Questions on Harddrives for 8850

I'm thinking, seriously, about purchasing the 8850.

I have several questions first.

I Don't really want to spend the exta for an SSD while the Seagate Hybrid is 500gb and getting good reviews on speed and functionality. I do play games, but not hardcore.

Now, for the second harddrive slot, is it best to get another 500gb ssd hybrid?

Or get a 640gb (grrr, only 5400 rmp though)

Or just stay with 2x 500gb ssd and raid 0 them? Or should I raid 1 them?

I guess I don't really need too much storage, as I'm buyng a 5bay (5x 2TB drives in RAID 5) raid storage tower.


Also, I'm thnking of buying from LatopMonkey his 940xm cpu he has listed on eBay for $580.00. He seems to have good feedback. But I'm alittle worried about purchasing a chip off eBay. Anyone dealt with this guy?

Is it even worth going for the 940xm at that price? Would I be better off going with the 840qm?

I have an Asus G60 with a P7550 CPU and a GTX 260m card. So even the basic system of the SAGER 8850 wil be a huge upgade.

I just don't want to be spending another 5grand in the future to upgrade agan. (meaning, i want ths to last me 5 years, playing games, etc. at max, or near, max settings)

Thanks for any help.

 

In my experience the Momentus XT Hybrid has fantastic performance, and you could get even more speed out of them by putting them in a RAID-0 stripe, as well as getting a terabyte of storage. RAID-1 is for backup and mirrors your drives, which you probably don't need if you have a 10TB storage tower that you can back things up to

I can't comment on LaptopMonkey, but if it's a working CPU at that price that's a very good deal. However, just be aware that many mobile CPUs on eBay are QS chips, and if one dies on you then you're out of luck as there's no warranty through Intel on it.

 

ya, i know about the warranty thing. Maybe I'll just stick with the 840qm. I mean, is the difference in performance to the 940xm really going to be noticeable for someone who is currently using a dual core P7550 and a GTX 260m card?

And, If i go with Raid zero, is the performance really noticeable?

I'm also worried about data getting lost forever if one of the drives craps out, but then again, I'll have a raid 5 tower I can be storing important stuff on.

 

Besides some moderate gaming, what else are you planning on doing with your laptop? If you're rendering 3D models or HD video the performance on both will be noticeable, but if you're just going to be typing papers, going on the internet, and possibly photo editing you won't really notice the difference of either.

 

Laptopmonkey is excellent, I've bought 3 cpus from him within the past 9 months.

 

watching DVD movies mostly and playin some online games (wow, eve-online, etc.)

I do play rainbow six alot and crysis.

 

and no probs with either of th cpu's?

 

No problems at all, I wouldn't buy from anyone else, except maybe shirley.

 

the other prob with buying from him....how hard is it to take off the gpu and apply IC-Diamond (or if a better, I'll get) and also mount the CPU?

I'll have to order the laptop without it and put the paste on both gpu and cpu when it comes in.

I just do't want to mess things up. I've built plenty of desktops, but this laptop thing all new to me.

 

he also offers a 3 year warranty laptopmonkey extended component warranty on eBay.ca (item 140374844325 end time 13-Sep-10 06:50:22 EDT)

 

You'll get a few more fps in games, and that's about it. It's honestly up to you whether or not you think it's worth the money.

 

The only really delicate pieces in a laptop that I've noticed are the monitor connectors/touch panel connectors/keyboard connectors. Everything else is the same as a desktop really.

 

If you can build a desktop, then you can build a laptop. It's actually easier to put together a laptop from a barebone than a desktop from scratch.

 

I bought my 940XM from LaptopMonkey. He was very helpful.

 

so, you're saying go ahead and get the 940xm?

get 2x SSD 500gb Hybrid harddrives and run them raid 0?

I shouldn't need to upgrade my system in the next few years with those specs?