SATA Raid Questions + Small SLI + CPU Question
Hello there, just abit of background first, been using,building repairing etc... computers for ages since the good ole pentium 1 but past few years ive had other things to do as well so kind of lost track with the way things are going at the moment.
Last PC i had i built when sata first came out and i got 2x 80gb maxtor sata drives and ran them in raid 0 on the onboard southbridge via chipset controller. Not sure what chipset is was, kt - something. But anyways had a 3200 xp in that machine and tried various times with windows xp but failure each time (after about 2 months the installtion got corrupt and it wouldnt boot) stuck with windows 98 and the machine ran like lightning. Last year i traded that in for an nforce 2 chipset motherboard (same cpu) and used an adaptec 39360 scsi raid controller card and had 2 15k.3 cheetahs hooked up, performance was about the same as the old sata array due to restrictions of using the card in a normal pci slot. Anyways ive sold that pc and am just using my laptop at the moment with about 5 million external devices attached
My question is what sort of range of sata options are available on current motherboards, noticed quite a few seem to have built in raid as well as an addin sata raid controller (but most of these seem to be on the pci bus). Id like to get an option where i can hook up 4 or 8 wd raptors in raid 0 on 1 array without bandwidth being restricted? Or is only only option to get a motherboard with a 4x pci-e slot and buy a seperate sata raid controller card?
Also on a seperate note is SLI overhyped or actually really worth the investment? (Last card i had was a radeon x850 xt pe it played everything ok but FEAR was abit slow sometimes) I dont want to invest over $600 in SLI then find out i could just buy 1 card
Finally whats the different between the X2 and FX models of AMD CPUs?
Hello there, just abit of background first, been using,building repairing etc... computers for ages since the good ole pentium 1 but past few years ive had other things to do as well so kind of lost track with the way things are going at the moment.
Last PC i had i built when sata first came out and i got 2x 80gb maxtor sata drives and ran them in raid 0 on the onboard southbridge via chipset controller. Not sure what chipset is was, kt - something. But anyways had a 3200 xp in that machine and tried various times with windows xp but failure each time (after about 2 months the installtion got corrupt and it wouldnt boot) stuck with windows 98 and the machine ran like lightning. Last year i traded that in for an nforce 2 chipset motherboard (same cpu) and used an adaptec 39360 scsi raid controller card and had 2 15k.3 cheetahs hooked up, performance was about the same as the old sata array due to restrictions of using the card in a normal pci slot. Anyways ive sold that pc and am just using my laptop at the moment with about 5 million external devices attached
My question is what sort of range of sata options are available on current motherboards, noticed quite a few seem to have built in raid as well as an addin sata raid controller (but most of these seem to be on the pci bus). Id like to get an option where i can hook up 4 or 8 wd raptors in raid 0 on 1 array without bandwidth being restricted? Or is only only option to get a motherboard with a 4x pci-e slot and buy a seperate sata raid controller card?
Also on a seperate note is SLI overhyped or actually really worth the investment? (Last card i had was a radeon x850 xt pe it played everything ok but FEAR was abit slow sometimes) I dont want to invest over $600 in SLI then find out i could just buy 1 card
Finally whats the different between the X2 and FX models of AMD CPUs?