[jcarle]

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.

[ringfinger]

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.

[ringfinger]

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...

[jcarle]

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.

[ringfinger]

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!

[jcarle]

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.

[ringfinger]

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.

[jcarle]

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

[ringfinger]

You rock man! Thanks so much J.

[jcarle]

Always a pleasure.