SSD RAID

[LavCat]

However I'd love to hear thoughts on a memory/cooler solution that would let me use 8 gigs, preferably at fast timings. Keep in mind that this is an AMD CPU system, not Intel.

Do you have room for something more vertical, such as Coolermaster Hyper 212 Plus CPU Cooler?

I don't think you've said it, what is your CPU and current RAM?

Not that you want to boost it, but I found a good article to help understand how it all works; http://www.overclockers.com/forums/showt...p?t=596023

Motherboard is Asus M4A79T Deluxe. CPU is Phenom II 720 BE. But as it happens I changed the memory this afternoon. Old memory was OCZ3RPR16992G. New memory is Mushkin 997000. Newegg dropped the price of the Mushkin the day after I bought it. Why?

I've known about the overclockers article for some while. It is one of my bookmarks. I read it ever few months whether I need it or not, but it never seems to make much sense to me, particularly the part about reduced NB timings. I read somewhere that AMD originally designed the CPU NB (that is the L3 cache and memory controller) to run *faster* not slower than the CPU itself, but that they couldn't make it happen.


The documents I found most useful this time around were:

http://sites.amd.com/us/Documents/AMD_Dr..._Guide.pdf

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDR3_SDRAM


The Mushkin DIMM's sit about an inch lower than the OCZ ones, but they still would not go in bank 1 because of the cooler (Zalman CNPS9700 NT). Interestingly the AMD document, under the section Memory Performance tuning – AM3 / DDR3, says "The DIMM slots furthest away from the CPU socket should be equipped first (usually marked as DIMM slot 2&3 or A2&B2)." That is where my memory is!

This is contrary advice to what the Asus motherboard manual says. Very confusing.

In any event the Mushkin seems to work at its rated 1600 7-8-7-24 timings. No crashes yet in my stress test. (Though the dailies don't reset till 4:00am.) I never could get the OCZ to work at its rated timings at all.

The biggest problem installing the Mushkin was because my floor is uneven. In putting the computer back next to the other computers, I have to lift the left rear caster to get it up on a pile of cardboard without crushing any cables.

Unfortunately I could not leave the system well enough alone. After I satisfied myself by running diagnostics that everything was stable I tried putting the NB up one more notch, from 2600 MHz to 2800 MHz. This was a mistake. No POST, no nothing. As I get older it becomes harder and harder to find the CMOS reset jumper. The NB is now back down to 2600, but as I was fiddling with the pile of cardboard I caught my hair between the side of the computer and the desk. As William Blake wrote, "You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough."

Once when I was much younger (in my twenties) and computers were much larger, I caught my hair around a fan. A merry laugh was had by all. I was stuck for quite a good long while.

Before I ordered the memory I was doing some measurements. With two instances of WoW and a bunch of browser windows open I was running up to 91% memory utilization. I also noticed that when I got a stutter it was associated with a massive spike in page faults. I am enough of a scientist to know that association does not prove causality but it certainly seems suspicious. I still have yet to move the pagefile to the SSD.

The little tweaks have not gotten me up to a consistent 60 frames per second, but I am closer. Now when I spin around in Ramkahen I don't go much below 40 FPS. So that is progress.