Building a new PC soon

[jakebaker13]

Well, to each his own - but personally I think 40GB is WAY too little, since you will use it as the OS/Game drive.

I am happy you said that. I was under the assumption that the only thing that went on the SDD was the OS.

 

[Dwagginz]

Well, to each his own - but personally I think 40GB is WAY too little, since you will use it as the OS/Game drive.

No, it's used as OS only. Games go on a second drive, with my personal preference being a Samsung F3 1TB drive.

 

[wolfing]

You can get (in the US at least) a 64GB SSD for about $100, and I totally recommend it for the Windows partition. Seriously. My computer went from booting in a minute and a half to 20 seconds! There's plenty of space left on that, so you could install your most used applications there. I install the currently played MMOs there, and they benefit from it a lot since they load new zones frequently. Any game or application that reads a lot (as opposed to write) can go there.

 

[DArtagnan]

I am happy you said that. I was under the assumption that the only thing that went on the SDD was the OS.

Well, that's something you can decide for yourself - obviously.

But if you want game-data to load fast, you need a fast harddrive for that purpose.

Then you'd need a fast drive on the side

OS files aren't accessed much when you play a game, because there's no need for it. But again, that will depend on configuration. If you have a lot of active services, more things will need to happen in the background.

But if you tweak your system, the OS will basically just be waiting for you to do something outside of the game, before accessing enough to make a noticable difference.

Ideally, you want a fast OS drive AND a fast game drive - but I think that might be overkill...

 

[DArtagnan]

No, it's used as OS only. Games go on a second drive, with my personal preference being a Samsung F3 1TB drive.

Putting games on a slow drive will nullify the advantages in terms of gaming. A fast OS drive is fine for booting and doing "OS stuff", but the impact on gaming will be minimal.

 

[Dwagginz]

Putting games on a slow drive will nullify the advantages in terms of gaming. A fast OS drive is fine for booting and doing "OS stuff", but the impact on gaming will be minimal.

Uh, F3s aren't slow. Using =on&prod[3016]=on]these benchmarks (Tom's Hardware) and factoring in the price difference, an F3 is still a damn good buy.

And no, it doesn't "nullify" the advantage at all. You've got one drive handling the OS, another handling the game. That means you've got two data streams at once, not one stream being shared between two aspects (OS and Game).

 

[DArtagnan]

Uh, F3s aren't slow. Using =on&prod[3016]=on]these benchmarks (Tom's Hardware) and factoring in the price difference, an F3 is still a damn good buy.

Well, that's relative. I'm talking about slow in comparison to an SSD drive or the Raptor.

And no, it doesn't "nullify" the advantage at all. You've got one drive handling the OS, another handling the game. That means you've got two data streams at once, not one stream being shared between two aspects (OS and Game).

I really have no desire to go into a technical debate about this, I'm just trying to help out a guy. But if you insist.

If you configure your OS to have minimal services/processes active - you won't have the OS interfering when gaming. It's trivially simple, really, as you can just launch task manager and watch activity with all processes visible. What you'll see is 99% of resources available at all times - with a properly tweaked OS. Harddrive activity is visible there, as it will tax the OS/CPU when loading/accessing data. That, or you can launch a decent performance monitor - if you want detailed info.

You're also forgetting that game-data and SPECIFICALLY streaming data is dependent on the actual drive for performance. So, even if the OS was taxed with background services (I guess what you consider a separate stream, even though the OS needs to be accessed no matter what drive you're loading from - and harddrives don't function independently from the CPU - as you might think), any modern streaming game would STILL be much faster on a fast drive - regardless of where it was installed. Unless you bloat your system with all kinds of needless crap.

—-

In any case, I think it's a bad idea to turn this into a case of who to trust.

I can only advise a new PC user to research this "on the net", and get expert opinions that you can rely on. You will find that everything I've said is true, but I find that a total waste of my time to "prove" here.

 

[JDR13]

I think SSD drives are overrated, at least in terms of using it just for your OS. My Western Digital 1TB Caviar Black Edition boots Windows 7 in about 30 seconds, and only cost me approx $150.

 

[MasterLich]

Hello, experts,

I have been thinking of building a PC with RAID0 and 2 x 1 TB hard drives. Is there something wrong with this idea as I haven't seen/heard anyone setting up drives like that? You can get a terabyte drive for less than 50 euros already. In my understanding this would speed up the disk operations tremendously without compromising the capacity.

Granted, you need a third drive for backup, but as this would be a gaming PC, most of the data is not critical anyway. And I could use my existing drives for backup.

Sorry for hijacking the thread, but it's kind of related to the topic, right?

 

[Gorath]

No, it's used as OS only. Games go on a second drive, with my personal preference being a Samsung F3 1TB drive.

I happen to have looked into the issue a couple of weeks ago for a PC for a relative.

We've decided on exactly that. A 64 GB SSD (-> Careful! Wrong chipset -> 50% performance loss!) and a 1 TB Samsung F3 7200 for the data. According to the review the Samsung drive is nearly silent, one of the faster disks out there (meaning it only loses significantly to expensive drives optimized for raw speed) and it's inexpensive. Such a drive is a great pragmatic decision.

Let me repeat the warning about SSDs. Chose carefully.

Practically you would put the OS and a few of your favourite games (except downloads because for example the Steam folder grows pretty quickly!) on the SSD. Office programs, data, movies and games you only play once in a while are put on the normal HDD.

 

[Gorath]

Hello, experts,

I have been thinking of building a PC with RAID0 and 2 x 1 TB hard drives. Is there something wrong with this idea as I haven't seen/heard anyone setting up drives like that? You can get a terabyte drive for less than 50 euros already. In my understanding this would speed up the disk operations tremendously without compromising the capacity.

Granted, you need a third drive for backup, but as this would be a gaming PC, most of the data is not critical anyway. And I could use my existing drives for backup.

Sorry for hijacking the thread, but it's kind of related to the topic, right?

Sounds okay to me, if you're willing to sacrifice data security for speed.

 

[BillSeurer]

I actually meant RAID5 in my post (now updated). Wikipedia's article about RAID is pretty good:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID

RAID5's advantage is that when a drive fails the system just keeps on working and then you can replace it. All without you doing anything (other than physically replacing the drive). You can also add more drives in to expand the available system storage. It has speed advantages when reading data from the disk but has a small performance penalty when writing. Almost all disk activity on a normal system is reading.

RAID0 is generally a bad idea. You may get some improved performance but at the cost of any disk problem losing all data. Because multiple disks are involved you increase the chances of a disk failure.

 

[Gorath]

I think RAID is too complicated for a PC gaming newbie. It's something worth considering for the 2nd gaming PC.

 

[BillSeurer]

I think RAID is too complicated for a PC gaming newbie. It's something worth considering for the 2nd gaming PC.

jake is having someone build it for him. I would hope that someone who builds PCs for a living would know about RAID.

 

[Alrik Fassbauer]

Personally, I don't think a RAID is a good idea - and even worse, there's so many RAID layouts that they are drastically different from one another - or so I understood it.
But again - that's my subjective point of view.

 

[jakebaker13]

You've all certainly helped out quite a bit. I never knew I could memorize so many acronyms in such short amount of time. I'll defiantly research all these options further.

 

[Zloth]

Been doing your research? Great. Now to throw even more at you!

Monitor: 24" LCD - 1920x1080 - ASUS VE246H

Make that an ASUS VG236H and you'll have a monitor that can do 3D Vision. (Several other monitors work, too - see nVidia's list.) 3D Vision is still pretty raw. Some games work well, some games work OK with tweaking, some games don't work at all. When it works, though, the effect is pretty incredible. I posted a topic over yonder with my impressions and I'm sure you can find plenty more via Google. If you're getting a new monitor anyway, this is definitely something to consider.

 

[JDR13]

If you're going for a 24" LCD, and it's primarily for gaming, then I would get one that supports 1920x1200. It's not a big difference from 1920x1080, but I prefer the slightly higher vertical pixel count.

 

[figment]

I think 4 GB ram is probably more than enough for most people unless you are running monster apps like Visual Studio or 3ds max or something. 6 GB isn't bad as OS can do more caching with it. Most games dont go above 2 GB anyway.

I think RAID 5 is a very good idea just for piece of mind especially if someone else is building it. I've lost a handful of drives over the years and one was really painful to lose. RAID5 allows purchase of several smaller presumably cheaper drives and gives good reliability in exchange. Only really drawback I see is less space and more power consumption and heat.

I think SSD drives are overrated. We use 16 GB SSD SATA drives at work for reliability/power/temperature reasons on embedded systems. Slow to write to so we actually created a ramdisk for the temp folder so that apps would not be slowed down because of writing temp files. Make sure temp folder and pagefile/hibernate is not on SSD drive if going that way.

I also second looking into the 3d monitor if buying a new monitor as you will probably not replace that anytime soon so buy that if its not too much more. I'm still using a 20" LCD from 2003 but have replaced the computer 4 or more times in that span.

 

[Zloth]

I went with getting a second, external hard drive instead of playing around with the various RAID options, myself. Back up your files then use the drive as a paperweight for all your important papers. If there's a fire, you can grab the lot as you run out the door!

I'm guessing those are really old SSD drives, Figment. The first ones were pretty slow for writing and 16GB is rather small.