MAMEWorld Forums - Hardware - Re: 'Been considering building a Gaming PC

> So, any suggestions on anything I could swap out, or probably wouldn't need...? Or
> any other recommendations?

Your build has no case fans! Protect your investment. I'd skip the sound card and spend $$ on a couple of silent case fans. The bigger the better, larger fans move lots of air at lower RPM which translates to less noise. Look up the case at the manufacturers website to see what size fans it has mounting holes for and where. Mind the direction of the airflow, you want cool air blowing across the motherboard, cool air coming in and hot air going out. Look out for little arrows on the inside of the fan shrouds that indicate the direction of the air flow. Bonus achievement build-points if your case allows the intake fan to blow air across the hard drives.

> As for the 2 Drives... I read a post by VasCrab where he said he had programs stored
> to his SSD, and files stored to his disc drive. I don't know off hand how one would
> go about doing that, but I guess that's another topic for another time.

Uh lol right-click, save as?

it means that you save/keep all your stuff, whatever you download, import from other devices etc on the mechanical drive. For example you would keep your music, videos and photos on the mechanical drive rather than in your user folder hierarchy, "My Documents", Windows "Library" folders etc which are on your SSD where Windows is installed.

Software that you update (or the kind that likes to constantly update itself) regularly such as MAME or, say, antivirus software is also a candidate. And your bittorrent downloads folder. Basically anything that doesn't really benefit from the speed of the SSD and does a lot of writes - keep in mind that the whole idea is to minimize unnecessary writes to your SSD. If you have lots of RAM (16GB qualifies I guess) you could also consider keeping the Windows page file on a mechanical drive.

For anything that needs a "temp" folder for working with huge (media) files (encoding, recording, super high res photo editing, compiling MAME etc) ideally you would use a folder on a mechanical drive, all such software should allow you to set the location of this folder or "scratch drive". For example I do a fair amount of multitrack recording and audio editing, I would never dream of recording to an SSD. I have separate 7200 RPM drives for that which are more than fast enough.

All my games, my Steam library is on a mechanical drive. It's too big to reside on my SSD anyway, which is only 128GB...out of which 53GB go unused.

S