Hi everyone. Im a bit stuck as to which parts to buy and figured some outside opinions could help me pick what to buy I am looking to upgrade sometime at the end of this year (or even early next if its worth saving a little extra) from my current setup. I do mostly gaming and web browsing. I am currently looking at either one of these upgrades: Option1: Intel i5 750, Gigabyte GA-P55-UD4, 4GB DDR3 1200mhz, 9800GT (for SLi with my current one). Total current price of AUS$750, though i assume the price of the 750 will drop as its jsut been released. Option2: AMD X3 720BE, Gigabyte GA-MA790X-UD4P, XFX 4870(or other suitable card). Total current price of AUS$515 Any views on these upgrades would be great. The AMD should be very similar gaming performance for the $$ but the main thing im worried about would be if the AMD would be "futureproof" enough.
I would go for the Intel core i5, socket 1156, You've picked a decent board with some good memory bus limits upto 2200mhz dual channel not bad. Onboard raid, your going for a raid 0 right on this setup? And you've got 2x PCI-Express x16 2.0 slots (4GB/s) bus frequencys which will work great for two way sli or quad sli. If you had the cash I would recommend a core i7 for the win. It's more future proof than the core i5. The core i9 will be out next year with 6 cpu cores and will be on the same socket as a core i7 1366 it's just 32nm ready which will just require a bios update.
Had a quick look into the i7 and i dont think ill be taking that path, its a bit too expensive right now. Im a big fan of bang for buck and right now the i5 750 seems to be a pretty big bang. I haven't actually thought about using RAID as ive never used it before. Im curious though, how much of a perfrmance boost does it give? Thank you for your opinion and suggestions
raid 0 makes a massive difference, it combines the speed of your hard drives together to make one big disk, so when booting into windows and loading programs into ram. The drives can read double the amount of data if you have a two disk raid 0. when extracting .rar files etc it will do it seconds instead of mins. also when loading games alot quicker, when waiting for a map to load on a game does it mega quick. only real downfall is if the raid 0 fails you've lost all your data because data is written to both drives instead of just the one. I suggest to invest in 2x western digital caviar blacks they are about £50 and have excellent read and write speeds and will perform very well in a onboard raid 0 looking at read and write speeds of upto 200mb/s. btw: also enable caching on the raid controller through device manager. this will increase the read and write speed.
I will definaly look at doing a RAID 0 setup next time i buy some new storage (probably after everything else). And i have lookin a bit further into your suggestion of an i7 setup and it could be worth the extra money. Thanks for the suggestion . Would probably cost me another ~$170 though i wont be buying til probably January 2010 so prices could vary. I looked into the intel roadmap and looks like they will be focusing alot more on the 1366 socket in the future.
im runing raid 0 with two raptors and its a great things and intel all day everyday! amd had its day in the sun but those are long gone
