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"IDE and S-ATA"

Right, must be quick.

Just ordered a new S-ATA drive (200GB 7200.7 NCQ Barracuda) to expand upong the measly 40GB IDE I have now. It's got some pretty important files, plus an installation of Windows XP SP2.

Now, how should I set up the S-ATA, and are there different ways?

I want to keep my 40GB, btw.

I don't doubt there is a difference Ali, I know that from experience as well from when I ran 2 GB in my rig. But most of the benefit is sheer Halo Effect - it's more in your mind than real. Or else you are extremely sensitive to tiny improvements. If you have money to burn then great, go for it. Else if you have 1 GB RAM then the best thing you can do is to buy a better graphics card or processor or motherboard or something. It's extremely unlikely that the best value upgrade at any time will be to move to 2 GB RAM from 1 GB.

Well, I'm only commenting based on what I've read...

I mean, I have no personal experience so...

Not disputing the fact that it isn't cash related. Just makes me laugh when people who haven't used 2GB RAM start commenting on what performance gains it does or doesn't give you.

ÂLŠ†ÂÎR wrote:
> You don't buy 2GB RAM for faster frame rates but having fri**ed
> around with so many different configurations over the last couple of
> years I can safely say it is definitley worth the extra cash.
> Especially with the XMSXLPRO stuff.

Of course if you have that much money to spend, why not go the whole hog and have Alienware build it for you. There's a point above which cash spent is no longer proportional to benefit gained, and 2GB RAM is well above it for non-specific uses.

2% Frame Rate increase but I would love to know how they measured smoother mouse movement and generally overall smoother gameplay...

You don't buy 2GB RAM for faster frame rates but having fri**ed around with so many different configurations over the last couple of years I can safely say it is definitley worth the extra cash. Especially with the XMSXLPRO stuff.

Well, according to every test and spec in every magazine / web article I've read, the world disagreas.

Difference from 512 to 1GB - 17%+ improvement. Difference from 1GB to 2GB - 2% imptrovement. Now, for £100 I know I'm getting more bang for my buck by shelling out on a good graphics card and processor...

Coin wrote:
> However, 1 Gig of RAM is more than sufficient...

Again, you aren't speaking from experience and have no idea what 2GB does for games like Doom 3 and Half-Life 2.

Err yes it does make a difference to gaming. Load times are a hell of a lot quicker and the games play a hell of a lot smoother, I don't think you will find anyone with Raptor drives who would say otherwise.

Aye, my thoughts exactly.

However, 1 Gig of RAM is more than sufficient...

In terms of purely gaming a faster drive SHOULDN'T make any difference to your playing.

If you have enough memory for the games to run properly, then they only time the HDD will be accessed is to load the level/section of the game you are in or stream audio/video.

If you don't have enough memoru, you'll get poor performance in games no matter how fast the drive is, becasue the game is expecting to be run from memory, not paged from a hard drive.

For HDD advice, don't go with what your games might need, if that's an issue, you need more RAM not a bigger/faster HDD.