[i]Originally posted by NinerMac[/i]@Jul 2 2004, 11:18 AM
[b] As far as PC's go, I'm on teh Intel side of things at teh moment [/b]
:ticked:
I went that way once and I’ll never go back. Both make good chips but in terms of more bang for your buck, you just can’t go wrong with AMD. Run cool and great overclockers too for the most part. Guess it comes down to a personal preference and what you want to do with it. For gaming, AMD can’t be beat. Of course, I’d say the same thing about ATI as well.
[b]you just can't go wrong with AMD. Run cool and great overclockers too for the most part[/b]
I’ve been back and forth. Even owned a Cyrix. at one point. That statement is funny to me because until recently, AMD chips were hotplates. Likewise, I actually did cook an egg on my Cyrix cpu just to prove a point. Terrible design with no thought towards heat dissipation. nVidia is doing that now too, which is why I won’t buy them again.
But back to AMD - until recently JCL, market analysts chided AMD for being foloowers. They had no innovation whatsoever and were content to simply copy Intel, but cheaper. They finally pulled even with the Athlon XP and their development partnerships with nVidia (the first developed platform for their chips). The Athlon 64 represents their first true innovation, and yes it is really good. Intel still hasnt recovered from that blow and probably never will.
From a personal standpoint, I’ve owned both and just go with value/performance - including noise, heat, size, etc. IMO, AMD is the better home user solution right now, and they are rapidly gaining workstation/server marketshare with the (soon to be dual core) Opteron.
Totally changing gears - Mac - what have you heard about the Hitachi Desk(Death)stars? They have a 120 GB one that’s only on two platters which creates really low seek times for an IDE drive (8.3ms I think). I was looking at one for really cheap but I was scared off by the whole “deathstar” history of the IBM GXP ones dying by truck load. I might wait for my next upgrade and get serial ATA if its really worth it (maybe for the 10k Raptors, I guess), but even this simple 8 MB IDE drive will be faster than my 2MB cache Seagate. Thena gain, Maxtor has some 16MB cache drives coming out, though I think they’re all serial. Big performance boost I’ve heard.
What’s your opinion on Seagate NA? Was leaning hard towards them after reading various reviews over at anandtech and Newegg but I only have personal experience with WD and Maxtor. I’ve come across some good deals on some 80-120GB/8MB ones, which is all I need at this point, but don’t know anyone who uses Seagate.
I have a 60 GB Barracuda IV 7200 2MB ATA100 one. Not one bad sector in 2+ years of heavy operation. It’s whisper quiet and reliable as hell. Of course, this was one of the last drives they sold with a 3 year warranty. I don’t know if the new ones are as good, but I’m terribly tempted to get a 120G/8M model just because of my experience with this one.
That’s the one I’ve been looking at getting. Newegg has the IDE at $92 (OEM)/Sata at $94 on a regular basis, but I’ve seen the retail version for $79.99 (after MIR). If Best Buy drops it down to that again, I’ll have to jump on it.
I haven’t read to many stories of Seagates going bad so it sounds like a good alternative to WD, Maxtor and the others.
[i]Originally posted by NinerAdvocate[/i]@Jul 2 2004, 01:39 PM
[b] Totally changing gears - Mac - what have you heard about the Hitachi Desk(Death)stars? They have a 120 GB one that's only on two platters which creates really low seek times for an IDE drive (8.3ms I think). I was looking at one for really cheap but I was scared off by the whole "deathstar" history of the IBM GXP ones dying by truck load. I might wait for my next upgrade and get serial ATA if its really worth it (maybe for the 10k Raptors, I guess), but even this simple 8 MB IDE drive will be faster than my 2MB cache Seagate. Thena gain, Maxtor has some 16MB cache drives coming out, though I think they're all serial. Big performance boost I've heard. [/b]
I've heard nothing bad about the latest hitachi . I believe they have fluid bearings now which makes them real quiet. I've got two WD 120 gig at the moment and one of them is somewhat quiet and the other screams. I'm all about quiet these days as I'm tired of thw "white noise" pc. My next build will be focused on performance but quiet.
I just read an article on Anandtech about raid drives and apparently real world tests show negligible improvement although benchmarks do show faster readings so maybe I’ll end up going raptor in the future.
On a side note, the server here has 4 Seagate Barracudas(SCSI) in it at 10K rpm, just 18 gigs a piece. In RAID 5 that is 54 gigs and there is also an ide 160 gig for backups and such. When I had that server here at the house, those drives dounded like jet engines even when they were spinning down…
