Enzo that case with the SATA hotswap is awesome - EXACTLY what I need. Just gotta wait to see the $ they want though

Alan looking good there! Nice score!

if i read things correctly i gathered that it would be about the same price as the Armour case that Lian-Li produce....after a look lol.....expect around (edit:) $600-ish?

bit of a bugger...but im not entirely sure, would that hotswap backplate act as a raid card? havent really looked into it yet, but it looks siiiik lol

I believe you still need a raid card thats ok i have a 3ware raid card

yeh i just read that too

lol.....i dunno, its a nice feature......but i myself wouldnt NEED it essentially i guess

I've ordered my proper hard drives .... 2 x 500 Gb Western Digital "Performance Desktop" drives and will be picking them up towards the end of next week.
I looked at the "Enterprise" version of these drives and really couldn't warrant the 50% price premium for a drive of the same performance specs .... irrespective if they are designed to run 24/7.

I've had the current 80 Gb Western Digital in my old PC for nearly 8 years now .... so I don't think reliability will be a problem with a lesser than enterprise drive..


Enzo - How did you get 3DMark06 to run on your Vista64?
I've just tried installing it but it won't run because I didn't install DX9 as the installation wanted to .... I wasn't going to overwrite Vista's DX10 with DX9.

I only just noticed today that my version of Vista Ultimate already has SP1 slipstreamed into it .... maybe that's why it's running so smooth and fast

i dont think i did anything fancy....

hit up google and see what you can find? (re: "64-bit vista 3dmark06 problems")

goodluck mate

Yes, just expect it to be a little slower. Also, if you have 2 Nero's open or whatever, designate 1 CPU to each. Shouldn't go too slow.

Btw,

1. Vista Sucks
2. With Vista, buy popular/reliable brands of ram(corsair) and look MAINLY at the speed of the ram rather then the quantity. Quality > Quantity.



I'm pretty sure you can have DX10 and DX9.0. Because most games do not support DX10 so DX9.0c(or lower) is required. Alot of people will disagree but bigger hard drives are slower, not by much, but a noticable amount. Your better off getting a raptor HD if your mobo supports it.

hi adras

it'd be great if you could provide some justification of your points.

Questions:
- if one was to install XP, quantity > quality?
- unlikely the majority of desktop users would notice the difference between 667 and 800mhz RAM, overclockers might; as far as I know cheapcrap brands still make quick ram (1066mhz sometimes; plenty of 800mhz).

Found something that explains it a little bit because in all honesty, i couldn’t justify it myself off the top of my head



Reading that though; fast DDR2 these days can be had for $24/GB.....so cant reeeeaaallly complain too much

I myself would (and did) pick quality ram for its history as a good overclocking component and/or warranty details. On any general budget however; I'd much sooner sit in twice the quantity of cheap RAM

also; larger hard drives are generally faster from what i can tell and hear.
Western Digital went into a bit of detail about hard drives here
and despite being a little older; here's a 500vs700GB test

if these points are wrong that’s fine; i think they're more accurate than your generalisations however I’m sorry. If not; Imp here to learn so feel free to point me in the direction of some quality information sources.

ps. i want a VelociRaptor ....no....two

edit: i like vista, i think alan likes vista....and for it, i think 4gig of RAM is enough for it to run quite nicely (cheap or not)

We'll have to agree to disagree ....

Personally I like Vista and have had no troubles at all with it .... it's fast (on my machine) looks pretty and does everything XP used to do
Sure some older hardware that I had on my XP machine won't connect to Vista 64 due to lack of drivers but I knew all
that from the beginning so no dramas there.

As far as RAM goes .... unless you are overclocking .... buying expensive low latency RAM is just a waste of money.

Vista uses memory in a different way to XP and makes effective use of additional memory.
If you had 2 PC's both loaded with Vista .... one having 2 Gb of expensive, low latency RAM and the other with 4 Gb of cheap generic RAM .... the PC with the 4 Gb of generic RAM would give you better performance.



Yeah .... it appears that different DX versions install along side rather than over writing eachother, I wasn't sure of that at the time.



Depends on what you are after .... not every one is interested in ultimate speed.
Raptor is expensive on a Gb/dollar basis, noisier and hotter than normal drives .... so it doesn't fit my criteria.

I agree with most of your points, not sure about this one though.

The problem with generic ram is two-fold:
1) Performance
2) Reliability

I don't want to think about the number of big reliability problems I've had in the past using generic brands of ram - given how small the price difference tends to be (between a good brand and generic) I just couldn't justify risking reliability (and performance, to a lesser degree) to save $20 or $30.

Onto the other issue of quality vs quantity, this depends on your application. From the benchmarks I've seen in my time, it seems as if very few applications show any noticable benifit when jumping from 2GB of ram up to 4GB. Games in particular (from all tests and benchmarks) seem to show absolutely zero benefit. It seems like only the select few applications (main media encoding, etc) can really benefit from the extra.

I faced a similar decision when I was RAM shopping for my own computer, and it was basically down to 4GB of RAM, or 2GB (and the extra cash spent on the next model up processor). In the end, the benchmarks I saw just didn't show enough benefit to justify spending for the extra ram.

So, I just went with 2GB of nice Geil 800mhz ram, with 4-4-4-12 timing and some sexy metallic orange heatspreaders!

By all means you can never have too much ram (worse case scenario, it wont be utilised) however if it comes down to sacrificing quality for quantity, I wouldn't do it. Performance difference is there, but to me the real decider is reliability. If there were two things on earth that I'd never go generic for, it's RAM and Power Supply.

I can understand your reservations about cheaper ram Muzzy
However in my years of desktop support I can count on two fingers how many PC's I've had fail from bad memory.
From my experience memory failure is a rare thing.
I absolutely agree with you on buying good quality ram if you are planning to overclock or modify your PC .... but if you are just going to be running at stock speeds I think you could spend the extra money elsewhere (a faster processor etc)
Depending on what you are after the price difference could be more than just $20 to $30 dollars.
As an example When I bought my ram .... 2Gb of generic (kingston/Samsung/Apacer) was $56, where as 2Gb of high speed OCZ ram was $119 .... so my 4Gb of OCZ cost me $238 over twice the amount of the generic stuff.
And then to rub salt into the wound .... 2 weeks after I bought my memory it had a massive price drop .... it's currently selling at $69 for 2Gb ....
Again it depends on what your needs are and the differences in price at any given time .... if it's cost effective to go for the good quality fast ram then for sure go for it .... if it's not cost effective at the time and if your needs are for a normal standard PC .... then don't be scared to save some money using the generic stuff.

Ah well .... such is life with PC hardware



Vista does like it's ram and 2Gb would be the minimum I would run on it. I went for 4Gb so that I can have a number of applications open at once as well as run a virtual machine without having the PC slow down to much.
For me the extra ram is for a smoother running environement with all the bells and whistles turned on and nothing to do with any increase in benchmarking speed.



Just like my sexy chrome heat spreaders

i get a light show with mine lol

yes .... you do ....

Last friday I picked up some more bits for the PC

2 x 500 Gb Western Digital WDC SE16 (WD5000AAKS) hard drives.
One will be used for the operating system and the other for the data.

2 x 120mm Scythe variable speed LED fans.
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Removing the std front fans.
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LED fans in place.
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Temporarily running the fans straight off the power supply as the leads are too short to reach the fan headers on the motherboard.
Will be extending the leads shortly after I get another fan for the rear of the case.
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With fan filters attached.
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With the fans running at low speed the PC is virtually silent in operation.
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not moving the standard ones to different locations?

lol...wow that optical drive looks small in the last picture.

Ahh, I think we had a different idea of generic!! I thought you meant 'no name' RAM!

Kingston (even the cheaper range) is fine - lifetime warranty and faultless reliability.

With the 'no name' stuff in the past I've had big time problems. In one case I had a PC that used to constantly freeze and give me a 'blue screen of death'. Checked so many things and couldn't find the problem - ran a memtest and found the RAM module had several faulty cells.

Took it back and had it replaced with another stick of the same RAM. Took it home, and got the same problem.

Took the second stick back, swapped it for Kingston value ram - result was years of reliable computing.

After the issues I've had with computers in the past, all I use is Antec (PSU's), Geil/Kingston/Corsair (Ram) and Western Digital / Hitachi (HDD's).

To where??

This thing has got more fans than you can shake a stick at ....

I've already removed one fan and disk drive cradle that lived up top where the power supply is now.
There are still 2 unused fans on the other side of the front disk drive cradle.
I'm only using 3 fans .... no need for any more.
More fans .... more noise


It's a big case

I think we have .... by "generic" I meant anything that's non enthusiast type ram

I don't think I've ever bought "no-name" brand .... the cheap "generic" stuff I've bought has always been branded with something or other .... Samsung, Hyundai, Kingston, Apacer, Hynix etc

Nice Pc similar case to mine but mine is the PC-75B (Has a door)'

Specs are-

Q6600 B3 3.6ghz with Thermalright Ultra 120 EX cooler and Scythe Fan
2gb Kingston HyperX 1066mhz DDR2
Asus Maximus Formula M/B
3x200gb 1x250gb 2x320gb 3x500gb Hdd's Around 3000gb total (500 free :|)
3870 graphics card (Until i got the money for 4870X2 when it's out)
And the Lian-Li PC-75B case ovcoarse.