It's really hard to predict what any one system will do at any
one
time. What works great on one game, may not on another.
Just look
at the Nvidia numbers compared to ATI on Doom3 as an
example. Trying
to find a nice all around combination is the
key. Unless you play
Doom3.
It sounds like a winner, but I'd
add another gig of RAM. RAM's cheap
these days. You don't
have to go with real expensive RAM, you'll
only see a 2 to 3%
gain. It's not worth the money.
I agree with the first
poster: You should use a separate drive for
your games. I
run a dual RAID 1 setup and one of the two, is
strictly for
games and music.
If you have two drives of different sizes,
use your biggest one for
your game/ music drive. You won't
believe how fast 80 gigs can get
eaten. And that's if your
NOT a nut about it! My "Call to Duty"
game is 2 gigs all by
itself and will soon get much larger as soon as
the new
version comes out next month. I have three other games
that
combined, take another 14 gigs of space. That's 16 gigs
of space
with only 4 games. See what I mean? It doesn't take
long to fill it
up.
Games are very large and take a lot of
disk space. My music files are
direct rips from my CD's, not
MP-3s, so they're quite large as well.
If they're kept on a
separate drive, the defrags will hold up much
longer and the
games won't muck up your main Windows drive either.
It makes
quite a difference. Especially to your main drive. A
fragged
drive is a slow drive, no matter what it is.
You can also buy
a very large disk and partition it as two drives.
This will
help the frag issue, but would put your games in the
center
tracks of the disk. That's the slowest area, because
the inner tracks
are much shorter in length then the outer
tracks. Two drives is the
ideal setup.
Also, about SATA II:
SATA II is really a server technology. It works
great with
huge databases like your medical insurance company would
use,
or my web server would use. But for normal home use,
the
overhead far outweighs any gain and it runs much slower
then
"advertised." (there's something new, LOL) I'd stick
with SATA I if
you can. This may change your mobo choice, so
I'd do some google
research on it before you spend any
money.
For hard drives, I would recommend picking up a pair
of Maxtor Diamond
Max 9 SATA I hard drives. They have liquid
bearings and are so quiet,
you can't hear them. They're
probably in the top echolon of
performance. Performance has a
price however; heat. You must use
direct cooling on the
Maxtors, so make sure your case has a fan mount
in front of
them.
Best of luck
