Video Card, Hard Drive

[charbroil]

What would everyone pick?

 

Hard Drive:

160 GB RAID 0 at 10,000rpm (w/ external drive for more storage) or

500 GB RAID 0 at 7,200 rpm

 

and

 

Video Card:

256 MB nVidia GeForce 6800 or

256 MB ATI Radeon X850 PE

 

I'm trying to decide. I think I would pick the 10,000rpm drive and the Radeon Card, but I've heard bad things about Radeon's w/ Studio Max?

 

Thanks.

[ihabkal]

second choice (500) and second choice (ATI)

and I'm talking from experience. you need detailed reasons?

[Tim Nelson]

but I've heard bad things about Radeon's w/ Studio Max?.

I would listen to that. I've not had an ATI card in years, but I too have heard many negative things about ATI when used with Max. The advantage of the Quadro's is stability, plus you can use the Maxtreme drivers which will give you additional viewport performance.

[charbroil]

Why wouldn't you prefer the 10,000 rpm drive over the 7,200rpm drive. I don't need the extra storage, so I would assume the faster the better???

[mbr]

you are talking about RAID 0 = 2 drives striped, right?

 

I'd suggest looking into RAID 5. I've got 3 250 gig (7200rpm) drives in RAID 5, so that's almost the speed of RAID 0, but with back up on the third drive (not a complete mirror, however, like RAID 1).

 

I'd also stick with the 7200 rpm drives, unless you have tons of cash and don't need much storage. The others are much more expensive.

 

Dell doesn't offer it standard, but they support it. The tech guy walked me through the setup.

 

No experience with ATI's. Depends on which 6800 you are referring to as well. As far as I know, there is a big difference between the GT and the Ultra (think that's what they are).

[ihabkal]

the 6800s use a lot of power. the Ultra needs two additional power cables attached. I installed one with a 550W power supply and still had problems had to turn off the acceleration to keep the pc from shutting down. they draw too much power.

the ATI cards use less power. and they don't need maxxtreme they are faster without it. the same priced ATI is faste rthan the same priced Nvidia

 

the hard disks you are talking about are Western Raptors. I had two in raid 0. they practically double the speed. which I didn't see in any other raid 0 setp with any other drives I installed, which give only 50% improvement. But windows sees thise as Scuzi drives, and attempts to turn on scuzzi features, which causes periodic system crashes. find the settings and turn them off, you'll get slower speeds but more stability. or switch to regular sata drives.

 

you can also opt for a mobo that supports sataII and see what improvement that brings. if I were you I would get that instead.