A few questions

CaptinSxb

1. Can regular ata drives be put into raid?
2. If yes, how does two ata drives compare to a sata drive?
3. Is the cache size going to make a difference between 2mb and 8mb?
4. Would there be a difference between having a sperate dvd/cd and a combo drive?
5. Do you need special hardware to monitor temperatures or does it come with the motherboards/gfx/proccessor etc.
6. If you cant afford the newest OCZ dual channel memory, will two sticks of this bottle neck your system at all? If it will can anyone point me to some better memory for not much more money?(feel free to do it anyway )
7. Is 420w powerful enough for an A64 processor,HDD,CD,FDD,6800gt and still be stable.
8. Whats better for gaming, an LCD or a CRT monitor?
9. Is there an easy way to remove the pins from molex connectors for sleeving instead of spending $20 on somthing that youll use once.
10. Any reccomendations for sleeving?
11. Would lapping the stock heatsink and putting some new arctic silver paste on it be sufficent for no overclocking?
12. Is there any software that you would recommend for any reason at all? (antivirus, OS's,games,utilities,etc)
13. Why is DH such a great site?

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A64-3200; x800xl; a couple other things ; and a floppy drive

Shinjikun

Holy crap; I'll try to answer some of these.
1. Yes
2. Depends on what you mean; 2 ATA RAID-0 VS 1 SATA?
3. Pretty good difference; but not a world apart
4. Yes there would be a difference; with a combo drive you get both of those read features without having to have two separate pieces of hardware in your PC.
5. Temperature monitoring comes with most (if not all modern) desktop motherboards.
7. I would go for at least a 480W PSU with an nVidia card.
8. CRT for faster refresh\fill rates and clarity\color quality; all though LCD displays have caught up recently.
9. Not that I've seen (easy that is).
10. Sleeving is a pain; get an Ultra X-Connect.
11. W/no overclocking a stock heatsink and AS5 should be fine.
13. Because the staff and community are both awesome and dedicated.

Yes I didn't answer 12. and 6.

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Xfire: [Shinji1225 \ Status]
A7N8X-E Deluxe
Athlon XP 2500+ (@ 2.2 GHz 11x200 MHz FSB)
Corsair TwinX XMS 1GB PC3200 Dual Channel (2-2-3-5)
[color=red]ATi [/color][color=white]Radeon 9500 Pro (@ 330\310) \ [/color][color=white]Omega Catalyst Drivers v2.5.90[/color]
[color=white]Ultra X-Connect 500W PSU[/color]

CaptinSxb

Yes thats what I meant.

If I could afford one of those I wouldnt be asking for a cheap way to sleeve now would I lol.

Is that just too give the hardware some leeway or should I seriously consider a stronger one? (im on a budget incase you didnt realize that so the less money i spend the happier i am.)

Thanks for the reply.

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A64-3200; x800xl; a couple other things ; and a floppy drive

Shinjikun

As for the hard drives I don't think that IDE RAID-0 would be faster than one SATA drive. I'd think both would be a similar speed with no clear cut advantage with one over the other -- but I could be wrong.

I tried to sleeve up a power supply for my new machine a while back but failed completely. You can get decent kits for $10 or less but if you are going to use heat shrink wrapping for the cables it can be a pain to get that applied, depending on the quality. You can use cable ties or electric tape but it looks worse of course.

Finally as for the PSU you might be able to swing it with the 420W but I wouldn't want to take the risk if it were my machine. Basically it should work; but you should do the machine a favor and give it some more breathing room with at least a 480W.

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Xfire: [Shinji1225 \ Status]
A7N8X-E Deluxe
Athlon XP 2500+ (@ 2.2 GHz 11x200 MHz FSB)
Corsair TwinX XMS 1GB PC3200 Dual Channel (2-2-3-5)
[color=red]ATi [/color][color=white]Radeon 9500 Pro (@ 330\310) \ [/color][color=white]Omega Catalyst Drivers v2.5.90[/color]
[color=white]Ultra X-Connect 500W PSU[/color]

Judas

Yes they can, Even the very very old drives that run PIO mode can work in RAID (as long as the controller supports it and runs on the same cable setup)

Depends on the drives themselves. Currently i'm running 2 30GB Maxtor 2mb cache ATA133 in Raid 0, Using various stripe lengths (block sizes) anywere between 32kb to 2mb... i can meat up pretty well exactly or above the speed of 1 Raptor 10000 RPM 72gb 8mb SATA drive.... which, is pretty good i think for the type of drives i'm using.... it's pretty well double what i was getting without raid. (could triple it if i had 3 of the same drives in raid 0)

Yes it will make a difference, but it depends a few things usually, depends on what your running... but usually overall, 8mb should show pretty well an obvious preformance boost just by using the 2mb and then using an 8 mb

Another one that depends.... I'm suspecting you are meaning ONE drive is a CD/DVD only reader, and the other a burner, IF you are buring cd/dvds from your hardrive, no probably better off with a combo drive, no need to have one just sitting around doing nothing. HOWEVER, if you make copies or burn files from one cd to another, thats were you'll see an improvement.... However, if you are meaning specifically a CD only Burn and a DVD only burner, don't worry, the burners that will burn CD and DVDs work great, (i don't know of any drives that only burn DVDs ATM)

Anything made within the last say, 6 years (i'd have to say enless it was a PREBUILT {dell, compaq}) has some form of monitor/temperature readout AND Shutdown or warning, however that's only for the motherboard and CPU.... when ATI released the 9800XT, i beleive they were the first to show temp monitoring mainstream without modding it all yourself. BTW... the motherboard checks the CPU's temp, so it may be dependant on a few things

Depends again on a few things, that ram is designed to run at 200mhz FSB (default for the AMD Athlon 3200+ XP or higher) at a cas latency of 2.5 which in my opinion isn't bad at all, if you wanted to overclock it may be a problem but usually most people can get another 10% more speed at best (overclock) Kingston is a good memory, i myself wouldn't have an issue buying it.

Should be plenty, plus more, a 420 watt psu should be able to support another HD and another CD rom drive plus probably some fans and some lighting of sort.... AS LONG AS THE PSU is of decent quality, you should NEVER skimp on a psu, power is everything, if you don't got the juice, you'll be asking for problems.. and even though at the first boot... or month, it may run well.... a cheapo psu may pull through for a first while, but may burn up and POSSIBLY take the rest of your machine with it..... i'd hate to see that....

Thats rides the edge of personal Preference, CRT's are way cheaper (the good quality CRTS) vs any LCD that compares to the quality of a decent CRT..... the responce times and overall clarity and crispness of a crt usually beats out a LCD any day.... however, they are making strides in LCD technology..... if you've got a massive wallet.. you could get a LCD that runs very much like a CRT

I have no experience with this aside from literly RIPPING the crap out of one PSU and finding out i had destroyed it trying to remove some stuff.. (i really didn't care as the psu was dead and i was having some fun)..... But if you look, there may be some hooks the hold the pins into place, using some really small needle nose pliers or tweezers.... you should be able to get them out fairly easily... .but don't take my word on it.... i've no experience at all

Um, sorry, i've never bought sleeving and enless i find something that does it all automatically at a resonable price.... i probably won't..... (enless i get hardcore into moding or something? )

IF you don't overclock or plan to overclock at all... running straight out stock without lapping should be PLENTY fine, although lapping and taking the time to make the best possible job done isn't without it's neatness...... as your temps should lower, more chance of being more stable..... probably a longer lifespan for the hardware...

anitvirus, erm, you'll have to wait for someone else to respond... i don't run one aside from a website based one at http://www.pcpitstop.com/ .....Windows XP Pro SP2 (slipstreamed) is probably the best and easiest ATM.... games wise?.... not sure what you like to play.... name your genres that you like.. i'm sure we could throw a few titles at you...... Utils...... depends ...what do you want to do....

Cause i live here....

no, because ...... i don't think i could answer that question at all easily in one post.......

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CaptinSxb

As for games Im into FPS,RPG's,and just about anything that has a good story line and decent gameplay.

Utility wise I have no idea whats out there to even begin knowing what I want. But I just saw the Useful Utilties sticky so I'll be checking that out.

Thanks for the information Judas.

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A64-3200; x800xl; a couple other things ; and a floppy drive

tastyweat

1. Yes
2. Depends on the speed of the ata drives... 2x 7200rpm, 8mb cache drives will be about 10-15% slower in raid than 2x sata drives - hitachi make the fastest ata drives available atm.
3. Yes... bigger cache is faster.
4. only real difference between having deperate dvd/cdrw and a combo drive is the ease of doing disc to disc copies... if you don't mind stripping a cd to your hdd and then burning it back onto a cd then go for a combo drive... it'll leave an extra ide port open for another optical drive/hdd.
5. CPU temp is measured by most motherboards... GFX temp is only monitored on more recent graphics cards... 5800 and newer for NV and 9800XT and newer for ATI
6. Look for PQI on newegg... they have some fast and cheap memory available.
7. 420W should be fine.
8. A good LCD is great for gaming... if you can't fork out that much money then a CRT will do you better. With LCD you want to be looking for 16ms... no higher or lower at the moment.
9. Can't answer this one - never tried.
10. same again.
11. For no overclocking you may aswell leave the stock HSF as it is... but lapping and AS5 would reduce the temps a couple of degrees C.
12. WinTasks 5 Professional... it gives you alot of control over the OS and what's running in the background... they'll be a DH review going up in a couple of days. A firewall is always a good thing to have... stops hackers and viruses from getting onto your system... the one included with SP2 is sufficient... I have a hardware firewall in my router at home and that does me - no need for any software firewall to take up CPU cycles then.
13. Because of all the genuine and friendly support, knowledgebase and discussion available.

EDIT: If you have a firewall then there's no need for a virus scanner... two programs taking up extra cycles - it's not worth it... when i had a virus scanner installed it used to slow my computer down... so i moved over to a firewall only and then shortly to a hardware firewall and i have had not a single virus since.

As for WinTasks 5 Pro... there's a 15 day free trial available on their website over at www.liutilities.com - i highly recommend it.

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CaptinSxb

For the hard drives how would the performance be with the following setup. A small sata hdd for the os and main programs and 2 larger ata's in raid-0 for data storage. Is that possible and will it be effective? Anyone know of anywhere that sells the xconnects for cheaper?, as it seems sleeving wouldnt be as easy as i thought .

Thanks for the info tasty.

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A64-3200; x800xl; a couple other things ; and a floppy drive

Shinjikun

Damn, information overload.

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Xfire: [Shinji1225 \ Status]
A7N8X-E Deluxe
Athlon XP 2500+ (@ 2.2 GHz 11x200 MHz FSB)
Corsair TwinX XMS 1GB PC3200 Dual Channel (2-2-3-5)
[color=red]ATi [/color][color=white]Radeon 9500 Pro (@ 330\310) \ [/color][color=white]Omega Catalyst Drivers v2.5.90[/color]
[color=white]Ultra X-Connect 500W PSU[/color]

dj_stick

that one sata for OS and raid for data is a good idea… that way if your OS disk goes down you still got the data

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