I hate computers!

[Techie101]

Hi all

 

Earlier this year I was hoping to build a new pc system for about £1000. But I cant decide on spending my money on a ati 5850 crossfire setup or spending the money on a SSD setup

 

Getting a lot of conflicting advice. Some say go for a sata raid 0 setup, its cheaper and gives more storage, is as fast as SSD but some say its unreliable?

 

also been told that ssd is unreliable and too expensive at the moment.

 

the spec I have s far is like this -

 

Intel DX58SO Extreme Series ATX

Intel Core i7-920 'D0 Stepping' Quad

6GB Kingston Hyper-X 1600MHz DDR3 Triple Channel Memory Kit

XFX ATI Radeon HD 5850 1GB

XFX ATI Radeon HD 5850 1GB

1TB Samsung SpinPoint F3 HD103SJ Hard Disk Drive

Sony AD-7241S-0B 24x DVDRW with Lightscribe

Microsoft Business Hardware Pack

850W Coolermaster Silent Pro M850

Antec Nine Hundred (Antec 900)

 

Total comes to about £1200!

 

any thoughts guys?

[hailstorm]

Well RAID 0 is unreliable, in that if one drive fails then you're stuffed.

 

I've owned a SSD in the past. The 2nd gen Intel 160GB SSD. I didn't see as much benefit as I was expecting for the £300 odd I'd spent. Yes it was fast but it didn't make everything magically instant like I was expecting.

 

Reliability of SSDs is a bit of an unknown at the moment. They have a finite life span when it comes to writing data. How long it lasts depends on how much you hammer the thing. In theory you should know well in advance before the thing fails as it can keep track of how many writes its done.

 

Some good choices of components there though. Make sure you get a quiet CPU cooler. Long list of recommended ones here Recommended Heatsinks | silentpcreview.com

[synaesthesia]

Can't really argue with the spec you've already got listed. I'd suggest a brand other than XFX purely in case one of them goes wrong and supplier insists you get an RMA from them - dealing with XFX is head against wall stuff.

 

Are you really going to miss an SSD? Like the above post I'm also erring on the side of caution. Besides which many places are still doing that F3 for well under £60 inc vat - how about getting another couple of those and going all Raid5 - performance boost, less prone to failure and cheap replacements should one go The F3's are still ruddy good drives and still hold their own against the new WD Blacks which are vastly more expensive.

[mac_shinobi]

Can't really argue with the spec you've already got listed. I'd suggest a brand other than XFX purely in case one of them goes wrong and supplier insists you get an RMA from them - dealing with XFX is head against wall stuff.

 

Are you really going to miss an SSD? Like the above post I'm also erring on the side of caution. Besides which many places are still doing that F3 for well under £60 inc vat - how about getting another couple of those and going all Raid5 - performance boost, less prone to failure and cheap replacements should one go The F3's are still ruddy good drives and still hold their own against the new WD Blacks which are vastly more expensive.

 

what about the intel x25-E 64gb drive ?

[synaesthesia]

well the intel drives are indeed very very nice - I wouldn't say no

 

Point is, is it a "nice to have" or "I really, really need the performance". A quick boot time might not be the top of everyone's priorities.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

But of course if anyone's got one going for under £10 I'd be very interested indeed

[RingOfFlame]

If you stay with standard drives look at the WD VelociRaptor WD VelociRaptor 300 GB SATA Hard Drives ( WD3000BLFS )

[mac_shinobi]

well the intel drives are indeed very very nice - I wouldn't say no

 

Point is, is it a "nice to have" or "I really, really need the performance". A quick boot time might not be the top of everyone's priorities.

 

But of course if anyone's got one going for under £10 I'd be very interested indeed

 

 

For the time being am sticking with normal sata drives until SSD's go down in price a considerable amount as would be nice to have a fast drive like the x25-E but with at least a few times the amount of capacity for a couple hundred quid would be good

[Midget]

Ive played with SSD in a Dell laptop and had no end of trouble with it. I would just go with the best SATA drive you can (and it wouldn't be a samsung)

 

I have to wonder why you're spending so much though, there aren't many games out there that would have a slow framerate on one of those cards or utilise an i7 properly.

 

 

I'm also amazed shinobi didn't suggest just getting a mac!

Edited February 20, 2010 by Midget

[mac_shinobi]

I'm also amazed shinobi didn't suggest just getting a mac!

 

Had enough of the after math of suggesting a mac - got no end of stick from a lot of members about how they are not good for gaming etc - personally if I wanted it for gaming your better off with a console whether its ps3 or xbox 360 - although admittedly I have no problems what so ever playing all the games I have on my mac pro with an 8800 GT nvidia

[torledo]

 

I'm also amazed shinobi didn't suggest just getting a mac!

 

 

he'd have a point if he did....given the OP's 1k budget.

[Guest Guest]

he'd have a point if he did....given the OP's 1k budget.

 

But mac pros start at £2000 for one with a single GFX card which doesnt even compare to the one in the OP

 

I remember when i made my PC around 3 years ago; intel 6750, 4gb ram, 8800gt, blah blah. For the same thing but with a apple badge on it was over £3000!! I payed around £600

 

Dont get me wrong, i love my macbook pro, but apples are a stupidly expensive way to play games.

 

 

 

To the OP; persaonally id get neither for teh time being. As said there are no games which will use the power of 2 5850s. And the price of SSDs atm is just silly. I do want a x25-m at some point, every week or so i check on their price, but i just cant justify £170 for a HD which will barely fit my OS, a few apps, and some audio samples. I really need to wait for the 160gb to come down in price.

Edited February 20, 2010 by Guest

[localzuk]

I'd say go for the GFX variant with 4 WD velociraptors in RAID 1+0 - not RAID 0 on its own. That way you get the speed increases and the reliability.

 

The SSD's just aren't worth it yet I don't think...

[Arcath]

i have 2x 640GB WD black editions in RAID0 and it works very well, there was a measurable performance increase to all game loading times etc... (i put the raid0 in after build so had been running the machine without it for a few months).

 

As for the reliability its been a few months with no problems, the way i see it is its a fast 1.2TB drive, if one of the HDDs fail i will just replace it and start again. My Gaming machine doesnt have anything i couldnt live without on, so it would only be re-installing games.

[somabc]

RAID 0 is fine as long as you don't store anything important on there. If you only have the OS, software, games that you can easily reload or restore from backup then you just have to accept that RAID 0 will break every few years as 1 disk fails.

[Midget]

RAID0 is named after the amount of data you'll recover when it fails.

[rlweb]

dealing with XFX is head against wall stuff.

 

 

XFX - i've had the best service from after they replaced my graphics card?

[tmcd35]

Okay, RAID-0. It's not as bad as everyone makes out. If the choice is between 1 x 1000Gb hard drive or 2 x 500Gb in RAID-0 what the difference? answer speed. 2x500Gb in RAID-0 would be fast and everybit as reliable a single 1Tb hard drive.

 

That said if you can afford to buy 4-drives for RAID-10 great - you get performance and redundancy! Question though - how meny home PC's have more than 1 HDD? and those that do - how meny are RAID'd at any level (inc. 0)? exactly!

 

Money wise if it's a choice of 2xSATA drives in RAID-0 or 1xSDD then I'd go the RAID-0 route and have a ganda at the WD Raptor drives.

 

Also I assume you're going Windows 7? If so have you looked at Readyboost? I'll bet a couple of Raptors in RAID-0 and a 2Gb Memorystick for Readyboost would blow the water out of (and be cheaper than) a decent size SDD.

 

The other question I'd have is - is Crossfire/SLI really worth the extra money spent on it? Do you really get enough of a performance boost? Are there really enough games on the market that make good use of the technology? Wouldn't spending the money on a higher spec single card be better? I honestly don't know but thought it'd be worth asking the questions.

[synaesthesia]

XFX - i've had the best service from after they replaced my graphics card?

 

It will differ for all people - I've probably had to deal with them around 150 times since god knows when - half of them were difficult/problematic. Unfortunately few people will be as good to deal with as BFG, who are sadly now no longer operating in the EU Plus, google XFX RMA and you'll soon find just how many people suffer problems with the process. Naturally you'll not hear much good about stuff, you only hear the bad :/

 

 

 

 

And to quote tmcd35 : "Okay, RAID-0. It's not as bad as everyone makes out. If the choice is between 1 x 1000Gb hard drive or 2 x 500Gb in RAID-0 what the difference? answer speed. 2x500Gb in RAID-0 would be fast and everybit as reliable a single 1Tb hard drive."

 

True - it's the wording though. It's not going to fail in half the time a single drive would normally fail - but you have twice the hardware, twice the mechanics, twice the electronics to fail. Still doesn't make it twice as likely to fail though - things shouldn't just stop working without a reason. Besides which every person with half a braincell backs up any data they'd consider important

 

Honestly though the F3's are definitely worth a look - great compromise for price and performance. Certainly not much slower than the Raptors and up to twice the capacity

[Midget]

Okay, RAID-0. It's not as bad as everyone makes out. If the choice is between 1 x 1000Gb hard drive or 2 x 500Gb in RAID-0 what the difference? answer speed. 2x500Gb in RAID-0 would be fast and everybit as reliable a single 1Tb hard drive.

not it's not! You've increased it's chance of failing by a factor of 2. If the single drive has a 1 in a 1000 chance of failing, in a RAID0 it's a 1 in 500 chance of failing as you are dependent on both drives working.

 

Also if the drive does fail, you will not be able to recover data easily if at all. Recovering from 1 drive is simple, recovering from a raid0 requires both drives to work fully and together, else you cannot recover any data over the stripe size.

[dhicks]

XFX ATI Radeon HD 5850 1GB

XFX ATI Radeon HD 5850 1GB

 

If you have a machine that will support multiple monitors you could have a play with getting it to support Debian with mutiple pointers... If you got NVidia cards instead you could also have a play with their snazzy new parallel-processing compiler.

 

850W Coolermaster Silent Pro M850

Antec Nine Hundred (Antec 900)

 

There's little point in expecting that Antec 900 case to be "silent" - our backup server is made out of one, it sounds like a small plane taking off.

 

--

David Hicks

[tmcd35]

not it's not! You've increased it's chance of failing by a factor of 2. If the single drive has a 1 in a 1000 chance of failing, in a RAID0 it's a 1 in 500 chance of failing as you are dependent on both drives working.

 

Personally I don't buy that argument. I see the logic, but it seems to me you are arguing that each drive is twice as likely to die because their are two of them. Maybe they'd last longer be cause each drive is now doing half the work than before?

 

Yes you've increased the number of parts than can potentially fail, but you haven't increased the chances of the parts failing.

 

Also if the drive does fail, you will not be able to recover data easily if at all. Recovering from 1 drive is simple, recovering from a raid0 requires both drives to work fully and together, else you cannot recover any data over the stripe size.

 

This is an interesting one, and you are quiet right. However, as someone else pointed out, you'd be pretty stupid to leave sole copies of all your important data on one hard drive let alone a raid0 pair. If we're talking home PC's that only usually have 1 hard drive then I can't see what the real difference is other than a slight speed boost.

 

If we're talking servers then it's a whole different kettle of fish and either RAID-1 or RAID-5 (or varients of) should be used everywhere.

[Guest Guest]

Personally I don't buy that argument.

 

Yes you've increased the number of parts than can potentially fail, but you haven't increased the chances of the parts failing.

 

Theres nothing to buy, its called probability.

 

I have a bag with 9 green marbles and 1 red marble in it. You get 1 pick, if you get the red one you lose (or you get a duff HD).

Now you decide you want raid0, so you get 2 picks. Are you telling me you are not twice* as likely to pick the duff marble?

 

 

 

*Actually in this case its 1/10 + 1/9 as there are a finite number of marbles to choose from but in the case of HDs there wouldnt be...

Edited February 20, 2010 by Guest

[torledo]

Theres nothing to buy, its called probability.

 

I have a bag with 9 green marbles and 1 red marble in it. You get 1 pick, if you get the red one you lose (or you get a duff HD).

Now you decide you want raid0, so you get 2 picks. Are you telling me you are not twice* as likely to pick the duff marble?

 

 

 

*Actually in this case its 1/10 + 1/9 as there are a finite number of marbles to choose from but in the case of HDs there wouldnt be...

 

so, are you saying the OP would be better off buying an imac ?

[Guest Guest]

so, are you saying the OP would be better off buying an imac ?

 

Exactly. See, someone did A-level maths

[Techie101]

Hi all

 

Firstly thanks for all the advice, its always good to get as many differing opinions as possible.

 

Ok, just a couple of things firstly, I won't be going with any GPU from XFX, from what I have read and heard they really are a nightmare to deal with, so the GPU I'll be getting will be either an Asus Radeon HD 5850 1GB or Sapphire Radeon HD 5850 1GB or even maybe the factory overclocked Sapphire ATI HD5850 Toxic 1GB, what to you guys think about those GPU's?

 

SSD is out the question, just can't justify the cost just to save 30-50 seconds on system bootup or having Word load up 5 sec faster!

 

VelociRaptor, again too expensive.

 

Think I'll go with the RAID 0 setup, I understand that data can be lost if things go wrong but I am also planning on getting a 1TB drive and using that to take backup images of the RAID drives. At the moment I use Acronis True Image to back up my system and I assume it will also backup a RAID setup, please correct me if I am wrong.

 

and tmcd35 to answer your question SLI/Crossfire does improve performance and overall FPS, even with current games, basically games will run smoother, but it may not be worth the extra expense. So for now I'll stick with one GPU and if in the future there is a need for more perfomance I'll stick in another 5850, the cost of the cards should have fallen by then also.