Overclocking Buyer's Guide - August 2004
by Wesley Fink on July 27, 2004 11:24 AM EST- Posted in
- Guides
SATA Hard Drive
SATA Recommendation: Dual Western Digital Raptor 74GB 10,000RPM SATAPrice: $386 shipped
As Anand found in his first review with the new storage benchmarking system, there is Western Digital Raptor and there is everything else. It is hard to argue with the choice of the top Raptor drives in a system geared to get the most possible from your computer.
The problem with the top Raptor drives is that they are still relatively small as hard drives go, so we are recommending two drives in a RAID 0, RAID 1, JBOD, or just plain 2-drive setup. Anand has shown there is little performance advantage to RAID 0, but striping is still useful for improving boot times. It can also improve performance in multi-tasking situations, which are admittedly rare on the desktop. RAID 1, on the other hand, is useful in protecting against hard drive failure, which is always a risk when pushing a system to its limits with overclocking. Frankly, many overclockers keep a second hard drive with known good images to restore hard drives that end up in data corruption in overclocking attempts, which is another great use for the second Raptor hard drive.
The storage capacity for two 74GB WD Raptor drives is a generous, but rational, 148GB of fast access storage. Compared to SCSI solutions with similar performance, the 2 Raptors are a virtual bargain. The 74GB Raptors have double the storage of the legendary 36.7GB Raptors, an increase in speed, and the same 8MB buffer. We are also pleased to see a price drop in the 74GB Raptors of almost $50 for the pair in the past two months.
The 5-year warranty for the Raptor drives makes this investment in high-speed storage a little easier to handle. All Drives will fail at some point because they have moving parts, but you have warranty reassurance for 5 years that attest to the quality of these WD Raptor hard drives. Previously, 10,000RPM speeds or a 5-year warranty were features only found on enterprise/SCSI drives, but they have now reached our high-end system desktop.
All of the Overclocking recommended and alternative motherboards, even the DFI Socket A board, have built-in capabilities for SATA or SATA RAID, so it is relatively easy to enjoy this level of performance on any of the four recommended and alternate motherboards.
For overclockers, there is, however, a flip side to using SATA drives. Many motherboards that are favorites with overclockers do not overclock as high with SATA drives as they do with IDE. This primarily applies to Intel chipsets that integrate SATA in the chipset and virtually require a fixed 33.3 PCI bus for SATA drives. At high overclocks, the SATA lock often seems to get compromised and slight drift means no SATA hard drive. You should keep this in mind with some other motherboards, but the two Intel Asus boards recommended in this overclocking guide seem more immune than most boards to high FSB SATA failure.
Listed below is part of our RealTime pricing engine, which lists the lowest prices available on SATA storage from many different reputable vendors:
If you cannot find the lowest prices on the products that we've recommended on this page, it's because we don't list some of them in our RealTime pricing engine. Until we do, we suggest that you do an independent search online at the various vendors' web sites. Just pick and choose where you want to buy your products by looking for a vendor located under the "Vendor" heading.
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rwinder - Tuesday, August 3, 2004 - link
I think it is a wonderful guide. Kudos for having the nads to do it, knowing that there would be "experts" that would give you crap about your recommendations. Don't let them deter you.One suggestion: Could you benchmark the performance of your recommendations (and alternatives) so us readers can make the price/value judgements?
mindless1 - Monday, August 2, 2004 - link
Seems kinda like we had to read whole article to get to the end, no?The point is, primary suggested parts were NOT appropriate for a "value o'c" system. Value does not mean merely not to choose most expensive parts in one or two areas. FOr the described value system there would be zero benefit to spending the extra $150 (over what needed spec parts would cost) on fancier case/PSU, and only a half-dozen %, at best difference in memory costing twice as much... that's not value at all, it's much higher than avg cost for new system in the market today.
lazerasa - Monday, August 2, 2004 - link
You people whining about the case, memory, and video card on the value selections... read the systems summary page, there are other, cheaper recommendations there. Read the whole artice before you start your whining.mindless1 - Monday, August 2, 2004 - link
CM Stacker is a nice case but c'mon, who's going to build a value o'c system and spend $262 on case + PSU?Likewise, someone would have to be kinda stupid to spend $300-odd $ on high end memory for the value o'c system unless /required/ by the particular 'board just to get 1GB or more stable. Other suggested systems would be a more appropriate platform for that memory.
BTW, the OCZ 520W PSU is not all that great. It IS fancy, but the base design (including after the cosmetic tweaks) cannot support 520W. Sadly it may be no better than a Sparkle 350W yet priced 3X higher. Don't be fooled by a $3 big anodized heatsink or "good" reviews where they don't subject it to a heavy load... after all that was the whole point of 520W, no? TO someone who knows PSU, it only takes a very short glance at that PSU to know why it can't support 520W.
cnq - Saturday, July 31, 2004 - link
Wesley,I agree with many of the comments: we may not agree with all your picks, but we really like the enthusiasm and obvious energy that you've poured into your picks and your writeup.
Now for a little more feedback :)
There wasn't any "value" video card pick.
Was that intentional, or an oversight? I can understand that the next gen vid cards are *so* far ahead in performance that you would urge your readers to spring for one, but still it seems that you should toss in a value pick.
So, thinking of the Athlon2500 buyer who (presumably) can't spring $400 for a next-gen vid card, what would you recommend in the $175-$199 price range? My picks would be a 9800pro followed by a 5900XT. (True, the 5900XT was born to overclock [390-->500 seems the norm ], but that doesn't mean it catches up to an overclocked 98pro in absolute performance.)
rjm55 - Saturday, July 31, 2004 - link
29 and WesleyThanks for clearing up the Athlon XP mobile info. I was a bit confused with the difference in the specs with desktop Barton, but now its clear. If you gotta have a XP, it looks like the 2600+ Mobile is now the one to get.
Wesley Fink - Friday, July 30, 2004 - link
#29 - You are correct and I actually do know better. The multipliers and FSB have been corrected in the Athlon XP section on page 6.#31, #32, and #33 - I fully understand that many look at overclocking to bring more value to their computer buying. There are also others who use overclocking to bring new performance highs to their computer platform. As I stated in the review, these 2 goals are often at odds. That is exactly the reason I have done BOTH Performance OC and Value OC recommendations and alternates.
If Value is your main OC concern, then throw all the rocks you like at my Value picks, but please don't assume the Performance OC buyers don't exist or don't matter. I can assure you from emails and discussions on Forums that Performance OC is also an important concern for many buyers who OC their systems.
WheelsCSM - Thursday, July 29, 2004 - link
I agree with Z80. While I understand that different people view value differently, I can't see how a $390 video card or $175 case can be considered value in anyone's book. Other than that, I think this was an excellent article, and I look forward to future overclocking system recommendations.Z80 - Thursday, July 29, 2004 - link
I'd say that most of your readers, like me, see overclocking as just another means to squeeze more "bang-for-the-buck" out of our PC dollars. We like to run well in the benchmarks but at the same time spend half of what a typical Dell customer might spend for the same performance. In my opinion, you missed your "Value OC" goal by a mile. If it wan't for your last statement "go with a cheaper case for $100 less. Second, buy an ATI 9800 PRO for $200 less and overclock the heck out of it. Third, go for one of the CAS 2.5 value DDR400 memories from Corsair, Geil, OCZ, Kingston, and others; this could save you about $125. These three substitutions reduce the price by $425 and get the core system price down to $836" Maybe you should look at factoring in a bang-for-your-buck cost comparison factor like you did with a recent video card review.Z80 - Thursday, July 29, 2004 - link
I'd say that most of your readers, like me, see overclocking as just another means to squeeze more "bang-for-the-buck" out of our PC dollars. We like to run well in the benchmarks but at the same time spend half of what a typical Dell customer might spend for the same performance. In my opinion, you missed your "Value OC" goal by a mile. If it wan't for your last statement "go with a cheaper case for $100 less. Second, buy an ATI 9800 PRO for $200 less and overclock the heck out of it. Third, go for one of the CAS 2.5 value DDR400 memories from Corsair, Geil, OCZ, Kingston, and others; this could save you about $125. These three substitutions reduce the price by $425 and get the core system price down to $836" Maybe you should look at factoring in a bang-for-your-buck cost comparison factor like you did with a recent video card review.