pondering

[whyppedwookie]

I currently have asus a7n8x deluxe, amd 2800 barton (333mz), 2x 512mb 400 3200 ram, ati 9600xt, atx generic case w/480 watt psu, audiology 4 sound card(just installed sound card last night) nothing is over clocked. My os (XPpro)is on a 9gb ide drive and have bf2 on my sata 80 gig 7200 hd.
Bf2 runs good in game also happy with my graphics at the moment. I would like the game to load faster tired of initially spawning and already being lit up by enemy air support. I have ~ $500 budget thinking about getting the 2 x37 gig raptors running them raid 0 and getting corsair matched 2x 1 gig sticks of ram also purchasing a legit copy of win xp. Would this speed it up?
Figure the raptor drives and ram would also be useful when i upgrade to e-pci and 64 bit.

Whypped

Thanks in advance

[whofriggincares]

Re: pondering

Get 2GB of RAM if you want a noticeable difference in load times. Not only will it load faster, you won't have the annoying stuttering or lag at the beginning of the round.

[Eternal-Souljah]

Re: pondering

^True, but also just to add to that won't adding a faster HD help too? like replacing the 7200 RPM one with a 10,000RPM.

[whofriggincares]

Re: pondering

It will be a little bit faster, but 2GB makes the most difference. With my setup, I literally noticed that my load times more than doubled, sometimes tripled going from 2GB to 1GB. With harddrives, you're talking maybe a difference of 2-5 seconds which won't compare to 45-90 seconds with more RAM.

[CaptJordus]

Re: pondering

RAM will make the most difference over a harddisk.

Remember, once BF2 loads its reading solely from RAM during gameplay (unless its out of RAM and using the Pagefile, which is all the more reason to have MORE RAM).

A fast haddrive is only going to increase map loading speeds and, if he lacks enough RAM, it can speed up pagefile access a little bit.

running RAID 0 would be nice, but having adequate RAM is the cheaper and better route to go.

If your going to run a RAID array, do SCSI Fiber Channel

[Sir. MatDef]

Re: pondering

Get the ram, and then get a normal sata drive with a 16mb cache, would be almost as fast a raptor for lots less and you get 10x the storage.

[gsxr310]

Re: pondering

IMO, Raptors are over rated (see sig). If I would do it over again, I would definately buy a 16mb drive for alot cheaper.

[imported_Wreck]

Re: pondering

IMO, Raptors are over rated (see sig). If I would do it over again, I would definately buy a 16mb drive for alot cheaper.

When I bought my raptor, 16mb drives were far from being released.

[whyppedwookie]

Re: pondering

got the 2 g of ram today will try it out tonight . Thank you every one for your imput :). Might get the sata drive next week