Testing the LTT Waters!

RPINerd · January 11, 2016

Hello everyone! This is my first (afaik) post here on the forums

So I come to you lovely people today with a handful of questions/ideas to get input on. The gist is that I'm looking to do some small upgrades to my current PC and I'm not sure what my best course of action would be.

The Background

Nothing to see here unless you're just curious!

So I build my current rig almost 8 years ago now (it began with a GTX 570) and over it's lifespan has seen a couple motherboards, two SSD's, a GTX 680, new mostly modular power supply, etc. This Christmas I got a shiny new GTX 980 Ti G1 gaming from gigabyte and a Kraken X41 CPU cooler from NZXT. The performance is beautiful, however I neglected to research whether my NZXT Phantom could mount a 140mm rad. Ironically, the monster which is the original Phantom has no mounting for such a cooler. Now I have the tools and the know-how at my disposal to MacGyver a mounting point but I think it's time to invest in a more reasonably sized case with fresh aesthetics. New case means a new build and while I'm at it I'd like to beef up a few of the other components which have gone largely unchanged since the initial build.

Current Specs

NZXT Phanom Case (original)

Sabertooth Z77 Mobo

Intel i7-2600K

8 GB (2x4) Corsair Vengeance

Gigabyte GTX 980 Ti G1 Gaming

Kraken X41 AIO cooler

Corsair HX850 Power Supply

SanDisk Extreme 240GB SSD

Also some ancient 320 Gig HDD.....

The Conundrum

So first, I'm moving to a new case for sure. I'm thinking the white Noctis 450 because I cannot stand just another black box for a computer.

Second, another 2 sticks of RAM because it's like.. 40 bucks and ridiculous not to grab while I have everything apart.

Third is where I'm looking for the most input. It's time to revamp my storage setup. I wanna go pure solid state and eliminate my need for a hard drive cage for good. As a PC junkie, more speed is always the way to go so I thought trying out RAID for the first time would be a great way to both increase speed and capacity while also reducing the physical space being taken up currently. However, when I looked on Newegg to price out a second matching SSD, the sticker shock was very real. Unsurprisingly, my SanDisk is not a "current" drive and appears to be sold only by third party vendors for upwards of 400 dollars. If the cost is going to be that high, I'm tempted to go the route of a PCIe drive like Intel's 750 which I believe comes in a 400ish GB variant...but where I'm still rocking the 2600K on the Z77 platform can I get away with sacrificing the lanes for storage? More importantly can my platform even support it?

When doing RAID 0, can I just pick up another cheaper 240GB SSD from someone like Crucial or ADATA? Or do the drives need to be identical in every way?
If I go with a PCIe alternative (Intel 750) will my platform support it? If so will the sacrificed lanes cause noticeable performance loss?

mynameajeff · January 11, 2016

Welcome to the forum.

Enderman · January 11, 2016

HIIII WELCOME

1) you can use any, but it is preferred if they are similar

also it is HIGHLY not recommended to do raid 0 if you care about reliability and data security

2) im not sure if asus has updated their Z77 board BIOSes to support NVME, but if they havent then you can stull use the drive, just not boot windows from it

you can have windows on your other SSD and have games/programs/files on the 750

No there will be no performance loss unless youre running triple GPUs or something like that

Why do you need such high speeds anyway? are you doing professional content creation?

Oshino Shinobu · January 11, 2016

1) The Noctis 450 is quite a nice case. Take a look at Phanteks line up as well, they have some nice ones.

2) A note for mixing RAM: Try to match the specs as close as possible. Mixing different kits (even with the exact same model) is never certain to work, so it's best to match them for best results.

3)

a. You can technically put any other drive in RAID 0 with it. In general, it's a good idea to use two of the same drives to avoid problems, but it's not essential. Make sure the sizes are around the same, or you're going to be rendering some of the drive useless. Bear in mind putting a drive in RAID 0 will involve wiping any drives being put into the array, so you may want to backup the data first. If you're planning on RAID 0 for a boot device, I would advise against it. It theoretically doubles the chances of losing data from the array, and will increase boot times as the RAID array needs to establish before it can be booted from.

b. Yes, it will. It may take your CPU down to PCIe 3.0 8x, but it doesn't matter. Even dual GPU cards can't fully saturate 3.0 8x, so there will be no impact on GPU performance.

EDIT: Also, welcome to the forums (: Congratulations, you posted in the correct sub-forum on your first post!

RPINerd · January 11, 2016

1) .....Take a look at Phanteks line up as well, they have some nice ones.

2) A note for mixing RAM: Try to match the specs as close as possible. Mixing different kits (even with the exact same model) is never certain to work, so it's best to match them for best results.

3)

a. You can technically put any other drive in RAID 0 with it. In general, it's a good idea to use two of the same drives to avoid problems, but it's not essential..... If you're planning on RAID 0 for a boot .... will increase boot times as the RAID array needs to establish before it can be booted from.

I hadn't looked at Phanteks yet, they have some really good competition to the Noctis

The RAM will be essentially identical so hopefully no troubles will be had.

I didn't know RAID actually would slow down boot.. interesting. See this is why it's good to consult other builders!

HIIII WELCOME

1) you can use any, but it is preferred if they are similar

also it is HIGHLY not recommended to do raid 0 if you care about reliability and data security

2) im not sure if asus has updated their Z77 board BIOSes to support NVME, but if they havent then you can stull use the drive, just not boot windows from it

you can have windows on your other SSD and have games/programs/files on the 750

Why do you need such high speeds anyway? are you doing professional content creation?

Hello!

Addressing both you and Oshino, I have zero cares about data security/stability for this rig, it literally only needs to run Steam, Origin and *Shudder* Uplay

I'll definitely need to look into the bios issue, if I can't boot from the 750 then that option is definitely out. The idea behind that was just to eliminate drives all together and make a really sleek cable management job

I don't need such high speeds at all haha all this rig is used for is playing games, and folding while not gaming. I don't even watch youtube or anything on it. The crazy speed would more or less just be a side effect of cleaning up the drive cage...

Oshino Shinobu · January 11, 2016

I hadn't looked at Phanteks yet, they have some really good competition to the Noctis

The RAM will be essentially identical so hopefully no troubles will be had.

I didn't know RAID actually would slow down boot.. interesting. See this is why it's good to consult other builders!

Hello!

Addressing both you and Oshino, I have zero cares about data security/stability for this rig, it literally only needs to run Steam, Origin and *Shudder* Uplay

I'll definitely need to look into the bios issue, if I can't boot from the 750 then that option is definitely out. The idea behind that was just to eliminate drives all together and make a really sleek cable management job

I don't need such high speeds at all haha all this rig is used for is playing games, and folding while not gaming. I don't even watch youtube or anything on it. The crazy speed would more or less just be a side effect of cleaning up the drive cage...

RAID does slow boot times, but really it's not by a whole lot. It's still going to be much faster than an HDD.

Unless you're moving large files often, having a super high speed PCIe SSD is mainly going to be a waste of money. It will result in faster load times and such, but nothing close to the difference of HDD to SSD. I would go for a similarly priced SATA SSD, rather than PCIe. That way you can have a high capacity SSD for boot, then a RAID 0 array for some more games.

Even if data integrity isn't a concern for you, it's better to not have your OS on an array that is more likely to fail.

EDIT: Also, do as I say, not as I do. I have my OS on a pari of 840 EVOs in RAID 0. Boot times are <10 seconds with Windows 10. It just takes a second or two for the RAID to establish.