What RAM and SSD's would you recommend

Maxpv · 22-07-2013 02:38AM #1

(I've edited this thread as I've decided not to upgrade the whole rig)

Hi,

Mobo: Asus Crosshair IV Formula

I've got 8GB G.Skill RAM in my rig, no idea what model it is, but I'm looking to upgrade it to at minimum 16GB RAM, speed is more important than quantity though.
Cost aside (I'm more interested in future-proofing my rig and getting bang-for-buck) what RAM would you recommend?

What is the life span like on current gen SSD's? Which ones are recommended? I have an ocz SSD in my rig now but don't have it that long. Ive been thinking about a SSD RAID setup, would you guys recommend that? I've been thinking a RAID10 with 4 SSD's, I don't need much space but do need the IO speed and redundancy.

What hardware RAID controllers are recommended? My mobo has a built in RAID controller but its pretty sucky.

Also what ATI graphics cards would you recommend for a 3x crossfire setup? I've already got 3x 5830's and am thinking about going for 3x used 7950's.

Any suggestions appreciated, thanks!

Monotype · 22-07-2013 11:43AM

What do you need 16GB of RAM for? If you're talking about games, I don't think there's any advantage.

Current generation SSDs have pretty good lifespan. The Samsung 840 drives are fairly good value... actually they've got shorter lifespan than other current ones because of the technology that they're built on, but it's still very substantial and you're talking about a decade of wear and tear unless you're constantly moving files - i.e., heavy professional work where you're converting, rendering and generating files isn't ideal, but gaming or such is fine.

RAID with SSDs is a bit unnecessary. The biggest advantage of SSDs is the fast response time and you're not going to increase that with more SSDs. Also, unless you have the latest Haswell system from Intel, you can't do RAID 10 on a motherboard at full performance - the problem up to now is that Intel didn't provide enough 6Gbps ports, and AMD didn't provide capabilities for using TRIM with RAID, so performance falls away after a while.
As you suggested, you could dedicated card for RAID, but you still probably lack TRIM support. Or you could get the very expensive PCI-E SSDs.
You'd be as well off just getting a hard drive to backup your data instead of mirroring.
If it's space that you're after, Crucial have a near 1TB drive.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Crucial-960GB-Solid-State-Drive/dp/B00BQ8RGL6

Three 7950s is a lot of power... do you have three 2560x1440 monitors or something?

Gumbi · 22-07-2013 12:15PM

3 7950s is a ton of power. What are you going to be using this rig for? For gaming 8GB is more than enough. I'd get 2 770s if you were gaming at resolutions above 1440p (and even that is overkill). CF 7950s might be worth considering after the CF fix which is supposed to be here within a few weeks.

BloodBath · 22-07-2013 04:30PM

The last time I checked crossfire scaling a 3rd card had poor scaling. I'd imagine their latency issues would be impacted even further with 3 cards.

I'd go with a dual Nvidia setup. 2 x 760gtx would have all the power you need for 1440p.

Monotype · 22-07-2013 05:08PM

Also the 5XXX were poor at scaling. There were big leaps in later generations.

Benchmarks show two 5850s in crossfire to be on par with two 6850s crossfire, despite the 6850 being considerably weaker.

I think that coming from three 5830s, you might be thinking that you need a lot more power. A single 7950 is around twice as fast as a 6850. I'd say that three 5830s would be far off something like an overclocked 7970, but the 7970 would have the advantage of greatly reduced power consumption, more vRAM etc.

What RAM and SSD's would you recommend

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