Clean, clean clean...

Well, I finally found out why my new Velociraptor drive was not being recognized by the Bios or by Windows 7...

It turns out that while this mainboard (MSI NF980-GF65) has 6 SATA ports onboard, only the first 4 are recognized as regular SATA ports for hdd to be plugged into. When you open up the bios on the main page it will list 2 IDE ports and Sata ports 1 through 4.

Strangely enough, Sata ports 5 and 6 are missing from the overall list. So after doing some research on the net, I found that one must configure ports 5 and 6 as Raid (ACHI) drives if one wants to use them which obviously I do.

After configuring them to be ACHI raid drives I found out that Windows would no longer recognize my pre existing C:\ (boot drive 0) as it was no longer a regular SATA drive but now configured to be part of the 6 newly configured ACHI raid drives.

Well, long story shortened as best as I can, I rearranged all the sata plugs that were plugged into the hard drives and numbered all of them with the SATA port number for future reference and plugged in the new velociraptor drive to sata port 1 and made them all ACHI raid drives. Unfortunately that meant that I had to reinstall Windows 7 once more for it to be able to use the drive, or so I thought, and that's what I did.

As it turns out I later found a message post that I could have simply edited the registry in windows to get it to recognize the new ACHI drives and no reinstallation of Windows would have been necessary.

Also as it turns out, it was a huge waste of time making the velociraptor the Drive 0 (boot drive C:\) as the performance measured in the Windows performance center gives me an abysmal scoring of only 5.9 (only 4 points higher than my last gateway) due to the hdd performance score of only 5.9.

It seems it didn't matter if I was using one of the 7200RPM one TB drives as the primary boot drive or the new 10,000 RPM Velociraptor drive, they both only score a 5.9 each, so I'm a little bummed about that since the Velociraptor is only a 150GB drive, and with minimal installation of my games and other programs necessary for my real life work, I'm already down to only 45GB free on the C:\ drive and thats WITH installing the fat majority of the few games and programs on my D:\ E:\ and or G:\ drives.

I guess I should probably have done it the opposite way and left my primary drive as the 1TB drive to install windows on and used the Velociraptor drive to install the games and programs that I use most often so that the WIndows drive doesn't eventually run out of space. I guess I'll have to relocate the My Documents folder over to either the D, E or G drive since that has a tendancy to get full of stuff after a while and might accumulate up to 50GB or more so that might save some space ultimately for the C drive. I don't mind doing that since it makes it much easier later on to reformat the drive since the My Documents folder will be on one of the drives that doesn't get reformatted with a fresh OS installation for me.

I guess with the last 4GB RAM installation I'm pleased to have 8GB again, I notice the difference for sure, now the only thing left would be to get a better CPU heatsink and fan as with doing video editing/rendering of my videos the CPU runs between 49-51°c. While that still leaves plenty of headroom for anything extra that I might want to run (like playing a game while rendering the videos), it's still only about 8 to 10°c before it hits what is considered the safe operating zone for the CPU, which I believe is about 62°c.

Although I've had others tell me that while 62 might be the listed safe high end zone, it's not like the CPU is going to blow up if it goes up to 70°c. although I have my computer set that if it reaches 60°c, I get an alarm that sounds and a popup window that tells me that the computer is going to shut down, unless I cancel the shut down.

So, I've been looking for aftermarket CPU coolers, many people seem to suggest that the Coolermaster V8 is the way to go, however while it might fit in my case, and likely would, that things just monstrously large and I can't imagine spending the time and hassle that many people report to get that thing installed for only a couple degrees extra cooling. Perhaps the Corsair H50 liquid sealed system cooling is the way to go, although I'll have to read reviews on what kind of cooling I could expect from that too as it seems to me if I don't get like 20°c extra cooling than maybe it's not worth hasseling with and just deal with the medium temperatures of my CPU.

Oh good news though, the CPU that I have is one of the newer 125W CPU's instead of the older 140W, although my mainboard can handle a 140W cpu if I ever need to upgrade to one of them in the future. I imagine in a year or two I'll get the AMD X6 1090T CPU when its no longer the top tier CPU for AMD and at a price tag that is affordable, after than it will be time to upgrade the mainboard again I suppose like the proverbial dog chasing it's own tail.