Using old parts

[Merkwürdigeliebe]

Hi there, I'm going to be making a new PC soon mainly for Maya and Sony Vegas work, but for gaming as well. Specs will include an E4300, an Asus P5B, 2GB of Corsair TWINX DDR2-800 RAM and a 2600PRO.

I'm concerned with wanting to use my Western Digital 2500JB hard drive. It is a 7200RPM, 250GB EIDE hard drive. I know there will be no compatibility issues, even the newest mobos still have IDE buses, but will it bottleneck my new computer's performance when running a game or the video/3D applications I listed above? or does the performance quality of the hard drive only dictate how fast something will load or how fast files can be moved in correlation with the processing power of the CPU?

I'm assuming that getting a modern CPU will maximize the efficiency in which data can be moved, so the hard drive will not be bottlenecked by the cpu and perform at full capacity. My current cpu, a 1.6GHz Pentium 4 (Willamette core) running on SDRAM, not DDR, feels like it's really holding up some of my hard drive's capability.

I appreciate any explanations.

 

[turtile]

The IDE (ATA 100) interface is fine. Its faster than any consumer drive's sustained speed.

 

[TRDCorolla1]

You're fine. We all experience hard drive bottleneck and until they get rid of those mechanical platters and such, we'll keep bottlenecking our systems.

 

[phucng_10]

Corsair TWINX DDR2-800; those are XMS2 aren't they? Well why not get a pair of Crucial Ballistix DDR2 800?

 

[Merkwürdigeliebe]

The XMS2s are cheaper at my local compshop and whatever quality/performance difference is highly negligible

 

[Ethereal_Dragon]

On that machine, the 2600PRO will probably be the bottleneck. I have read some less than stellar reviews on the X2k series.... how much graphics horsepower are you going to need in your digital media renderings?

 

[Merkwürdigeliebe]

Well, any gaming card that I'll get won't really be as good as even a low-end workstation graphics card. The graphics card is mainly for gaming, most of the editing and 3D modeling would be loaded onto the CPU anyway. I'm not much of a expert 3D artist, so I wouldn't be doing lush, hi-poly, dynamic scenes or anything.

Are you suggesting I go with a high-end DX9 card instead for the same price range? Because that's what I was thinking too, it'd be a lot faster plus I'm gonna be running on XP anyway.

 

[Jorsoft]

If you must have DX10, go for an nvidia card. Better performance for the money.
But like others have pointed out, it's not the cream of the crop for rendering. How high end are you going with that?

 

[Merkwürdigeliebe]

actually, I've now decided to go for an ultra cheap system that can take advantage of my older hardware (copied and pasted):

CRUCIAL REND 800MHZ DDR2 NO-ECC 1024MB........$55
Intel E2140......................................................$85
S775 ASROCK 4COREDUAL-VSTA PT880 AGP/PCIE...$89
CASE ATX NIKAO XBLADE BLACK w/ 500W PSU.......$79

/old hardware

WD2500JB 250GB HDD...................$0
256MB Sapphire 9600XT AGP..........$0
Pioneer DVR-112D DVD-RW.............$0
Speakers/Mouse/Monitor................$0

____

TOTAL w/Tx........................................$351.12 CAD (canadian dollars)

That'll pretty much be my next paycheck working minimum wage, part-time.