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dual channel memory

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dual channel memory

Postby cncnb on Sat May 14, 2005 12:25 pm

I've got a Lanpartypro 875B motherboard with an Intel P4 3.0 processor that supports the hyperthreading.

When i put this system together, i just used the two 512 Kingston sticks I had in my old system.

The mb supports the dual channel memory so i was wondering if it would make a bigger difference to upgrade on the ram? i do alot of video editing and what i have now is adequate but bogs down sometimes if i have several things open.

Would I benefit from just adding the new new sticks along with what is there now or just run the dual channel by themselves?

You guys haven't steered me wrong yet so i put more on what you think rather than the guy trying to make a sale.

Thanks
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Postby Ian on Sat May 14, 2005 12:36 pm

With dual channel, you want to use at least two sticks like you're already doing.

What speed is your Kingston memory? If its older, slower memory, you might be better off buying a couple of sticks that are faster or have lower timings.

I too have an Intel 875P based system and the best I upgrade I made (along with buying more and faster memory) was to get a faster hard drive.
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Postby cncnb on Sat May 14, 2005 12:59 pm

The sticks I am using now are the Kingston model # KVR400C4C3AK 2/1G

These were just an upgrade I had made on an HP I was using. I bought them from newegg as a pack of 2.

The HD I am running is a Maxtor 7200 rpm. I also use an external HD to store clips in that are not used everyday.

Whats your thoughts?
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Postby dodecahedron on Sat May 14, 2005 2:27 pm

Ian wrote:I too have an Intel 875P based system and the best I upgrade I made (along with buying more and faster memory) was to get a faster hard drive.

what faster HD was that?
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Postby Ian on Sat May 14, 2005 4:00 pm

cncnb, I have that same memory in one of my systems. The latency is a little higher than I'd like, but it works fine for my needs.

dodeca, it was one of WD's 80GB hard drives with the 8MB cache. I had one of these drives in there originally, but for whatever reason, swapped it for a Maxtor. Big mistake. I ordered another WD and things are speedy again. Right now I'm actually considering getting the SATA version.
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Postby eric93se on Sat May 14, 2005 5:36 pm

I upgraded my HD recently, SATA II by Hitachi is out, even though my MB only supports SATA I. The new sata is backwards compatible and dirt cheap, 250MB for $130 :D Nero says 66mb/sec

With the second HD I can rip DL as high as 8.4x :) before I was limited to around 3-4x.
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Postby LoneWolf on Sun May 15, 2005 1:05 pm

I'm now sold on Seagate for SATA. Native Command Queuing is properly supported, the drives are fast and quiet, and they have five year warranties.

I'm a big Western Digital fan for PATA hard disks, but the SATA models don't have NCQ, aren't as quiet as Seagate, and have 3-year warranties.

I won't buy Hitachi. They're the only major manufacturer that doesn't have advance replacement for defective hard disks. Shame on them. [-X
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Postby eric93se on Sun May 15, 2005 1:15 pm

LoneWolf wrote:I'm now sold on Seagate for SATA. Native Command Queuing is properly supported, the drives are fast and quiet, and they have five year warranties.

I'm a big Western Digital fan for PATA hard disks, but the SATA models don't have NCQ, aren't as quiet as Seagate, and have 3-year warranties.

I won't buy Hitachi. They're the only major manufacturer that doesn't have advance replacement for defective hard disks. Shame on them. [-X


How often do your hardrives fail? I've never had a failure, in almost 15 years. So who really cares about "advanced repacement" (sounds like a gimmick anyway). Read the reviews they are top performers.
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Postby Boba_Fett on Sun May 15, 2005 6:28 pm

I've had 3 Maxtor HDDs and 1 WD HDD die on me within 4 years. LoneWolf is right, Seagate (with their unpresidented 5 year warranty) is the best in the biz right now. Too bad you can only utilize NCQ and SATA II on the newest P4 and Athlon 64 (nforce4 only for the moment) boards... Also sucks that no real increases of speed can be seen from upgrading to SATA II. Even though SATA II can sustain 300MB per sec transfers, there is no way in hell a measly single 7200RPM drive could saturate more than 50-60MB of that. Maybe they made it for the RAID-0 crowd :lol:
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Postby LoneWolf on Mon May 16, 2005 11:45 am

eric93se wrote:How often do your hardrives fail? I've never had a failure, in almost 15 years. So who really cares about "advanced repacement" (sounds like a gimmick anyway). Read the reviews they are top performers.

There are plenty of other drives the equal of Hitachi in performance, or 1-2% less, that have better customer service. I'm willing to sacrifice 1% to get that service if that's what it takes, but Seagate and Western Digital have top performing drives too, so I really don't have to.

If you haven't had a drive fail, then you're lucky. I worked for a mom-n-pop computer shop for 3.5 years, as a systems engineer for a year and a half, and a systems administrator for over five. I've seen plenty of drives fail, several of them mine. I've also seen plenty of times where a user didn't back up their data. It's kind of hard to try and attempt to recover data from a drive when you don't have a new drive to direct the data to. I'm not just talking about ny own drives; I have clients of my own to look after. Getting them a Hitachi drive would be hurting myself if it failed, because lacking advanced replacement, Hitachi has to receive the drive from me, test it, then decide to send me a replacement. Everyone else diagnoses the drive on the phone, sends you the new drive, then gives you a set period of time to send the bad drive back. This gives you a chance to attempt data recovery, and gets you a replacement hard disk in half the time. And I don't have to pay more money to get this good service, either.

Advanced replacement is NOT a gimmick. It's an incredibly useful feature. It ensures that you have a new drive before you send the old one out. Back when the IBM "Deathstar" fiasco occurred, some users were waiting for 1-3 MONTHS for their replacement hard disk drives; I've also seen occasions (not common, but it happens) where a company can suddenly find no record of having received the drive someone sent in for RMA, and the ensuing runaround takes a week or two to resolve. I'm not willing to fork out extra cash just to have a hard disk sitting on my shelf at home in case one of mine fails, and I don't want downtime.

If you don't ever have a hard disk fail in your lifetime, you'll be the one with a charmed life. But generally, there's two kinds of people: Those who have experienced a hardware failure, and those who will someday.
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Postby cncnb on Fri May 20, 2005 1:01 pm

This is an item I'm looking at. Do you think this will do well with my system? If not, what would you recommend?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... etailSpecs
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Postby LoneWolf on Fri May 20, 2005 10:46 pm

Pretty nice stuff. Do shop around though; NewEgg's prices on memory vary widely, and sometimes they get beat by a fair margin.

I'd look at Corsair XMS, Crucial Ballistix, and the Mushkin you were looking at, from both ZipZoomFly.com and Outpost.com just in case. Choose the best deal on the best RAM from any one of the three, and you should be happy.
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