Black-Hawk XR5 with 3 64 GB SSD's in RAID 0

You are not alone in the aforementioned spousal constraint.

 

i intend to have some techies at my firm run every test they can on this thing while they are setting it up for vpn connection to my office network. I will report whatever results they get.

 

Thanks. The premium warranty package offered by PCMW includes upgrades at PCMW's cost plus trade-in credits, so perhaps I can stave off the inevitable march of obsolescense for a little while at least. For example, PCMW assures me that the upcoming 9800 graphics cards will be available as an upgrade without a motherboard change. That was a big factor in going ahead and ordering this now.

 

I don`t mean to be a pain, but you should not take PCMW's words ad-literam.

I believe the 9800M GTX will be available for the D901C, just maybe not without a mobo change.

 

Understood, and I appreciate the caution. I do have that commitment from them in writing, though, and it specifically says "without a motherboard swap", which should at least be good leverage for some type of satisfaction if they cannot live up to the commitment. Will report further on this when the time comes for the upgrade.

 

i DO have to swap MY mobo

 

Whether I do or not apparently remains to be seen! Actions speak louder than words. Have you had any experience with upgrades under PCMW's premium warranty packages? If so, I would be interested in whether you found their upgrade process to be consistent with what they advertise.

 

i have made constant fone calls to diff. reps asking about prices. and they've been very helpful, you get a farely good trade-in credit on your old parts. You pay for shipping to them, and they match the shipping back. No labor costs.

 

Thanks. If they sell you the new part at their cost and give you decent trade-in credit, that certainly seems like a pretty good upgrade program.

 

PCMW trade in and warranty programs seem really great. Your lappy is goin be crazy fast and if you can put 2 9800GTX's in there it really be great cant wait to see how that goes good luck.

 

Agreed. 2 9800M GTXs will be the fastest cards in laptops yet. Man ,I`ll be envious once again

 

I have a similar setup, 3xSSD raid but with a QX9650 and only 4G (for now)
I set my SSD in RAID5, I've already had a couple rebuilds of the raid cause by operator induced crashes

I only saw a 3dm06 cpu score drop from ~4500 to ~4450 for RAID0 to RAID5, so I'm sticking to that. Besides I can keep working while it's rebuilding

 

That's interesting. I would have thought there would have been a bigger drop-off than that.

 

On the topic of PCMW's customer service, my order is now scheduled to ship by fed ex overnite today, about a week late. The explanation given by PCMW was that they had gotten a defective batch of the graphics cards and had to get a new batch, which they say arrived a couple of days ago. On the plus side, to compensate for the delay, they are throwing in 2 years of LoJack and an HDMI adapter cable. They did this without prompting from me. (While I have had generally good performance out of the Dell products I purchased over the years, Dell never offered me anything to compensate for their delays, so I appreciate the gesture and take it as a promising sign of PCMW's attitude toward customer service. And of course, after-purchase upgrade options on my Dell products have always been very limited, so getting something which has high quality initial components and which I can more easily upgrade over time is going to be a nice change).

 

yea... they give me free stuff too wen the bottom of my laptop came unscrewed >_<... So i wat no big deal... they sent a whole bag of the lil' screws with other unmentionable goodies

 

My computer finally arrived yesterday, after Fed Ex unilaterally decided to ship the box clearly labelled "priority overnite" as second-day air instead, which meant 4-day air since it put me into the weekend. (Fed Ex sheepishly agreed to refund my shipping charges, but could give me no explanation for why this happened). PCMW, to their credit, called me to alert me that they were tracking the shipment and had spotted a Fed Ex screw up before I did.
Anyway, I am just starting to get software loaded up, and so far only on the XP side. After updating windows and installing Norton Internet Security 2008 and Earthlink software, I downloaded and ran 3dMark06 and HD Tach. Using all the stock drivers and default settings on both the computer, display and the utility, and with no tweaking or overclocking, and with Norton even running in the background, the initial 3dMark06 number was 10,790 in XP. (BUT SEE UPDATE A COUPLE OF POSTS BELOW).
The HD Tach results were slower than expected--read speeds were in the 150s. I suspect this may be a result of the dual boot configuration, which has the computer seeing two drives, each with about a drive and a half of storage space. I needed dual boot in part because my office network is not compatible with Vista. Based upon tests of similar SSD'S in RAID 0 configurations but without dual boot OS, I would have expected speeds well over 300. Any thoughts on whether having dual boot partitions could reduce read times in a RAID 0 setup compared to an unpartitioned RAID 0 with one OS? The RAID controller is an Intel 82801(if memory serves at the moment). I realize that that certainly isn't the fastest controller out there either.
I have also run into the infamous Intel Pro Wireless 4965 144mbps instead of 300mbps issue even though I have a netgear wireless n router. Am currently trying to find a fix for that issue. Meanwhile, file downloads on this rig are of course lightning fast compared to my XPS M1710 on the same 16MB/2MB cable network, and the time between choosing the operating system to boot and full loading of xp on the BlackHawk is about 5 seconds. The fans are dead silent, and no temp problems have occurred so far.
I have more software to load and such in the coming days, and the entire Vista side to load and configure, but thought I would report these initial results and seek any thoughts or tips you might have on the above items. I very much appreciate all the sage advice you folks have passed along to date.

 

Wow, that thing must be aewsome with your state-if-the-art config.

I highly recommend you to contact (PM) our head moderator, Chaz.... or admin, Andrew.

Tell them what you got, they will help layout what you will need to mke a review that would be proudly displayed on the homepage... which links to dozens of other tech sites.

That notebook of yours is amazing.... I just just see the title of the Review...
- "$12k notebook... all power for the money"
(no lame fiber glass mods or pretty lights)

 

Yeah! Seconds on what Gophn said; that's going to be an incredible review, once you've finished the shakedown cruise.

 

http://www.ocztechnology.com/aboutocz/press/2008/294

The price on SSD seem to have gone down a bit. Does anyeone know if this will affec the PCMW pricing?

 

The shakedown cruise produced an update. Turns out the unit is shipped with SLI disabled. When I enabled SLI in the NVIDIA utility, the 3dMark06 score jumped to 14,839. Now we're talkin! Still have not gotten to any tweaks or overclocking, and all other settings remain at the defaults for 3dMark, the computer, the display, adapter, etc. Meanwhile, i ran into a small hiccup--the Blu-Ray/DVD/CD drive is not recognized by the system. I called PCMW, though, and they immediately said they would ship a new optical drive overnite (assuming Fed Ex can read this time).

 

Given my reverse midas touch and the fact that i hit the "submit order" button 2 weeks ago, I can almost guarantee the price will go down in no time.

 

I don't keep obsessive track of 3dMark scores, but 14,839 right out of the box, without any tinkering around with different drivers and without having obsessively fine-tuned the system is pretty darned impressive!

 

I was thinking about your 3dmark score earlier. Didn't want to say anything to spoil the party.

14.800 with no tweaking is really impressive.

 

Thanks. The untweaked initial 3dMark06 on the Vista Ultimate 64 side of the dual boot is actually slightly lower--a little over 13,900. Just beginning to configure Vista, though, and this is my first ride on Vista, so I may not yet have stumbled on any basic Vista options or settings that make a difference.

 

Can we get a HDTUNE benchmark?

 

Sure, HD Tune results are:

READ (BLOCK SIZE 512KB)--185.1 MB/SEC MIN, 293.8 MB/SEC MAX, 260.8 MB/SEC AVG, ACCESS TIME 0.1ms, Burst Rate 168.2 MB/SEC, CPU Usage 3.1%

READ (BLOCK SIZE 64KB)--81.7 MB/SEC MIN, 145.4MB/SEC MAX, 125.6 MB/SEC AVG, ACCESS TIME 0.1ms, burst rate 163.4 MB/SEC, CPU usage 2.7%

READ (BLOCK SIZE 1MB)--MIN 216.1 MB/SEC, MAX 312.7 MB/SEC, AVG 285.2 MB/SEC, ACCESS TIME 0.1ms, BURST RATE 163.5 MB/SEC, CPU USAGE 2.6%

WRITE TEST ATTEMPT REPORTED WRITE TESTING DISABLED IN HD TUNE DUE TO PARTITIONS

 

I'm getting a 1100 points drop when i'm switching over to vista 64. I don't think it's much you can do about that. XP just have better performance.