=DdogG=

thanks for all the advice guys....

If I do not go SLI (which I have been convinced of.....) then I will not need a psu. I have an antec 500w, it just is not sli ready.

I really like MSI as well, I just had three crap out on me though... like within 2 days of each other.... all three k7n2g-l... I loved that board too.... I have set up well over 50 biostar boards and they are rock solid, but you are right, they are basic. I just think I'm over the overclocking thing.

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xTYBALTx

Just make sure the biostar has the required slots (PCI-expressx16) etc etc.

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TheFeniX

I run RAID 0 on two SATA WD HDDs. The extra throughput can come in handy.

There's no exponential increase in chance of failure. My math may be off, but if your HDD has a 1 in 1000 chance of dying adding another would be 2 in 1000.

Further, I've personally never had a single HDD die on me. I had some old 200MB HDDs I finally had to just throw away. Buy quality parts and you have no issues.

Further, with the invention of SMART tech for HDDs, you rarely do not have a warning before your HDD finally craps out.

To each his own I guess.

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KeithMann

So if you have 1000 such drives, one is certain to fail? I'm afraid your math is off.

My bias agains RAID0 comes from running database servers with literally hundreds of hard drives in RAIDs. We lose about one drive per month -- not because they're not good drives, but because we have so many that the odds of at least one drive failing in a given month are pretty high. Hard drive failures in the absence of redundancy are sufficiently unpleasant that I prefer not to take any unnecessary chances, especially when a drive with capacity 2n is cheaper than 2 drives of capacity n.

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=DdogG=

raid problems aside...

I found a really big snafu in my plans....

turns out ATI +fire has to be a radeon Xpress 200 chipset.....
the good news in that would be that +fire does not have to have identical cards. I could get an x850 and an x1800xt and they would work together. one of them has to be "crossfire edition" however.

SLI only works on Nforce SLI chipsets, and they recommend identical cards, even from the same manufacturer. the other downside is that NVidia's approach only works on supported games, so there is no guarantee that there would be any benefit at all in SLI for any given game.

so, I think I might be leaning towards the opteron 146 if I can find it. (it is an Athlon FX 5x underclocked.) the 1xx series is a socket 939, and overclocks like crazy. people have gotten the 2.0 ghz 146 to 2.8 on air and 3.2 on water.
thats insane.

I do think since I am getting only one Gfx card now, that I will spend the extra on a great motherboard. the Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe looks nice.for 150, the thing is pimp.

so here is the new setup:

eVGA 7800GT
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16814130247

Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813131517

Opteron 148 2.2 ghz Venus core
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16819103595

pqi turbo PC3200 cas 2
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820141233

I'm keeping the case and the hard drives. since I am not going sli, I'm keeping my psu. (I dropped the DVD burner since I have an external Laptop DVD+/-RW I can use...)


nice rig. right at 1100 shipped.

__________________
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former. -Albert Einstein
The two most common elements in the universe are Hydrogen and stupidity. -Harlan Ellison

If all else fails: "rm -rf /"

TheFeniX

It's called statistics and MTBF.

Ok, database servers != home PCs. If a database server goes down, you're losing money by the minute. The cost of the hardware is negligable, you're worried about downtime.

Also, you have to contend with drives that are most likely being accessed 24 hours a day if you're losing one a month. A home PC rarely sees that kind of activity.

And if you are really worried about it: backup (which people shoud be doing anyways with their important data).

If one of my drives dies: I have to reformat and restore data.
If my single drive dies: I have to reformat and restore data.

So I reiterate: buy good hardware and you'll have no problems.

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slugslinger

wat ever u do dont i repeat dont get x1600 reviews dont look that good for that card from eat i read.this is kind of a bad time to buy cuz u got new tech just comin with in the next few months and high end of last generations prices goin down. u gotta make up ur mind wats best for u. i really stress the GS in your case you are gonna need the pixal shader 3.0 in furture games and as we all know thats lackin in all x800 cards as for the 1600 i would strong recomennd u read up some revies from wat i hear the GS is the same if not faster and also more cheap.

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Spyder

Yugh. Punctuation is such a novelty nowadays.

I think the new setup is Purdy, nuff said.

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Trooper

hey it wasnt me this time. sheesh

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that sounds like a good idea trooper.
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KeithMann

I'm aware of what it's called, but the fact remains that your math is incorrect.

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hayes321

Ive got a x800pro 2gigs of ram and a 3.0 processor and i run BF2 on
"Super High"

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CingularDuality

Looks very nice. I'm finally starting to feel small twinges of jealousy again now that about a year has passed since I upgraded...

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TheFeniX

Yet, you fail to answer the other part of my post. There is no "exponential" chance of HDD loss by adding a second HDD. Further, I would like to see information on how my math is off.

Don't scare someone off from a perfectly sound idea like RAID 0, unless you're going to give them accurate information.

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sordavie

For those of you guys wondering what the probability that at least one of your hard drives will fail given that the chance of any hard drive failing is .001 (or 1/1000), the answer is not .002 (or 2/1000) for two drives, although it's close to that. The formula to figure out this probability is not the probability of one failing times 2. Here is the correctly formula and answer:

1 - (.999 ^ 2) = .00199 or .199% or 199/10000

The probability that at least one out of one thousand drives will fail is:

1- (.999 ^ 1000) = .63230

So given a thousand drives, the chance that one will fail, given that the chance of any hard drive failure is .001 is .6323 or 63.23% or 6323/10000

KeithMann

Thanks for saving me the math, Sordavie

I'm not trying to "scare anyone off" but my experience is that this industry, in an attempt to sell products like RAID-equipped motherboards, emphasizes the benefits and deemphansizes the risks. Hence, I try to at least present the risks so that an informed decision can be made. In the case of RAID0, the 'redundant' part of RAID does not apply and there's debate as to whether 0 should be considered a RAID level at all; it's simply disk striping.

So, in essence, my point is this: with RAID0, you are trading an increased risk of failure for an increase in performance. IMO this is a bad trade-off, especially considering the added expense of a second disk.

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