Vista - Will I have a bottleneck?

Hi guys,

I built a new system which you can see at my system specs. As you can see, the only bottleneck I have now is the RAM as I can't go higher than 800Mhz ubtil I change my mobo but is not driving me crazy. My question is about my HDDs. I have only 1 x 750 GB with 32 MB of cache and there's a 2nd one coming next week and it's exactly the same. What I would like to do is have them both on RAID 1 to have backup of all my files and have a 3rd HDD with my OS and software. The problem is that I can't afford a 3rd HDD right now. Will a 250 GB WD Caviar with only 8 MB of cache make a huge bottleneck? They are al SATA 3.0 G/Sec access of course.

Thanks in advanced,

First off, i have one hunch why you cannot reach 1066 on your ram. OCZ is a very "cheap" brand. sure at the time you probably had no other choice about what ram you were going to choose, but OCZ doesnt overclock to its full potential most of the time. I always go with corsair or G skill which sometimes can be the cheaper brand. but on a 780i it shouldnt be a problem. with the 680i, it was because it was new to the 1066 interface.

now onto the hard drive question. where you planning on buying the 3rd HDD? and how much is your budget? because 250 Gb go for a low 40-50$ or not even that much sometimes. But no, you shouldnt have a bottleneck with any SATA drive these days.

Hi MDA and thanks for the answer.

Unfortunatelly the 780i only supports up to 800 Mhz and only 1200Mhz in case you use SLI ready modules so I'm stuck at 800Mhz untill I can change the mobo -.-

About the disk, in my country it's impossible to find HDD smaller than 750GB 32NB buffer now. Importers try to so hard to keep up with the latest stuff that they forget about the basics.

But I think you are right... it might read a little more often but the transfer rate should be as fast as my other HDDs.

Thanks

ah yes i have seen that before that it jumps from 800 mhz support to 1200 with sli ready. i did get my system to post at 1000 mhz with timings of 5-5-5-18-T2 if you could try that. my friend did with his 780i as well and worked for him and same on my old 680i.

let me say this, in your case, any SATA hard drive you buy wont give you any bottleneck. so depending on whats available. if you get any capacity, it really doesnt matter.

All right, thanks a lot.

Will try that HDD setup on wednesday when the other 750GB arrives.

Gonna try that with the RAM too.

Thanks again

Of Course

bottleneck........no

increasing ram speed not worth it , the increase in bandwidth verses the increase in performance isnt worth the hassle you'll never notice , not even in high end games

it'll look inpressive if you run a memory benchmark but thats it

the only way to make a real differance is to upgrade to DDR3

i had issues running my ram at 1066 with my cpu overclock , i had to drop it to 800 using multipliers , the differance in performance in games and all other applications isnt noticable , game benchmarks stay exactly the same