OT: The 'joys' of building a PC.

farss wrote on 7/29/2008, 3:41 PM

I thought a bit of heads up wouldn't hurt as I know many of us like to roll our own. Managed to throw all the bits in a box, install XP, get it up to date and the Quad is screaming along. That was easy, maybe too easy, I even for once had the time to dress cables and make this PC look pretty inside. I don't think defragging does much but neat cabling sure makes the electrons run faster :)

Except yesterday I decided to add another three disks and figured I'd run two of them in RAID 0 for a giggle. Last time I trusted a mobo RAID the results were tragic, maybe things have improved, worth a shot I thought.

This forced me to read the mobo manual. I read it cover to cover several times in fact and that was an eye opener. Out of the box the BIOS has the mobo setup to just work with the minimum of fuss and the minimum of performance. I don't fully understand the significance of some of this and even if I did have the answers they mightn't be that applicable to everyone so I guess what I'm saying is you need to do a bit of reading and digging deeper into things to perhaps get things working as good as they coudld. What I did find was the following:

1) By default S.M.A.R.T. is turned off, thanks to Terje for bringing the significance of this to my attention in a now deleted thread. Maybe XP doesn't use it but it sure will not have a chance if it's turned off in the BIOS.
2) By default all SATA ports run in IDE emulation.
3) Not all SATA ports are the same. It looks like only 2 ports on the mobo support the full SATA II spec including NCQ and they might also be the only ones that support hot swap.

Probably none of the above matters much. But without a bit of deep delving you might not actually be getting what you paid for.

Bob.

Comments

GaryAshorn wrote on 7/29/2008, 7:36 PM

Bob,
Funny you should bring this up. Been looking for few months as to what to buy or build. Searching here and other places. I usually build my own but depending on my needs a production model could do it as well. I decided to go with a configured model from Ibuypower and take a chance. Priced out the exact same parts from Frys and Newegg to what they offered and figured what the heck let them do it and it cost a bit less. I did research on the MB I wanted etc on those items you mentioned. What I have not done in a few years is mess with the BIOS and what can be done these days now. I did read up on my board selection for overclocking and the ease to make changes without blowing it all up because I am stupid. I should have it in a week or so and then we will see how smart I hope I was. I did make sure I had the SATA ports as needed, the Raid support and slot expandability I will need. You bring up all very important points. Let's hope I understood them well enough on my new Vegas system.

Gary

johnmeyer wrote on 7/29/2008, 8:13 PM

Guys, let me know what you figure out. I really need to get a new PC, and am perfectly capable of building one, but I'm not sure I will go that route because there are so many subtle choices and settings that could do some major damage to the overall performance. I guess I could hang out at Tom's Hardware (or do you have other recommendations), but I don't have infinite time.

riredale wrote on 7/29/2008, 9:06 PM

I have never played around with raid setups, but recently read an article in, I think, CPU Magazine that tested numerous raid configurations. They concluded that motherboard-based raid was generally poor when compared to plug-in card raid setups. There was one card in particular that was blazingly fast, but I didn't pay that much attention. I'll try to find the magazine.

farss wrote on 7/29/2008, 11:41 PM

In general indeed the kind of RAID you get on a mobo isn't worth much, at least to us, because it can use quite a bit of the CPU doing its thing. As you've noted once you get into RAID controllers the prices go up quite dramatically and if you don't need it you're spending money that could be better spent elsewhere. Only reason I use it is from time to time I do work with uncompressed or not very compressed video which means moving a lot of data quickly.

I'm not that excited about overclocking either, saving 10% on render times would just mean having to wake up earlier. When I have a lot of stuff to render Peachrock's Multirenderer does it all for me. However many of the newer Intel CPUs are a snap to lightly o'clock with just the stock cooler and if you can get more than a 25% improvement without exotic cooling or raising voltages it does seem very safe.

However most of the things I was looking at in the BIOS aren't just for speed. SMART is a system that lets the OS know about errors on the disk. Theory is from that data impending disk failures can be detected. I say in theory because it seems Google reckon it isn't worth much as most disks fail very quickly. Still, what the heck, it's there, I paid for it, I might as well turn it on.

Regarding SATA. It seems some old OSs don't understand SATA so the controller can make the SATA disks look like IDE disks. Not something you'd want if your OS does support SATA.

If you use external eSATA drives then hot swap is handy. Without that if you want to change a drive or just plug one in you may have to shut down the system to do it. Again no that big a deal but if it can be so, good.

Oddly enough best place I've found for a lot of good advice is the local overclockers.com.au .It's not all people with dewar flasks of LN2 running CPUs at 6GHz! Much of it is about where and what to buy so it's not relevant outside Australia but I imagine the USA one would contain an equal amount of very helpfull people if you dig down into the right sub forums. So far they've helped me sort out my network and I'm just about to take their advice on getting this RAID working. Also great sub forums on photography, cooking, cars, pets, various OSs and mobile phones. Just be warned though, the .au one does have a lot of "colourful" language.

Bob.

Rory Cooper wrote on 7/30/2008, 1:47 AM

You know how squeamish some people get when they see blood and guts well I am like that when I look inside my pc

So what settings should my pc be set to for optimal performance?

[I read with interest S.M.A.R.T should be off] does this apply to me ?

What else /

I am running a quad core
Windows xp
8800 GT nvidia
Also run Boris red
And what about the pref settings in Vegas? Any final answer

I would like to print the results out for future ref. so please any info would be appreciated
Also keep it simple [ you know the squeamish thing]

Thanks
Rory

JJKizak wrote on 7/30/2008, 5:14 AM

My motherboard has two SATA drivers, one Intel CH9 and one Gigabyte. The Intel driver controls 6 SATA ports and works just ducky in three Raid configurations with the bios set to raid for them. With the Gigabyte bios set to Raid/IDE the IDE drive works fine but the SATA optical drive (Sony Bluray or LG Bluray) has big problems on being accessed. The harddrive blinks for about 1 minute then the Bluray drive says "OK, you found me" and then everything works. I'm afraid to set the bios to AHCI as one time I lost the OS.
Vista 64, GA-X38-DQ6, 8 gig ram, Q6600, 8800 EVA Nvidia
JJK

Stringer wrote on 7/30/2008, 7:26 AM

' ....I'm not that excited about overclocking either, saving 10% on render times would just mean having to wake up earlier. When I have a lot of stuff to render Peachrock's Multirenderer does it all for me. However many of the newer Intel CPUs are a snap to lightly o'clock with just the stock cooler and if you can get more than a 25% improvement without exotic cooling or raising voltages it does seem very safe. ..."

I wouldn't hesitate to overclock to the highest clock that Intel is selling .. I believe that is currently 3.2g ..

Lower clocked CPU's have simply been " underclocked " by Intel ...

richard-courtney wrote on 7/30/2008, 7:59 AM

Bob,

I agree that external raid cards work better. I'd rather buy multicore CPU
for its speed and save board space for slots. I use 3DM raid controllers.

The fancy cables to dress inside I thought was a sales gimmick but have
found it helps cut down thermal hot spots inside the case. So lookin' good
inside helps in important cooling.

Jim H wrote on 7/30/2008, 10:12 PM

I'm on my 4th PC build and I've only had to tweak bios settings once in order to get the system running, not to speed things up. During my last build I hooked up with one of the tech support managers at Asus, great guy. He told me that their bios is set up so 99% of users wouldn't have to touch a thing...most settings are auto and will do just fine. What little gains you get from overclocking are just for bragging rights as far as I'm concerned. Never bothered with RAID, I just buy two identical HDs for data and duplicate everything manually. I believe in spending my money on the fastest CPU I can afford and keeping it for as long as I can......it's been three years now and I'm itching for another upgrade. I'm thinking the itch will be pretty bad around xmas...heh heh.

farss wrote on 7/31/2008, 12:48 AM

Well the RAID is working, wasn't hard at all. More my stupidity getting in the way than anything, like trying to use a USB keyboard that was disabled in the BIOS.

Results from HD Tach using 3 identical Samsung 250GB disks, 1 vanilla SATA, 2 in RAID 0.

SATA:
Avg Read 80MB/s
CPU 1%
Burst 200MB/s

RAID 0:
Avg Read 106MB/s
CPU 2%
Burst 261 MB/s

Not a huge amount in it although the graphs show that the RAIDs performance is pretty constant across the entire 500GB.

Bob.

megabit wrote on 7/31/2008, 1:05 AM

Bob,

If you haven't done it already, and you're using Intel chip (like ICH9R) - open the Intel Matrix Storage Manager console and enable the volume's write-back cache. This will increase your Intel RAID 0 writing speed enormously (mine are some 220 MBps now).

You need to do it with the Intel manager, as this option is not active (grayed-out) for RAID 0 drives in the XP Device Manager.