Two hardware questions

[Toxin]

1) Would I really see a big performance difference if I get myself two 80Gig SATA2 Seagate drives and run them in RAID0, then what I have now with my one 80Gig SATA Seagate?

2) Is getting the Creative X-Fi (whichever model) really that much better than a Audigy4?

Enquiring minds (who would like to save some cash ) would like to know.

 

[willirob]

1) No - not real performance. Your disk benchmarks will improve though

2) techically yes - in real life no

 

[gkm]

1) No - not real performance. Your disk benchmarks will improve though

I would disagree. Load time for Windows startup etc will improve a lot. Down side is higher risk of loosing everything.

 

[willirob]

Depends on what you mean by performance improvement.

If you mean gaming FPS - probably no, but load times will be quicker

On the whole though performance is not really disk bound - depends on the application

 

[useless]

1. As mentioned games will load faster, nothing like having BF2 load in 5 secs with 2xRaptor SATA drives other than the usual 45+ secs.

2. Audigy 4 does it best until more games support X-Fi to its full extent.

 

[gkm]

I assumed Toxin was talking about drive performance. I agree it will have no effect on frames per second performance.

 

[Toxin]

Was actually thinking about both FPS and loading times. What about Windows overall? Faster?

 

[SkrewbalL]

yea no fps gain, but hard drives are a huge bottle neck, if you use your drive alot, image\video editing\programming ect its definetly worth it