Future Upgrades?

[iMc]

Just looking for a little advice on what my next upgrade(s) should be. Ive had my system for 6/7months now and im starting to look towards how much £££ im gonna need for my next upgrade. Im sure theres a few others in a similer situation. Spec in sig. A few suggestions would be great.

What you all think?

[floppybootstomp]

The one thing that jumps out is upgrading the video card to something like a 9800 Pro or 9800XT.

Does that board support serial hard drives or RAID 0? Room there, maybe, for upgrade.

Other than that, looks good to me as it is

[Spud1]

wait until the new radeons come out and then grab a 9800XT when they fall in price . imho its your 9600pro thats the bottleneck in that system.

other than that a new CPU would be in order (3200+ or something)


but that looks like a good rig to me, NF2 mobo, plenty of ram, not much HD space but then not everyone needs 250gig like me

[iMc]

yeh it supports sata and raid 1, 0. when are the new rads meant to be coming out?

my HD is fine at the mo 80+ gig left. will get a sata one wen i start to run out. id like a new case as my lanboy hasnt got the best cooling. in fact its pretty shoddy. what case would you recommend on a bugdet of 60-100quid?

[Korky]

Upgrading the gfx card would prob make this rig high end, looks like the most obvious upgrade anyway.

[iMc]

sorry to be a dopey sod but can someone explain to me the benefits and disadvantages of RAID 1 and 0. Ive never really looked into what this does.

[nichomach]

sorry to be a dopey sod but can someone explain to me the benefits and disadvantages of RAID 1 and 0. Ive never really looked into what this does.

RAID1 is mirroring the two disks - basically, data is written to both hard disks so that if one fails, you don't lose your data. The data can also be mirrored back to a new drive when you install one, to get your RAID1 redundancy back (RAID = Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks).

RAID0 is a misnomer - data is written across two or more drives as they become available; there is no fault tolerance or redundancy here, but there is an increase in performance. Also known as striping. If one of your drives goes, bye bye data.

[iMc]

thanks nichomach now i understand a lot better! so if your using RAID0 its best to use another drive not involved in the array for important data such as windows and whatnot, and then use the RAID drives to run games etc. Does this also mean that when in RAID0, the 2 (or more drives) appear as a single drive under windows?

[Stoo]

RAID 5 is the best bet as it gives you the performance increase, the increased storage, and the better performance, but the bad news is that you normally need a dedicated hardware RAID card for it, the built in solutions just aren't good enough. But unless you're running a mission critical server it's unlikely that you'll need anything other than RAID0.

As for configuration, it's completely up to you, you can either go with a single fast drive then RAID for fast storage, or you can go with RAID on the boot device to boost general system performance, and yes, only one drive letter will appear on the my computer screen

[Spud1]

for a case get a Thermaltake Xaser III V1000+

around £100

great cases, plenty of room and they look badass. if only i could afford one

[atifds9]

Also consider the Antec Sonata, it's rocksolid, comes with a 430w trupower silent psu and is piano black.

[Ravens Nest]

Yep i'd agree you need to upgrade the videocard to a 9800 pro or XT, but as everyone has said you should wait a while at least a couple of months till you do upgrade..

Other than that reading up on your motherboard it has AC97 sound so i'd upgrade that to an Audigy 2, or one of its competitor's or you could buy another nforce 2 motherboard with soundstorm and sell your existing motherboard

Other than that you have a sweet rig already .

[Speedo]

Is your system struggling with something in it's current state ? It still looks a decent spec to me. Would have thought it would be more worthwhile saving your money until you actually needed an upgrade rather that doing one for the hell of it...
(Yes i'm a hypocrit and change things all the time.. ).

[fondie]

Is your system struggling with something in it's current state ? It still looks a decent spec to me. Would have thought it would be more worthwhile saving your money until you actually needed an upgrade rather that doing one for the hell of it...
(Yes i'm a hypocrit and change things all the time.. ).

i agree with speedo

[iMc]

yeh i am saving money now but im just looking to the future a little and any upgrades wont be done for 2/3 months anyway.

[funnelhead]

couple of questions - whats your ram configuration and brand?

are you overclocking your cpu or vidcard at all?

what do you use this computer for? games, music, media encoding or erm er work i suppose?

o yeah and what monitor are you using?

and what about your mouse / keyboard? if you have some budget own brand keyboard it may well be worth getting a nice cordless logitch / microsoft combo....

have a look at the casetek cases at www.scan.co.uk

easynow, F