I need Nerd-Assistance.

[eb_5litre]

Hi guys, Its been a couple of years since ive changed anything in my system and think its about time I gave it a little bit of an update......

In order of priority is a new videocard, HDD & RAM, I currently have a Radeon 9600XT, Seagate Barraccuda SATA 120G & 1G of Kingston DDR400.

Now my plan is to purchase another Seagate but noticed they are now advertised as SATA II.... will this work with my existing SATA HDD ?? Also I keep seeing references to RAID 0.... what the hell is this and will it benefit me? My motherboard has RAID but I just have no idea what it is or how to use it.

Apart from that Ive got a fairly good idea of what videocard I want and i'll probably grab another 1G of Kingston RAM.

Thanks in advance.

[the_scotsman]

RAID is basically using 2 or more drives to mirror each other to act as a backup...also it can help performance:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redunda...ependent_disks

It can be useful but is not something I would ever use on my home PC.

[robjh80]

SATAII is in "theory" twice as quick as SATA but you will need a Motherboard that supports SATAII in order to run one, (ie: a new one), the Hard Drive is the last place to look if your looking for any performance gains, in reality you wont see any real world gains between SATA and SATAII....... stick with DDR400 for now as it performs just as well if not better than DDR2 on systems running lower to midrange processors, which unless your one of the very few who have the spare $1200.00 plus for an AthlonFX or high end Intel CoreDuo processor that pretty much means most of us, I presume your current Motherboard has 4 RAM slots and your currently using 2 of them with the 2x512Mb sticks running in Dual Channel?, I'm using exactly the set up your looking at in regards to RAM, 2 sets of Kingston 1Gb Dual Channel DDR400 CL3 equalling 2Gb,....... forget all about RAID, as "the scotsman" said it is basically 2 Hard Drives running as a mirrored pair, can be quite complex to set up for the novice, mainly used in servers, bit more of a gimmick on desktops, but Motherboard manufacturers have to offer all the "extras" to compete with their competition, whether half the features are actually worthwhile is open to much debate, ..........as for Video Cards, obviously firstly determine whether your Motherboard has an AGP8X or PCiExpress slot, this is where you will see some actual performance gains if your into playing the latest games.....do your homework in relation to Video Cards but basically it's the old "you get what you pay for" scenario.......the Video Card production life cycle is remember though very rapid, ie: new ones are coming out all the time and superseding what was "the best" very very quickly, more so than any other area of PC Hardware, think about what you're expectations are in relation to graphics performance as opposed to what you're willing to pay and remember that you will pay a premium for the very latest cards, it may be better to get one of the models that is in fact being superseded as the price gap could be worth it in relation to the minimal performance increase between the new and old cards........video cards can somewhat be surrounded with more hype than actual performance gains............a recent online survey found that something like 75% of systems playing CounterStrike Source online are using what is now a reasonably modest Nvidia 6600GT card.....Good Luck with it all, hope Iv'e been of some assistance.

[S3SR]

sata and sataII - you wont notice the difference unless you are moving and creating 100gigs of data at one time.
sataII is also cheaper so just get that....lol

RAID
is simple
theres a few setups, scotsman already said you use one HDD and the other is a mirror image of the other so when/if the other dies you can just use the other (what a waste of time and money ...do not do this)
the other way
eg 2x 500gig HDDs in raid so every bit of data is split between the 2 HDD's, they act as one big 900+gig HDD with the other half of the info on the other drive. this is SOOO much faster than normal HDDing as its not using one 'needle' to read the info its using 2 and so on...... BUT if one HDD stuffs up EVERYTHING is gone.

stay away from raid if you use any software/data that you cant recover (ie download, scan, backup)

videocard just go all out and get a 6600gt, or 7600gt its not worth upgrading to a better every 6months its a waste of money.

HDD - just get the sataII 500gig's are REALLY cheap now.

RAM - kingston/kingmax and corsair are the best brands on the market atm
but if you already have 2x 512mb kingston in dualchannel you MUST use the EXACT same model, ram size and bus otherwise its just gonna be a big cache of memory, or may not work at all. otherwise use the 2x 1gig sticks in dual channel if they are the exact same that is

sell the videocard on ebay - should recoup some money.

also check prices on www.umart.com.au or www.altech.com.au

PS ignore raid, and keep your 'big' HDD's cool, you'll see what i mean.

[XR6-VCT-2000]

Just my 2 cents worth ..

All has been mentioned about the raid so i wont worry with that.

Also as mentioned , a 400fsb (which i still only run now myself too years on ..lol ) is heaps fast enough for day to day stuff , internet and gaming.

Realy , imo , unless your making animation for a movie (extreme 3d applications) , or want to render extreme 3d scenes mixed with live footage, or ripping dvd's and decoding/encoding to other formats, or want to run games at majorlly high screen resolutions and refresh rates etc etc , then a faster processor than around even the 1.5ghz mark with a 400fsb is heaps fast enough ( in the Pentium and AMD range , forget the Celeron processor ! ), even for extreme home gaming or most home needs, providing you have enough harddrive room and speed ( you have the speed no worries with a sata setup, amount of space you have left i dont know ? ) , you should find with a decent gfx card ( personally there days i recomend the GT aswell , excellent gfx card ) and plenty of decent ram / you should be able to run pretty much anything with ease and plenty of speed .