Upgrading my harddrive and system RAM but by how much with Windows 7?

[spa]

<p>I built my PC about 18 months ago, it has:Intel Core2 quad Q9300 2.5ghzNvidia 9800 GTX2GB RAMWindows XP 32bit home edition sp3Western Digital Raptor SATA harddrive (5 years old from my old PC)</p><p>It has issues;harddrive is constantly making loud grinding noises especially when zoning in EQ2. Just like how my even older PC's harddrive was acting in EQ2 beta.2GB RAM isnt quite enough with high quality EQ2 graphics settings in certain areas/zones of the game such as Terans Grasp.</p><p>So im looking to upgrade my harddrive and system RAM, as well as use Windows 7 64bit.Would 4GB RAM be worth it or should i get 6 or even 8GB these days? I dont really use this PC for anything else other than gaming, downloading/watching Divx/HD movies and browsing websites. If in 12 months time i upgrade my graphics card then 4GB RAM under Win7 64bit might be pushing the limit? So maybe 6 or 8GB RAM is best?</p><p>Harddrive: Im thinking of getting the new WD Raptor SATA-II 150GB drive, but is the performance noticable compared to the same type of HD spec's with higher capacity but without the Raptor label? Also, would 2x Raptor's in RAID provide faster - around half the games loading/zoning times? or just a little.</p>

[Wingrider01]

<p><cite>Evocarti@Najena wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>I built my PC about 18 months ago, it has:Intel Core2 quad Q9300 2.5ghzNvidia 9800 GTX2GB RAMWindows XP 32bit home edition sp3Western Digital Raptor SATA harddrive (5 years old from my old PC)</p><p>It has issues;harddrive is constantly making loud grinding noises especially when zoning in EQ2. Just like how my even older PC's harddrive was acting in EQ2 beta.2GB RAM isnt quite enough with high quality EQ2 graphics settings in certain areas/zones of the game such as Terans Grasp.</p><p>So im looking to upgrade my harddrive and system RAM, as well as use Windows 7 64bit.Would 4GB RAM be worth it or should i get 6 or even 8GB these days? I dont really use this PC for anything else other than gaming, downloading/watching Divx/HD movies and browsing websites. If in 12 months time i upgrade my graphics card then 4GB RAM under Win7 64bit might be pushing the limit? So maybe 6 or 8GB RAM is best?</p><p>Harddrive: Im thinking of getting the new WD Raptor SATA-II 150GB drive, but is the performance noticable compared to the same type of HD spec's with higher capacity but without the Raptor label? Also, would 2x Raptor's in RAID provide faster - around half the games loading/zoning times? or just a little.</p></blockquote><p>what are you going to do with the machine besides EQ2? The game is a 32 bit application so it adheres to those restictions.</p>

[TSR-DanielH]

<p><cite>Evocarti@Najena wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>I built my PC about 18 months ago, it has:Intel Core2 quad Q9300 2.5ghzNvidia 9800 GTX2GB RAMWindows XP 32bit home edition sp3Western Digital Raptor SATA harddrive (5 years old from my old PC)</p><p>It has issues;harddrive is constantly making loud grinding noises especially when zoning in EQ2. Just like how my even older PC's harddrive was acting in EQ2 beta.2GB RAM isnt quite enough with high quality EQ2 graphics settings in certain areas/zones of the game such as Terans Grasp.</p><p>So im looking to upgrade my harddrive and system RAM, as well as use Windows 7 64bit.Would 4GB RAM be worth it or should i get 6 or even 8GB these days? I dont really use this PC for anything else other than gaming, downloading/watching Divx/HD movies and browsing websites. If in 12 months time i upgrade my graphics card then 4GB RAM under Win7 64bit might be pushing the limit? So maybe 6 or 8GB RAM is best?</p><p>Harddrive: Im thinking of getting the new WD Raptor SATA-II 150GB drive, but is the performance noticable compared to the same type of HD spec's with higher capacity but without the Raptor label? Also, would 2x Raptor's in RAID provide faster - around half the games loading/zoning times? or just a little.</p></blockquote><p>For the RAM, 4gb is the max you will need to get performance gains from Everquest 2.  As Wingrider mentioned, the game was originally designed for x86 systems and can't address memory beyond that limit.  If you're multiboxing, playing other games, or running lots of stuff in the background then you might get a bonus from installing more than 4gb, though.</p><p>The raptors are good drives and I used a set of them for years.  That said, the difference in zone loading times wasn't that great and after a while I ditched them for the 1TB WD black models.  A quick search on newegg shows the 1TB black models at around $100 while the 150GB raptors are around $180.  Certainly its up to you, but I just didn't think the load times were worth the loss of space and extra money.</p><p>Finally, I would not recommend a raid setup unless you're a fairly advanced user.  I have had bad experiences with it in the past with the drives getting desynced.  Its possible(probable actually) that I did something wrong but for me it wasn't worth the trouble.  Your experiences may vary.</p><p>I hope that helps.</p>

[Templari]

<p>I recently built an i7 system that started off on a single Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 (8 MB cache) drive, then I switched over to two Seagate Barracuda 7200.12s (16 MB cache) in RAID0.</p><p>Impact to loading times was effectively nothing.  A single 3.0 GB/s SATA drive performed almost identically to a pair of nearly equivalent drives in RAID0 configuration using the Intel X58 chipset integrated RAID control (Asus RAMPAGE II GENE motherboard, Windows 7 RC build 7100 x64).</p><p>RAID setups really shine when there are mutliple concurrent read / write threads to the volume, one of the reasons why they're so popular for servers and other multiuser, multiprocess applications.  EQ2 does not (appear to?) thread its disk I/O in any significant way, negating the performance gains available from having mutliple read / write channels to multiple physical disks available.  Much like 64-bit processing, EQ2 just doesn't / can't capitalize on the extra I/O channel bandwidth.</p><p>If I had it to do over, I'd probably arrange the 2 drives in RAID1 instead just for the failure tolerance.  Load time performance should be equivalent.</p><p>Hope this helps.  For your new compy, consider 6 GB DDR3 RAM in a triple-path arrangement; that seems to be the best bang-for-the-buck setup right now.</p>

[TSR-DanielH]

<p><cite>Templari wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>I recently built an i7 system that started off on a single Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 (8 MB cache) drive, then I switched over to two Seagate Barracuda 7200.12s (16 MB cache) in RAID0.</p><p>Impact to loading times was effectively nothing.  A single 3.0 GB/s SATA drive performed almost identically to a pair of nearly equivalent drives in RAID0 configuration using the Intel X58 chipset integrated RAID control (Asus RAMPAGE II GENE motherboard, Windows 7 RC build 7100 x64).</p><p>RAID setups really shine when there are mutliple concurrent read / write threads to the volume, one of the reasons why they're so popular for servers and other multiuser, multiprocess applications.  EQ2 does not (appear to?) thread its disk I/O in any significant way, negating the performance gains available from having mutliple read / write channels to multiple physical disks available.  Much like 64-bit processing, EQ2 just doesn't / can't capitalize on the extra I/O channel bandwidth.</p><p>If I had it to do over, I'd probably arrange the 2 drives in RAID1 instead just for the failure tolerance.  Load time performance should be equivalent.</p><p>Hope this helps.  For your new compy, consider 6 GB DDR3 RAM in a triple-path arrangement; that seems to be the best bang-for-the-buck setup right now.</p></blockquote><p>My experience with using a RAID0 setup was about the same as yours.  The difference in load times was almost unnoticable.  It sure makes Windows load fast, though!</p>

[Wingrider01]

<p><cite>TSR-DanielH wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><cite>Templari wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>I recently built an i7 system that started off on a single Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 (8 MB cache) drive, then I switched over to two Seagate Barracuda 7200.12s (16 MB cache) in RAID0.</p><p>Impact to loading times was effectively nothing.  A single 3.0 GB/s SATA drive performed almost identically to a pair of nearly equivalent drives in RAID0 configuration using the Intel X58 chipset integrated RAID control (Asus RAMPAGE II GENE motherboard, Windows 7 RC build 7100 x64).</p><p>RAID setups really shine when there are mutliple concurrent read / write threads to the volume, one of the reasons why they're so popular for servers and other multiuser, multiprocess applications.  EQ2 does not (appear to?) thread its disk I/O in any significant way, negating the performance gains available from having mutliple read / write channels to multiple physical disks available.  Much like 64-bit processing, EQ2 just doesn't / can't capitalize on the extra I/O channel bandwidth.</p><p>If I had it to do over, I'd probably arrange the 2 drives in RAID1 instead just for the failure tolerance.  Load time performance should be equivalent.</p><p>Hope this helps.  For your new compy, consider 6 GB DDR3 RAM in a triple-path arrangement; that seems to be the best bang-for-the-buck setup right now.</p></blockquote><p>My experience with using a RAID0 setup was about the same as yours.  The difference in load times was almost unnoticable.  It sure makes Windows load fast, though!</p></blockquote><p>Don;t really care for raid 0, to much of a chance of complete data loss with a single drive failure, unless you  have a good backup regime. Now raid 0+1 is acceptable, but that requires 4 drives of like size, other then that raid 1 or my favorite a fast ssd drive for the OS and raid 1/0+1 for data.</p>

[Derrmerth2]

<p>While this does interject a nice chunk of opinion, if any one asks for a hard drive reccomndation, there should be a standing order to get a Western Digital Black edition drive. I've dealt with dozens of those drives in various sizes and they are all pretty much as fast as one gets with a magnetic based storage drive at this point in time. Spending time or money for more advanced solutions simply puts you too far down the diminishing returns curve. Even when I flipped EQ2 over to a Patriot Tourqx model drive, it wasn't terribly faster. Some, but not a lot.</p><p>That line of drives has an excellent storage/price/preformance profile. Also the RE3s are pretty much no faster then those so don't worry unless you are going to do some RAID setups.</p>

[Wingrider01]

<p><cite>Derrmerth2 wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>While this does interject a nice chunk of opinion, if any one asks for a hard drive reccomndation, there should be a standing order to get a Western Digital Black edition drive. I've dealt with dozens of those drives in various sizes and they are all pretty much as fast as one gets with a magnetic based storage drive at this point in time. Spending time or money for more advanced solutions simply puts you too far down the diminishing returns curve. Even when I flipped EQ2 over to a Patriot Tourqx model drive, it wasn't terribly faster. Some, but not a lot.</p><p>That line of drives has an excellent storage/price/preformance profile. Also the RE3s are pretty much no faster then those so don't worry unless you are going to do some RAID setups.</p></blockquote><p>Not overly happy with those drives, have cooked a number of them so far in validation testing, in reading uunet groups they have a pretty high failure rate as compared to some of the other drives available. Sending 2 of them back to the manufacturer for warrenty replacement later today, the MTBF for that have benn fairly poor</p><p>I buy storage for other uses in the machines I run, EQ2 is a minor application that I run, so my drive configuration discussions are based on a real life working system that I build for validation of vertical market software for dependablity, speed and accuracy.</p>

[Silicon_Panda]

<p>Someone mentioned EQ2 using 4gb gb of memory, actually EQ2 will not address more than 2gb of memory since it is limited by its 32bit Architechture.</p><p>Whether you use a 32-bit or 64-bit operating system depends on the amount of memory you require in the system. 64 bit operating systems, except for their access to more memory, do not provide improved performance, and sometimes there a problems finding 64 bit drivers.</p> <p>Extra RAM also doesn’t help improve performance unless its needed i.e. you are running multiple memory intensive applications that are currenlty using up the physcial RAM. Once the system goes into using Virtual memory (hard disk) for storing the excess, it’s a 1000 times slower. In this situation A RAM upgrade makes a significant speed improvement, from what I have seen making operations  sometimes 400% faster or more.</p><p>The 4GB limit refers to total addressable memory space and not just the RAM installed. It’s a total made up of system RAM, graphics RAM, PCI memory range, ACPI and a few other bits and pieces. And if you think that your system RAM is the only significant factor, think again. You can buy graphics cards fitted with 1GB of RAM, and if you wanted you could fit three of these into a system. There’s not a 1 to 1 relationship between graphics memory consuming system memory allocation, but the larger the memory, the more the card sets aside for itself. Now that 4GB limit doesn’t leave you a lot of space for system RAM</p>

[Derrmerth2]

<p><cite>Wingrider01 wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p> Not overly happy with those drives, have cooked a number of them so far in validation testing, in reading uunet groups they have a pretty high failure rate as compared to some of the other drives available. Sending 2 of them back to the manufacturer for warrenty replacement later today, the MTBF for that have benn fairly poor</p><p>I buy storage for other uses in the machines I run, EQ2 is a minor application that I run, so my drive configuration discussions are based on a real life working system that I build for validation of vertical market software for dependablity, speed and accuracy.</p></blockquote><p>Sorta the same thing here. I've been picking them up for work applications as well personal. I've had about 75 of those drives come through me at work alone and only one has died for reasons I don't attribute to the drive. The bulk have been the 500Gb versions being stuck in workstations. Others have been put in to small servers for many months now, no fails but the one, a 640GB version. I don't use them for serious server apps but anything requiring some good throughput in a JBOD config, there are working great.</p><p>You probably don't hug them enough.</p>

[TSR-DanielH]

<p><cite>Derrmerth2 wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>While this does interject a nice chunk of opinion, if any one asks for a hard drive reccomndation, there should be a standing order to get a Western Digital Black edition drive. I've dealt with dozens of those drives in various sizes and they are all pretty much as fast as one gets with a magnetic based storage drive at this point in time. Spending time or money for more advanced solutions simply puts you too far down the diminishing returns curve. Even when I flipped EQ2 over to a Patriot Tourqx model drive, it wasn't terribly faster. Some, but not a lot.</p><p>That line of drives has an excellent storage/price/preformance profile. Also the RE3s are pretty much no faster then those so don't worry unless you are going to do some RAID setups.</p></blockquote><p>I generally agree with everything here.  I have heard reports of the Black edition drivers failing but it hasn't happened to anyone I know.  Even then, it's usually the lower storage models that I hear the most failure reports about.</p><p>It's always a good idea to keep your warranty info handy, though. <img src="/eq2/images/smilies/ed515dbff23a0ee3241dcc0a601c9ed6.gif" border="0" /></p>