Thinking of replacing the drive setup

I currently have the following drive setup in my PC.

• OS/Application (including games):
• Kingston HyperX 120GB SSD
• Data/Work:
• 2x Samsung HD103SJ 1TB 7200RPM drives in RAID-0
• Backup:
• Samsung HD204UI 2TB 5400RPM drive

I was thinking about replacing all of them with larger drives which might even give better performance (especially, random access performance). Not to mention, the RAID-0 setup is twice as probable to go kaput than a single drive setup.

I have the following drives in mind.

• OS/Application (including games):
• Samsung 830 series 256GB SSD
• Data/Work:
• Toshiba DT01ACA300 3TB 7200RPM 1TB/platter drive or
• Seagate ST3000DM001 3TB 7200RPM 1TB/platter drive
• Backup:
• Western Digital Green WD30EZRX-1TBP 3TB 5400RPM 1TB/platter drive

GeForce Experience to optimize graphics settings for your hardware

nVidia released a service called Geforce Experience which suggests the best graphics settings to use with each game according to the specs of your PC. It’s a cool service, because you don’t have to experiment with each individual setting to get that balance between performance and quality.

Some games have a million individual setting that you can tweak, and finding the right balance will be quite a tedious task. Most people will just play with the default settings, and this is far from optimal settings for his/her PC. If you are not using the optimal settings according to your hardware, you are wasting money. Think of a person having a GTX680 playing a game with just the medium settings when the game can be played smoothly at ultra settings.

There have been few games that set optimal settings on their own but it was not always optimal, in that they couldn’t know anything about the hardware that came out after the game was released. Sure, they can push out updates to that “engine” every once in a while, but why would they do something that wouldn’t give them anything in return, right?

Anyways, you can download the tool from here.

http://www.geforce.com/drivers/geforce-experience

Prime95 with AVX support for Stress Testing your Sandybridge or IvyBridge CPU

I discovered this recently. I’ve been using Prime 95 without AVX support for all this time. Prime 95 with AVX support is the bomb. Just compare the temperature difference between the following screenshots.

Note: Small FFT stress test was run for 5 minutes.

Without AVX (v26.6)