Pretty much what Bo and Kinetic said. Gigabyte UD mobo's are the shiznit. ATI for GFX are in the ascendancy. Nothing wrong with Benchwhoring

I'm moving toward a SSD for OS and RAID5 HDDs for storage and applications. RAID5 still gives nice read /write speeds with the comfort of good resilience. PiLsY suggested something good in a previous thread too which is to configure the Windows swapfile to use a SD card to prolong the life of the SSD.

Stock cooling is fine considering you aren't fussed about overclocking, the retail fans are upscaled versions of that which came with the core2 series cpus. Nothing wrong with benchwhoring, but spunking a wad of the budget on watercooling isnt nescessary unless you insist on pushing past 4ghz. Nothing wrong with that screen you have freddie, but for all we knew you could've been using a CRT still.

As for RAID. I have a Raid 5 array running on my UD5s ICH10R southbridge. Its slow as feck, with prolonged data transfer in the area of 10MB/s, and a burst of about 70, which compared to a stand alone drive under AHCI mode is pants. It works, yes, and i have a lovely 2TB documents partition, but don't sit and watch anything copying to/from the drive, it's a long wait. Striping was ok, as was mirroring, [RAID 0 and 1 respectively] but the parity calculations of mode 5 give it a real headache, which is a shame as thats the only type of array that interests me. If you NEED 2TB, AND you would be devastated if you lost any data, then its worth it for the peace of mind but for a fun project it will disappoint.

If you want to get into the real RAID club you should look at:

The PERC5/5i card Bo mentioned is specc'd in Dells servers and a bargain one complete with the battery needed to turn on write caching is readily available on fleabay for peanuts in comparison to retail solutions.

RAID 5 with a good controller [as the one above] will give near or equal to RAID 0 performance with the security of being able to lose any one of the three minimum drives used. an example I found :
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/Dell-PERC-5-i-5i- ... 20b3f9aba1

from the US for £100, bidding can rise to £160-200 for some UK examples, depending on which way the wind is blowing that day

So i've bodged up my older PC as a stop gap, got an old fx5200 card in it. Doing the job atm but i can't play shit on it (Actually i talked crap here i played tf2 today :p).

Looked at the prices of a few things got a couple of ideas, Not sold on SSD yet, it is the way forward i understand that but in it's current state I'm not sure if i wanna bother with it just yet.

Right now i have about 200 gb in use on my current HD and near 100 gb partitioned (never need that much anyway as anything not played gets uninstalled soon enough and other than the games i got installed at the time, nothing else is really that meaty



I have this ATX case ( the name eludes me at present), I'm more or less certain that I'll recycle this as it stands.

That would make it the most understated £2k rig in the country

Stupid point, but a lot of the new cards are big, I mean really big... would they even fit in that tiny thing??

yeh my 4890 is 12" and the new ones are even bigger. also, i can imagine that thing being like a suna. or a steam room depending if you like wet paintbrushes like erasor

This is a good, nay great, case. Big enough for everything you could need. Especially if you're getting the new, hefty bugger gfx cards.

Really? im 6'3 and it's tall enough to reach my knee from the floor lol

Guess I'll have to fork out then :p

the obsidian ftw

Height's not really the problem, until you start putting in multiple cards and hdd's, its the depth that might get you...

Gfx cards are getting longer, plus the power inputs adding extra space needed means that case might not handle it, plus it looks lame