Re: Building a computer? Need advice/suggestions? Come here!
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Cortexian
What I meant about the LP kits being slower is that there are no options for faster speeds. They just don't make anything over 1600mhz in LP to my knowledge, and the reason for that is (IIRC) because they can't dispate enough heat.
The larger heat spreaders ARE more efficient, though I have to agree with you that some of the designs are just silly. I'd take the G-SKILL spreaders over the regular Vengenge style ones any day.
I found that a good medium for speed and capacity is 1866mhz since it's a lot more affordable than most 2133mhz+ stuff and you can still get yourself 16GB fairly easily. More if you want to fork over the cash for 8GB DIMM's.
I actually think that the companies are buying into their own marketing with regards to LP DIMMs. Anything above 1600MHz is obviously going to be geared mostly towards enthusiasts, and they think that all of us like the flashy, windowed, LED-littered look. Well, we don't. Case manufacturers are starting to find that out. I'd have no problem with the large sinks if they didn't look totally dorky. Hell, just make the slab of aluminum taller, maybe rib it to give more surface area and put straight, vertical slots once you get above the PCB itself. None of this angled, shark-tooth stuff. Please.
Also, yeah, I'd spring for 1866 16GB, but I also wanted to keep price down. Bacon's original choice was $25, your choice made it $60. Well, it's daft to go with 8GB for more than double the price when you can get 16 GB for just $20 more. Like I said, capacity trumps raw speed in general.
Donut: Lol, that ASRock 870 is quite the steal, isn't it? If there are parts he can scrounge (optical drives, hard drives, etc.), I would definitely recommend using the savings to bump up to a Phenom II X4 965. Performance deficit with the Athlon II is rather notable.
Re: Building a computer? Need advice/suggestions? Come here!
I originally bought this OCZ OCZ Agility 3 60GB SATA III SSD for $99 with a $30 MiR to bring the price down to $69.99. However, I got wind of the talk that the SandForce controller isn't reliable. So, I took it back (unopened), got a refund, and bought this Kingston SSDNow V200 Series 64GB SATA III SSD for $85 instead (no MiR).
The specs of the OCZ drive are up to 525MB/s Sustained Sequential Read and up to 475MB/s Sustained Sequential Write.
The specs of the Kingston are up to 260MB/s Sustained Sequential Read and up to 100MB/s Sustained Sequential Write.
Apparently, the Kingston drive is supposed to last much longer than the OCZ one because there's some issue with the SandForce controller, but I've also read that there is a firmware update for the affected drives to address this issue. On the other hand, that fix supposedly reduces performance significantly (?). I've also heard that some new version of the SandForce controller doesn't have this issue, but I don't know how to tell which version has the problems.
On the Notebook Review forum I found a lot of people who are getting close to the advertised read speeds for the Kingston V200 drive, but are getting abysmal write speeds for it. I believe one of the admins on the forum inquired to Kingston about the issue and they have acknowledged that they are investigating it.
I haven't opened the Kingston drive's packaging yet, but I might tomorrow to test it for myself. It sort of pains me to see the drastic difference between read/write speeds on the OCZ Agility 3 and Kingston V200 drives.
I've had my eye on this Crucial M4 64GB SATA III SSD since I've heard nothing but great things about the M4 series, but I can't find a local vendor that sells them. Online purchases are out of the question here since they are so expansive and I have no doubt that they sell cheaper locally, which was how I got the OCZ and Kingston drives for a lot cheaper.
I don't know what to do. Should I keep this Kingston drive? Or should I take it back and get the OCZ one again? I really have no idea what to do.
Re: Building a computer? Need advice/suggestions? Come here!
Reliability:
#1 Intel
#2 Crucial
Performance (from what I can tell right now):
#1 OCZ
#2 Other SandForce drives
The M4 and Intels offerings are the best performace/reliability combination right now.
Re: Building a computer? Need advice/suggestions? Come here!
Okay, I just realized that the place I bought these drives from sells the 64GB Crucial M4 and there are three left at the closest location so they aren't going anywhere soon. The problem is that it's $120 instead of the $104 on Newegg.ca. Even with newegg I'm not willing to pay over $95 for an SSD. Honestly, I couldn't be too bothered with the write speeds, which would make the Crucial M4 perfect for me, but it's just too far out of my price range. I think the Kingtson V200 might be worth the 37% less performance I'll get out of it for read speeds if I'm spending $35 less, even if the write speeds are hampered due to some unknown issue. I'll just keep the drive and see what fix Kingston comes up with in the future. If shit is really bad after I benchmark it, I'll just take the drive back, bite my tongue and get the M4 and end my troubles.
Meh, I've made worse purchases, like my Logitech G110 for $89.95, which dropped to $75.99 at Best Buy the week after I bought mine. I mean, well, anything is better than what I'm currently using (I had no idea this POS was so slow): http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822149059
Re: Building a computer? Need advice/suggestions? Come here!
There's a cheap SanDisk 120 GB SSD on the market right now, selling for USD 125. It's not the fastest drive in the world, but it's getting great reviews, it's spacious (relatively speaking), and it's affordable. It's also not an HDD.
Re: Building a computer? Need advice/suggestions? Come here!
Wow, that's quite affordable for a 120GB drive with decent speeds. I'll definitely look into getting one of those instead. The only downside I see to it is that it's not SATA III. I would go for the 60GB version instead since you would think it'd be cheaper, but nope, it's only $5 cheaper on newegg.com. You'd be retarded not to buy the 120GB version. In any case, it's $134.99 at Newegg.ca, so that's wayyyy to far out of my price range. I might as well just get a large 7200RPM drive at that point.
Re: Building a computer? Need advice/suggestions? Come here!
Even at SATA II, it murders the throughput of magnetic HDDs, which is the whole point. I'm going to grab one for my upcoming build; will use it for Windows 7, Battlefield 3, and Steam.
Re: Building a computer? Need advice/suggestions? Come here!
True. Well, I've decided to put in the drive I do have as soon as I'm done slipstreaming SP1 to a new bootable Windows 7 USB ISO.
Re: Building a computer? Need advice/suggestions? Come here!
Hey with all this SSD talk and space restrictions due to lower capacities, I've got to ask; Is there any program out there that lets me pick and choose what Steam games get installed onto which drive? I have Steam installed on my SSD right now but I only want a few Steam games on the SSD, the rest can go elsewhere.
Possible?
Re: Building a computer? Need advice/suggestions? Come here!
It took me 15 seoncs and I found a file config.vdf that saves the location of every game. So it should be possible...
Code:
"apps"
{
"410"
{
"HasAllLocalContent" "1"
"UpToDate" "1"
"installdir" "c:\\program files (x86)\\steam\\steamapps\\patrickssj6\\portal"
}
"440"
{
"UpdateKBtoDL" "0"
"installdir" "c:\\program files (x86)\\steam\\steamapps\\patrickssj6\\team fortress 2"
"HasAllLocalContent" "1"
"UpToDate" "1"
"maintenance_time" "1324739657"
}
