Your future SoH rigs and why?

Neatton · 12-11-2005, 07:24 PM

I wanted to start a thread to ask the horde of folks planning on building or buying new rigs for SoH what it is they are planning on putting into their machines. If you know what mainstream brand or model you are planning on picking up let us know which and why. I will be posting a rig setup I plan on putting together for release and I will just update it as new hardware is announced until the final build that I purchase before release.

Epidemic · 12-11-2005, 11:21 PM

Ohhh, man. I have no reason to build a new computer... but, well.. Who cares!

BTX~! TRUE SLI~! DUAL-CORE~!

When I plug in my computer, the lights in the house should dem slightly... of course, BTX isn't out for a while... so I can wait.

Neatton · 12-12-2005, 12:44 AM

Yea I was hoping to go BTX as well but I am thinking that SoH will be out before they are so I went ahead and bought my Lian Li case for my new rig. If they do come out before SoH it will be a dissapointment I will be happy with

Epidemic · 12-12-2005, 01:36 AM

So ya gotta case... whatcha gonna put in it?

The system I have now can definately run whatever the game demands, so I can wait a while. I hope the price of the new hawtness GFX cards drops by then... they should, right?

Aredhel · 12-12-2005, 02:21 AM

Yup, and it's already started! When I was looking for a board, we saw prices wobbling like crazy and mass talk of duel core and stuff. So, it's going to be interesting!

Greymain · 12-12-2005, 09:25 AM

I usually build a new rig each year but haven't bothered this year. Gonna wait till Vanguard is released. My hardware kitty is very healthy with £8k in the account, so I can go for the best possible solution. Still dont know if Vanguard will support Dual screen so not sure if I will keep my Dual 21" CRT's r go for a flat screen.

I know I will need 4 Gig memory, 512k Vid memory. 64bit processors but not even started picking specific products yet.

Neatton · 12-12-2005, 10:21 AM

You will want to wait until Vista comes out to get 4 gigs it is not going to do you any good with XP. Heck I haven't even heard if Vista is going to support 4 gigs even though it would make sense for it to.

Epidemic I am going to post what I have currently for my new rig soon but it is going to evolve up until I actually purchase it as I am waiting for new hardware to come out. As far as prices go the older stuff gets cheaper as newer stuff comes out so chances are the GFX 256 meg will go down a bit as the 512 meg version becomes more readily available. However who wants the older technology lol there will always be something bigger and better youll want. I dont like the current trend of the newer cards just getting more and more expensive. The new 512 meg GFX is running what like 750 US that just rediculous. I was going to get an SLI setup but there is no way I am buying 1500 worth of video card just for a little boost in FPS as that is all SLI really does for ya.

Greymain · 12-12-2005, 11:34 AM

The area I have always found most confusing is the hard disk drives and how to gain the best performance. There are lots of options using multiple drives, interfaces and buffering options some insight would be appriciated.

Aredhel · 12-12-2005, 01:19 PM

Even tho I'm still considering deleting one game on my D partition, I'm still considering getting another HD to run with it and put VSoH on it. Right now, VSoH is said to take almost 10gb, kinda like all of EQ did/does, so that's a beefy chunk! The way prices with HD's has dropped, I'd probably get one no smaller than a 60 and partition it again so cleanup on the VSoH side would be easier!

I'm expecting that Sigil will be doing patches and such as they bring new content in, and that means moving a lot of info on a drive. So, for optimum performance of a HD, defrag will be our friend! It's easier/faster to defrag a smaller area, so it makes sense to me to have 30gb rather than 60 or more to do at one time!

Neatton · 12-12-2005, 01:34 PM

Honestly these days your not going to find a huge difference in HDDs. If you want to squeek a little more performance out and have the bucks you will want to go with a rapter HDD they are FAST. The reason they are fast is that they spin at 10,000 RPMs as opposed to the 7200 of average HDDs. however as time has progressed with little update in that area the gap is getting thinner and thinner. That was going to be the next area I posted about on my new rig.

I purchased a 250 gig western digital 16 meg cache 3.0 gig/s drive. Now there is going to be 0 difference in speed between this drive and a 150 sata drive as bandwith is bottle necked at this point. So I purchased it mainly in hopes that something develops in the future to use the extra bandwith and it was only a few extra bucks so I thought eh what the heck. Now if I were rich and famous then I would have gone with a rapter as I mentioned previously. The problem however is that the biggest (preasantly) that these drives get are 74 gigs. This means basically that you are going to buy this one drive for about 165 bucks for your gaming installs and then have to buy another 200+ gig drive for storage. I am not a pack rat by any means but I also dont care about squeezing the extra few bits of performance out at the cost of an additional 165 bucks to my rig. I opted for the 1 drive and I will probably partition it a few times to divide my files up.

Where it gets confusing. Some people strongly feel that certain types of Raid setups will eek out a little more performance. A raid is where you link up multiple drives to work together. Some types of raid simply put chunks of the information your saving on multiple drives. A different type is to mirror the exact same data on two identical drives. This one is mainly as a backup. As I said some think this is a tad faster. In my personal experiance for the gaming at home experiance this is not true.

So in short if you are in the market for a new HDD pick up a SATA 150 ata or sata 3.0g/s drive if you want to proof for the future. There is going to be such a small hit on performance over a rapter that it is really just not worth all the extra money at this point. However I have heard rumors that they are going to be coming out with raptors that hold more then 74 gigs. I did not think this was possible previously due to some more in depth issues however if it does and you can pick up say a 200 or 250 drive for as many dollars it may be worth it as you will not need a second drive for storage at that point.

Hope this helped a little just my two bits. If you need further information feel free to PM me.