AMD 64 Bit + Longhorn vs PCI-X & DDR2

Banlain · Post by **Banlain** » Mon Jan 03, 2005 12:10 pm

Just for fun I ran 3DMark 2003 on my machine which is an AMD 1.1 with 384meg sdram and a Geforce MX 420 and got a score of 83 /flex

Time for an upgrade

Minute · Post by **Minute** » Mon Jan 03, 2005 12:44 pm

Actually I am contemplating something and wondering if it would be worth the cost. I was thinking of running a small 10 or 15 gig 15,000 rpm SCSI drive as my primary and only have my OS on it. Then having a large drive as a secondary in which I install everything on. The theory being that since the swap file is being written to and read from so much that it would speed up the overall performance of the system.

What I question though is how good the data exchange would be compared to running 2 SATA drives, 1 being 10,000 rpm and the large one being 7200 rpm. The reason I wonder is because I've read that running a raid setup with multiple drives is very good for handling multiple drives. And certainly less expensive.

Bahd Zoolander · Post by **Bahd Zoolander** » Mon Jan 03, 2005 4:40 pm

SCSI is a waste of money for a regular desktop system. SATA with NCQ gives you more than you'll ever need.

If I was buying something new today I'd buy 2 WD Raptor 74GB 10k RPM drives that support NCQ, a NForce4 motherboard that also supports NCQ, and run them in a RAID 0 array.

Post by **Ddrak** » Tue Jan 04, 2005 9:00 pm

The SLI isn't worth the cash in my opinion. The game itself has to be coded to support it - which many aren't just yet.

Dd

Bahd Zoolander · Post by **Bahd Zoolander** » Tue Jan 04, 2005 11:43 pm

No, SLI is transparent to the game. As far as it knows there is only one video card.

Bahd Zoolander · Post by **Bahd Zoolander** » Tue Jan 04, 2005 11:50 pm

http://developer.nvidia.com/object/sli_home.html

I don't think it's worth it either. I'd rather buy whatever $500 video card I can get now, and later when it's too slow I can buy something newer and faster. I know that as soon as I plunked down a ton of cash on today's cool technology some guy would come up with something 4 times better, cheaper, and completely incompatible.

SicTimMitchell · Post by **SicTimMitchell** » Wed Jan 05, 2005 4:43 am

I still say buy the best $200-$250 video card available at the time.

The 6800s have held out the longest at the $400+ price point, but my 6600 smokes HL2 and EQII (I get a respectable 7K+ in 3Dmark 2003 with a 2.2 ghz processor).

By the time I'm ready to upgrade again (this is gonna be a big one, since I'm holding out for a 64-bit CPU and PCI-E -- the meat of this thread is that we're seeing the first better-than-incremental PC upgrades since the early Pentium IIIs and Athlons) the $200-$250 cards will smoke the 6800s.

Post by **Ddrak** » Wed Jan 05, 2005 7:27 am

Bahd,

I was slightly incorrect. The driver has to be coded specifically to support each game. If the game isn't recognized by the driver then it disables SLI.

http://graphics.tomshardware.com/graphi ... ce-05.html

After several benchmark tests we noticed some relatively slow performance in two of our games. After turning on SLI HUD in the driver we saw that SLI was not active during these games. Even our efforts to force SLI operation through the expanded driver settings had no effect. After talking with NVIDIA we learned the cause: SLI is not available with some games. NVIDIA has so-called SLI Profiles for games that are defined in the driver. The driver recognizes the game via application detection and executes the SLI mode (split or balancing) designated for that profile. If no SLI profile exists for a game, there is no SLI rendering. It is not possible to force SLI mode or generate your own profile. According to NVIDIA however the driver already contains over 50 profiles for games running with SLI. For newer titles this therefore means that SLI system owners have to wait for a new driver. But even then there is no guarantee that SLI will be possible with a particular game.

According to NVIDIA there are games that are simply not compatible with SLI. Microsoft's Flight Simulator 9 and Novalogic's Joint Operations for example both cause problems. As of the test date we were unable to find out the precise reasons why. NVIDIA only talks about frame buffering techniques used in games of this sort that are problematic for SLI. Of the 10 games we included in this test, two of them were non-SLI-compatible.

NVIDIA has said it intends to set up a dedicated SLI homepage listing all games that are SLI-compatible. There is also supposed to be a list to be found there of games not compatible with SLI. We'll be glad when we see that.

Dd

Bahd Zoolander · Post by **Bahd Zoolander** » Wed Jan 05, 2005 4:33 pm

Hmm, that directly contradicts what NVidia's developer FAQ for SLI says. Oh well, it wouldn't be the first time they've deliberately misled customers and developers.

This appears to be a list of games they've "certified" to work. No EQ, EQ2, or WoW on the list. http://www.nzone.com/object/nzone_hardware_sliapps.html

Flunkie · Post by **Flunkie** » Thu Jan 06, 2005 1:10 pm

Grygonos Thunderwulf wrote:Makes no sense to me that raid0 would be slower... raid1 maybe.. but maybe there is something I'm not thinking of. That's the whole purpose of raid0 is performance where the purpose of raid1 is stability.. thus raid 1+0 or raid 10 is striping and mirroring with a parity drive. combining both...

raid0 = slower than single drive does not compute.

Raid of any kind requires some processing power, so there is overhead. Hardware controllers with their own processor and software for handling RAID mitigate this for higher end systems or servers. Lower end PCs usually end up taking a bit of a processor hit due to the Raid driver.

Raid 0 on a typical PC can give better performance in certain situations. If you were capturing video at 1024x786 30fps, Raid 0 is a good way to go to minimize the frame drop rate on a lower end PC with IDE drives. But in most gaming circumstances, Raid 0 isn't going to do anything for you, and might end up slowing your system down a tiny bit. There is also the risk of losing one of those two drives and losing everything.

Post by **Ddrak** » Thu Jan 06, 2005 2:26 pm

CPU speed is so far in excess of HDD transfer rates that to talk about "overheads" is just silly. Even though modern desktop systems have hardware IDE RAID controllers on the motherboards, just looking at CPU based RAID you get about 5-10MB/sec from each drive on a CPU capable of shifting hundreds of times that data rate around.

When you add the RAID 0 set, you have double the bandwidth (2 IDE channels) so it's going to run faster. The overhead is irrelavent because it's taken out of CPU idle time anyway.

Dd

Grygonos Thunderwulf · Thu Jan 06, 2005 2:51 pm

i'm gonna agree 100% Dd. From running a database server on my desktop at work (don't ask.. you wouldn't wanna know) I can tell you that the database speed bottleneck is not the processor, but the drives. My machine doesn't sit at 100% CPU and occassionally access the disk. The disk grinds like a cheese grater while the cpu sits at like 5 to 10% (p4 2.4 1GB RAM)