Challenged by a hardware upgrade today

[K PhaNTOM]

You know I feel ya. I hadn't had much trouble fitting my vid card but I bought a CPU fan that was way too huge for my case, but I somehow fitted it after a while, that is when i discovered my first gray hair

Stupid Zalman Newegg.com - ZALMAN 9500A 92mm 2 Ball CPU Cooler - CPU Fans & Heatsinks

[Donziboy2]

Whats your full rig setup?
Im running a pair of evga 8800 gts 512mb cards.
Which are killing my 4800+ x2 athlon lol.
Dont think ive made it to 10k on 3dmark, but thats cause my cpu is a few generations old. If work picks up again im gona upgrade my rig.

[mapes]

The MB onboard raid will take a perf hit because it's driven from the CPU (unless the MB manufacturer sources a raid controller into the board)

[WalkinTarget]

Donzi, that AMD 4800 is your bottleneck. Of course you knew that. I bet if you removed a card, you'd score almost the same.

System specs:
CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo 6600 (2.4ghz OC'd to 3.2ghz)
Motherboard: MSI P6N Platinum SLI
Memory: 4096 MB of Super Talent DDR2-800
Video Card: 2x eVGA 9600GSO SLI Nvidia (only 1 card in rig now)
Hard Drive: 2x Seagate RAID 320.0gb/16mb cache@ 7200rpm

Mapes, the fact that other boards net an easy 80/90mb/sec. transfer rate make it clear that its not a board issue. I've seen other Nvidia 650i boards scoring the numbers, so it's got to be something other than just pointing at the onboard setup and saying thats it.

I even deducted that it was Vista's Superfetch running in the background or on heavy system utilization, as this is a fresh Vista install and Superfetch will slow down a fresh install until its determined your application patterns.

[mapes]

Donzi, that AMD 4800 is your bottleneck. Of course you knew that. I bet if you removed a card, you'd score almost the same.

System specs:
CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo 6600 (2.4ghz OC'd to 3.2ghz)
Motherboard: MSI P6N Platinum SLI
Memory: 4096 MB of Super Talent DDR2-800
Video Card: 2x eVGA 9600GSO SLI Nvidia (only 1 card in rig now)
Hard Drive: 2x Seagate RAID 320.0gb/16mb cache@ 7200rpm

Mapes, the fact that other boards net an easy 80/90mb/sec. transfer rate make it clear that its not a board issue. I've seen other Nvidia 650i boards scoring the numbers, so it's got to be something other than just pointing at the onboard setup and saying thats it.

I even deducted that it was Vista's Superfetch running in the background or on heavy system utilization, as this is a fresh Vista install and Superfetch will slow down a fresh install until its determined your application patterns.

You misunderstand me I'm saying that a hardware raid will always out perform a software raid.

If you want to test your raid like a raid vendor then I suggest iozone or specfs tools

[WalkinTarget]

You misunderstand me

Nah, I didn't word my reply properly. My bad. C'mon Mapes, gimme credit for knowing that is what you were going for !

Nothing else I can think of doing other than trying Ultimate Boot CD and using its built in hard drive tests to verify the oddball results.

Second card gets here tomorrow so I'll post some pics of that once I get it crammed in there.

[juneau]

I'm starting to wonder if the raid on the MSI board is just a bad performer. I've seen results of Velociraptors raided using onboard and the speed is staggering.

Just grabbed this from OcUK as they have a massive HDD benchmark thread.

2 x WD 320GB RE3 w/ Abit IP35 Pro



Do your seagates have write cahcing enabled? That can make quite a difference.

[WalkinTarget]

Checked the write caching on them on Sunday in fact, and it is enabled. They are running in SATA mode and I confirmed that the BIOS was properly enabled and listing the options I selected.

I plugged one drive into SATA 0 and one on SATA 3 (equates to SATA port 1 and 4 on the board) and the BIOS then listed both ports 2 and 3 as free. I had to stagger them due to the right angle SATA cable tips to keep the video cards from crunching into them.

As far as I know, and reading over the MSI manual confirms it, that I don't need to have them in adjacent SATA ports (ie: 0 with 1 or 2 with 3). Some boards offer up two SATA RAID controllers, either Intel or Nvidia, paired with a JMicron, but I'm finding that hardly nobody uses the MSI P6N for a RAID setup (probably for a reason !)

[Donziboy2]

Donzi, that AMD 4800 is your bottleneck. Of course you knew that. I bet if you removed a card, you'd score almost the same.

Your pretty much right on the money. But on some games I did see a large increase in Fps. Mostly shooters that dont tax a single core let alone a duel (aka COD4).

I actually oc'd both cards about 20 minutes ago went from 650mhz to 720 and i ended up with a 3dmark score that was 10 points lower

Id oc my 4800+ but they dont oc well even when you have a spare drum of liquid nitrogen you cant get hardly anything from them. I think i managed a 15% oc but it wasnt occt stable and it run pretty hot even on a well rated cpu cooler. Anyone got a 5k watt pelter laying around i might get 20% that way

Im kinda screwed atm since i dont want to spend 800 or so dollars for a new system and then get layed off from work for like 4-6 months cause there is no work lol.

[K PhaNTOM]

Comon Donzi, you got those specs and an AMD? Get in with the big dogs dude, Intel ftw, always, ftw!

[Donziboy2]

Hey dont diss my rig man...
I spent $884 on that sorry lil duel core way back in 2005.
It saw the dawn of evga's 7800 gtx ko's.
It learned how to SLI them.
Then it was happy till the g92's came out.

Btw walkintarget do you really need raid that bad? I mean a single HD is pretty fast nowadays. Im running an old 74gb raptor and it feels slow compared to alot of the newer normal hd's wont even talk about the new raptors lol.

Its also sad that im looking at an E8500, 750i mobo, 4gigs of pc 8500, a 1tb HD, and a new copy of OEM xp and it will cost me less then my 4800+ x2 did when i bought it

[K PhaNTOM]

Btw walkintarget do you really need raid that bad? I mean a single HD is pretty fast nowadays. Im running an old 74gb raptor and it feels slow compared to alot of the newer normal hd's wont even talk about the new raptors lol.

I got 2 150GB raptor X's in raid 0 and I tell ya, it is worth it. I mean anyone that have played CoD4 with me will usually see my name first in the list. Loading maps in 3 seconds that takes a 7200RPM 10... but damn Activision made us wait 10 seconds before the match starts for people to get ready... no respect for better rigs

[WalkinTarget]

Hmmm, well I dropped the 2nd vid card in tonight, and in doing so I had to disconnect the SATA cable. Mind you, the PC was off (duh), so I thought nothing of it.

Booted back up, and at the BIOS RAID screen it flashed a red letter warning about 'Degraded drive array !!' so I thought, damn, bad hard drive already ???

Booted into Windows, used Nvidia's MediaShield utility via the Nvidia Control Panel app and had it test the array. The drives passed that test, so did the PC actually know that I had unplugged the cable at some point ???

I'm new to RAID, so this one is a learning experience for me.

[Donziboy2]

Drop us some numbers when you get a chance.
Im trying to get some decent ocing ota my old toledo, not doin to well thou went from 1.3vcore stock to 1.4 for only a 7.5% oc.
Good news is i made it over 10k on 3dmark with only a 2.5% oc.

[WalkinTarget]

Here's a pic of the RAID performance:



This is one of the better graphs ... most dip into the single digits at some point, so consider this my best run out of 10 so far.