Considering upgrade, coupla questions

[floppybootstomp]

This is what I have at the moment:

DFI Ultra Lan Party Ultra II B
XP3200 2.2Ghz
Gigabyte 3D Pro CPU cooler
2 x 512Mb Corsair Value Select PC3200
Leadtek 6800GT 256Mb AGP
2 x WD 35Gb Raptors, RAID 0
2 x 80Gb IDE drives for storage

Upgrade I'm considering, all other components to remain:

Asus A8N-Sli Motherboard
XP3700 San Diego 2.2Ghz
Leadtek 7800GT 256Mb Sli/PCI-E

Which comes to £510.00 inc. VAT & Delivery.

Main question is, I'll be using the 2 Raptors in the new board in a RAID 0 config.

The Asus board has 4 SATA ports, linked to the RAID controller.

Can I attach a 160Gb SATA drive to one of the other SATA ports and use it as storage?

The reason I ask is that if I'm using two ports for RAID 0, will an extra drive be recognised as a seperate drive and not be confused with the RAID setup?

Will Win XP assign it an independent drive letter?

I was thinking of taking out the 2 x IDE drives I currently have and using just the one 160Gb drive, but I'd prefer a SATA drive, that's the reasoning behind it. I have uses for the old pair of 80Gb drives elsewhere.

Second question is will I actually see an improvement in the upgrade over what I currently have? Cos 500 smackers is a lot of money.

I realise the video card is better and the CPU has twice the cache, but I'll still have the same processor speed so I was wondering.

I don't want to upgrade purely for the sake of going 64 Bit, I could wait for that. But if I'll see a definite improvement - particularly in games - then I'll probably go for it. Will the Nvidia Sli feature help any?

This upgrade is very much budget oriented, I've been looking at prices for last few days and was going to buy from Overclockers, but it seems they've put almost all their prices up within the last 24 hours.

So I'll be buying these components from Novatech and actually be saving around £30.00.

Also, if anybody would like to comment on the choice of components, I'd be pleased to hear what you think.

I'll be using my old memory and the Gigabyte 3D Pro CPU cooler. Ideally, I would have liked 2Gb of RAM and a Zalman cooler but as I said, I'm doing this very much on a budget.

 

[Raje]

Well I'm not the expert here since I was asking similar questions earlier. But I'm in similar boat. From what I've heard the SLI feature is helpful but not yet considered stable. The whole Idea that 2 6800gts will equal 1 7800 gtx constantly leads to an argument.

The SATA drives in 0 shuld help any games that have a large hard drive install. But I think some games run off of DVD's now or both. So I'm unsure of the effect.

Hope that helped

 

[Me__2001]

if you set up the array, install windows then add the HD you might be able to get round it but i thought you had to tell it what drives are to be in the array ?? i know you on a buget (aren't we all ?!) but the deluxe version has 2 RAID controllers which would make things easier

in theory yes you should see a difference in day to day tasks but i dont know, if your encoding and rendering images you will but opening programs will probably be about the same, gaming on the other hand you will as you said because of the graphics card and the extra cache, i actually read an interesting article today (its in todays news and well worth the read if you haven't already) about the CPU's affect on gaming

the only person that can say if the SLI will be any help is you, will you get a second graphics card for some extra oomph when the system starts struggling with the latest games ?, i think just about everyone that has the option would so yes it is useful, but im not sure exactly what you mean by 'helpful' ?

i've been keeping an eye on the prices at overclockers for a while and their weekly "offers" are actually not that much cheaper, maybe a £1 or 2 than normal and sometimes more

overall i think you have a decent system, the extra RAM would be nice but for now i think you can get away with just 1GB for all of the latest games, you may loose a few fps but TBH you cant really tell above a certain level, as for doing alot of multitasking i rarely run out of RAM, it happens on occasion but it depends on how much you're going to need regularly

 

[floppybootstomp]

Thanks for the input fellas.

Me__2001: You kinda confirmed what I was thinking.

The deluxe board is another £35.00 but it did look kinda desirable, I must admit.

Another 1Gb RAM would certainly be cheaper and I haven't had my 6800GT all that long. And it's handling all my games just fine.

I may just get a 2Gb matched pair for now, I can use the old pair of 512's to upgrade another machine.

Certainly food for thought, thanks.