Zxian

@ripken - See... you went ahead and bought the system BEFORE consulting the rest of us. That's your choice to make of course, but you should realize that people are often going to have different suggestions. You're the only person that I can think of in the past few months who went ahead and bought a system before posting here. vegettoxp, eyeball, FabulousFred, RJM, Messerschmitt, and myself - we all asked questions about our systems before we went ahead and bought the damned things. I think that I know quite a bit about computers, but I'll still consult my friends and MSFN before spending my money. Thinking back on my file server - I've put about $1600 into that system alone, and I can say with confidence that it's worth every bloody penny. For your setup - I feel like you could have done better. The sad part about this thread is that it's too late to do anything about it. You've already spent your money, and to be honest, I think you're taking a $230 risk with the P5K Premium. You've also spent more money than you need to on RAM (4x1GB is cheaper than 2x2GB, and would be better for your system). The Lian-Li case... inverted ATX systems aren't really all that they claimed to be thermally. Sure you're going for water cooling eventually, but you could have found a better case for that. Even though I don't like the looks of it - the CMStacker 832.

So... you ask what we think of your plan, and then you go ahead with it without consulting our advice...? What's the point in trying to help you out. jcarle, memnoch, and I have all given you suggestions and solid information, and you seem to toss it to the four winds.

Hang on a sec.... If you're not going to actually use the second drive now, why buy it now? Western Digital and Seagate are both going to release 1TB drives in the next few months, and when they do, it'll drive down the prices of 320GB and 500GB drives. Save your money and wait a while... especially if you're not going to use the drive. EDIT - Another thing... I also prefer WD drives for another reason - power consumption. WD drives draw less power than similar spec'ed Seagates. Lower power means less heat means lower temperatures. Lower temperatures leads to longer lasting drives. All 5 of my hard drives in my file server are running at 30C right now. The two drive cages I have each have a 120mm YateLoon fan running at 6V. The 200GB 7200.7 drive I have is running at 35C right next to the WD2500KS. You figure out the rest.

Try to do an uninstall with a regular boot up, and then use Safe Mode if that doesn't work. From what I understand, you can't even use Windows when it boots up normally, so Safe Mode is your only alternative.

Yea... the 3-3 iCages are kinda dumb. Way to go ThermalTake. Is this the 3ware cage you were talking about? Also... is there somewhere to get a shorter ML breakaway cable? Something like... 12"? You can see, the card and drives are pretty close to each other, and having 3ft of cable is rediculous.

*looks in P5B Deluxe manual* The black ports are set to "slave mode" when the ICH8R is running in IDE mode. When the ICH8R is running in ACHI or RAID mode, there is no difference between the ports. The port located near the back of the board is for the JMicron SATA controller. That controller runs the port you found, as well as the eSATA port. You can even run RAID0 or RAID1 on those two, although the purpose of running RAID with an eSATA drive is beyond me... You can configure any combination of RAID that you want. EDIT - Haha... memnoch and I post the same stuff... wicked.

Dedicated controllers only add benefit for RAID5 or RAID6 functions. RAID0 and RAID1 take up pretty much no extra overhead on your system resources, so you wouldn't see any advantage for your setup.

Boot into safe mode and uninstall Daemon Tools. I'd toss Kaspersky and grab Avast instead. I've had Avast + Daemon Tools running on several systems without any troubles.

How can a game get infected? Most malware doesn't infect games - it infects the OS. Regardless of where you install your programs, malware will find your system.

I think it's the Force Unit Access that's killing performance on Protection and Balanced... Write journaling would be disabled anyways, since I don't have a BBU.

Get it!!! Jcarle and I both have the Deluxe, and memnoch has the P5B-E. I think I speak for all of us when I say that it's worth every bloody penny.

I just got my P5B Deluxe... love that board.

Why do people install games to a secondary partition? If your Windows partition goes down, so does your game, since settings are still stored in the registry. There's also the problem of disk access. By splitting up your programs to two different sections, you're slowing down overall disk access. Depending on the game/program, it might need to access files from Windows, so the disk head needs to travel back and forth between the partitions from game to windows to game to windows. All the meantime, it's travelling over empty disk space at the end of your Windows drive. I have partitions on all of my single-drive systems, since I dont' want my data to be fried in case Windows one day decides to keel over and die - but that second partition is for static data, not programs. Documents, music, videos, installers - all that goes on the secondary partition. Anything that you run, or is needed to run a program goes on the system partition.

The Premium isn't a newer model of the P5K series - it's another model, just like the P5K3 is another model, just like the P5K Deluxe is another model. The entire P5 lineup from ASUS is built on top of the P35 or G33 chipset - but they're all variations on a theme. The problem that people are running into is the fact that the P5K series is essentially the first generation of new hardware. As with any new device - there will be initial problems that you hadn't tested for. The P5B series has been out for a while, is still as futureproof as you need it to be (aside from DDR3 support), and will give you far less problems. You tend to be a "first-adopter" of hardware, and I'm guessing that you've been lucky so far. If you didn't work with PCs, but instead dealt with Apple computers, you'd learn very quickly never to be the first to buy the brand new product. Apple has one of the worst reputations when it comes to first-gen hardware (iPod, iMac, Macbook, etc...) in terms of reliability, stability, and so forth. The rest of the computer market isn't exempt from that rule either - at least not in my books. What jcarle and I are trying to say is that by getting the P5B instead of the P5K, you'd be loosing nothing, and gaining a lot. EDIT - To answer your question about RAID - no. Just use the onboard Intel Matrix RAID for your setup. You have no need for a separate controller.

The P5B Deluxe does support 1333FSB. I believe a BIOS update is needed, but otherwise, you're good to go.

Hang on a sec - games go with programs. If you play a lot of games, give yourself more space than 15GB. System drive = system, drivers, programs Secondary drive = data

The P180 has plenty of space inside, but it's partitioned out into the different sections. Each of the sections might be smaller than you expected, but it helps channel airflow. It's reviewed as one of the most thermally advanced cases on the market. I really don't see the advantage to using an inverted ATX case... can someone fill me in on the big picture here? I also would have suggested another board from the P5K series. The P5B series is still known to be one of the best overclocking boards there is. The only thing you'd be giving up is DDR3 support, but the advances of that in the near future are somewhat negligible (it's the old latency vs clocks argument all over again).

So... one last update, since everything is in and installed. Some necessary pictures... I went out to FutureShop today and bought a craptastic 500GB external drive to hold my data temporarily while I converted the disks. The array is now a dynamic GTP disk with a simple volume on it. My Disk Configuration While I had an empty drive to play with, I made sure that I could create a volume, and then extend it as needed. I was able to without any troubles, but I noticed that what Windows actually does is create another volume with the same label and drive letter, and just merge the two for the rest of the system - See here I'm still playing with the configuration a little bit here and there, but I'm wondering about the "StorSave" setting. If I set it to "Protection" or "Balanced" I get pretty poor write speeds - 5MB/s on protection - 7-8MB/s on Balanced. If I set it to Performance, I'm limited to whatever the other medium is, and it can copy to itself at nearly 100MB/s. Any thoughts on this? I've got write-cache enabled, and queuing enabled as well.

Four years ago, I was using 512MB of RAM in my system. Now, I've just managed to get all my main computers up to 2GB, but that was just recently. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx...N82E16820227030 I picked up a set of that for my file server. If you want 4GB, get two packs.

The correct answer? Any drives really. HDTach - 160GB Maxtor 2MB Cache - PATA HDTach - 250GB WD2500KS - SATA HDTach - 2x80GB Seagate 7200.7 - RAID0 - PCI SATA RAID card I think that the speed of the RAID0 setup I've got is severly limited by the PCI bus. Notice how the speed only tails down at the very end? That's probably the "slow end" of the RAID configuration, but my guess is that the fastest speed is upwards of 120-130MB/s. Need I say more?

Why don't you like RAID? What's not to like about RAID0 for a system drive? You've spent that much money on the system, and then you're killing the performance boosts over your current system by running a single drive. To give you a slightly older example - I went from a single PIII setup with 1GB of RAM using a single hard drive to a dual PIII setup with 2GB of RAM and the same drive. Then I went to RAID0. The RAID0 was far greater of a performance boost than the dual CPU and doubled RAM.

Do people really need 8GB of RAM? Encoding videos doesn't take that much, playing games doesn't take that much, and like memnoch said - 1GB per virtual machine, and you still leave the OS with plenty to spare. I just think it's excessive for the tasks described. 4GB I can understand, but 8...

I think you're better off going with 4x1GB (two sets of 2x1GB). It's cheaper and will work just as well.

Why did you get 2x2GB? Wouldn't 4x1GB be considerably cheaper? Also - Pioneer DVD drives are better than Samsungs. I've got a DVR-111D, DVR-112D, and a DVR-212D, and all are fantastic. Personally - Lian-Li cases have never piqued my interest. I find them relatively... boring and the layout is overly complicated in my opinion. Secondly - you're paying that much for a modern case, and they still use 80mm fans? Has nobody brought them up to speed yet? Why did you say "Finally gunna get a kick-a** case"? What is wrong with the P180? It's one of the best thought out cases in terms of noise and airflow. Oh... one last thing. If you're gonna spend that much money - you're killing your performance by running it off a single hard drive. Get yourself a couple of Raptors instead of the 500GB seagate and run them in RAID0. I've got two 80GB drives running in RAID1 over a PCI RAID card on my old system, and the performance boost is VERY noticable. Remember - this is still over the PCI bus, so I'm limited by it's bandwidth.

Vancouver!!! Your flag says otherwise...