Author Topic: Questions (Read 326 times)

Ghosth · « **on:** November 28, 2004, 09:13:25 AM »

Why SATA drives for a new system????

Are they that much faster?

I'm a bit early but I'm starting to research for building a new system this spring.

Next, SLI

I thought we lost that with the old 3d accelerator only cards.

Are new mobo's going to have both agp & pci- express slots? Could you SLI them together if they did?

Or is this strickly another gimmick?

maddog · « **Reply #1 on:** November 28, 2004, 12:45:00 PM »

Sata drives are the future.... They have the potential to be faster.... When you buy them you look for one with a "native" sata interface, which means it is built from scratch as a sata drive..... Most now just take standard drive commands and interpolate...... I think when you get to 10k rpm drives and greater densities it will definitely be an advantage......

If your looking at the spring PCIexpress should be in your gameplan....

Roscoroo · « **Reply #2 on:** November 28, 2004, 01:08:44 PM »

http://forums.amd.com/

this should help

keep your eyes in the 939pin amd stuff . as for pci express vs agp
were not quite shure if its gonna go mainstream,(one sec they say it is the next there not shure kinda thing) pay attention to whats going on there also .

we still need a better operating system for the 64 bit pc's also .

acetnt367th · « **Reply #3 on:** November 28, 2004, 02:50:58 PM »

What maddog said

SLI currently a Nvidia offering (ATI still catching up). To be used with PCI express (not sure if you can do agp and pci express on motherboards that do)

Two video cards to share the work - mean twice the expense too :-)

Read recently that a guy was able to use SLI slots to have an ATI card and Nvidia card at the same time.......however they did not work SLI ...they only allowed him to choose which card he wanted to use - --- eg he could use Ati card with far cry and nvdia on doom.

SLI benchmarks are very promising ... for those with cash

Kev367th · « **Reply #4 on:** November 28, 2004, 10:51:01 PM »

SLI - Ability to link 2 PCI-Express graphics cards together. Similar to the old Voodoo concept only a lot lot faster.
ATI SLI should be available early next year, until then only nVidia supports it.
How much faster? I posted a link to a review not long ago. Do a search for FX-55.

There will not be mobos with both AGP and PCI-E graphics slots.

SATA - Faster than IDE, still slower than the fastest available scsi drives. Little more expensive than IDE, lot cheaper than fastest scsi drives.

Ghosth · « **Reply #5 on:** November 29, 2004, 08:25:35 AM »

939pin is exactly where I have been looking.

As to SLI, sorry, been there done that, doubt I'd do it again.

Thanks for the answers guys!

I doubt I'll bother with SATA at this point then. IDE still works fine on my end.

Last, Recomendations on a 64 bit OS?

Wait till they come out with a good one?

Kev367th · « **Reply #6 on:** November 29, 2004, 09:06:57 AM »

SLI for PCI-E is going to be a nice way to get a performance boost.
Best way to go is to get an ASUS A8N (due out this week) mobo, and a good video card eg 6800GT. Later on when you want more performance just add another 6800GT and use SLI to link them.

Microsoft has a free beta 64bit Win XP that you can download from their website. Should go public release early next year.
You don't have to use a 64bit OS, Athlon 64's will quite happily use standard Win XP/2000 edititons.