# Upgrading rig, need help!



## Frizz (Feb 5, 2009)

Hey guys,

I've recently received a budget for upgrading at about 350AUD. Problem is I don't know what hardware will increase my overall performance so I narrowed it down to my weakpoints which are onboard sound, budget ram and average hdd's. 

Which one would give me the most performance boost out of these three?

*Western Digital VelociRaptor WD1500HLFS for 319AUD

Corsair Dominator DDR2 PC8500 1066mhz 194AUD

Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Titanium FATAL1TY Pro Series 245AUD*


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## MRCL (Feb 5, 2009)

You already have PC26400 RAM, so PC8500 would be a huge decrease
Seriously, I'd go with new RAM. It provides better overclockability, too.


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## {JNT}Raptor (Feb 5, 2009)

Out of the 3 you would get the best boost from the faster memory.

Sound card will not Increase performance unless your current card is hanging the system.

The Raptors cost to much to justify the small increase you would get.

You should be able to grab that memory and a decent midrange sound card though. 

Hope it helps.


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## alexp999 (Feb 5, 2009)

I'd say the ram probably. Sound Blasters have terrible drivers, and you already have a WD AAKS, that gives great performance.


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## MRCL (Feb 5, 2009)

One more thing, I once made a thread about wether I should get OCZ Reapers or Corsair Dominators. People told me into the OCZ, Corsair would be overpriced. Heres the link:
http://forums.techpowerup.com/showthread.php?t=80749


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## Frizz (Feb 5, 2009)

Would these two do?

RAM:
http://www.pccasegear.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=186_537&products_id=7670

Sound Card:
https://9289.com.au/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=194_73&products_id=1450

A bit over budget but that's okay.


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## MRCL (Feb 5, 2009)

randomflip said:


> Would these two do?
> 
> RAM:
> http://www.pccasegear.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=186_537&products_id=7670
> ...



I have those RAM sticks. Just with another heatpipe construction. But basically the same. Don't regret buying them, they perform very well.


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## j_d3 (Feb 5, 2009)

I just had some serious OCing problems on my last build with OCZ and frankly I think the Corsair's look better . My dominators weren't much more than the OCZ sticks and they were worth every penny.

As far as more headroom, I think most people forget, hdd's are the slowest part of your computer because they aren't solid state yet. You may not see much in the benchmarks with better drives but you will definately notice it in daily use. Don't waste your money on a raptor, get high density platter drives like 2 Samsung F1 1tb and stripe them. Latency you still won't touch the raptors, but on drive benchmarks you are going to see some serious read/write speeds. Finally around here the 1tb drives are under half the priceof the velociraptor and 3x the space, so whats better? 300GB for $300, or 2TB for $300?


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## alexp999 (Feb 5, 2009)

If I were you and were buying from there Id get these:

http://www.pccasegear.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=186_537&products_id=8184

and

http://www.pccasegear.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=211&products_id=8756

Thats if you think you need a sound card, I'm quite happy with onboard


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## MRCL (Feb 5, 2009)

j_d3 said:


> I just had some serious OCing problems on my last build with OCZ and frankly I think the Corsair's look better . My dominators weren't much more than the OCZ sticks and they were worth every penny.
> 
> As far as more headroom, I think most people forget, hdd's are the slowest part of your computer because they aren't solid state yet. You may not see much in the benchmarks with better drives but you will definately notice it in daily use. Don't waste your money on a raptor, get high density platter drives like 2 Samsung F1 1tb and stripe them. Latency you still won't touch the raptors, but on drive benchmarks you are going to see some serious read/write speeds. Finally around here the 1tb drives are under half the priceof the velociraptor and 3x the space, so whats better? 300GB for $300, or 2TB for $300?



Samsung 1TB F1s are wonderful!


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## Frizz (Feb 5, 2009)

alexp999 said:


> If I were you and were buying from there Id get these:
> 
> http://www.pccasegear.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=186_537&products_id=8184
> 
> ...



I could really use the ASIO low latency recording, I use my rig for recording and watching movies. So its like 50% gaming 40% music 10% movies

Hmmm should I be worrying about RAM compatability at this stage? Or as long as its ddr2 it should be fine? ... BTW Where would I plug my 5.1 speakers into that soundcard?!



j_d3 said:


> I just had some serious OCing problems on my last build with OCZ and frankly I think the Corsair's look better . My dominators weren't much more than the OCZ sticks and they were worth every penny.
> 
> As far as more headroom, I think most people forget, hdd's are the slowest part of your computer because they aren't solid state yet. You may not see much in the benchmarks with better drives but you will definately notice it in daily use. Don't waste your money on a raptor, get high density platter drives like 2 Samsung F1 1tb and stripe them. Latency you still won't touch the raptors, but on drive benchmarks you are going to see some serious read/write speeds. Finally around here the 1tb drives are under half the priceof the velociraptor and 3x the space, so whats better? 300GB for $300, or 2TB for $300?



+1 for the HDD and dominators. But Reapers and sound card still in the lead.


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## alexp999 (Feb 5, 2009)

randomflip said:


> I could really use the ASIO low latency recording, I use my rig for recording and watching movies. So its like 50% gaming 40% music 10% movies
> 
> Hmmm should I be worrying about RAM compatability at this stage? Or as long as its ddr2 it should be fine?
> 
> ...



All I know is that people have so many problems with creative X-fi's that I will never touch em.


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## J-Man (Feb 5, 2009)

Hdd.


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## j_d3 (Feb 5, 2009)

randomflip said:


> I could really use the ASIO low latency recording, I use my rig for recording and watching movies. So its like 50% gaming 40% music 10% movies
> 
> Hmmm should I be worrying about RAM compatability at this stage? Or as long as its ddr2 it should be fine? ... BTW Where would I plug my 5.1 speakers into that soundcard?!
> 
> ...



Don't get me wrong, Reapers are good too, and you can't go wrong with OCZ's lifetime warranty (used it before). Gaming, ram is your friend far more than hdd's, music, I agree, latency is nice since the file sizes are relatively small but faster read/writes help for swapping larger audio mixes, and recording movies definately hdd's. Watching/listening doesn't really matter as anything can keep up with that. If you can swing 2 get the hdd's and ram, but upgrading your ram from 800mhz to 1066mhz won't show you a difference you notice and I believe the hdd's will show you a difference in everything you do.


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## farlex85 (Feb 5, 2009)

That's a tough poll b/c imho none of those will increase overall performance very much. I would say the veloci raptor, however we're talking a few seconds on load times and boot times, you already have a fast drive in the AAK. As far as I've been able to tell faster memory means nearly zilch as far as performance goes, it just allows you to oc your cpu higher sometimes and use different combinations (of course it depends on what you do w/ your computer). The sound card, although not the one I would choose, would imo be the biggest step up from what you have, but I really wouldn't say that would necessarily be good. In short, I'd say none of those, but if your hitting a wall w/ your oc'ing that's memory related get that, if your impatient about boot times (very impatient) get the raptor, and if you have decent speakers and poor sound get the sound card.


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## Frizz (Feb 5, 2009)

I've heard OCZ Reapers are pretty bad with p5q pro, the corsair dominators are the only `1066 pc-8500 ram listed for compatability so I'm definitely going for those. 
Thanks for the quick and fast opinion guys, will hit up "YOUR PC ATM" thread once upgrades arrive. 

I really need this sound card, I record music with an electric drumkit. I'm choosing the xonar because it comes bundled with cakewalk  and the other music software.

So I've ended up going for a new wireless card to stop spikes when playing online and xonar for when i record music, ram to improve my fps a little??? if the RAM wouldn't do much different to generic DDr2 800mhz ram 5-5-5-18 then I would pass on that.


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## j_d3 (Feb 5, 2009)

randomflip said:


> I've heard OCZ Reapers are pretty bad with p5q pro, the corsair dominators are the only `1066 pc-8500 ram listed for compatability so I'm definitely going for those.
> 
> Thanks for the quick and fast opinion guys, will hit up "YOUR PC ATM" thread once upgrades arrive.



Agreed, I had OCZ and couldn't get them runnign right on my P5Q-E so I went dominators for that same reason. You won't be dissappointed!


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## Solaris17 (Feb 5, 2009)

MRCL said:


> Samsung 1TB F1s are wonderful!



i own the samsung 1TB F1 amazing drive.


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## MRCL (Feb 5, 2009)

Solaris17 said:


> i own the samsung 1TB F1 amazing drive.



And so quiet and fast...


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## farlex85 (Feb 5, 2009)

He's already got a AAK SE16, which is a bit faster than the F1, so if your really wanting a overall gain I suppose adding another one of those for a RAID 0 would offer the biggest all-around boost. Raptors give you response time, which translates usually into faster boots. RAIDs will give you faster sustained speeds, which will speed up everything else.


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## Frizz (Feb 5, 2009)

Man my choices have changed alot from the start of the poll to now. The only definite buy so far is the Asus Xonar. 

Still don't know if buying the extra HDD and or changing my RAM would be an improvment worth the dollar.


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## farlex85 (Feb 5, 2009)

randomflip said:


> Man my choices have changed alot from the start of the poll to now. The only definite buy so far is the Asus Xonar.
> 
> Still don't know if buying the extra HDD and or changing my RAM would be an improvment worth the dollar.



HDD would offer the greatest potential for noticeable change, I can almost garuntee you you won't see a difference w/ the ram. It may be difficult to notice the change in HDD speed as well though, but it will speed up everything or boot times (depending on whether you go raptor or RAID), the question is will it matter to you. The Xonar for sure though.


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## Frizz (Feb 5, 2009)

I guess that says it all @farlex. 

Xonar for sure and I may just spend a bit of the money on a better wireless card and put my 2 HDD's in RAID0 for now. And maybe also a ram cooler to make my budget RAM look fast .

Bed time for now.


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## driver66 (Feb 5, 2009)

farlex85 said:


> HDD would offer the greatest potential for noticeable change, I can almost garuntee you you won't see a difference w/ the ram. It may be difficult to notice the change in HDD speed as well though, but it will speed up everything or boot times (depending on whether you go raptor or RAID), the question is will it matter to you. The Xonar for sure though.



Very much agree with farlex


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## Frizz (Feb 6, 2009)

Would the Veloci Raptors speed up games if they're installed on it? Like get rid of stuttering and speed up the loading etc.
I heard virus scans only lasted less than half a minute too and boot times were at 7 seconds. 

I would buy this with the sound card if this is true, current budget rose to 550 but still waiting til next month to order these babies


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## j_d3 (Feb 6, 2009)

The drives you'll only notice on load times, so maps loading, boot times, ect. Ram coupled with more overclocking headroom will get you the game performance boosts. Which drive are your games running off of? Do you see high hdd access while gaming?


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## farlex85 (Feb 6, 2009)

randomflip said:


> Would the Veloci Raptors speed up games if they're installed on it? Like get rid of stuttering and speed up the loading etc.
> I heard virus scans only lasted less than half a minute too and boot times were at 7 seconds.
> 
> I would buy this with the sound card if this is true, current budget rose to 550 but still waiting til next month to order these babies



Won't speed up gameplay but will speed up load times. Virus scans depend on density and fragmentation of the drive. Boot times are faster, I do xp in about 7 seconds, vista takes longer. You can kind of think of it logically, the access times are very low, so the drive can find files much quicker, sustained read/write times are roughly average for fast drives (your AAK actually is a bit faster here, but not by much, your access time is about twice that of a raptor though) so reading and writing once it finds the file is roughly average. If you raided another AAK your read/write times would be roughly twice that of the raptor.

As somebody who owns a raptor, I can say from what I can tell they probably aren't worth the money unless you can get em cheap. They have their perks, but they just cost too much and are too loud to be truly a recommended choice imo.


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## spearman914 (Feb 6, 2009)

VelociRaptors are pretty much crap until u buy 2 to raid 0 them. RAM ehhh, ur not gonna see a huge increase, save up some more.


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## j_d3 (Feb 6, 2009)

farlex85 said:


> Won't speed up gameplay but will speed up load times. Virus scans depend on density and fragmentation of the drive. Boot times are faster, I do xp in about 7 seconds, vista takes longer. You can kind of think of it logically, the access times are very low, so the drive can find files much quicker, sustained read/write times are roughly average for fast drives (your AAK actually is a bit faster here, but not by much, your access time is about twice that of a raptor though) so reading and writing once it finds the file is roughly average.
> 
> As somebody who owns a raptor, I can say from what I can tell they probably aren't worth the money unless you can get em cheap. They have their perks, but they just cost too much and are too loud to be truly a recommended choice imo.



Definately agree with you, I went striped F1's for that reason, raptors look nice on paper but practically they just don't give the bang for your buck, if you really want to go that route SSD's are getting more affordable . Stick with the ram upgrade and see what you can get in additional overclocking with them.


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## Frizz (Feb 6, 2009)

So if I buy say another 1tb wd caviar aaks ... and did raid 0 altogether with my hdd's it'd be faster than a raptor!? :O

That would be an awesome choice, I might buy another 640gb + 1tb for backup... hopefully my powersupply will be able to handle this lol.


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## j_d3 (Feb 6, 2009)

randomflip said:


> So if I buy say another 1tb wd caviar aaks ... and did raid 0 altogether with my hdd's it'd be faster than a raptor!? :O
> 
> That would be an awesome choice, I might buy another 640gb + 1tb for backup... hopefully my powersupply will be able to handle this lol.



Faster for sustained read/writes, not latency, so you'll notice it on drive intensive apps like video editing, sound mixing, photoshoping, and generally in everything you do because it has to come off your drive at some point or go on.


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## Frizz (Feb 6, 2009)

If I wait til next month I'll have a 600 budget, yet still don't know what to get for my system altogether with that money hahaha. 

Its a bad month for upgrades . Virtually nothing gives me the performance boost I want thats worth it, HDD latency and faster read/write times just isn't appealing enough to spend 200 - 300 on.


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