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XFXScorpio911 - Its Drive Time

xfxscorpio911

Posted in PC Development on September 8, 2008 at 9:05 pm

Hey all
Just got my two new Drives installed.
I spent about £150 on a 1TB SAMSUNG F1 Drive and an LG Blu-Ray & HD-DVD Drive

The thinking behind the F1 Drive being that I’ve had a 200Gb drive for the better part of 4 years, It was filling up (quickly) and its performance meant that during lan parties, my mates were blazing away while i was still sat at a loading screen
I desperately wanted to get some serious performance and storage and so I picked the TB drive

Several people have asked why i did so
“surely you don’t need all that space” they say
well there’s a reason I chose it over say the 750Gb drive.
Samsung quote these drives as having “up to” 334GB formatted capacity per disk.
The TB drive has that Full Areal Density of 334GB per platter
the 750GB and 500GB drives have a density of only 250GB per platter
This seriously impacts the performance of the drives and i wanted a drive to last me a good few years until SSD’s or Racetrack memory are viable alternatives
the Only other option was the 640GB F1 drive. It has an Areal density of 320Gb per platter and so maintains close to the TB’s rapid speed. I decided against it based on the fact that it is only available with a 16MB cache and that storage wise, i was more secure with a Tb Drive
Its up and running now and ripping into everything i throw it at.
Windows loads quicker, the desktop is more responsive and games pop up instantly before your eyes. If SSD’s are substantially better than this (which they are) then we’re in for a real treat.

My other purchase was the LG (we’ll call it a HD (High Def.)) Drive.
I have been very interested in High Definition since i upgraded from a 19″ to a 22″ monitor, I found that videos and DVD’s stretched out to fill the screen we’re pixelated and artifacts we’re clearly visible. The HD drive offers me video of higher resolution than my desktop and of incredible quality. Also the demise of HD-DVD has created a bit of a loophole. For the time being you can buy HD-DVD’s at about £5. They are of identical quality to Blu-Ray disks (even if the disks are of smaller capacity) and look absolutely incredible. The dual format nature of the drive allows me to purchase Blu-Ray disks as well in the future when new titles aren’t available on the opposing format.

I am very pleased with Both Drives and would, without hesitation, recommend them both to anyone, The TB drive for its capacity and sheer speed, and the HD drive for its dual capacity, and ability to play movies and really do them justice

PS. The F1 drive is also incredibly quiet (hugely better than my previous Maxtor attempt)
PPS. Also had to replace my Mobo with a Gigabyte GA-M57SLI-S4, managed to brick my previous board after a bios update, (which worked fine) but i have (should i say had) a custom bios splash screen which i tried to restore after the flash. Went Bad and took out the Mobo. That’ll Teach Me!!!

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XFXScorpio911 - Internal Shots

xfxscorpio911

Posted in PC Development on December 27, 2007 at 2:09 pm

A Couple More Pics

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Development

xfxscorpio911

Posted in PC Development on September 28, 2007 at 9:04 pm

My Machine started out as the Following,
AMD Athlon 64 3200+
Nvidia Prophet 3d Geforce 2 GTS 64Mb
512Mb DDR Ram
DVD/RW Drive
TARGA 15″ CRT Monitor
Gigabyte GA-K8NSC-939 Mobo
200Gb Maxtor HDD
XP Pro

I spent £462 on everything and bought some of the bits from Maplin (not wise). The graphics card and monitor came from my old machine. I didn’t replace them as i couldn’t afford it.I originally intended to build a skt 754 machine but i was sent a skt 939 Athlon 3200 chip. So i decided to build a 939 machine. This left me with a spare Skt 754 Motherboard. I worked out what to buy and how to build it by reading little guides that came with computer shopper, but when i got more into hardware i jumped to custom pc.

I build it and it worked perfectly first time. It wasn’t the most powerful machine in the world but it was mine. I remember when i’d connected all the jumpers, pluged in all the cards and pushed the power switch. The Computer Hummed into life. And I got into the arduous task of installing Windows.

I left the machine as it was for a while but when my GeForce 2 GTS Died I was forced to buy a cheap replacement. I couldn’t afford a good replacement so for about £20 i got my hands on a Palit Geforce FX5200 AGP Card, which was actually quite a bit better than the Geforce 2. So i decided that year around Novmber to do a revamp of the older components and give my PC a little more umph. I bought:
Another 512Mb of Ram (unmatched so not in dual channel mode)
A 19″ LCD Monitor (Samsung 1280×1024)
And An XFX 7800 GS Extreme Edition
By the time i had finished this upgrade i realised i had spent nearly £1000 on my PC!!!

More recently this year i was once again contemplating upgrading some components
as some of the components were getting out of date, the Athlon 64 3200+ for example

I was quite excited about the Idea of an 8800 GTS, although i realised that the other components in my PC would bottleneck performance. I am a member of the Egosoft Forum (Madness 3d) and was advised to buy an ASRock 939-DualSata2 motherboard as it has a 939 slot and through the use of an Expansion Card Supports AM2 CPU’s and DDR2 Ram. It also has both An AGP and PCI-E Slot. So I could upgrade to an 8800 without changing the motherboard

The Full story is here
and continued here

So I’ve ended up
since then
with an Athlon X2 6000+
2Gb of DDR2 Ram
And an OCZ GameXStream 600W PSU
suppling 4, 18A, 12v rails
So The PC in its current state - Full Specs are in a Previous Post
Main Shot
Close up of CPU
my lovely cabely mess
Which allows good airflow down the bottom
Graphics Card and Expansion Card
And there it is

Im looking into getting an XFX 8800 GTS 320Mb FATAL1TY edition graphics card towards the beginning of november
Along with an Antec 900 case, an X-Fi Extreme gamer soundcard and a copy of Windows Vista

Big thanks To shifty_powers for all his help
and everyone else on the egosoft forum

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• Specifications (100%)
• XFXScorpio911 - Home and Shots (86.6%)
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