hey all, I am going to, very soon, upgrade my computer slightly, i was just wondering if you guys thought it was a good idea, i currently hav the pc in my specs, but i was thinking of swapping the video card for an 8800gts 512mb, adding an extra 2 gb of ram and getting 2 320gb WD HDDs and running them in a RAID config

Is there anything that you think i should leave out or add in if i am to do this?? thaks for your input

EDIT: forgot to mention that this is for gaming, lol, it performs admirably already, but vista is a memory hog and a lot of my games have memory leakage issues which is the reason for the extra ram, i think the 8800 explains itself

Hello Tall_jono,

Get an 8800 GT. Better bang per buck. They perform almost as well as the GTX cards (and in some games better) which are more than twice the cost. They outperform the 8800GTS and are cheaper.

Otherwise...I like the idea

Well, actually, i was talking about the new gts, which has more shaders/higher clocks than the GT, and i know it's more bang for the buck, but my dad offered to pay for the video card, so i decided to take him up on the offer, also i prefer the dual slot cooler because the airflow in the lower part of the case is pretty lousy because im too lazy to sort out my cables, so it works well for me.

But thanks for the input.

The new GTS isn't a whole lot better then the GT (barely scrapes 15-20% improvement), but if your dad offered to pay for it, then heck, get it (finding it in stock might be a bit hard though)


I personally wouldn't recommend a RAID config, they *might* give you a small performance boost, but I highly doubt it'll be anywhere near anything really noticeable to the point where you'll be like "HOLY BOOGERS It's wayyy faster!!!"

At most you'll see a 5-15% improvement on load times, or something equal to a few seconds, bjut nothing more then 20seconds really on games. Windows might load a bit faster, but if you want to do that you can do it in a myriad of other ways then hardware upgrades.

The 2Gbs more of RAM also probably won't do a whole ton (I'm assuming you're running in 64bit). Honestly, if you performance, memory running in dual channel will bring you a much higher performance increase then throwing in 2Gbs more and sacrificing the dual-channel on the 2Gbs. Just my thoughts, on the other hand, if you aren't looking for performance, then I geuss 4x 2Gbs is ok, though I don't really see a point to having 4Gbs of RAM, it's pretty superfluous to have anything above 2Gbs.

actually, i run a whole lot of low cpu apps in the background so it can get up to and over 60% mem usage without games, and the raid is mainly to make things easier to find, i accidentally partitioned one of my hard drive and now i get loast trying to find exactly what im looking for, so its mainly to help ME. but either way im still gonna get the two drives, since putting HDDs in can be a pain, this way ill still have the space there when i need it

EDIT: I also like to photoshop LARGE pictures, so the mem helps there too

Ah alright, well now that I know what it's geared for, then yes, the 4Gbs will certainly be a great benefit. If you want storage, get some 500Gbs drives, they go for ~100$, in fact, I picked up 2x 500Gbs drives for 102$ each, with free S&H not long ago, SATA2 interface too, very nice HDs, loving them