Need Feedback on Hypersonic

[Dudley Henriques]

I'm seriously considering a new gaming machine. Anyone out there have
anything they can tell me about Hypersonic computers? Good or bad, it will
really help me in making a final decision. Keep in mind I'm interested in
flight simulators as my only "game" please. If you have any recommendations
within the system itself, please feel free to tell me what they are. I have
to choose between Anthlon and Pentium for example, and Nvidia and ATI.
All comments will be appreciated believe me.
Thanks.
Dudley

[Dudley Henriques]

Many thanks for this info.
D
"Gnasher" > wrote in message
...
> On this day of our lord, Sat, 23 Aug 2003 18:09:18 GMT, "Dudley
> Henriques" > quilled:
>
> >I'm seriously considering a new gaming machine. Anyone out there have
> >anything they can tell me about Hypersonic computers? Good or bad, it
will
> >really help me in making a final decision. Keep in mind I'm interested in
> >flight simulators as my only "game" please. If you have any
recommendations
> >within the system itself, please feel free to tell me what they are. I
have
> >to choose between Anthlon and Pentium for example, and Nvidia and ATI.
> >All comments will be appreciated believe me.
> >Thanks.
> >Dudley
> >
>
> Ever considered building your own instead? Takes a bit more work but
> you get exactly what you want. But if buying a pre-built the best
> advice I can give is buy the fastest and most (HD, ram etc.) you can
> afford. Intel P4's with 800mhz FSB are the best performers right now
> but cost more than AMD too. I would say an AMD Barton 2500+ cpu with
> an Nforce2 motherboard, Sapphire Radeon 9800 OEM vid card, ATA100
> 7200rpm120+gb HD and at least 512mb of PC3200 (400mhz) ram will
> provide the most bang for the buck. That's what I would buy if
> building a fast system and on a budget. But I do use an Intel P4
> system right now.

[Kevin©]

Don't forget serial ATA if you want a bit more punch.


"Dudley Henriques" > wrote in message
ink.net...
> Many thanks for this info.

[John Ward]

Hi Kevin,

Serial ATA 2 will be out soon, and, as the current ATA is said by some
to be not quite up to scratch, I'd not worry about it yet.

Regards,
John
"Kevin©" > wrote in message
...
> Don't forget serial ATA if you want a bit more punch.
>
>
> "Dudley Henriques" > wrote in message
> ink.net...
> > Many thanks for this info.
>
>

[Kevin©]

At the prices of the SATA drives, it'll probably need to be SATA3 before I
bite.


"John Ward" > wrote in message
u...
> Hi Kevin,
>
> Serial ATA 2 will be out soon, and, as the current ATA is said by some
> to be not quite up to scratch, I'd not worry about it yet.
>
> Regards,
> John
> "Kevin©" > wrote in message
> ...
> > Don't forget serial ATA if you want a bit more punch.
> >
> >
> > "Dudley Henriques" > wrote in message
> > ink.net...
> > > Many thanks for this info.
> >
> >
>
>

[Flyfish]

"Dudley Henriques" > wrote in
ink.net:

> I'm seriously considering a new gaming machine. Anyone out there have
> anything they can tell me about Hypersonic computers? Good or bad, it
> will really help me in making a final decision. Keep in mind I'm
> interested in flight simulators as my only "game" please. If you have
> any recommendations within the system itself, please feel free to tell
> me what they are. I have to choose between Anthlon and Pentium for
> example, and Nvidia and ATI. All comments will be appreciated believe
> me. Thanks.
> Dudley
>
>

I second the motion to build your own, been doing that for years. SATA
may or may not deliver punch, but ATA-RAID absolutely will.

Flyfish

My system:

Kingwin case, vantac 400W dual fan PS.
ABIT BE-7 Raid
P4 2.4Ghz 533Mhz FSB
4 WD 40G 8M disks striped/mirrored
1 G DDR 333 memory
Ti4600
SBlive soon to be an audigy 2
and the usual CDRW etc.

[John Ward]

I agree, and by then they'll probably be 20,000 RPM or so on anyway...

Regards,
John
"Kevin©" > wrote in message
...
> At the prices of the SATA drives, it'll probably need to be SATA3 before I
> bite.
>
>
> "John Ward" > wrote in message
> u...
> > Hi Kevin,
> >
> > Serial ATA 2 will be out soon, and, as the current ATA is said by
some
> > to be not quite up to scratch, I'd not worry about it yet.
> >
> > Regards,
> > John
> > "Kevin©" > wrote in message
> > ...
> > > Don't forget serial ATA if you want a bit more punch.
> > >
> > >
> > > "Dudley Henriques" > wrote in message
> > > ink.net...
> > > > Many thanks for this info.
> > >
> > >
> >
> >
>
>

[Mike Davis]

Interesting thread on drives here. I use ATA 100 drives and find that the
difference in performance is negligible for flight sim work. I would,
however, highly recommend getting 7200 RPM drives with 8 meg caches in the
80-120 range. The larger the drive, the more platters and the quicker the
access. Drives inevitably fail and these are less expensive to replace than
some of the higher priced SATA versions when they do. Seldom do I have need
for loading a LOT of data very quickly. The feeds for scenery updates while
flying in FS9 are relatively small and the differences in access times is
unnoticable, IMHO, especially with a 7200 RPM multi-platter drive.

Most motherboards now have SATA (Asus, MSI, Gigabyte, etc.) if you're going
to the Intel 800 FSB DDR setups so it's a matter of what you want to hook
up.

--
Mike Davis

[Jan-Albert van Ree]

Flyfish wrote:

> I second the motion to build your own, been doing that for years. SATA
> may or may not deliver punch, but ATA-RAID absolutely will.

But at a price and with added risk (RAID-0 means your chances of failure
increase a lot... not just double but more so. Sorry, too lazy to do the
statistics)
atm the fastest IDE drive is the SATA Western Digital Raptor. Blows away
anything IDE and at a very nice price too.

Besides, fast HD's aren't that important... LOADS of RAM and a nice (dual-
or at least HT) CPU with a high FSB do more miracles, specially for sims.
--
Jan-Albert "Anvil" van Ree | http://www.vanree.net/~javanree/
VanReeDotNet IT Solutions | http://www.vanree.net

[Jan-Albert van Ree]

Gnasher wrote:

> On Sun, 24 Aug 2003 08:36:42 +1000, "John Ward"
> > wrote:
>
>>Hi Kevin,
>>
>> Serial ATA 2 will be out soon, and, as the current ATA is said by some
>>to be not quite up to scratch, I'd not worry about it yet.
>
> Not to mention it is way to expesnsive for the amount of HD space you
> get for the buck. I would buy SCSI before I would buy SATA.

SCSI comes with it's own issues :
- Extra PCI card needed
- Usually higher power useage
- Higher drive temperatures
- Cost

Apart from the somewhat small capacity, what's wrong with the new Western
Digital Raptor series? They blow away EVERY other IDE drive, and almost all
7200 rpm SCSI drives. And they make less mess in your case, since Serial
ATA cables are very compact, SPECIALLY compared to SCSI.
--
Jan-Albert "Anvil" van Ree | http://www.vanree.net/~javanree/
VanReeDotNet IT Solutions | http://www.vanree.net

[Chris Townsend]

Yeah, my next upgrade plans include dual raptors in RAID 0. Heh, data
integrity? I am not overly worried as the Raptors should be pretty robust
and with my home network humming along and finally biting the bullet and
getting a DVD burner I am backed up to the hilt. Now as to when I will
actually upgrade is another question, my main machines creaky 400MHz P4 2.4
@ 2.64 with an RDRAM board and 9700Pro are still keeping me awfully happy.

The Hypersonics look like excellent machines although I have never heard of
the company, going through the P4 configuration I did notice that you can
knock 165.00 of the price right of the bat by going with the base case which
is an excellent ATC Aluminum model. I configured it as I woulld like
including dual raptors in RAID 0 and it came out 500+ dollars cheaper than
the initial configuration.

Jan-Albert van Ree wrote:
> Gnasher wrote:
>
>> On Sun, 24 Aug 2003 08:36:42 +1000, "John Ward"
>> > wrote:
>>
>>> Hi Kevin,
>>>
>>> Serial ATA 2 will be out soon, and, as the current ATA is said
>>> by some to be not quite up to scratch, I'd not worry about it yet.
>>
>> Not to mention it is way to expesnsive for the amount of HD space you
>> get for the buck. I would buy SCSI before I would buy SATA.
>
> SCSI comes with it's own issues :
> - Extra PCI card needed
> - Usually higher power useage
> - Higher drive temperatures
> - Cost
>
> Apart from the somewhat small capacity, what's wrong with the new
> Western Digital Raptor series? They blow away EVERY other IDE drive,
> and almost all 7200 rpm SCSI drives. And they make less mess in your
> case, since Serial ATA cables are very compact, SPECIALLY compared to
> SCSI.

[Marc de Vries]

On Sun, 24 Aug 2003 08:36:42 +1000, "John Ward"
> wrote:

>Hi Kevin,
>
> Serial ATA 2 will be out soon, and, as the current ATA is said by some
>to be not quite up to scratch, I'd not worry about it yet.

Serial ATA 2 is just a bunch of extensions to SATA intended for use in
servers. (quite usefull extensions, but not for a gaming machine)

You are probably thinking about the faster speeds, but that isn;t
interesting either. Simply because there is not a single harddisk that
is limited by the speed of SATA1 or even by ATA/133.

In fact, for a gaming rig I would just buy a recent 7k IDE HDD.
Harddisks are not a bottleneck in games, (there are hardly used at
all) unless you have the slow 4200 rpm laptop harddisks.

Marc