Greets.I'm looking forward receiving my new Aurora ALX soon (hopefully), and until then, I'd like to buy some additional upgrades to further increase it's perfomance.As I almost ever used AW systems, and hardly ever bought additional parts, I still have three questions and would be VERY grateful, I someone would help me out :)1.) As the Aurora uses a dual 7.200 rpm HD-Raid-Setup, I thought it could lead to an increased performance if I'd add a 10k rpm HD (VelociRaptor or something like that) and solely install the OS on it - all remaining software would stay on the 7,2k's.Am I right, or am I wrong? And if yes, is it possible to add that third hard drive to the raid0-setup?2.) I wanted to increase the available RAM to about 12GB 1,6k MHz.Yet someone told me that I should avoid using RAM from different manufacturers - which brought me to the problem: Which RAM is Dell actually using for their AW systems?I thought of adding Corsair, yet I see no other choice but buying full 12GB if I'm not able to figure out which one would fit Dell's factory standard best :/3.) The moment, I ordered my Aurora, they were still sold with Vista preinstalled.Since I bought Win 7 and - of course - want to use it preferably as a clean install, this leads me to my last question: Will I be able to intall AlienFX my own aftewards, or will it cause problems?Thanks in advance =)
Modern 7200rpm drives outperform the older velociraptors by a fairly wide margin, plus offer more storage. This is due to a greater disc density, larger cache, and other advances in design and firmware.
Unless you upgraded your ram during your order, it will ship with value ram which could come from several different companies, but most likely samsung or elipida. Since the bios is fairly limited there is no need to get too carried away with the ram. One of the major reasons to get higher speed ram is to overclock the processor, and since you cannot overclock these because of the MB/bios limitations, you should just shop around for the cheapest set of DDR3 you can find, then get 12gb of it. I prefer newegg.com for parts, but there are other good choices as well. Just be sure you do not get the value ram, and get something with heat spreaders. Most places do not sell DDR3 ram slower than 1333mhz any more, so you should be good to go with whatever you find.
If you do an upgrade from Vista to 7 rather than a clean install it will be the same as doing a clean install, since the vista was a clean install, and it will retain all the alienware command center software.
Thanks!
So the only way to really increase the overall performance should be a solid state drive, right? But the question I ask myself then is: How obvious would the difference be if I am hardly ever doing something other than playing games (like WoW for example)? Even compared to 10k rpm's, SSDs are not that cheap yet, so I'd like to only consider them as an option if they'd really lead to a boost.
I finally bought 2 Corsair Dominator 6GB Kits. They have those headspreaders and - I think - are an overall good choice :)
Ok nice, so if I am going to stick with the factory installed HDs, an upgrade would do it's job as well. That's good since I do not have to worry about getting all that alienware stuff again ;)
SSD drives are very fast, but unfortunately they don't really affect much in real world performance. Boot times are much faster, as well as load times for any apps that are on the SSD drive, but other than that, once a game or app is opened, you will not see any increase in performance. And keep in mind, the larger the stripe (raid 0) array the faster it will be. If you already have two 7200 rpm drives it would be cheaper to to add two more 7200 rpm drives to the raid...this would give you much more storage for much less cost, and would compete very well with a SSD.
The best way to increase the overall performance of an Aurora is to replace the MB with an Asus Rampage II gene. (assuming you have a 920 processor...if you sprang for the overclocked 975 its probably not worth the trouble) With this you can overclock your processor to at least 4.0ghz, and your memory to at least its rated speed with tighter timings.