Hey guys... as you probably all know by the 'Best Socket T Mobo' thread thats been here for weeks I'm building up a new Intel machine on a P5WD2 Premium mobo and still cannot decide on the best RAM to get. To me, it makes sense to get 800MHz RAM as the board natively supports it and plus thats the FSB on the P4 650 I'm getting. I'm thinking about either the Crucial Ballisitx BL2KIT6464AA804 2 x 512 @ 4-4-4-12 or the Corsair XMS2 TWIN2X1024A-6400 @ 5-5-5-12. Both almost the same price. Suggestions?? Trials and tribulations?? Other brand better?? Thanks guys! Newegg.com's PC2 6400

Alrighty then..

I would get the ram from crucial. There ram rarely fails me. Did you already buy it?

No I haven't yet. All I lack is the RAM and the Raptor. I think I have made up my mind on the Corsair though. Unless for some reason I can get proof that the Ballistix is better than the XMS2. Although I'm still not sure on the timings. In some places I see 5-5-5-15 and in others I see 5-5-5-12. And is there really that much of a noticable difference between a 3 and 5 CAS latency?? The age old latency vs. speed battle!

Not unless you are doing a lot of games or a real high speed server.

What is the computer used for?

Gaming, DVD production, video editing, lots of applications. I need a fast machine.

Then tae the better ram. Video editing will need it. Check out the specs for avid systems and other ones like it.

??? And the better RAM would be? The Ballistix?

I would go for the crucial. I have allways been happy with them. Corsair is more f a store brand. I wish there was a good way to tell the difference. 1 thing you could always do is ask a video edit. I am assuming your are using something like avid? Don't forget to cool your ram. If you had simular systems you could always test them with a benchmark but, that would be expensive. Also if your bios supports it you can make ram adjustments.

The Crucial Ballistix has tighter timings and so will have lower latencies. This translates to slightly faster RAM. They also have a lifetime warranty, which I personally have never had to use. I use Crucial RAM in nearly every system I build. I even use it in my mission critical servers at work due to their proven reliability.

As for the Raptors...you may want to do some reading up on them. I have a pair of 36GB Raptors in my system and while they are fast I believe a pair of NCQ capable drives would outperform them. Raptors are also not native SATA drives...WD uses a PATA to SATA converter on the drive PCB.

@rjz ... This will actually by first system I've built. I am a college grad in network security and cryptography, but never have really gotten hardcore when it comes to hardware. So far I have purchased: ASUS P5WD2 Premium mobo, P4 650 3.4/2M/800MHz, Antec performance TX640B case and a Plextor PX-740A burner. I got a 19" Samsung LCD along with a Radeon X300 SE for $300 from a friend all brand new. The only things I lack like I said are the RAM and HD.

@nmX ... I have been going back and fourth like I said, I know the Ballistix has tighter timings and will most likely be the better buy since they are both almost exactly the same price. As far as the Raptors, I didn't know they weren't a TRUE SATA drive?? Is there performance loss due to the PATA/SATA conversion?? This is another thing I have been debating on as my mobo supports TCQ (Tag Command Queuing) which is supposed to give better performance than NCQ drives. So, its either the Raptor or a bigger size TCQ drive.

So all in all, I am really still only stuck on which HD to get.

nmX is my clan tag.


I'm not sure if you're aware but they even have PC2-8000 now. Run it at the 6400 speeds and you may get better than the 4-4-4-12 timings.


Definitely go with a couple of NCQ/TCQ drives. You'll get more bang for your buck.

It's hard to pass up a Western Digitial 250GB SATA "II" drive with 16MB cache for $122 shipped.

u need 2 1G rams...hahah

nmX... I was aware that there is now PC-8000, I think that the 6400 will due just fine for me, no need to get too insane. So you think I should go with the 250GB Caviar huh? You think 2 of these will be faster than a Raptor if in Raid0 on my system?



???

Well...being that the Raptors are SATA150 (150MB/s) and the Caviar SE16 is SATA II (300MB/s)....yeah, it should be faster. The 16MB cache will also help quite a bit.

Plus, the largest size Raptor you can get is 74GB.

Yeah, I knew about the size constraints but I figured for a system drive it would be faster. I was thinking use the Raptor as the system drive and then buy a couple WD SATAII 250's later on and Raid0 them and use that for storage.

Here ya go...compare the numbers in these two reviews. This should help you make up your mind if you really want to pay the price premium for a 74GB Raptor.


Western Digital Raptor WD740GD Review

Western Digital Caviar WD2500KS Review

I am not sure if the 250GB drive review was done on a system with a SATAII controller that supports NCQ/TCQ though. However, at the beginning of the article they state that the WD2500KS doesn't support NCQ anyway.

Be sure to check out the Seagate Barracuda 7200.8 line as well. I've read good things about them as well. We have some here at work for our workstations but haven't installed them yet.

Bah... screw it. I'm going for the Raptor and will buy some others later. Just makes more sense to me, and I'm willing to pay for speed and reliability. So the Raptor and the Ballistix sounds like a good combo to me!

I did some more reading today on the Raptors (was looking up some info on another drive). Apparently there's more of a difference between the 36GB and 74GB models than just the sizes. From what I read WD actually included TCQ on the 74GB version.

Hmm... well thats good to hear.

I see the discussion ended up here... lol.

Sorry I haven't been around much, just been loaded at work.

I'm glad you decided to go for the Raptor drives... even with NCQ, the performance increase from a drive that's not NCQ to a drive that is, is just not large enough to compare with the difference between a drive that runs at 7,200rpm and one that runs at 10,000rpm.

The cream of the crop will be when Western releases their rumored to be in development 10,000rpm hard drives WITH NCQ. But who knows when that will actually happen.

If you want some good reading, take a look over at this article:

Tom's Hardware - Round-Up: Comparison Testing of 22 Hard Disk Drives

You'll see that both 10,000rpm drives (the Raptors) are far above in performance then any other drive from any other company, with or without NCQ. RPM just plain out beats any other features such as cache and command queueing. Hence why SCSI drives where the king for the longest of times, because the high end drives have been running at 10,000rpm for years. Remember when drives went from 4,200rpm to 5,400rpm, then from 5,400rpm to 7,200rpm. Each time, the increase in performance was imense. The same applies when going from 7,200rpm to 10,000rpm.

Point said.

Wow! Mr. J himslef! LOL, I havent seen ya around much, I understand the work thing. I am FINALLY ordering the RAM and Raptors within a week and a 1/2, gotta keep the par level up on the cash ya know, just can't go blow it all. I did decide on the 74gb Raptor and the Crucial Ballistix PC2 6400 @ 800MHz. Think all the components will be alright with the system we've built????

One thing while you're online, I'm a bit worried about the P4 650 stock heat sync and fan fitting in the external "pipe" (thats the only way I know how to describe it...) ya know the thing that sits right over the cpu on the Antec case that I got and lets the heat flow right out?? Do you know if it will fit as I haven't tried to hook it up yet.

Good to see ya back online, I hope to have everything up and running w/o a problem soon.

Very good read J... and makes me even more confident on my Raptor purchase! Thing blows away every drive in all I/O benchmarks! Can't wait to have it up and running. Thanks again...

I have no doubt everything will be just fine. One thing you can do to make sure everything goes smoothly is once you have everything and have it all put together, update the motherboard's BIOS to the latest version.

As for the stock heatsink, it's just fine to keep the processor within original specs. If you find it too noisy, you can enable Q-Fan in the motherboard's BIOS to dynamically adjust the fan speed as per the cpu temperature. Or, you can change the cooler to an aftermarket watercooling solution that's much quieter, such as the CoolerMaster AquaGate R-120.

The pipe which you're referring too is does not need to fit exactly over the stock heatsink, it's only there as an aid to give fresh cool air to the cpu fan. Since the fan pulls air from the top and blows it over the heatsink, the pipe helps the fan suck fresh cool air from outside of the case, instead of using warm air that's floating around the inside. Sure, the closer you can get the pipe to fit over the heatsink, the nicer the cooling, but it's not crucial.

I wanted to mention also, Arctic Silver is good if it used as the only thermal paste. The stock heatsink has to be cleaned of the original "pad" of thermal paste before you apply Artic Silver. The two together can be counter productive. Cleaning the thermal pad, as well as the Arctic Silver can be cleaned with Rubbing Alcohol and a scott towel.

Alright thanks for the info! Glad to hear that the pipe will fit alright and everything. As for updating the BIOS, I'll have to wait till windows is inatalled and use the updater from there as I'm not buying a floppy b/c I haven't used one in years. I hope that'll be alright. And I already bought some Arctic Silver 5 and will most definately be using that instead of the stock paste/pad. That stuff seems to produce some great results. I'll post some pics once I have everything together. Hopefully a screenshot, not a pic of something I can't figure out!

You're obviously using a computer somewhere if you're posting on this forum, so what I have for a suggestion for you is this. If you don't want to buy a floppy, which I don't blame you, I don't want one in my next PC either, then you can do this. Make the boot floppy on another computer with a CD-RW, then once the floppy is bootable and contains all of the files you need to update the BIOS, then simply make a bootable CD using the floppy as an image. Then, all you have to do is boot with the CD to update the BIOS.

Good plan! Yeah, I use the computer at work a lot, plus my laptop at home so there are many avenues. Man, I don't even know if I have any floppies anymore, lol. I'll have to do some work on making it bootable as well with the BIOS information, I haven't done that in years.

I have a little present for you. I prepared the ISO for you of a boot cd with the latest BIOS for your motherboard (version 0519 at this writing). All you have to do is unzip the file, burn the ISO to CD then boot your P5WD2 Premium motherboard with the CD and it will automatically start the flash process for the BIOS.

I was bored...

http://www.jcarle.com/biosboot.zip

You rock man! Thanks so much J.

Always a pleasure.