Upgrade question

Post by **Cakedaddy** » Fri Jul 23, 2004 1:02 am

Hard drive speeds:

ATA/33 vs ATA/100 = HUGE VERY NOTICEABLE DIFFERENCE
4500rpm vs 7000 rpm = Very small, 99% of people won't notice

RAM speed = semi noticeable difference. You have the different PC speeds (2700, 4000, etc). You also have different CAS (2, 2.5, 3). The lower the CAS, the faster it is (and more expensive).

In my opinion, it will be a close tie between your CPU and your RAM as to who will become the new bottleneck.

71-1085092892 · Post by **71-1085092892** » Fri Jul 23, 2004 2:46 am

Cakedaddy wrote:In my opinion, it will be a close tie between your CPU and your RAM as to who will become the new bottleneck.

So do you think it would be worth spending $400 for that card in my system, or will I not see a noticable improvement?

Post by **TheCatt** » Fri Jul 23, 2004 8:28 am

Zetleft wrote:I really can't tell the difference from looking at the cables either but if you been using the same HD since the 90s I'll bet its running as fast as it can.... which is really fucking slow. It should tell you some specifics on the hard drive itself if you want to check it out and when your system first boots up it should state what speed all your HDs and CDROMS are operating at right after the memory test.

ATA-33 cables have about 40 wires (bumps in them) and each bump looks to be about 1.5-2mm wide.

ATA-66+ cables have about 80 wires (bumps) in them, each less than 1mm wide.

And you can always get the fancy round IDE cables, of which I've only seen the 133 variety (also allows for less clutter and more air-flow)

Paul · Post by **Paul** » Fri Jul 23, 2004 8:45 am

TPRJones wrote:
Paul wrote:How fast is your hard drive?

4500 RPM

It really made a big difference? I've got a 800MHz system with 640Megs RAM, and it doesn't act like it. The only piece I haven't upgraded in longer than I can remember is the hard drive.

Maybe it's time.

It made a big difference capturing video. When my 7200rpm drive crashed I got a 5400, and was unable to capture video after that despite it being a clean install of Windows (with no programs running in the background). Technically I could capture stuff at the lowest possible settings, but even with tiny video and the lowest quality sound it had choppy points.

I bought a 7200rpm, reinstalled and video capture works flawlessly at normal settings despite the fact that I now have some stuff running in the background. I captured 20 minutes of uncompressed raw video last week and only lost one frame.

My system: Pentium 700MHz, 512MB RAM, 120GB 7200rpm HD, ATI All-In-Wonder 32MB AGP.

Paul · Post by **Paul** » Fri Jul 23, 2004 8:56 am

Cakedaddy wrote:4500rpm vs 7000 rpm = Very small, 99% of people won't notice

A 7200rpm drive is 33% faster than a 5400rpm drive, and 60% faster than a 4500rpm drive. It made a big difference for me.

mbilderback · Post by **mbilderback** » Fri Jul 23, 2004 12:01 pm

Gordo, believe it or not, a lot of stuff you think would be loaded into RAM isn't. Games specifically hit the HDD a LOT. If you really want to see a jump in system performance. Go get yourself 3 moderately sized SCSI drives (20GB a piece or so but make sure they are all the same size), get you a bootable Adaptec SCSI raid controller and run your system in RAID-5, it's not as expensive as it sounds and you WILL notice a huge increase in speed.

mbilderback · Post by **mbilderback** » Fri Jul 23, 2004 12:03 pm

As far as Ultra DMA cables (ATA-100/133/166) go, here's one:

Regular ATA cable:

mbilderback · Post by **mbilderback** » Fri Jul 23, 2004 12:08 pm

You can get an 18GB UW-SCSI-3 @ 10k rpms for $50, X3=$150.
Adaptec 2940 UW-SCSI-3 controller: $20
Total: $170, giving you 36GB of total space and a speed that will blow your mind.

EDIT: About $125 per drive for 73GB if you want a lot of space. And every size in between.

Also, this will give you redundancy. If one drive fails, it will run on 2 until you replace the one, then it will rebuild the lost drive. NO downtime and NO lost data. The reason you loose the extra 18gb of space is for the parity to make it redundant.

71-1085092892 · Post by **71-1085092892** » Fri Jul 23, 2004 12:16 pm

mbilderback wrote:Gordo, believe it or not, a lot of stuff you think would be loaded into RAM isn't. Games specifically hit the HDD a LOT. If you really want to see a jump in system performance. Go get yourself 3 moderately sized SCSI drives (20GB a piece or so but make sure they are all the same size), get you a bootable Adaptec SCSI raid controller and run your system in RAID-5, it's not as expensive as it sounds and you WILL notice a huge increase in speed.

Yes, but something like framerate isn't going to be determined by the HD. It's going to be the CPU, video card, RAM, and how fast they talk to each other.

mbilderback · Post by **mbilderback** » Fri Jul 23, 2004 12:27 pm

GORDON wrote:
mbilderback wrote:Gordo, believe it or not, a lot of stuff you think would be loaded into RAM isn't. Games specifically hit the HDD a LOT. If you really want to see a jump in system performance. Go get yourself 3 moderately sized SCSI drives (20GB a piece or so but make sure they are all the same size), get you a bootable Adaptec SCSI raid controller and run your system in RAID-5, it's not as expensive as it sounds and you WILL notice a huge increase in speed.

Yes, but something like framerate isn't going to be determined by the HD. It's going to be the CPU, video card, RAM, and how fast they talk to each other.

Unless it's pulling polygons, textures, and lighting effect information off the HDDs...which it does quite a bit. I've had games stall out for a couple of seconds every once in a while and it's because of HDD access.

71-1085092892 · Post by **71-1085092892** » Fri Jul 23, 2004 12:54 pm

Ok, nevermind, in order to improve video performance, I need to upgrade to SCSI. Got it.

Post by **TPRJones** » Fri Jul 23, 2004 1:39 pm

I've never seen one of those newer cables before. I'm using all old ones.

Well, there's one mystery solved.

Post by **Cakedaddy** » Fri Jul 23, 2004 1:55 pm

GORDON wrote:
Cakedaddy wrote:In my opinion, it will be a close tie between your CPU and your RAM as to who will become the new bottleneck.

So do you think it would be worth spending $400 for that card in my system, or will I not see a noticable improvement?

I dunno dude. . .

I'd say, get the card, cause it can be moved to a system that can handle it later. But then, you're spending alot of money on a card and only getting perhaps 80% out of it. By the time you can pull 100% out of it, it will have been cheaper/or not the best any more.

Perhaps look at a lower than top of the line card maybe or something.

Over all, in my opinion, will you see a better frame rate? Absolutely. Will you be getting 100% of what the card can do? Probably not. So, you'll be somewhere between better than now, and not quite at the card's full potential.

Could be summed up with: You will see perfomance.

Post by **Cakedaddy** » Fri Jul 23, 2004 1:58 pm

Paul wrote:
TPRJones wrote:
Paul wrote:How fast is your hard drive?

4500 RPM

It really made a big difference? I've got a 800MHz system with 640Megs RAM, and it doesn't act like it. The only piece I haven't upgraded in longer than I can remember is the hard drive.

Maybe it's time.

It made a big difference capturing video. When my 7200rpm drive crashed I got a 5400, and was unable to capture video after that despite it being a clean install of Windows (with no programs running in the background). Technically I could capture stuff at the lowest possible settings, but even with tiny video and the lowest quality sound it had choppy points.

I bought a 7200rpm, reinstalled and video capture works flawlessly at normal settings despite the fact that I now have some stuff running in the background. I captured 20 minutes of uncompressed raw video last week and only lost one frame.

My system: Pentium 700MHz, 512MB RAM, 120GB 7200rpm HD, ATI All-In-Wonder 32MB AGP.

Since video capture is obviously a very high HDD use application, you would see the improvement. But games don't hit the drives like that. They hit the drives, but only to cache info into RAM or to load a cut scene. So, the extra RPMs when gaming won't help that much. At least, that's what I think/have seen.

Post by **Cakedaddy** » Fri Jul 23, 2004 2:02 pm

mbilderback wrote:Unless it's pulling polygons, textures, and lighting effect information off the HDDs...which it does quite a bit. I've had games stall out for a couple of seconds every once in a while and it's because of HDD access.

Then you need more RAM.

mbilderback · Post by **mbilderback** » Fri Jul 23, 2004 2:47 pm

Ok, it's not that I need more RAM. Here's the issue. When a game is programmed, it's set to put certain things into memory, prioritized by what's accessed more often, what's needed most, etc. You could load the entire game into physical memory, but that would require you to have about 500mb above and beyond the entire size of the program, not very practical. So, it's programmed only to put certain things into memory. This is where they get their minimum memory requirements. As you load more and more stuff, it will only start removing stuff from memory if it starts to run out of space, that's why programs run better with more memory. Now, if you want HDD access not to matter at all during game-play with current developed games, you would have to make a 2GB or so RAMDRIVE out of the system memory, leaving some amount over 256 free for system resources. At that point, you would basically copy the entire game over into that ramdrive and then run it from there. That would COMPLETELY eliminate the HDD access from the gameplay, but until then, you will continue to load pieces of the game and swap pieces of the game to and from the HDD as you play.

Ok, rant over. The point is, with modern games, the more RAM the better, and it's more important than HDD. But you cannot ignore the fact that faster read/write times to your HDD will become more and more important. And he asked where the bottleneck would be after buying a new video card, and probably at that point, his issue would be in HDD read/write operations.

71-1085092892 · Post by **71-1085092892** » Fri Jul 23, 2004 3:08 pm

By the way, here's my Current card, for comparison to the new one.

mbilderback · Post by **mbilderback** » Fri Jul 23, 2004 3:57 pm

Do you have a game, Gordo, that's hurting with the Ti4200?

71-1085092892 · Post by **71-1085092892** » Fri Jul 23, 2004 4:02 pm

mbilderback wrote:Do you have a game, Gordo, that's hurting with the Ti4200?

I had to crank down the graphics on Far Cry, which I hate doing. Doom 3 coming out next month... I want it to be pretty.

71-1085092892 · Post by **71-1085092892** » Fri Jul 23, 2004 4:23 pm

Oops, I have a 4800. My bad. Brainfarted.