New system building time.. san diego or venice?

[spigidygak]

So it's time to rebuild the gaming box. After doing a bit of research looks like I'll be going to AMD this time around. I'm thinking about getting the Abit AN8 Ultra motherboard. So for cpu though I need some opinions. Anyone think the san diego core 64s are worth it right now or should I just stick with a venice core and oc it? This is gonna be used mainly for gaming and some video encoding, nothing much else as I use a mac still for evertyhing else.

Oh and other thing I've noticed there are a few drives out now using SATAII/3Gb/s interfaces. Is the speed noticeable compared to a SATA 1.5Gb/s drive? Or is it more noticeable going with a raptor 10k drive instead.

[AlpineJay]

Wouldn't the second core be very useful in multimedia apps and gaming? My inclination is to go with San Diego (that is where you live, after all, right? )

[spigidygak]

i don't think the san diego is a dual core either the only difference i could get from the venice/san diego is that sd has 1MB of L2 cache vs 512K on the venice. Either way a dual core won't really help in gaming unless if you want to have other things going on in the background which I won't.

[SmokeyDP]

The new 7200.9 Seagate Barracuda uses the SATAII. Its supposed to be a real fast drive, but its expensive.

There has to be more of a difference than cache amount for it to be a difference core...

[shocky123]

The major difference between the Venice and the San Diego is the L2 cache size. 512 on the Venice, and 1MB on the San Diego.
San Diego doesnt necessarily mean dual-core.
There's a 3700+ single core San Diego version on Newegg.

~Kyle

[nate el bueno]

san diego means 2 things if it's not dual core: 1meg cache and 90nm. i have a venice, which yes, is 512 cache, but is also 90nm. supposedly it's the best core for oc'ing, which i dont do anyways

[spigidygak]

Well from the few reviews I'm finding on the new sd core chip the benchmarks aren't impressing me much for the $90 price difference. If anyone can disagree with that please let me know why.

As for the hard drive, looks like the raptors will be faster still especially with two of them in raid. But I might hold off on those for now.

[gear02]

Oh dear...it's a sad state when I have no idea what you guys are talking about...and I'm a techie.

[AlpineJay]

My bad with the two cores. Regarding RAID, I don't know if striping will necessarily result in a significantly faster gaming performance. I recall reading on Tom's Hardware about RAID performances and how they're not really cracked up to be, although I forget if gaming was one of the few exceptions that they cited.

But two Raptors @ 155 each? If I were you, I would be more inclined to go with one drive and save the 155 to either squeeze more RAM or just in your pocket.

[shocky123]

I doubt you'd ever be pushing the two Raptors if you set them up in a RAID configuration.
I'd go with either an SATA2 drive, or a Seagate barracuda 7200.8 (250GB+) as they have much larger platters, and actually are about 94% as fast as the Raptors in sustained speed, (vs about 74% for a regular 7200rpm drive).

Unless you have a hardware raid controller, two raptors in raid would somewhat defeat the purpose of this, as your cpu would quickly be bogged down by the overhead from the software raid.

If you want quickness.. one raptor is more than enough, two raptors, and you're probly gonna lose the only thing they have going for themselves.. the quick access speed (I'd imagine w/ 2 disks you could worst case get two times the delay, which kills your performance gains..)

~Kyle

[Jeffbx]

I've said it before, and I'll say it again:

One 74GB Raptor for OS & apps
One big 7200RPM drive for storage

You can't beat the speed and cost of that setup.

[kimchicowboy]

I've said it before, and I'll say it again:

One 74GB Raptor for OS & apps
One big 7200RPM drive for storage

You can't beat the speed and cost of that setup.

i was waiting for you to say that. hahhaha

[spigidygak]

Yeah I was just thinking of getting two since the board I'm getting has a raid controller... but that was me just getting a bit hardware greedy hehe. Anyhow I wouldn't even dig the extra noise of another drive in there. So I'll be getting one of those raptors for boot and use my current drive as a storage.

Picked up a x800xl off anandtech forums for a good price so that'll be the card for time being. I plan on upgrading that later after the holiday season when the new cards all ship out and see whats what then. I think I'm gonna settle for a venice also for now. Just can't find any reason to spend another $100 for the san diego.

[SmokeyDP]

The Baracudas also generate less heat and are much quieter than even one raptor.

[Jeffbx]

i was waiting for you to say that. hahhaha

Jeez, am I that predictable?

[LegendKiller]

Raid on a gaming/app computer isn't worth it. You get minimal (1-2%) speed increase while you are costing yourself 2-5% CPU resources with a software controller and even 1-2% with a hardware. You get almost no gain, or none at all, with a lot of data risk loss.

[shocky123]

Raid on a gaming/app computer isn't worth it. You get minimal (1-2%) speed increase while you are costing yourself 2-5% CPU resources with a software controller and even 1-2% with a hardware. You get almost no gain, or none at all, with a lot of data risk loss.

..I'm pushing ~800MByte/s of sustained Read/Write on a 4TByte array here... on 2 hardware Raid-5 controllers. But I only dream I could call this a gaming/app computer

~Kyle