Good box?

Hello All.
This is my first letter to this forums, I just wanted to ask your opinion on a computer I'm going to buy before it is to late. I have placed an order for it, but still got time to change it if you guys don't like what I have put togather here.

NEC 3520A svartur DVD±RW
DVD+R/+RW 16x8x16x/DVD-R/-RW 16x6x16x/CD 48x24x48x/+DL 4x/-DL 2x/ with software

Microstar ATI Radeon X800 XT
256MB DDR, PCI Express

Chieftec Dragon3 LCX Middle Tower silver and black
extra deep, LCX-01-SL-SL-B tower, 410W ATX2

200GB, Western Digital
(WD2000JD),8MB buffer, 7200rpm, Serial ATA150

Logitech MX510 Optical Mouse
Performance Optical Mouse,

MSI K8N NEO4 Platinum - nForce4
4xDDR400, SATA2 Raid, Gb Lan, PCI-Ex16, 10xUSB2, FW, 7.1 hljóð, S939

AMD Athlon 64 3500+, 2,2GHz
Socket 939, 640KB cache, 90nm core, Retail

Corsair ValueSelect 1GB DDR400
184pin, PC3200, 400MHz, CL3,

Thanks for checking this out for me

 

get two 73gb Western Digital Raptors and make them RAID 0

 

When you get into the upper end AMD...high number XP's and/or any of the 64's...you will find that the cpu is hungry for good quality memory (Corsair, Kingston, etc.)!!!! They don't tend to like the generic memory!!! So like everyone else says...Don't skimp on the memory!! I know this from experience!!!!!

Roger

 

Thank you for reply so far, only trouble I have on this is that the store I am buying from dont have alot to choose from. I did find this memory there
Corsair XMS LL 512MB DDR400
184pin, PC3200, 400MHz Low Latency
That chip has simular price as the other one 1gb. Is it better to start on one chip like that and wait on better faction with whife and add another one next month?
Ofcourse I would love to get these Raptor disks but that would triple cost on disks, and I'm trying to get as good system as possible inside some price range I can manage
Best regards

 

You should get 2 sticks of 512 matched pair,to make use of dual channel mode,its cheaper than a single 1gig stick and offers %5 performance increase. .Its best to get them matched out of the same packet,to be sure dual channel will work.

 

BTW raid0 offers no performance increase,its a con to make you buy two drives,if one goes you lose everything and if a surge or something kills your computer it kills 2 drives!

 

I concur with Rikky. I know what RAID is and how it works but I ain't buying in to the HOOPLA.

 

Raptors are fast on their own though.

However, it makes little sense to buya raptor that has so little capacity when you can buy a Sata150 300gb drive from Maxtor w/ 16mb cache.

Iirc, tests show it to perform closely with a raptor.

 

Yep know what you mean, when I upgraded a few weeks ago, I tried some standard cheapo 512mb stick and then upgraded it to a Kingston and noticed the improvement!

But yeah nice system there, just a small thought that there's no keyboard and monitor, but hey you probably have that!
The psu might and I say MIGHT need an upgrade in the future when you upgrade it, sure you won't be for a bit though!

 

Hello again all

This morning I did change order and I'm getting 2 pices of
Corsair XMS 512MB DDR400
184pin, PC3200, 400MHz XMS CL2
I think this is alot better than I was going to buy in the beginning. So thank you guy's very much for assist.
p.s. yes I got a keyboard and a monitor

 

Actually, raid 0 is faster, but if you are looking at boosted framerates in games...well, forget about it. Is the performance gain twice as fast? No, more like 1.5 times faster.
Yes, I have tested speed between raid 0 drives and a drive that wasn't raided. This is only my opinion.

Basically, the only areas of increased "performance" is windows boot time (got to be an idiot to install windows on raid).
Boosted load time on games.

Personally, I wouldn't touch raid 0 at all.

For both performance and reliability I'd go for either Raid 1+0 or Raid 0+1. But, this, of course takes 4 drives.


I'd love to give matrix raid a shot. Not sure if intel has fully released this as of yet.

 

Sink your teeth into this Guys,its an in depth article testing raptors in raid 0 and a single stanalone raptor.The last raid system I built was nearly 5 years ago with an abit kt7 and everyone was sayin "my computers got raid,its got raid,its got raid,my computers as fast as a server""No its not son".So I can't speak from experience with what modern drives are capable of.

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2101

Skip to the last couple of pages if you wanna see the results.

 

Once again, this is just what I saw. Can I show benchmarks like that? No. I didn't state that Raid 0 was the way to go. I only said, that from MY aspect, I saw a performance gain.

Then again, perhaps I was drunk at the time. Never know.

Only Raid I've configured was 0, 1, and 5. RAID 5 was on my old exchange server which ran SCSI about 8 years ago.