Best upgrade with current specs?

So I have a bit of extra money (Happy New Years!) from the Lunar New year. Debating on buying 2x 80gb SATA HD's ($34 each) and stripe them for faster load times + upgrading to 4gb ram (currently have 2gb, $42 for the G.Skill 2x2gb) or saving for a new video card?

AMD 5000+ Black @ 3.0ghz
eVGA 9600 GT
2gb Corsair XMS 4-4-4-12 800mhz pc6400
1x Seagate Barracuda 7200rpm SATA 3.0gb/s HD


80gb SATA HD's
G.Skill 2x2gb

Thoughts? Opinions? I only really dual-box ATM, and load times are brutal and it's a bit choppy. I'm leaning towards the HD's+RAM. But a 4870 does sound good >;]

I will also be installing Windows7 64bit. If only Ventrilo wasn't such a pain in the ass to configure in Ubuntu and then getting the microphone to work, and multi-boxing in WoW seems slower than Vista. There was some recent news on the ATi drivers for Linux also... /tangent

look into an inexpensive SSD (solid state drive). If you can wait a couple weeks I'll give you my thoughts when mine comes in.

Order I'd upgrade:
2 GB of memory more (even 3.2GB on 32-bit will be an improvement over 2GB if you're trying for 3+ instances of WoW).
Small & cheap SSD (OCZ 30GB for under $100) instead of RAID 0 hard drives.
Faster videocard.. 4850/4870-1GB.

Why an SSD over RAID? I understand that if I lose a single drive the whole array is lost, but for performance and lessen up load times I would imagine RAID has the clear advantage.

Sequential Access - Read: 154.1 MB/s

Is this the stat I'm looking for in SSD's related to WoW load times? I thought SSD's don't write data contiguosly, but rather a random sequence because of the limited write cycles.

Disregard
OCZ Core 64GB MLC SSD Review.. (Testing in progress..)

I found the review you wrote of the SSD. hehe. Thanks =D

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by southeastbeast',index.php?page=Thread&postID=17429 5#post174295]Disregard
[url='http://www.dual-boxing.com/forums/index.php?page=Thread&threadID=12529

OCZ Core 64GB MLC SSD Review.. (Testing in progress..)[/url]

I found the review you wrote of the SSD. hehe. Thanks =D

---

Yep, I've done various ways of running WoW, including RAID0 300GB Velociraptors, RAID0 36GB Raptors, RAID0 320GB 7200rpm, and an SSD. The key is the access time. An SSD can locate a file in 0.1-0.3ms, while the fastest Velociraptor is around 4.10ms. That's a huge difference when you're trying to locate hundreds of files on a drive. Just think of every piece of gear on every player in your local area when you visit a battleground or Dalaran - every piece of gear has textures and animations that have to be loaded. When you enter an area with 200 players, and each player has roughly 50 textures to load.. that's a sudden request for 10,000 files from your hard drive. These data files needed to be transferred aren't very large (evidenced by the comparatively ugly and pixellated textures), so the transfer rate doesn't matter at all as much as the access (seek) time.

My next step will be hosting WoW from Acard's ram drive with 16-32GB of memory.. which supports RAID0 from one Acard box. I'm positive this will be faster than any hard drive option short of a true main memory ram drive, but I don't want to take 12GB of space away from system memory to dedicate towards WoW, nor do I want to have to rebuild the ram drive after every reboot. Acard's unit has a battery backup - system ram drives don't.

If you get a decent SSD, you don't need to have them in Raid. A single drive will work just dandy.

I'm running an OCZ SSD in conjunction with a 7200 RPM HD. I load three WoWs from the SSD, while the other two load from the HD.

The difference is remarkable because the SSD WoWs load up so much faster than the other two windows. If I run into Dalaran, the SSD-based characters follow, while the others will lose follow.

You can run the same test if you get an SSD. Keep one WoW folder on your HD and pop the other one on the SSD.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by 'not5150',index.php?page=Thread&postID=174316#post 174316

If you get a decent SSD, you don't need to have them in Raid. A single drive will work just dandy.

I'm running an OCZ SSD in conjunction with a 7200 RPM HD. I load three WoWs from the SSD, while the other two load from the HD.

The difference is remarkable because the SSD WoWs load up so much faster than the other two windows. If I run into Dalaran, the SSD-based characters follow, while the others will lose follow.

You can run the same test if you get an SSD. Keep one WoW folder on your HD and pop the other one on the SSD.

---

Why don't you make all your WoW directories on the 7200 drive, then just symlink to one WoW/data directory on the SSD? That's what I did when testing the SSD months ago with one 7200 drive, and it was the best config on a budget.

Because I'm lazy :)

Ok new thing what is the best external hdd for a laptop so maybe i can run main from laptop hdd and 4 from external just thinking. I run a duo core 2.5 ghz 2 cpu and am upgrading from 4gb to 8gb mem atm. Ideas ideas ideas let me know the king of procrastination is me.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by '-silencer-',index.php?page=Thread&postID=174312#post174312

Yep, I've done various ways of running WoW, including RAID0 300GB Velociraptors, RAID0 36GB Raptors, RAID0 320GB 7200rpm, and an SSD. The key is the access time. An SSD can locate a file in 0.1-0.3ms, while the fastest Velociraptor is around 4.10ms. That's a huge difference when you're trying to locate hundreds of files on a drive. Just think of every piece of gear on every player in your local area when you visit a battleground or Dalaran - every piece of gear has textures and animations that have to be loaded. When you enter an area with 200 players, and each player has roughly 50 textures to load.. that's a sudden request for 10,000 files from your hard drive. These data files needed to be transferred aren't very large (evidenced by the comparatively ugly and pixellated textures), so the transfer rate doesn't matter at all as much as the access (seek) time.

My next step will be hosting WoW from Acard's ram drive with 16-32GB of memory.. which supports RAID0 from one Acard box. I'm positive this will be faster than any hard drive option short of a true main memory ram drive, but I don't want to take 12GB of space away from system memory to dedicate towards WoW, nor do I want to have to rebuild the ram drive after every reboot. Acard's unit has a battery backup - system ram drives don't.

---

That thing about textures makes a lot of sense, maybe access time is critical. If transfer rate is not important why not get the cheaper ($245 vs 379) acard, both are sata 3.0 and the smallers could be set to 2X6 (12G which should be enough for wow), for about $150 of ram. Just can't raid it (but raid only effect transfer rate and not acess time).

Still when we start talking around $400 - $600 seems that waiting for a stable 24G I7 motherboard is the best bet ....

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by 'Sam DeathWalker',index.php?page=Thread&postID=174462#p ost174462

That thing about textures makes a lot of sense, maybe access time is critical. If transfer rate is not important why not get the cheaper ($245 vs 379) acard, both are sata 3.0 and the smallers could be set to 2X6 (12G which should be enough for wow), for about $150 of ram. Just can't raid it (but raid only effect transfer rate and not acess time).

Still when we start talking around $400 - $600 seems that waiting for a stable 24G I7 motherboard is the best bet ....

---

Possibly, but because I use my machine for heavy processing far beyond WoW, when X58 24GB BIOS is stable on the Asus Rampage 2 Extreme, I'm going to use all 24GB without wanting WoW on half of it.. thus, the Acard will be the best solution. For anyone who just wants WoW performance, I agree with you.. although I have a feeling that 6x4GB DDR3 sticks may be more expensive than 6x2GB DDR3 + Acard + 8x2GB DDR2.

Currently, 6x4GB DDR3 = $1800.

6x2GB DDR3 = $420
Acard = $380
8x2GB DDR2 = $200

Nearly half the price for 12GB memory and Acard with 16GB... and it's available NOW without BIOS issues.

As ususal all so true. Seems everyone getting higher end stuffs has other uses for it lol ...

This thread is showing way worse performance then what the acard company publish:

ACard ANS-9010 RAM Drive

Well I figure that by the time the rampage board is stable (my choice of board also) 4G ram will cost 1/2 the price.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Sam DeathWalker',index.php?page=Thread&postID=174707#p ost174707]As ususal all so true. Seems everyone getting higher end stuffs has other uses for it lol ...

This thread is showing way worse performance then what the acard company publish:

[url='http://www.dual-boxing.com/forums/index.php?page=Thread&threadID=19039

ACard ANS-9010 RAM Drive[/url]

Well I figure that by the time the rampage board is stable (my choice of board also) 4G ram will cost 1/2 the price.

---

Yep, and there's nothing wrong with buying this:
3ware 9650SE - hardware RAID controller with 8 SATA 3.0 ports. $520
2x Acard ANS-9010 boxes. $760
16x2GB DDR2 sticks. $400
= $1680 for RAID0 across 4 8GB virtual drives.. that's 32GB of space with 4x SATA 3.0 bandwidth and little RAID overhead on the CPU since you're using a true hardware RAID controller.
This is where the Acard becomes the best solution.. since no consumer system is close to being albe to run 32GB of memory for a true system ram drive at this price. Technically, this could be done without the $520 controller... the ICH10R on the Asus Rampage 2 Extreme can handle 4x drive RAID0 array, but it only leaves 2 SATA ports for other hard drives or optical drives..

Plus, the RAID controller will be able to handle two more Acard boxes for future expansion..

So you figure the horrid Raid0 test results for the acard

http://techreport.com/articles.x/16255/9

Is due to the junk onboard raid controler?:


coded the bars by manufacturer. The ANS-9010 appears in bright red, and we've tested it in single-drive and RAID 0 configs. In RAID mode, we relied on the RAID feature built into our test system's Intel south bridge.

All tests were run three times, and their results were averaged, using the following test system.


Processor Pentium 4 Extreme Edition 3.4GHz
System bus 800MHz (200MHz quad-pumped)
Motherboard Asus P5WD2 Premium
Bios revision 0422
North bridge Intel 955X MCH
South bridge Intel ICH7R
Chipset drivers Chipset 7.2.1.1003
AHCI/RAID 5.1.0.1022

Sam, might want to try testing with ICH10R. A family member is a microprocessor engineer for Intel's chipsets (I'm not sure which they are working on now or have in the past), but there have been both performance and featureset improvements with each generation of southbridge. I'm sure there's a significant difference between ICH7R and ICH10R for RAID0 performance.. I wish I could find the link, but there was a review when the ICH9R came out and the improvement numbers were impressive.