My New Dream Machine

[prits_88]

hi im thinking of setting up a new rig, and i wanted your opinions on the following rig:

C2D e6600
geil 2gb ram pc6400
asus p5b deluxe/wifi
vista home premium OEM
2x 160GB western digital SATA (16mb cache)
Asus DRW-1814BLT
320MB Palit 8800GTS
Aspire X-Cruiser Silver
520W Corsair HX Series
Zalman CNPS9700-NT
Pinnacle PCTV DVB-T PCI Digital Tv Tuner Card with remote control
22" LG L226WTQ,
Razer Deathadder
Microsoft Windows Media Center Hardware Kit V2
AS5

This will be the first system i will ever make from scratch, ima bit nervous but lookin forward 2 it

[fresh]

looks good but i would definately change the case. it has 80mm fans and will annoy you at how loud they are. if your looking for cases at quite low prices, go with the antec 900 gamers case, good air flow, looks good and not that expensive.

fresh

[prits_88]

looks good but i would definately change the case. it has 80mm fans and will annoy you at how loud they are. if your looking for cases at quite low prices, go with the antec 900 gamers case, good air flow, looks good and not that expensive.

fresh

ye ok i will bear that in mind. jus looking at pics of the antec 900 atm.
but i love my the look of the aspire case SO much.
how about if i jus replaced the fan to other akasa ones?

[Thorsson]

The case has got a lot of bling for the money, but the specs look s h i t e to me.

Apart from that the choice of HDs is the thing that stands out in your mid-range rig. I'm guessing that you're going to use this mainly for games. If so then you may be better off with one big drive - you can get 500Gb for less than those 2x160s. RAID won't make much difference to your overall feeling of speed, if that's your intention.

[prits_88]

The case has got a lot of bling for the money, but the specs look s h i t e to me.

Apart from that the choice of HDs is the thing that stands out in your mid-range rig. I'm guessing that you're going to use this mainly for games. If so then you may be better off with one big drive - you can get 500Gb for less than those 2x160s. RAID won't make much difference to your overall feeling of speed, if that's your intention.

ok thanks for your input. The kinda reason i wanted 2 HDD's was that so i could back up uni work on another HDD, but i guess i can jus burn it to disc evry month or so.
Will definetly look into 500GB hdd.
and yes i do love my games.

[tigerboyce]

Yep i would get one drive and just get a 80GBish external drive for backup

All looks very good to me , but i got to be blunt, that case is utter junk. It doesnt even look nice. If you didnt know, that is the case that a pre built gaming website uses as thier cheapo base/stock case. If i were you i would seriosly consider changing it to a better one, antec 900 reccomendation here

[prits_88]

can i ask if anyone knows if NCQ is something that i should look to get when getting a 500GB SATA hdd.

i saw on wikipedia that "However, the current technology actually slows down HD access in certain applications, like games and sequential reads & writes, because of the added latency induced by NCQ logic"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NCQ

anyone know what i should do?

[prits_88]

http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Compa...324&CPID=15961

anyone know which one to recommend? i dont really care about 0.2 miliseconds of response time cos u wont really notice.
which company has the best reputation of their drives lasting a long time etc..

[Thorsson]

IMO that NCQ ref. is a bit out of date - if you look at the article it was written in 2004.

[prits_88]

oh right.
thanks for that then thorsson .
NCQ all the way!
dont suppose u could recommend a manufacturer for a hdd

[tigerboyce]

The second from last one. WD is highly reccomended and the other one is meant to be a server HDD

[Thorsson]

anyone know which one to recommend? i dont really care about 0.2 miliseconds of response time cos u wont really notice.
which company has the best reputation of their drives lasting a long time etc..

Get the Samsung or the Seagate 7200.10 (Seagate say the 10 series is for performance http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/pro..._hard_drives/).

Samsung are quieter and probably more reliable. Seagate have a great warranty.

[cotswoldcs]

Personally I would buy the 500 Gb Western Digital WD5000YS RE2. This is an enterprise level hard drive and therefore will provide the best reliability. Performance will also be very good and WD drives are also fairly quiet. It is expensive however, and if cost is an issue my second choice would be the Samsung. Very quiet and good reliability.

As for NCQ I understand that it doesn't actually help unless you are using it in a server environment. However if you buy a drive with NCQ you can always disable the feature. Correct me if I'm wrong but you can do this with manufacturer supplied software??? Thinking of this I have a 150Gb Raptor and have never bothered to do anything about NCQ - is it enabled by default?

[Thorsson]

You disable NCQ on the controller.

[nvening]

As you will see by other people who i predict will post here and agree with me get the samsung

samsung are fast, quiet and reliable

[moogle]

As you will see by other people who i predict will post here and agree with me get the samsung

samsung are fast, quiet and reliable

same, got 2 sp2504c samsungs running here. always use 2 drives for easy backup. these are fast ones and each one is 250gb so in total you will have 500gb
apart from the case i cant see any faults. but since the case can be chosen through personal preference then hey if you want it get it.