3d Benchmarking

[DrSpike]

That's the one that rates the whole system for a broad spectrum of uses right? Never tried it.

[DrSpike]

DP.

[Adagio]

That's one hell of a late DP

Never tried PCMark04. Is that also a 3D test program of some such?

[DrSpike]

Originally posted by ADG
That's one hell of a late DP

I was getting database down message for almost 10 minutes.

[Spaced Cowboy]

Originally posted by DrSpike
That's the one that rates the whole system for a broad spectrum of uses right? Never tried it.

Yeah,

It has an overall computer score and then breaks it down.
CPU
memory
video
HDD

I'm curious if anyone has run a raid 0 setup and what their HDD score is. The Raptor gets me 6100.

[DrSpike]

Originally posted by Asher

39,219.

CPU: AMD Athlon 64 3200+ @ 3400+ (2.2GHz)
MB: Asus K8V Deluxe
RAM: OCZ Platinum EL PC3200 512MB (CL2) x 2
HD: 2 x 120GB SATA Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 w/ 8MB cache in RAID0 config
Sound: SoundBlaster Audigy 2
Network: 3Com 3C940 Gigabit ethernet
Video: ATI Radeon 9800 Pro @ 430MHz core

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?

Also how do you reinstall windows with this setup?

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.

[Spaced Cowboy]

On board sound and video steal cpu cycles and use system memory. I recommend buying a separate sound card (~$45 US).

Also Ashers core on the 9800 Pro is impressive, mine capped out at around 408, did you use a Bios setting or something else?

[DrSpike]

I suspect he upped the AGP voltages in the BIOS.

[centrifuge]

I couldn't quite beat Asher's score on Aquamark3

I came pretty darn close though

38,927 with nothing over-clocked

CPU: 3.0GHz P4C (800 FSB)
MoBo: chaintech 9cjs Zenith
RAM: 2x512mB Corsair DDR 400 (PC3200) (Dual Channel)
HD: 2x36 Gb Western Digital Raptors (10,000 RPM), RAID 0
Sound: Onboard Envy24 HF
Video: ATI Radeon 9700 pro (128mb) AIW

[centrifuge]

Originally posted by DrSpike


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?

Also how do you reinstall windows with this setup?

There is a definite increase, unfortunately, I don't know any specifics.

As far as installing windows, its easy as pie with XP, generally if you want to use a RAID or SATA drives, you need to tell setup to install the 3rd party drivers from a floppy by pressing F6 and following the onscreen instructions.

[DrSpike]

Originally posted by centrifuge
I couldn't quite beat Asher's score on Aquamark3

I came pretty darn close though

38,927 with nothing over-clocked

CPU: 3.0GHz P4C (800 FSB)
MoBo: chaintech 9cjs Zenith
RAM: 2x512mB Corsair DDR 400 (PC3200) (Dual Channel)
HD: 2x36 Gb Western Digital Raptors (10,000 RPM), RAID 0
Sound: Onboard Envy24 HF
Video: ATI Radeon 9700 pro (128mb) AIW

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.

[DrSpike]

Originally posted by centrifuge


There is a definite increase, unfortunately, I don't know any specifics.

As far as installing windows, its easy as pie with XP, generally if you want to use a RAID or SATA drives, you need to tell setup to install the 3rd party drivers from a floppy by pressing F6 and following the onscreen instructions.

I've never tried RAID (though I have it, and when I move to SATA will probably use RAID 0 with my new drives). As I understand it both drives are used simultaneously to improve speed. So let's say you have 2 drives reasonably full, and then you want to reinstall your OS, as you need to do from time to time. Now I partition my drive and do a clean format of the OS portion and reinstall when I want a clean version of windows. But what do you do with the RAID setup? It might be obvious, but I've never tried it.

[Spaced Cowboy]

Originally posted by centrifuge


There is a definite increase, unfortunately, I don't know any specifics.

As far as installing windows, its easy as pie with XP, generally if you want to use a RAID or SATA drives, you need to tell setup to install the 3rd party drivers from a floppy by pressing F6 and following the onscreen instructions.

Which can be quite tricky. My new mobo came with the driver on CD, not floppy. Problem was that the CD would not work on a comp without that Mobo (plus the floppy on my old comp no workie).

I had to install XP on an old ide drive, then make a floppy driver disk from the CD, then reinstall on the SATA drive. And it was not obvious that this was what needed to be done. It was one of the 10 items that I tried that day.

[centrifuge]

I actually just did a reformat and re-install about a week ago.

There really isn't that much to it if your bios are set to use the RAID. Like I said in the post above, the only tricky part is installing the SATA drivers (by pressing F6 during setup) so that WinXP will recognize the drives, otherwise it will only recognize any IDE HDD's that might be on the system

[centrifuge]

Originally posted by Spaced Cowboy


Which can be quite tricky. My new mobo came with the driver on CD, not floppy. Problem was that the CD would not work on a comp without that Mobo (plus the floppy on my old comp no workie).

I actually had this same problem...
XP set up couldn't find my SATA drives, and it was driving me crazy...

Finally somewhere in the fine print of the readme that came with my motherboard drivers cd I saw that some files needed to be transfered to a floppy. ...And guess what, the floppy on my old computer wasn't working Luckily I'm a packrat and had another computer that was even older that had a working floppy.