On Friday I decided it was time to upgrade to a new Intel Wolfdale Core2 Duo CPU. I also needed a few other things to go along with this, so I ended up with:
- Intel E8400 Wolfdale 3.0Ghz Core2 Duo (6MB L2)
- Asus P5N-E SLI Motherboard
- Antec P180 Case
- Antec EarthWatts 500W Power supply
I pulled the 8800GT from and the 4GB of OCZ DDR2 RAM from my old system. I added a few hard drives (after some data juggling to free them up), a CompUSA branded SATA DVD-RW drive (I found on sale for $20 at MicroCenter), a PCI 5 port USB card (I have a lot of USB peripherals), and a dual port SATA Card (to support additional hard drives/SATA DVD drive).
My primary hard drive is a Western Digital Raptor X 150GB drive; the other four drives are each 250GB drives (some Seagate, some Maxtor) and give me a total of about 1.1TB of storage.
Since I do a bit of downloading, I have allocated two drives to this processes; one is a 'News' drive for downloading files from the binary news groups. The other is a 'Downloads' drive for IE/Firefox downloads and extracts from the News drive (via NewsLeecher).
The remaining two drives are dedicated to Games and backups. Games are simply game installs. Even though my PC is backed up to my Windows Home Server (WHS) and I have chosen to store my user data (photos, docs, music, etc) on the WHS server, there is no backup of the data on the WHS (at least until WHS Power Pack 1 is released)- so I copy data from the server back to my PC with Titan Backup.
So far the system is very stable and much quieter than my prior AMD Phenom 9500 system. While four cores are cumulatively much faster than the two core CPU, the issue is that most games/application will not recognize more than one core- so Neverwinter Nights 2 ran like ass on the Phenom 9500.
Hi Broo,
ReplyDeleteI'm also going down the WHS path you are going and have some questions.
Are the 'News' and 'Download' drive kept out the WHS Drive Extender? And are the other two allocated to the Drive Extender.
What do you mean by 'simply the game install'. Do you use this as a backup for the game-installs?
Yeren (Bart van Overbeek)
Yeren,
ReplyDeleteSorry for the confusion- this was upgrade was for my desktop PC; my WHS is another system that is in the office closet.
As far as my WHS goes, I put everything (nine drives) into a the 'storage group' (basically 2003 server drive extender). From there I created shares on the WHS for Video, Music, etc.
If you need more info, let me know and I can make another post (there is also some more WHS info further back in my blog).
Bruce