in normal windows use. It would be a little help in games, but not really worth it either.

bonkey

Originally posted by astrofool
have a read of this article explaining RAID:

<snip>

Read that and say RAID ain't worth it

The benchmarks quoted are for measuring "overall" system performance. This involves perorming tasks such as opening huge documents to measure disk read-speed, and image-manipulating large images with sufficient complexity again to more or less ensure that memory is overloaded and swapping must occur.

These are not "real world" benchmarks. They attempt to determine average/overall performance. But no-one uses their machine in an average way - we all focus on one or two priorities.

if you are a gamer, for example, go compare your RAID system against someone who has spend the extra few quid on an extra chunk of memory or a slightly better gfx card. I pretty much guarantee that their 3dMark score will topple the RAID systems.

If you're looking at other uses for your system, then again, its a question of priorities. I work quite a lot with memory-intensive J2EE servers and so on. For me, more memory is a winner every time. You can improve your load times of large documents, but cutting my disk-thrashing by 50% through more memory will far outweigh the benefit of allowing my thrashing to occur faster.

There are situations (video editing being one) where IDE-RAID can be a cheap solution for the home enthusiast to gain performance benefits, but it is not a panacea for improving system performance.

jc

po0k

Is there anything to add about RAID? No?
Fair nuff.

Shamie.
Please explain
a) who is paying for the system
b) what the system is intended for
c) your of a soul spending so much cash on a hoime system. not that i'm jealous. oh no.

Praetorian

Im sorry to have to admit it but the 1900mhz p4 does easily beat the AMD 1400. How do I know?? Ive benchmarked both. VIA and S3 are releasing new chipsets for ATHLON mobo's that will apparently deliver 10-15% more speed. For the moment there is no point buying a new athlon and board, because the desktop ATHLON4 core will be out v soon.

Athlon TBirds are fast and cheap but run extremely hot. My pc sounds like a 747 jet engine.

The P4 2000mhz for example is much faster, in fact it beats the 1400Athlon by miles in all benchmarks. For proof check www.tomshardware.com or www.anandtech.com.

If your loaded and impatient you cant beat the P4-2000 atm. If you can wait tho, AMD should have a 2000mhz athlon 4 out by christmas.

Although watch out for the reintroduction of the PR rating system!!

JustHalf

A 2GHz Athlon by Christmas?

You are talking through your ass.

bonkey

Originally posted by Praetorian
Im sorry to have to admit it but the 1900mhz p4 does easily beat the AMD 1400. How do I know??

<snip>

Athlon TBirds are fast and cheap but run extremely hot. My pc sounds like a 747 jet engine.

This is what it boils down to. The current 1.4 Athlon is equivalent to about a 1.6 or 1.7 P4, depending on the benchmarks you run. Its also a hell of a lot cheaper.

As for sounding like a 747 - your machine will sound like that only if you go and buy a massive "overclocker" style fan to keep your chip cooler than you need it to, or you're overclocking. There are plenty of quiet fans, (and heatsinks as a result) out there which are perfectly OK for cooling a 1.4 Athlon. Sure, a chip running several degrees cooler is theoretically faster, but you'd be talking less than 1% there. Is the extra noise really worth that much to you?

If your loaded and impatient you cant beat the P4-2000 atm. If you can wait tho, AMD should have a 2000mhz athlon 4 out by christmas.

Although watch out for the reintroduction of the PR rating system!!

They may have an Athlon4 which is rated as comparable to the 2Ghz by early next year, but thats realistically gonna be a 1.6 1 .66 chip. Big diff. As for the PR rating system - stupid move by AMD IMHO. If they couldnt win consumers when they were winning the MHz war, they aint gonna win them now by pretending to win the MHz war.

If being the fastest, or best value high performance chip isnt doing it for them, tacky marketing isnt gonna make it any better.

jc

po0k

also you're comparing a 2GHz amchine witha 1.4GHz machine.
*ahem*
no sh¦t sherlock.

Gerry

An athlon machine can sound like a 747, but its better than running the machine too hot. Running the chip a few degrees cooler, WILL NOT make it 1% faster. It will increase the overclocking potential of the chip, and let it run with more stability. Good case cooling is also essential, but this does not have to be noisy either. you can run your fans on lower voltages to keep them quiet.

The 1,9 or 2 gig p4 will beat the athlon for a lot of things, but not heavy number crunching, 3d rendering etc. Its still not faster overall.