I'm looking to upgrade my computer (phase 2 of an overall upgrade)...I've recently upped to an Ahtlon64 3200+ and GA-K8NS motherboard...my exisiting ram module is a PC2100 512 Crucial stick...I will take that out and put it in another pc when I ugprade ... but my question is:

Is it worth purchasing the WD Raptor 36 gig (to be used as the primary HD windows and progs, with a 160 gig secondary for music etc...) ? I will be buying 1 gig of Corsair Value Select PC3200 DDR400 by default, but should I go for even more RAM than this and scrap the Raptor idea...?

Spec:

Athlon64 3200
Radeon 9700 Pro
Audigy 2 ZS Platinum Pro

The computer is used for a variety of tasks, small photo editing, video and encoding tasks, gaming (regularly the likes of Far Cry...and soon frequent HL2, Doom3, Sims2, SH4 etc..) and quite frequent sequencing and composition with Cubase SX2 and Reason...I know this is a broad range of tasks so basically would I benefit more (in terms of raw performance , loading textures, loading samples, etc.. without games buffering during play and frame rate stutters etc..) from 1gig + 512 ram...or just 1 gig of ram and a WD Raptor?

p.s I will be saving up for a few months to buy a top end graphics card, so this isn't considered at the mo...thats phase 3

Thanks very much for reading!

I personally would forgo the Raptor for more RAM, the hard disk will affect loading times but once loaded (a one off operation) it's the RAM you need so Windows doesn't have to rely on the swapfile. Just my opinion, gamers may have a diferent opinion. Enjoy your shiny new upgrades!

I don't see the need for more then 1GB of Ram (yes even with games such as Doom III & FarCry). It would help with the little video/music editing that you do once in a while but you should also remember that too much Ram is bad for performance ( link ) & that if you decided to populate 3 Ram slots with your A64, it might lower the speed to PC2700.

It could be cheaper & still quite effective to use a RAID-0 SATA setup without needing to get a Raptor. RAID-0 SATA is quite fast with normal SATA drives ( & less expensive ).

The problem with Raid-0 that I've experienced (altho only with 2 IDE's) is that performance fluxuates too much depending on the block size...coz i do quite varied tasks i need good balanced performance...thanks for the replies...im still at square 1 tho lol im mentally leaning towards the raptor....

I've just ordered the Raptor along with 2x Corsair Value Select PC3200 . I'll post again when it arrives with a verdict