Overclocking Buyer's Guide - September 2004
by Wesley Fink on September 17, 2004 12:05 AM EST- Posted in
- Guides
SATA Hard Drive
SATA Recommendation: Dual Western Digital Raptor 74GB 10,000RPM SATAPrice: $362 shipped
As Anand found in his first review with the new storage benchmarking system, there is Western Digital Raptor and then 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 a plain 2-drive setup. Anand has shown that there is little performance advantage to RAID 0, but striping is still useful for improving boot times. It can 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 overclockers. Frankly, many overclockers keep a second hard drive with known good images to restore hard drives that end up in data corruption due to overclocking attempts, which is another great use for the second Raptor hard drive.
The storage capacity for two 74GB WD Raptor drives is a rational 148GB of fast access storage. Compared to SCSI RAID 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 $24 each ($48 for the pair) since our last guide.
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, which 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 alternative 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 Asus Intel board recommended in this overclocking guide seem to be 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 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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jeeptrkr - Friday, December 10, 2004 - link
Perfect timing and very infomative article. I'm looking to buy a MSI K8N Neo2 Platinum w/ an AMD 64 FX-55 cpu.How would Crucial Ballistix PC4000 2.5-4-4-8 compare to PC3200 2-2-2-5 on the MSI mb? Faster bandwidth ver tighter timings?
decptt - Thursday, September 30, 2004 - link
Thank you, Fink.I ran Athlon64 Mobile 3200 2.0@2.55 Vcore 1.8
I will drop to 10x250 vcore1.7 for safer :>
Ballistix run@ 1:1 2.5-4-4-8 (I don't want to set 2.5-3-3-5 like the review for make sure that it works fine)
I'll tell the testing result again.
P.S. I had reached to 10x260 V1.8, windows works but Prime95 doens't work stable.
southernpac - Sunday, September 19, 2004 - link
Wesley,If Raid 1 is used (mirrowing), is the slow down negligble for a simulations gamer - or would it be noticable? Would the same be the case with 7,200 rpm SATA's?
I also notice that you listed the eVGA 6800, but the July High-End Guide listed the Gigabyte 6800 (Ultra). Have you noticed performance or manufacturing differences between the 6800 vendors?
The photo of the Crucial Ballistik PC3200 512 memory has a CL113V.X1 part number on it. I can't find that part number listed on the Crucial web site. ? Bill Mackay
thebluesgnr - Saturday, September 18, 2004 - link
This is one interesting article, but I wish it had the same idea of a "Value" system as other AT articles. The Value system of this guide is too much for me, here's what I came up with:AMD Athlon XP Mobile 2400+ 45W $77
ASRock K7V88 Raid $44
512MB (1 X 512MB) Corsair Value Select DDR400 CAS2.5 $79
128MB GeCube Radeon 9550XT $99
Antec SLK3700-BQE Black ATX Midtower w/ 350W PSU $90
Seagate 80GB 7200RPM SATA (8Mb Cache) – ST380013AS $71
HSF not included, total of $460.
One could change that system to a Chaintech VNF3-250 + Sempron 3100+, but I would rather upgrade the video card first.
PrinceGaz - Saturday, September 18, 2004 - link
#25 Wesley Fink- its great to hear a Value RAM roundup is being planned, listening to and where necessary addressing your readers comments is one of the main reasons AT is such a valuable website.Gholam - Saturday, September 18, 2004 - link
You have a mistake on page 13 - you list CM Stacker as an all-aluminium case, while it definitely isn't. It has aluminium panels, but the chassis frame is made of steel. It also weighs 14.9kg... ouch. On the other hand, there is no other case where ducting the PSU is as easy...Wesley Fink - Saturday, September 18, 2004 - link
#24 - I mentioned in the Value conclusion that you can cut $300 by choosing a cheaper case and an ATI 9800 PRO instead. Perhaps I should make those recommendations part of the Value OC chart in the future.#22 - I recommended one 512MB stick of Crucial Ballistix to get the cost down on the lowest priced system and still have great overclocking. We do plan a Value RAM roundup in the future.
cnq - Saturday, September 18, 2004 - link
Wesley,Keep up the good work!
Only nit is that like last time, you "forgot" (maybe it was intentional) to present a value video card. The price of the video card stuck out like a sore thumb in the summary pricing table for the value system!
The power requirements are ugly, but consider putting the 9800pro in the summary table for the value system next time. Until the X700XT and 6600GT's come out (and in AGP), you can't do better for $190. [Or at least you could have downshifted from a 6800GT to a 6800 to save a hundred bucks on the value system.]
ksherman - Friday, September 17, 2004 - link
you know what would kick arse? doing comparison tests! Compare all the different rigs you guys reccomend and see who the winners are. i.e. Performance OC vs your high end setup etc.PrinceGaz - Friday, September 17, 2004 - link
I really don't know why anyone here is so keen on the Sempron 3100+. You'd be a fool to buy one when the A64 2800+ is available at only a slightly higher cost, has twice the L2 cache, and most importantly 64-bit support. Anyone who buys a Sempron 3100+ today will regret it in a year or two when x86-64 Windows is supported.If you only keep a CPU for a year or so though, it makes even less sense getting something like the Sempron 3100+ with hopes of high overclocks unless you like always having an overclocked substandard processor.
The non-high end memory issue is important and really needs to be covered, CAS 2.5 modules form the likes of Corsair are available at very competitive prices compared to CAS 2 modules. We need an article that looks at CAS 2.5 and also CAS 3 PC3200 modules from the major manufacturers so we can see how far they overclock, and at what voltages and timings. Most people don't buy CAS2 modules unless they're getting a top of the range CPU (2.4 GHz A64 or 3.2+ GHz Prescott), so if you look at an A64 3200+, you need to look at the memory most people will use with it.