3d Benchmarking

[centrifuge]

Originally posted by Spaced Cowboy
My system:

Asus P4S800D-E Deluxe
P4 3.0 OC'd to 3.3
1GB(2 sticks) OCZ 3700 gold Rev 2 (set at stock 2.5-3-3-7)
ATI 9800 pro
WD 74GB 10,000RPM Rator Sata
Lite on 4XDVD/CD burner.
SB audigy 5.1
Logitech 5.1 speakers
21" CRT

Spaced Cowboy,

I'd be interested to see your Aquamark3 scores, since your system is almost identical to mine, with the exception that you have the 9800, and the lone 74 GB raptor rather than the RAIDed 36 Gig raptors.

[alva]

I'm surprised to see many of you already adapted SATA.
-

Damn, Spike is that all you have to pay for two SATA drives

[Asher]

Originally posted by DrSpike
I have 3 questions btw, particularly in the light of SC's HD point.

With the SATA drives in RAID 0 config what is the performance increase over just 1 SATA drive and over say a decent ATA 133 drive?

SATA and ATA133 don't differ much in speed. SATA uses less CPU so it has less overhead, and it also offers better protection against data corruption. Technically SATA is 150MB/s and ATA133 is 133MB/s, but the bottleneck is on the physical HDs and not the connections.

Also how do you reinstall windows with this setup?

I did a fresh install myself. At the beginning there's a ROM for the RAID chips that come up, where you can configure them before Windows or Linux or anything else loads. From that point on, it's effectively one disk.

My motherboard actually has two RAID controllers, each with two SATA connections -- and they can work together to make a 4-way SATA RAID. One is a Promise, the other the Via, both do RAID 0, RAID 1, and RAID 0+1.

Is there a reason you have the Audigy and that network setup? My board has onboard stuff (and I presume yours does too) which seems not to suck too bad.

I have a good surround-sound speaker setup. The Audigy and Audigy 2 support Environmental Audio (EAX 1, 2, 3 and now 4) and this makes a huge difference to me. For a good demo of what it can do, see if a friend of yours has one of those cards and play Knights of the Old Republic or Call of Duty on them with EAX-HD (EAX3) enabled. Incredibly immersive.

Audigy 2s also use far less CPU, giving more performance, than onboard audio, and allow for far more advanced things in general. More EAX info is here: http://www.soundblaster.com/eax/

I have gigabit ethernet because it came with my motherboard.

[Asher]

Originally posted by DrSpike
Wow how did a non-overclocked 9700Pro come that close to Asher's score? I know the difference isn't huge between the cards, but I thought it'd be bigger than that.

Probably has to do with system memory. Athlon 64s are single channel (3.2GB/s) and P4s are dual channel (6.4GB/s).

Some benchmarks favor bandwidth, others latency. Athlon 64s have ~70 cycle latency to RAM, P4s have 200+ cycle latencies.

[Spaced Cowboy]

Originally posted by centrifuge


Spaced Cowboy,

I'd be interested to see your Aquamark3 scores, since your system is almost identical to mine, with the exception that you have the 9800, and the lone 74 GB raptor rather than the RAIDed 36 Gig raptors.

I'll see if I have time tonight, but I read somewhere that the 74 is faster than 2 raid 0 36s, hence my purchase (at a ridiculous $250, more than 2 separate 36s). Oh well, the memory was more than that anyhow.

[DrSpike]

Thanks for the answers. Would you put a ballpark figure on the performance increase of 2 SATA drives in a RAID 0 array over a solitary SATA drive?

If I do upgrade it's difficult to choose...........I could get 2 80GB SATA drives for just over £100. The Raptors are much more expensive (£160 for 2 of the 36GB ones). It's about the same for the bigger Raptor drive.

[Asher]

This review has RAID performance statistics of non-RAID versus RAID0 for my Seagate 7200.7 SATA's using two different RAID controllers:

[DrSpike]

Btw I got 37,291 for Aquamark..........which is about 13th for computers with stock 9800 Pro graphics card settings and processor within +/- 20 Mhz or so. Some got 2000 higher.

[Spaced Cowboy]

Asher...

Hmmm...looking at the PCMark score and is only ~2000, my single raptor is over 6000.

Another subject. I tripped out on the shut down time of my machine. 8 seconds from mouse click to no power. My old machine took 45-60 seconds. What a delta!

[DrSpike]

Hmm, I'm leaning towards 'doing an SC' and getting the big Raptor. I don't want more than 2 drives, since they get too hot with all 3 slots used.

The 2*36 Raptor with RAID 0 looks a little skimpy.

That leaves as option one the 2*80GB SATA drives (either Barracuda ones or the Maxtor one) using RAID 0.

Or, my preferred option, keep my newer ATA133 80GB drive, and get the 76GB Raptor.

Cost is comparable across the 2 options, though slightly cheaper for option 1. (Edit Actually it's about £60 cheaper)

What does everyone think?

[Asher]

Originally posted by Spaced Cowboy
Asher...

Hmmm...looking at the PCMark score and is only ~2000, my single raptor is over 6000.

1) That's PCMark02, not 04
2) It's the overall system PCMark, not HD only

[alva]

SATA and ATA133 don't differ much in speed. SATA uses less CPU so it has less overhead, and it also offers better protection against data corruption.

Does it matter much if your MB is 'only' SATA ready?

[centrifuge]

Originally posted by DrSpike

The 2*36 Raptor with RAID 0 looks a little skimpy.

What does everyone think?

I'm happy with them

If by skimpy you mean lacking in size I have plenty of space(in fact probably more than I'll need for quite sometime)







...but my third drive has 250 gigs

[Asher]

Originally posted by alva

SATA and ATA133 don't differ much in speed. SATA uses less CPU so it has less overhead, and it also offers better protection against data corruption.

Does it matter much if your MB is 'only' SATA ready?

I'm not sure what that means.

[DrSpike]

Originally posted by centrifuge

I'm happy with them

If by skimpy you mean lacking in size I have plenty of space(in fact probably more than I'll need for quite sometime)

...but my third drive has 250 gigs

Yeah I mean in space.

I guess I could keep the 80GB ATA133 and get the 2 Raptors in a RAID 0 array. It costs about the same as the larger Raptor. But I am a little concerned about the heat with all 3 slots used..........everyone says the Raptors are hot, in more ways than one.