Rightio, almost forot about you T-D-C...Almost [img]tongue.gif[/img]
I will do up a list of what I recommend tomorrow ;)

Heheh, I just spent about $2700 on my new CPU/GPU/Mobo/PSU

But im sure we can get you a damn nice system for that price, although you said you only need 1-4, you missed the Video card (One of the most important parts in machines these days)

Opps guess I meant 1-5 I definatly need to get rid of the POS FX 5200

Well Hive has sent me these specs for $2635.60 AUD in GST

1 x PC-3200 2048MB Corsair TwinX Pro 184-pin DDR SDRAM CAS 2 (2x 1024MB sticks) 400mhz w/LEDs and heatspreader
1 x Thermaltake Soprano Black Steel case w/side window, 2x 12cm fans, 430w PSU - due 3/4
1 x AMD Athlon64 X2 3800+ 64-Bit CPU, Dual-Core 2x 512K Socket939 w/AMD fan-heatsink
1 x Black 3.5inch 1.44mb Floppy drive, Panasonic
1 x 74Gb Western Digital Raptor 10,000 RPM SerialATA Hard Drive, 8mb cache
1 x 250Gb Western Digital 250JS SATA-II drive, 8mb cache, 7200RPM
1 x Asus A8N-SLI Skt939 AMD64 board, 2x PCI-x16, DDR, 3x PCI, SATA RAID, IEEE1394, GigaLAN, Audio
1 x LG 4167 Black 16x DVD±R, 6x DVD+R DL, 6x DVD-RW, 8x DVD+RW drive, 5x DVD-RAM, 48x CD-R, 32x CDRW, OEM w/software
1 x Point-Of-View GeForce 7800GTX 256mb PCI-E x16 Video card, 2x DVI, video in/out

What do we all think ?

Hmm...my impressions...it would be nice to have a 500W power supply...the new graphics cards need them, pretty much!

Also, I'm not sure I'm in favor of the 250 Gb, 74 Gb combo, for storage...especially when you could get two more 250s for the price of the 74...and I have my doubts as to whether the 10K drives really offer an appreciable performance change versus the 7.2K ones...but Hive knows better than I do!

Your motherboard even has native RAID support...which is faster than a 10K drive any day, though I have heard some people say dedicated cards are much better for RAID arrays...

I think I'm gonna give a big check mark to everything else...incidentally, how much of a power user are you, T-D-C? What all do you plan to use this computer for?

perhaps the 74g would be only for gaming while the rest is for storage

TDC - definately no point in upgrading your existing machine as that would require basically all components being upgraded anyway. Better to keep it for a back up as you've suggested, use it as a print server or something.

As for Hives specs - looks good, but I would go for another case (Personally I love the Akasa Eclipse 62) and buy a seperate power supply - of 500W + (Manufactured by either Tagan, OCZ, Hiper, Enermax, Antec, or the Power Cooling Solutions one).

I enjoy my raptors, they're great drives, and while I have mine in conjunction with 200GB RAID 0 Drives, and 250GB RAID 0 Drives, they're still worth getting with one single big drive.

Ilander, as far as what you said about the RAID 0 beating the Raptor - this is neglible. In terms of game loading performance etc. the Raptor will win hands down.

One 10000 RPM drive outperforms an array that only has to write a fraction of the information per disc? I'd have to look that one up, but I was under the impression it was faster...'course, I have a RAID 5 array that seems incredibly fast to me...load times are nearly non-existent things...unless loading something genuinely huge, like Morrowind with expansions or Oblivion...and I seldom see in-game load screens anymore...and I figure that's the most bandwidth my HDDs will ever have to worry about.

My main point, though, is that for a near-trivial adjustment to load times, a person could potentially triple their storage...

Im mainly going to be using this as a gaming rig so thats what I am going to be using this for.

I am thinking of going for a bigger drive or getting some more attached storage as I have a lot of digital photos and videos that I want to store (probably about 40GB at the moment)

So the only real questionmark is getting a 500w PSU.

I will see how much that will cost from this place.

Do you have a dedicated RAID controller for your RAID 5?

See, performance via RAID 0 is neglible, very very neglible. In tests I've seen in CustomPC (a magazine I read) there was basically no difference between RAID 0 and no RAID, and the Raptor can load faster, as of faster spinning times. There's not all that much in it of course. However RAID 5 is different.

Oi!!! I have a Soprano housing my beast [img]tongue.gif[/img]