My build I've been thinking about. Advice=good!

[aetherh4cker]

Do you know of any examples of programs that access the hard drive a lot? I use everything from games of all kind, to rendering pictures etc. in Photoshop and Illustrator CS3.

Also, what is a paging file exactly?

Most games only have noticeable hard drive access during actual loading screens. Such as when you zone into an instance in World of Warcraft. A progress bar comes up on a loading screen. The only part of games that you will notice go faster is that loading screen.

Photoshop I don't think does much hard drive access either. Only when loading on startup, saving, and opening files.

No games will get higher frames per second from faster hard drives. The way they are designed is to be RAM intensive, so that you don't need a fast hard drive.

In all honesty, I can't think of any programs that would benefit noticeably from faster hard drives either. I'm sure there are some, but they are rare.

The paging file is a section of your hard drive that Windows uses for virtual memory, to reduce stress on your actual memory. Since it is on the hard drive, it is much slower than actual memory, and it is recommended to disable the paging file if you have more than 2GB of RAM.

 

[Akumajin]

Cool I will have more than 2GB. How do I disable it?

Thanks for the quick answers, by the way.

Oh yeah and looking at some mobos, they say they have ATA100, does that mean they support E-IDE/ATAPI as well or does it have to specifically state that?

 

[Akumajin]

Bump...

 

[blackhawk13]

I would assume it would be in the BIOS, no? That's just a guess though. I'll Google it...

I was wrong lol. You can disable it in regedit apparently.

Win XP Increasing System Performance by disable paging - Techie Corner

Good luck. .

 

[baron5]

at the end of the day raptors are not all that much faster and coz u a fortune its just not worth it

 

[zerodayATK]

you can disable paging in windows cant you? Start>control panel >system > Advanced > Advanced? thats how I've Always done it?

 

[aetherh4cker]

you can disable paging in windows cant you? Start>control panel >system > Advanced > Advanced? thats how I've Always done it?

Pretty close.

Start > Control Panel > System > Advanced (tab) > Settings (under Performance) > Advanced (tab) > Change (under Virtual Memory)

One of the radio buttons will say "No Paging File".

This is the method I recommend doing it. Windows gives it to you up front, so don't do it in the registry.

 

[veg1992]

in regards to what I said on the previous page:

i don't think he wants to blow 400$ on a board... If you go with a 680i based board.. it has to be the MSI Diamond because of the built in X-Fi audio or the Abit 680i or get the XFX or eVGA 680i

thanks to Nosboost we have a new board to praise that supports SLi... the P5N32-E Plus board... don't be fooled with the 650i chipset.. its got the x16 PCI-e in SLi

 

[macdawg]

"at the end of the day raptors are not all that much faster and coz u a fortune its just not worth it"

I agree that a good sata 3gbs hard drive with 16 mb cache like this one is sufficient and for the dollar is awesome.

Newegg.com - Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 ST3250410AS 250GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive - OEM

That said, I have seen youtube videos of a guy with raptors in raid 0, running every game under the sun maxed settings while recording with fraps and not a single stutter in a 10 minute video. A fast hard drive can help smooth a game out just like ram does, but the extra money spent could be spent better.

Lastly, I wouldn't disable the pagefile, this article sums up nicely.

Windows Article - Welcome

 

[aetherh4cker]

Lastly, I wouldn't disable the pagefile, this article sums up nicely.

Windows Article - Welcome

The article is wrong. Read some of the comments on it by people that know what they're talking about. Here's one:

Daniel is correct.

Microsoft's claim that the pagefile is used only "when the memory in use by all the existing processes exceeds the amount of RAM available" is blatantly untrue. Let's just call it a lie.

WinXP tries to send ALL inactive paged memory to the pagefile. It is fairly agressive in what it considers 'inactive'. Don't believe me? Lauch a few large applications (but make sure you still have plenty of physical RAM), leave your computer for 30 minutes, and come back and check the pagefile. If you don't want to figure out which counter to use in Performance Monitor, here is a great little tool: Windows Tweaks & Tips - Bill James, Microsoft MVP

As you can see, WinXP will shove as much of your running application to the pagefile as possible. Usually half of my allocated RAM is offloaded to the pagefile even with hundreds of free MB of physical RAM. I have had particular trouble with memory intensive applications, but I see preformance degradation across the board. My 1GB system might as well be a 128MB system, given the way WinXP thrashes my hard drive with pagefile swaps. My total memory usage rarely goes above 500MB.

Bottom line: if you have a lot of memory (and it is so cheap these days) turn off your pagefile for a dramatic performance boost.

One warning: You are more vulnerable if you encounter a nasty memory leak, as you have no pagefile to buffer you. So programmers and beta testers may want to keep their pagefile.

-Neil