Need best setup for gaming....

[RyanUSMC]

Im replacing my 3.0 northwood with either;

FX-55 or 4800+

ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe

Radeon X1800XT

and im setting up a raid 0 array

any comments/suggestions are more than welcome!


Thanks
Ryan

 

[mpjesse]

FX-55 will get you almost the best performance in games. However the 4800+ is cheaper and almost as fast as the FX (in games). I'd get the x2 4800+ if it were me.

That mobo is a good one. Nice choice.

Video card... Good choice I guess. I personally like x1800XL cause it's way cheaper. But if you got the cash...

If you're doing RAID 0- go for the gold and get 2x WD 74GB 10,000rpm raptors. You'll be glad you did...

-mpjesse

 

[hashv2f16]

Dual core AMD all the way.
And maybe a Nvidia 7800GT, they're not extremely more expensive than the 1800xl

 

[RyanUSMC]

I think im just going to wait for the dual core FX-60 in 8 days, if im spending this much i might as well pop for 200 more and have the best for a while!

 

[theholylancer]

get a DFI (only if you got previouse experince with comp building or if you like to lear by trial by fire) expert (if you got enough money) ultra-D (if you don't) crossfire (forgot name) and a opertron dual core s939 and over clock that up to 3.2 GHZ (if you get one of them super chips, they reguarly OC to 2.7~2.8 least i seen was with some vaule ram and 2.6GHZ, all of these are faster than anything stock.... all these are reached by air, not my phase chill or anything, but air.... someone had his on stock cooler on 3 GHz

or get a single core opertron s939 and maybe reach 3.2 (maximun with SI-120 and some 120mm fan)

if you wish to OC and not get DFI go with abit or epox or something asus is not bad, but for the price your getting, a DFI expert is offering a hella lot more stuff....

BTW if you want to OC, do not skimp on ram, or else get something with tight timmings and put them on a divider

 

[RyanUSMC]

i dont plan on overclocking, ive been building my own computers for 11 years. I dont have any history with DFI, when they first came out they were just an eye candy board. They pretty stable then I take it? Im just looking for a no b.s. mobo that does what it says and dosent give me any problems when setting up my raid 0 array. Took me an hour or so to setup my first raid 0 array but now its pretty simple. I just dont want anything like my first experiance ever agian. BTW im running corsair's XMS 2-2-2-5 DDR400 ram right now.

 

[theholylancer]

well check out this jan 06 buyers guide from anand tech, they have the DFI expert as their ultra-high,

http://www.anandtech.com/guides/showdoc.aspx?i=2659&p=2

although if you don't OC and want a no fills board try something cheaper.... i mean ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe costs 220 buscks while the expert cost 204...

then again dfi is known for its bad with noobies or ingorants... (there are sooooooo much options in the bios, the damned manual is like friggin 60 pages, with like 6 diff lang there, you need to dl the long manual in pdf from dfi or else goto www.dfi-street.com to get info on it) so again this means that if you don't want the hassel or the reading then i suggest keep away form dfi and any of the other other mobo that is listed on anandtech is great (dfi have nice support, if you need it... the manual is IMO the worst manual there is for a mobo, excipically that there sooo much friggin options and sooo much otential to screw up ur sys in there.... not to memtion its incompatibility with nTune (nforce auto over clocking utility, any real OCer will tell you that using software that does auto OC is bad for any system... as that no system is the same and that these software kind generallize the settings.....), and some reported bad with the hardware firewall that is build into the mobo, but not all people had this problem)

 

[endyen]

You may want to take a look @ the Asus crossfire board. It's not very expensive so it seems to be overlooked, but it is a top performer, and crossfire looks like it has some features over SLI.
The board is the A8R-MVP. Anand did a nice review of it here
Even if you dont OC, knowing that the board is solid enough to handle a heavy OC should let you know how stable it is.

 

[theholylancer]

ATM i dunno if i will trust crssfire though, it being little too new, i mean when NF3 and 4 launched it was not perfect (ok it sucked... but was better than VIA!)... same being that crossfire had to use ULi south bridges because the intinial crossfire south bridge sucked.....

 

[RichPLS]

I got 9550 in 3DMark05 using a crossfire board and a X1800xt.
So far seems stable and overclockable. only hickup was with testing RAID array rebuild after re-install, still working on recovering access to RAID 1, something I think can be done...or should be...
Shows up in bios and under windows, it just won't accept a drive letter without a breaking the partition.

 

[endyen]

I've never heard of anyone being able to carry an array from one chipset to another, let alone from an Intel setup to an Amd, so I think you are out of luck. I'll keep my fingers crossed for you though.
I guess that is an advantage to the add in raid cards. Now if only they would come out with a nice 4X pci-exp card, with raid5 support.