MP 2008 drive configuration.. SSD/HDD

[VanneDC]

Hi all, well its about time (a week away) when i have to ship my MP across to Dubai, and was thinking instead of shipping both my MP and my windows Box across, id just ship my MP across...

thing is, i use my win box for playing the occasional game, have a wolfdale with an Ati 4870X2 in there humming away on L4D1/2 / SC2 and a couple of other nice games...

If i wanna leave my win box behind, how will my MP go (box in Sig) comparable to games with my winbox?

If i do decide to leave my winbox behind, ill have to re-set up my MP, and if thats the case, i was wondering what the best way to go would be?

Leave my SSD as my OSX boot drive, with WD Green 1TB drive as storage/swap

and

1 TB WD Black drive with Win7 and games on it?

My SSD is only 64GB big, so i dont think that would be enough to partition it in 2 and run both OSX and Win7 as boot drives from them....

or maybe buy another new SSD and use that as the OSX boot drive and the smaller 64gb ssd as the win7 boot drive....

what do you all think?

cheers

 

[nanofrog]

Put Win7 on a mechanical disk (separate disk from OS X if at all possible), and transfer over the video card if you wish (won't work properly under OS X, if at all, but would for Win7 gaming).

Cheaper and easier than shipping 2x systems.

 

[VanneDC]

yeah thats what i was thinking aswell.. i obviously cant run the 4870x2 alongside the gtx285... so what to do?? i dont think the psu has enough grunt to run the 4870x2 and the gtx anyways...

 

[nanofrog]

yeah thats what i was thinking as well.. i obviously cant run the 4870x2 alongside the gtx285... so what to do?? i don't think the psu has enough grunt to run the 4870x2 and the gtx anyways...

OS X would ignore it (unless you flash it's firmware or use Netkas's injector method; only one GPU would work IIRC). Fortunately, Win7 would be able to run both.

There are two ways you can safely deal with the GPU power issue (prevents damaging the MP's PSU by trying to draw too much current):

1. Use a standard PSU run externally (just jump the green and black wires in the Main Board connector together to make it work). Not pretty, but effective.
2. Use a 5.25" GPU PSU (fits in the 2nd optical bay). Nice and clean way to go about it. Here's a list of sites that sell them in AU (hopefully $65 or 69AUD that includes GST doesn't isn't too steep for the 5.25" bay model).

Either will work, so it's up to you. No additional GPU cables that fit the logic board in either case, so you only need another PSU.

BTW, the point of mentioning this, is so you don't have to constantly swap out graphics cards (an option, but not good for the PCIe slot's contacts as they're not meant for constant card swapping).

Hope this helps (not sure if you've sufficient time to place an order and get it delivered before you have to pack up the MP).