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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bluedart - Tuesday, July 27, 2004 - link
It does say the price. Read from the top of the page:AGP Overclocking Recommendation: eVGA 256MB GeForce 6800 GT
Price: $389 shipped
BTW FX53 is a good choice at overclocking. Keep in mind this is with air. But if you utilize other forms of cooling the FX will go even higher, approaching 3GHz with proper cooling (see THG's review). This makes it one FX58. That is absolutely a grand overclock, seeing that FX58 speeds will not be here for another year or so.
danidentity - Tuesday, July 27, 2004 - link
#4: Did you read Anandtech's article on breaking the overclocking lock? Almost all companies have broken it. It is very possible to reach those speeds with the stock HSF.http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?...
devonz - Tuesday, July 27, 2004 - link
Why isn't the 6800 GT card in the price list on that page? Or am I missing it somehow?T8000 - Tuesday, July 27, 2004 - link
I think recommending an Athlon FX for overclocking is a joke. Those things do not even manage a 5% overclock, and their real world performance is only close to a P4 at 3.4 GHZ, as gaming at 640x480 is not very common among people spending this kind of money. And at a realistic setting of 1600x1200 and 4xFSAA, the CPU is not really the bottleneck in todays games. When you do encoding, where CPU speed does matter in the real world, the P4 is head and shoulders above Athlon FX.yzkbug - Tuesday, July 27, 2004 - link
How about a VALUE OC DDR section? Paying $300+ for 5-10% performance increase over ~$150 regular DDR is a waste, imho.Zebo - Tuesday, July 27, 2004 - link
Peferformance------------
1. 2.8 P4C to 3.6 $180
2. A64 3200 to 2.5 $223
Value
--------
1. Duron 1.8 to 2.4 $44
2. Mobile XP to 2.6 $89
:)
Zebo - Tuesday, July 27, 2004 - link
Wow recommending a P4C over a moblie barton in the value section.Twice the price for roughly the same OC performance I don't get it. It's the inverse of price to performance. must be an error is all I can imagine.Then recommending a Socket 775 presshot. Lets see this 3.8- 4GHZ OC with stock HSF. I don't think so. Then the overclock lock issues which hav'nt been settled, have they? My understanding is 10% over stock FSB, yeilding about 3.4 Ghz far from 4ghz, the system crashes!! What kind of overclockers choice is that?
chuwawa - Tuesday, July 27, 2004 - link
Perhaps it's time to start recommending the Athlon64 3000+ for the value OC alternative.bluedart - Tuesday, July 27, 2004 - link
This is a great guide for overclocking, although I believe that there needs to be some more acutal testing with the 755 and 939 sockets to give us a better picture of how they perform. It is especially difficult when PCIxpress and ddr2 aren't widely available yet.If anyone else has some REAL data on overclocking these new platforms, I would like to see those posts.
Currently I am making a heat sink out of synthetic Diamond (better heat transfer than copper and silver by 2x) and will be testing it on the FX system. If there are any other reccommendations I would be more than happy to hear them.
expletive - Tuesday, July 27, 2004 - link
I would cast a vote for the A64 3500+. If it can reach 2.6 like an FX53 at half the price that's tough to beat.The 3500+ is currently retailing for $390 shipped online. I know thats not quite a 'value' but to get FX53 gaming performance for half the price, that can't be denied....