Diamond Nacho

Ok, that's great news, thanks so much!

Well I'm at work right now and can't verify it, but you think it will carry over to my new motherboard as well? And would I need to use the same SATA ports? Thanks for your help btw.

USB-B cable for printers and I guess other things

Well it was until I flashed the BIOS back to try and resolve the overheating and fan detection issue. It only shows the individual drives right now as if they weren't in a RAID configuration.

For seeing if it fits, use PC part picker. They'll automatically determine if it fits in your case or not. As for the GPUs, just look at the FPS that those cards put out from the games you like to play and go from there.

Hello fellow tech people, In my current setup, I have four 250gb SSDs in RAID 0, but I just had a motherboard issue where it was incorrectly reporting my CPU temperature and not detecting my CPU fans (even though they were running) causing the computer to think the CPU was overheating and proceeded into thermal shutdown, even though the CPU was perfectly fine and cool. I've already resolved that issue and will be receiving the replacement board from ASUS soon, but after flashing the BIOS to see if that had something to do with my issue, I noticed that my raid array config was not active and the BIOS was now seeing all of the SSDs as individual drives instead of one big array like I had it setup before. Does this mean when I get my new motherboard that I will have to rebuild the array and start from scratch? Or is there some way to tell the computer to figure out which drive goes where and set it up accordingly so I can get all my data back? There isn't any information on the drives that is critical, but I'd rather not do the tedious process of setting up my PC again to the way I want it and re-downloading some 500gb of games I had. Thanks in advance for your help.

Well, the BIOS time is maybe 3 seconds if that? And there's nothing you can really do about that anyway

Yeah I guess so. But did you ever consider a RAID type of build for your PC?

Who are they made for then? I've never heard of content creators or even businesses using them because of their terrible cost/performance and they're as big as a graphics card for gods sake. Even the supercomputer at my university uses striped SSDs in various raid configs.

So I recently did a "I have 3 grand and I want a PC" sort of build (http://pcpartpicker.com/list/dzFZZ8 if you care) and just basically wanted the best everything, without being absolutely stupid and buying like a $1000 processor or obscene amounts of Dominator Platinum. Yeah, ok it's not a great value or whatever, but that's not really the point. My point is, I did something, I guess, a bit different than a lot of people typically do when they buy a hard drive(s). I took 4 250gb SSDs and threw them all in RAID 0. Now obviously I know the risks of RAID 0 blah blah blah... 1tb single SSD is cheaper blah blah blah... more reliable... blah blah blah yeah, no, I don't care. Does the little peasant 1tb SSD get 2.2gb/s read write speeds? No? Ok then. Now the only reason I say it is weird is because all of my pasty-white nerd friends (you typically hang around people somewhat similar to you, right?) who see daylight for maybe ~4hrs/week all think my build is cool and whatever, but what surprises them the most is the SSDs. Why is that? Is it such an uncommon practice? I mean I spent maybe $250ish for all 4 of of them, but a 1tb PCI-e SSD that gets only 65-70% the speed costs ~300% more and takes up precious PCI lanes and looks out of place and dumb in the slot as well. "But what if one of them crashes, then you have to reinstall everything and you'll lose all of your important data!". Tbh, if you don't back up your 4tb of Overwatch futa p0rn, then you deserve to lose it. But seriously, who doesn't back up their documents to an external hard drive or the cloud? All I mainly have are games and those can easily be re-downloaded anyway. And do people have no faith in these manufacturers? I'd hazard to say that <99.5% of the drives will fail before their 5yr warranties are up, because they are losing money if they make crappy drives. I work with a 5yr old SSD in a server at work that has had over 780 TERABYTES of read/write history and the Crystal Disk benchmark still says it performs better than the speeds it's advertised as. I feel like my 6700k is going to burn up from the 5ghz o'c (yeah, 5ghz boi) I have on it before my SSDs start dying. And besides that, having windows boot time say the last boot time was 1.3 seconds is nice. So again, why is this not done more? Discuss, because I'm interested to hear what you guys have to say.

They make you pay the full price if you don't send it back within a month

See my reply to airdeano above ^^

Interesting. However, I'll talk to Amazon about this. Last time something like this happened (dead stick of RAM) they overnighted me a new kit and said to just send the broken stuff back (for free by the way) within the next month, so that's what I'll probably try.

Amazon usually will send me a new one by tomorrow if I talk with them today. I don't want to go through an Asus RMA process haha

"Open box" actually. It was $60 cheaper than brand new and none of the packaging had that came with it had even been opened

That's not a risk I'm willing to take, as I can easily just return it and get one that isn't bent.

No, I don't. I just got the thing a few hours ago and Amazon shipped it without one.

So I just got my Asus Sabertooth LGA 2011-3 motherboard in today and I think 1 or more of the pins are bent on it. It's really hard for me to tell and I wanted to get a few more opinions on it before I send it back to Amazon. I tried to take some pictures of it as best I could, but it's really difficult for me to see it other than the small nonconformity I noticed in the pin layout. I know I saw something in the description about ASUS adding extra pins to the board to help with overclock stability, and it's possible that could be it, but I'm still skeptical. Amazon said it said it was in fully tested and working condition, and I verified that because a few of the RAM and PCI-e slots were unclipped and the CPU cover was gone, but my guess is that if it is in fact damaged, something probably just hit it during shipping. Thanks in advance for any help. Sidenote: I don't have my i7-5930x to test it out on because it's not going to arrive until next week and I would like to get this RMA'd ASAP if it is indeed a bent pin. There is 32gb of DDR4 Corsair Dominator Platinum 3200MHz that you can see off to the side in case you were curious.

Very helpful. Thank you guys so much. Raid 1-0 it is!

I thought that might have been the case with me having to wait for the RAID thing to initialize anyway. 1-0 definitely sounds like the better option now.

Interesting point. Thank you.

Gaming - both are overkill unless you have a 4x GPU config Virtualization - Intel (from personal experience, their drivers are better and more responsive in this aspect) Programming - Intel, it has more powerful single-core performance so the programs compile faster (but for you it wont matter at all unless you program for a company) Multi-OS - AMD (more dedicated cores) Cooling - definitely Intel Long time use - Intel

http://portablepicker.com/ is a great source to use for this. It's run by PCPartPicker and I used it to buy my laptop.

That's probably what ill end up going with. Thanks.

Why? It's the slowest option on the list.