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.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
40 Comments
View All Comments
danidentity - Wednesday, July 28, 2004 - link
...for sale either online or in stores, I meant.danidentity - Wednesday, July 28, 2004 - link
Wes, do we have ANY idea when we'll start seeing PCIe X800's?Pollock - Tuesday, July 27, 2004 - link
I would have expected to see the 3000+ in there with the recent price drops... And I'll second #6, even if you did mention CAS 2.5 ram on the summary.I also think that you shouldn't focus on clear cut categories, but perhaps design one for each of the sockets that appeals at the time. Basically what I'm saying there is that you've got to get socket 754 in there but you don't have to cut anything else out.
Pumpkinierre - Tuesday, July 27, 2004 - link
Agree with #15 Wesley, you've added passion to the buying guides.Wesley Fink - Tuesday, July 27, 2004 - link
#15 - The price in the Guide has always been $389, which is certainly close to $390. New Egg shows the eVGA 6800 GT expected tomorrow 7/28 at a price of $410. Pricewatch shows this link for $389 with an ETA of 7/30 - 3 days away - at http://www.buyxtremegear.com/vc129114.html. The PHY brand is also shown at $389 with an ETA of 8/10 at http://www.futurepowerpc.com/scripts/details.asp?P...kherman - Tuesday, July 27, 2004 - link
Awesome article! Love the concept even though I'll never do an OC rig. It's interesting to read about though.RobJ - Tuesday, July 27, 2004 - link
But the 6800GT is not listed in the real-time pricewatch list because eVGA's website says that the GT won't be available until September 2nd and that it will cost $390, not $380. I have been able to find it on some websites for markups as high as $460. I'll wait until the price comes down to $380. Other companies are even selling the GT for $500 and above. That's crazy.Wesley Fink - Tuesday, July 27, 2004 - link
#12 -The only reason I did not list this in the guide is because we will be making some HSF recommendations in the next OC Guide. The HSF I had in mind for $12 was a "SPEEZE 80mm LED CPU Cooler for Socket A, Model "5F353B1L3GL" -OEM" which has an 80mm fan. A quick check shows you can now buy this Speeze for $9.99 from a reputable on-line retailer. I have found the 80mm fan HSF move more air and do a better job of cooling than the more common 60mm fan models - even the expensive ones. The 80mm are also normally lower noise.
trexpesto - Tuesday, July 27, 2004 - link
Wonder what 12$ HSF is used for the DFI Infinity?"Overclockers will also be happy to find the 4 mounting holes around the CPU socket for heavy-duty cooling; although, we do find the CPU area has too many components around the socket that could interfere with some of the larger cooling solutions." - http://anandtech.com/guides/showdoc.aspx?i=2138&am...
Zebo - Tuesday, July 27, 2004 - link
#9 Thanks....While only a couple mobos seem to have found a work around I appologise for my ignorance Wes. Still have issue with the presshot not because of heat, the northwood/canterwood is so much more mature and even a bit faster clock for clock,. The price factor of course.