Well I thought I would post my experience with Surpass Computers at Taringa. Went there as I got a good price on my uber upgrade -

AMD 4800+ 'Toledo core'
Asus A8N SLI Premium Motherboard
2 x XFX 7800 GTX video cards in SLI (factory OC ones at 490/1.3ghz)
2 gig of Corsair TWINX2048-3200C2PRO (2x XMS1GB)
Enermax 600w Noisetaker SLI certified PSU
22" Phillips 202P40 professional monitor
74G WD Raptor HDD
plus all my old stuff (sound card, DVD drives ect..)still in the box.

-and a couple of new systems for the Mother & Sister in law.

Mad props to Pedro and the guys there for their excellent service, polite and professional assitance. Nothing was too much trouble for Pedro (the manager) to chase up for me, source from his distributors (i.e. chase them up!) and also give me a competitive price. I had already worked out what I thought was a great price for all my upgrade gear sourcing items myself from all over OZ if need be, and well Pedro came to within $1.00 of my figure, not having been aware of my own calculations. Cant' ask for much more than that.

Also when I took very ill recently and was in hospital for 3 weeks he was very supportive and made no pressure or demands on my wife to come pay/collect the item. Secretly, I think him and the guys at Surpass were having too much fun playing games on it. :P

So all in all a very positive experience for me dealling with Surpass and I heartily recommend any other gaming/hardware junkies out there to go check them out.

ka-ching

pedro offers you his protection.

^^^^LOL! :)


So what was the damage on a system like that?

http://oldsite.gvsd.org/gvhs/activities/filmclub/images/POSTERS/PNAP2.JPG

wtf that kind of system and no raid?!?!
please explain why...

please explain why...

What level of raid are you talking about, I hope you are not one of those who jump on the USE RAID 0 ITS FAST LOL bandwagon.

I like to live dangerously.

no, just the "use raid 0 its faster" one.
is that incorrect?

How much was all that gear psycho?

Vote 4 Pedro!

Why would you want raid ?

Raid 0 ... 1 HDD gets hurt and you are screwwed. And its not really RAID (the R in raid stands for Redundant).
Raid 0+1 ... yeah good option but you lose half your space. Bit of a waste of $$$s

All the rest are focused on reliability.

Get more memory so everything gets put into ram. Ram is a f***tonne faster then any RAID.

also KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid). Its 1 more piece of hardware, with 1 more proprietary driver. 1 might refer to them as points of failure, and you just added 1 or 2 of them.


All for minimal gain in load times ...

omg your pc loads a map .2 of a second faster then him, and your benchmark is a bigger number....

ps. psycho is a dirty skank and needs to be casterated and his hardware confiscated.

ok...
i guess i do more with my hard drive than load maps into memory... i actually load the app to begin with as well, and do other hdd io based stuff.

i can see the benefit.

If you vote for Pedro all your wildest dreams will come true!

so how much did it cost u?

i voted for pedro. DID YOU?

I've never seen the point of RAID myself, the cost and setup issues outweigh the small gain in performance

then again I've never bought top of the range on video cards, you always find that sweet spot with cost to performance ratio a few notches under the top of the range, and it'll all be superceded in a few months anyway so why spend a fortune on it?

Well, you have a sweet bike. And you're really good at hooking up with chicks. Plus you're like the only guy at school who has a mustache.

I've never seen the point of RAID myself, the cost and setup issues outweigh the small gain in performance

So my Exchange/SQL/WEB Server's hard drive failed... There is a point, its just not at the end consumer level.

exactly ^

is this him?

donkey_magic_pedro.jpg

Two 7800 GTX running in SLI mode? Fark, i see someones future proofing for quite awhile. :P

Yeah, tell us. How much dough?

I agree for servers raid is godly.
But for the vast majority of consumers its purely e-penis. Some hobbiests with extreme data in/output may find a need for it, but thats not gamers.

For small businesses I'd say raid 5,raid 1 or raid 0+1 is almost as important as a nightly tape backup (with offsite rotation) for their finacial and business data.

obes do you even know what a server looks like?
no I didn't think so

What’s RAID got to do with Pedro.
Pedro sells fish n chips n free brill cream down the road @ Gambaro's.
Seen him crackin oysters with his mostache.
Pop in say g-day!!!

He must only work at Slurpass part-time.

I guess the people at Surpass computers surpassed your expectations then Psycho.

ok...
i guess i do more with my hard drive than load maps into memory... i actually load the app to begin with as well, and do other hdd io based stuff.

i can see the benefit.

You can SEE the benefit behind your misinformed eyes im sure, but unless your running a server with important data, or a file server with a large user access, there is no benifit for you.

I hope you do know that if one of your hdds colapses, your f***ed.

Yeah not a bad bunch of guys.. bought my gear from them. I wen't in there with expectations and some conditions wern't outlined and hence delayed things a bit...

Also RAID != backup kids.

Believe me the WD Raptor is plenty fast enough for me and the rig at the moment, in fact everything is bloody quick.

Fired up BF2 last night at 1600x1200@100hz, completely maxed out and its beyond my expectations. Fiddling with the SLI AA modes and the transparency AA stuff at the mo..good stuff.

must get some new games...

http://img467.imageshack.us/img467/8051/pedro5mx.jpg

And q4 will probably still run like ass on it.

seef shad. i ran q4 on dethon's 3.4ghz p4 with a 6800ultra with all the shiz on but only 4x anti-aliasing & it was running a solid 60fps (vsynch on). looked aweshum.

seef, Q4 runs smooth like butter at 1600x1200 everything on on my humble 2.8GHz Opteron system with a single 7800GT.

FEAR smashes a system way more than Q4.

And q4 will probably still run like ass on it.

um.. Q4 scales to a wide range of s***boxens dude.

~35-50fps on this Celery 2.4 I'm tapping on atm (GF3 Ti200).


I'd love to see FEAR run on dual 7800s with everything turned on though *drool*

Seems there was a problem with my config, deleted it and now q4 feels much better. Although 60fps cap makes it feel horrible to me.