17-02-2004 19:24									#61
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That's the one that rates the whole system for a broad spectrum of uses right? Never tried it.

	17-02-2004 19:33									#62
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DP.

Last edited by DrSpike on 17-02-2004 at 19:38

	17-02-2004 19:42									#63
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That's one hell of a late DP

Never tried PCMark04. Is that also a 3D test program of some such?

	17-02-2004 19:47									#64
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quote: Originally posted by ADG That's one hell of a late DP

I was getting database down message for almost 10 minutes.

	17-02-2004 19:51									#65
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quote: Originally posted by DrSpike That's the one that rates the whole system for a broad spectrum of uses right? Never tried it.

Yeah,

It has an overall computer score and then breaks it down.
CPU
memory
video
HDD

I'm curious if anyone has run a raid 0 setup and what their HDD score is. The Raptor gets me 6100.

	17-02-2004 19:58									#66
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quote: Originally posted by Asher 39,219. CPU: AMD Athlon 64 3200+ @ 3400+ (2.2GHz) MB: Asus K8V Deluxe RAM: OCZ Platinum EL PC3200 512MB (CL2) x 2 HD: 2 x 120GB SATA Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 w/ 8MB cache in RAID0 config Sound: SoundBlaster Audigy 2 Network: 3Com 3C940 Gigabit ethernet Video: ATI Radeon 9800 Pro @ 430MHz core

I have 3 questions btw, particularly in the light of SC's HD point.

With the SATA drives in RAID 0 config what is the performance increase over just 1 SATA drive and over say a decent ATA 133 drive?

Also how do you reinstall windows with this setup?

Is there a reason you have the Audigy and that network setup? My board has onboard stuff (and I presume yours does too) which seems not to suck too bad.

	17-02-2004 20:04									#67
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On board sound and video steal cpu cycles and use system memory. I recommend buying a separate sound card (~$45 US).

Also Ashers core on the 9800 Pro is impressive, mine capped out at around 408, did you use a Bios setting or something else?

	17-02-2004 20:07									#68
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I suspect he upped the AGP voltages in the BIOS.

	17-02-2004 21:01									#69
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I couldn't quite beat Asher's score on Aquamark3

I came pretty darn close though

38,927 with nothing over-clocked

CPU: 3.0GHz P4C (800 FSB)
MoBo: chaintech 9cjs Zenith
RAM: 2x512mB Corsair DDR 400 (PC3200) (Dual Channel)
HD: 2x36 Gb Western Digital Raptors (10,000 RPM), RAID 0
Sound: Onboard Envy24 HF
Video: ATI Radeon 9700 pro (128mb) AIW

Last edited by centrifuge on 17-02-2004 at 21:08

	17-02-2004 21:06									#70
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quote: Originally posted by DrSpike With the SATA drives in RAID 0 config what is the performance increase over just 1 SATA drive and over say a decent ATA 133 drive? Also how do you reinstall windows with this setup?

There is a definite increase, unfortunately, I don't know any specifics.

As far as installing windows, its easy as pie with XP, generally if you want to use a RAID or SATA drives, you need to tell setup to install the 3rd party drivers from a floppy by pressing F6 and following the onscreen instructions.

	17-02-2004 21:24									#71
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quote: Originally posted by centrifuge I couldn't quite beat Asher's score on Aquamark3 I came pretty darn close though 38,927 with nothing over-clocked CPU: 3.0GHz P4C (800 FSB) MoBo: chaintech 9cjs Zenith RAM: 2x512mB Corsair DDR 400 (PC3200) (Dual Channel) HD: 2x36 Gb Western Digital Raptors (10,000 RPM), RAID 0 Sound: Onboard Envy24 HF Video: ATI Radeon 9700 pro (128mb) AIW

Wow how did a non-overclocked 9700Pro come that close to Asher's score? I know the difference isn't huge between the cards, but I thought it'd be bigger than that.

	17-02-2004 21:28									#72
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quote: Originally posted by centrifuge There is a definite increase, unfortunately, I don't know any specifics. As far as installing windows, its easy as pie with XP, generally if you want to use a RAID or SATA drives, you need to tell setup to install the 3rd party drivers from a floppy by pressing F6 and following the onscreen instructions.

I've never tried RAID (though I have it, and when I move to SATA will probably use RAID 0 with my new drives). As I understand it both drives are used simultaneously to improve speed. So let's say you have 2 drives reasonably full, and then you want to reinstall your OS, as you need to do from time to time. Now I partition my drive and do a clean format of the OS portion and reinstall when I want a clean version of windows. But what do you do with the RAID setup? It might be obvious, but I've never tried it.

	17-02-2004 21:42									#73
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quote: Originally posted by centrifuge There is a definite increase, unfortunately, I don't know any specifics. As far as installing windows, its easy as pie with XP, generally if you want to use a RAID or SATA drives, you need to tell setup to install the 3rd party drivers from a floppy by pressing F6 and following the onscreen instructions.

Which can be quite tricky. My new mobo came with the driver on CD, not floppy. Problem was that the CD would not work on a comp without that Mobo (plus the floppy on my old comp no workie).

I had to install XP on an old ide drive, then make a floppy driver disk from the CD, then reinstall on the SATA drive. And it was not obvious that this was what needed to be done. It was one of the 10 items that I tried that day.

	17-02-2004 21:44									#74
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I actually just did a reformat and re-install about a week ago.

There really isn't that much to it if your bios are set to use the RAID. Like I said in the post above, the only tricky part is installing the SATA drivers (by pressing F6 during setup) so that WinXP will recognize the drives, otherwise it will only recognize any IDE HDD's that might be on the system

	17-02-2004 21:53									#75
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quote: Originally posted by Spaced Cowboy Which can be quite tricky. My new mobo came with the driver on CD, not floppy. Problem was that the CD would not work on a comp without that Mobo (plus the floppy on my old comp no workie).

I actually had this same problem...
XP set up couldn't find my SATA drives, and it was driving me crazy...

Finally somewhere in the fine print of the readme that came with my motherboard drivers cd I saw that some files needed to be transfered to a floppy. ...And guess what, the floppy on my old computer wasn't working Luckily I'm a packrat and had another computer that was even older that had a working floppy.

	17-02-2004 21:55									#76
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quote: Originally posted by centrifuge I actually just did a reformat and re-install about a week ago. There really isn't that much to it if your bios are set to use the RAID. Like I said in the post above, the only tricky part is installing the SATA drivers (by pressing F6 during setup) so that WinXP will recognize the drives, otherwise it will only recognize any IDE HDD's that might be on the system

Sorry to be a pain but do you mean you formatted both drives entirely? Obviously that's not what I want.

	17-02-2004 21:58									#77
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Also a while back loads of people were reporting problems booting from SATA drives..........were those just teething problems?

	17-02-2004 22:02									#78
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I had no problems at all installing Windows XP on my S-ATA harddrive.
When I was running on my old harddisk, I did patch my motherboard with a S-ATA patch. I didn't need any special disks to install Windows on my HD.

Intel, integrity to build on

	17-02-2004 22:03									#79
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Well, with a RAID 0, the 2 drives function as 1. So the OS system thinks that there is only one drive. So yes, I did do a complete reformat of both drives.

If you use other versions of RAID like RAID 1 or 1.5, then it simultaneously writes to both drives, so that if one drive goes out then you have another drive left that has all of the same info on it. I unfortunately don't have experience with RAIDs other than RAID 0 so I'm probably not the best person to answer your question.

Though the general rule is, that RAID 0 is used for increased performance, while the other types of RAID are for primarily data safety.

	17-02-2004 22:32									#80
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Could you combine boh options with having for drives?

	17-02-2004 22:36									#81
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Alva,

I have no idea if that would work or not.

quote: Originally posted by centrifuge I'm probably not the best person to answer your question.

	17-02-2004 22:43									#82
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quote: Originally posted by centrifuge Well, with a RAID 0, the 2 drives function as 1. So the OS system thinks that there is only one drive. So yes, I did do a complete reformat of both drives.

As I thought. So if you have 240GB of space in total and you want to reinstall where do you put your possibly large amounts of stuff? Or can you partition the 2 drives once RAIDed?

	17-02-2004 22:53									#83
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Yeah, you can partition them just like any other drive.

Or you can do like I did and get a 3rd ATA drive for bulky data like movies, music and pictures.

	17-02-2004 22:58									#84
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Ah ok, then that upgrade is one I might consider. However 2 120GB SATA drives costs the best part of £150, so I'll try and get some more mileage from my current drives.

I'm interested to know the performance increase.

	17-02-2004 23:05									#85
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Btw SC I tried PCMark but unless I register and pay it wont do any interesting tests.

	17-02-2004 23:42									#86
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I'd go with the 10,000 rpm western digitals over the 7200 rpm seagates. Unfortunately The western digitals are even harder on the wallet and have less storage space.

...but they're just so damned fast

	18-02-2004 00:11									#87
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BTW,

Using the Radeonator 2.0 tweaking utility, I pumped the core on my videocard up slightly to 337MHz from the original 324 MHz.


With the slightly overclocked card I now have an AquaMark3 score of 40,118

Down with 64 bit processors

	18-02-2004 00:12									#88
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Hmm, I spy a contest that could end in burning components.

I'm in.

I'll download later.

	18-02-2004 00:33									#89
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quote: Originally posted by DrSpike Btw SC I tried PCMark but unless I register and pay it wont do any interesting tests.

Oh, I forgot, I'll email you some help when I get home.

	18-02-2004 00:52									#90
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quote: Originally posted by Spaced Cowboy Oh, I forgot, I'll email you some help when I get home.

Understood.