Good afternoon,

I am going to attempt to build a computer. I will use it for homework, games, online games, and internet surfing, copying cds, music, some fireworks image editing. Also I would like to try running raid to get better performance on games and just applications. I want one that stripes, but also mirrors for a fail safe.

I don't have the most money, but have some and will built myself.

Question: When I partition should i make seperate partition for pagefile I heard that is smart?

I currently have a:
P4 3.0ghz Intel processor HT
DDR2 pc3200 (533mhz i think) 240ping 2GB or 1.5GB forgot 4 sticks
320GB HD Seagate
80gb western digital
G5mouse logitech
Dell cheap keyboard
Stock power supply (no clue)
17'' LCD display
Geforce 4 nvidia 7600gt
COmp gets a bit warm no spot for extra fans.

Think that is it. PS. or should I get a laptop?

Just wondering because tigerdirect was having mad sales in my email from them.

Frankly RAID isnt worth it. Neither is putting the swapfile on a seperate partition. The only time youll see a boost in that department is if you put the swapfile on a seperate physical disk.

Get a PCI cooler or upgrade your fans and thermal compound. The HT is easialy damaged by heat. Dont get a laptop.

Be nice now jbennet...please explain for the nice person your reasons.

A:

Raid , its a pain to set up and windows hates it.

Also unless you have good disks (read - server class) then it doesnt yield much benefit at all.

B:

There is no point puttting swap on a different partition as its still the same disk. A disk only has one read/write head. The point is to put it on a different actual disk so that the swap file can be read/written at the same time as you are working on something on the other drive. This reduces the effect where your hdd light flashes a lot and your pc becomes unresponsive/very slow for a few seconds.

C:

The HTs generate a lot of heat. If they dont have any heatsink or fan at all they will literally start to burn after a few seconds. Most pcs you can buy have poor quality heatsinks, fans and thermal compound. I know from experience that by replacing the comound with a high quality one such as Arctic Silver has great boosts. Arctic Silver is expensive but can dop your CPU temp by many degrees.

D:

Dont get a laptop. Get a desktop. Laptops CPUs overheat easialy and there graphics cards cant handle many modern games.

Alright I will try the thermal compound, do you think putting a bigger case fan would help or a better one how I know if better?

Also what is a server grade hard drive, you mean like bigger buffer? I have two SATA1s in it now, that is where most of my heat comes from. The hard drives are caged together standing vertical, one hd cage connects into the other one, so they are literally standing up right behind another with little or no space in between. What is a good cpu fan, and sink, gonna try and upgrade them as well?

Thanks alot.

yeah, what i meant by server grade was that you only really see a boost when using RAID with disks which have a large buffer/data burst and fast rpm/seek time