Personally I think RAID-0 is overrated, unless you have the money to burn. And in that case then I would make sure I got some sort of redundant array (can't remember what number of RAID that is), as well. Having two hard drives striped basically quadruples your chances of data loss down the road. And considering that the performance improvement from it will only occasionally be noticed when loading levels in games (and then only by a few seconds, maybe), I don't think it's worth it. I used to be more positive on it, simply cause of looking at synthetic benchmarks showing how goddamn fast a RAID-0 setup is. But a few weeks back some gaming website did a comparison of load times in Far Cry, HL2, Doom3, and maybe some other games (and maybe not all of those three, I don't remember) and the load time improvements were damn near nothing. Saving three or four seconds on a 40 second load time just isn't worth the trouble, IMO.
Quote:
|
Contrary to what some 'informed' parties will have you believe, a proper overclock does not (significantly) shorten any hardware life or cause any problems, it's just a fucking pain to setup.
|
Yeah, it will, but it depends on a lot of factors. If you have really good cooling and don't play with the voltage much, then your CPU should last a long time regardless of how fast you run (who cares if it only works for 6 years instead of the guaranteed 10, right?). But if your cooling is mediocre and you do play with voltages and jack it up, you can wear out a CPU pretty fast. I had one of those awesome Athlon XP 1700+ that overclocked like mad, and were perfectly happy with really high voltages. Ran fine at 2500mhz for 8 or so months, rock solid. Then all of the sudden it wouldn't even run much past it's stock frequency (1433) without serious stability issues. It was just plain worn out. Not that I cared much, it was like 90 bucks CDN, oh noz. Ended up replacing it with a 2500+ mobile Barton for the unlocked multiplier, but it never came close to touching the clockspeed of that old T-bred.
And I also vouch for OCZ ram, it's a bit less expensive than Corsair, but seems to be as high of quality. Hell, most ram makers buy the same chips from the same manufacturers.