Its here Its Here!

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I ordered this thing in january, took until Feb to get it paid but its finally arrived this morning. A brand spanking new system for me. It cost about £1k in total (not including monitor/etc as i already have these). Its a beast of a system.

Ill list the specs at some point but briefly:

2.3GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
2GB RAM
640MB Geforce 8800 GTS
should work out as 320GB HDD

I've got a question though, I got a RAID card so i could do RAID 5, but checking the manual, it lists that it does RAID 0 1 & 3.

Raid 3 looks like 5 to be honest. can anyone tell me if there is actually any difference between 3 and 5? or are they just different naming conventions for the same thing?

THanks
Fergal

 

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Holy Cow !

All of that for a grand ? Where did you get it from ?

640mb Geforce 8800 GTS. Goddamn !

That is no beast. It's monster.

 

Hi, nice machine..
Depending on your setup RAID5 can be slower but offers better recovery in a HDD failure. How many drives have you got in this beast? Dont forget also that you will lose some space depending on the amount of drives installed. ie; 3 drives would lose you 33%, 5 drives 20% etc etc.

RAID 5 requires a minimum of three drives and it's better [not essential] all drives are the same size. The only time RAID 5 could fail is if two drives were to fail at the same time.

RAID 1 requires 2 drives but you do lose 1/2 the capacity, ie you would only have 160gb for data as its mirrored.

RAID3 not too sure about as I have never used but I am sure google could help there..

Cheers
G

 

nice one mate...u will certainly be able to play Solitaire without any problems now... hehe...seriously tho mate thats one hell of a machine...enjoy

 

Yeah, ive been speaking to the ops guys here, they reckon 3's a bad idea. 5's good for redundancy and a speed increase.

So instead of having to buy another card im going to (for now) run with Raid0. get blisteringly fast speeds. Ill maybe see about doing nightly backups. I've got 3 160GB drive at the moment so that should be pretty good.

I actually ordered the setup from Scan. There were issues with the dispatch being delayed beyond when i was told it would be sent out. But once it was dispatched i got it the very next morning.

Looking forward to seeing WoW running on the system. I ended up going for Vista since i could get a cheap OEM for it.

 

Lovely system there Fergal. Enjoy!

 

ARGH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Ok so its my first time building a system, I expected troubles and taking a long time to build. Took me most of the night (almost threw the heatsink across the room when it wouldnt lock into the MOBO).

I finally got it set up, although i only got two Sata power leads to power four drives, not a problem until you realise that the DVD drive is that the top of the case and the HDD's are at the bottom. So im off to buy one today to sort things out.

I put a temporary measure in place to be able to turn the machine on and begin installation, seemed to go ok. But now i have another issue and i dont know how to resolve it...

I've got This installed to provide a RAID array with my disks. Apart from the issue that with three disks the ONLY configuration the card will accept is Raid3 (meaning if i want all three disks I have to set two to Raid0 and effectively set the third to Raid0 on its own (just to make it show up). Anyway, booting to the Vista installer, it progresses ok until i have to select which drive to install to. With the raid0 setup above, i got both drives listing, but both of them have an error which says (im not at the machine right now so this is only rough) "Your system may be unable to boot from this drive, please update your BIOS configuration".

Im using an ABIT9 MOBO, with Phoenix Award BIOS. I've gone into the settings and (cant remember which setting exactly, and set the Bios to boot to CD Drive first, then Hard drive, and the Boot priority option does list the Raid system (Listed as SyncRaid) - although thinking about it it does seem to list it a SCSI, so perhaps i need to change the booting order from hard Drive to a SCSI drive option?

Can anyone offer advice here?

 

if it labels it as SCSI I would choose that...and see how that goes...

 

Alright, got it sorted. It was the Raid controllers fault. With three disks, it wont list as a bootable drive for anything other than the default Raid3 setup. So i went with that in the end.

Once i did that Vista installed without an issue. I went with 64-bit vista for compatibility with my processor. There were a couple of issues, mainly that the driver disks i had for my Mobo and graphics card, etc didnt include vista drivers, so i had to go to the websites and download their Vista 64-bit drivers. After that its all working well.

For those of you who dont know, Vista has a scoring system that it uses for your hardware to judge suitability for programs. Currently the highest ranking available is 5.9, my system rates at an overall 5.0 (my raid array drops writespeed down to a 5.1, and my processor scores a 5.0 for calculations per second and something else - but my graphics scores are 5.9!!), so im happy.

For the first time in years i have a brand new system, and for the first time ever i have a top of the range system!

 

now thats a score and a half mate... well done mate...enjoy it...oooh tell you wot...get yourself a copy of the Matrix Online and we can have a laugh on it together hehe...

 

Good system no doubt, but id have personally chucked a 8800 GTX on board! Makes a whole lot of difference when your going to be playing games like the forthcoming crysis.

My rating's are...........................

processor - 5.2

memory (1gb) - 4.5 will be better when back up to 2gb again

graphics - 5.9

gaming grahics 5.9

primary HDD - 5.5

Base score of 4.5 cos of the 1gb ram. OCZ though, quality stuff