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SSD’s are not the same as mechanical hard drives and require different configuration & maintenance to keep them in tip top condition.
Here are my top tips to help: |
Continue reading “How to setup and keep your SSD running optimally” »
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Manufacturer: Seagate Available at: www.novatech.co.uk |
Introduction
I have been on the look out for a new portable external drive for a while now; having had many of the larger external 3.5″ drives, the main draw back has always been that they required powering via a huge great big power block.
This brings me onto my article today regarding the Seagate GoFlex 1TB Ultra Portable.
Continue reading “Portable hard drives – Seagate GoFlex; a new spin on connectivity.” »
Introduction
Carrying on from Terry‘s excellent work on Short Stroking we will now find out the benefits of extending the concept using a Raid 0 setup.
A Raid 0 configuration gives the best performance using 2 drives, but at the cost of reliability; if one drive fails then data on both are lost.
For our Gaming rigs we are interested in the best performance; so lets see some benchmarks in this configuration.
Testing Strategy
Here we have 2 Samsung F3 1Tb drives that I have setup using the Intel Raid Manager, a Short Stroke drive of 500gb (that’s using the 1st 250gb most performant sectors from each drive) and the remaining slower space (so as not to be completly wasted) was configured as a 1.3gb drive which can be used for other storage; as long as you remember not to use it at same time as our games.
Continue reading “Samsung F3 1TB (RAID 0 & Short Stroking)” »
Introduction
As part of my new Gaming Rig build I have added two Samsung SpinPoint F3 1TB SATA-II drives, and have been looking at short stroking as a way to get some extra performance for a small cost and have been experimenting with different settings on the drives to produce some comparative output.
The results of these tests are presented here… suffice to say the benefits of a short stroked drive are definitely there for the taking.
What is Short Stroking?
Short Stroking is the process of setting a drives capacity lower than the native size. It can be seen on normal drive speed tests that, as the drive is tested, the read speed drops the further into the disk the head moves. Short Stroking forces the drive to only use the faster outer tracks of the disk, which in turn also reduces the amount of head movement required to read the data, this configuration reduces the amount of speed “drop off” seen when accessing the inner tracks of the disk… this speed benefit of course comes with a price in that the drives capacity is vastly reduced. However with the price of HDD’s these days and the fact that a Gaming Rig should only ever contain the games you are playing currently the reduced size of the drive is an acceptable loss.
Testing Strategy
Testing was carried out using HD Tune 2.55.
I carry out three test runs at each point in my configuration to get a feel for the average speed performance at that point, I will be providing the details of all three test runs at each stage of the Short Stroking exercise.
I allocated each drive to a purpose, “Disk 1″ will be my OS drive, “Disk 2″ will be allocated for Games installations.
Continue reading “Hard Drive Short Stroking – Tangible Benefits!” »
Well that seems like one hell of a question, and it is, but it is one that I am going to try/will shed some light on. Even before pcGameware came to fruition I had always assumed that effectivley you needed to run your CPU as fast as you dare or as fast as you could afford, well folks there is actually a little more to it than that! Over the past few days I have been busy benchmarking various tools and games at differing processor speeds to see what I could find out, the results have been a little surprising…
Rig Setup, tools & games
My rig was used exclusively for this set of benchmarks and it’s make up can be seen here. The rig’s drive was reformatted before I started with a clean install of Windows.
All testing was carried out at a resolution of 1920 x 1080.
All test were performed 3 times and the rig was rebooted after each test to avoid any caching discrepancies. So as the results started to come in a trend started to appear, but it was not what I was expecting…
To us here at pcGameware the ‘Gaming Rig’ is what we are about. This is a machine that has been purposely designed for games to the exclusion of everything else that is NOT (perish the thought!) related to games.
First we must talk about how we do this; the answer is easy, we have 2 machines. Now before you all cry out in horror, let us tell you a little more. The other machine is a basic workhorse costing as little as £200-£250. We are using one of these machines to run (not host!) this website and it’s perfectly acceptable (HD Video, Office, Web, Email etc) in its performance.
Now you may ask why would you need an additional machine if you already had a machine that was powerful enough to play games, surely this machine will do everything else admirably. This is true, BUT, this leads us on to talk about the other hardware and software that will need to be installed to support the other functions. It is this hardware and software that we really don’t want in our Gaming Rig. This is because every additional piece of hardware and or software has the potential to slow your Rig down (now that’s something we don’t want! Right?). Also it greatly increases your chances of having some form of issue that is caused by a hardware/software conflict. When you only have Windows installed (plus related drivers) it makes diagnosing any faults/issues (say when overclocking) much easier. Effectively the state of your machine is always a known entity and you will be able to avoid those issues that may occur when installing new software or hardware…
So what does the ‘Gaming Rig’ look like, well below we will talk about the eight (and only eight!) major components of a gaming rig and try and guide you through them.
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Reviews Coming Soon | |
Razer Naga Hex
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Asus VS247H
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