SSD for new I7 setup ?

conuk

conuk

conuk

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just building tomorrow an I7 setup.

At the moment I have 2 x Raptor 150gb in raid 0... 2 x 500gb drives for 'stuff' and backups.

Games (flight sims mostly and Iracing) are ran off the raptors...

heres the dilemma....

save £100 on the gfx card... get a 5850 rather than 5870... and sell the 2 raptors and get 2 ssd in raid.....

or keep the raptors.... and get the better gfx card ?

I dont just play games on PC.

What would you do ?
If SSD which ones ... probs got £300-£400 or just over.
 
You're not going to get 300GB of SSD goodness to replace your Raptors within budget so I would;

Get an SSD for the boot drive, your apps and maybe a few of your favourite games. Something like the Crucial M225 for £170 for 64GB or the Intel X25MG2 80GB for £190ish (but on sale at £159 elsewhere today).

Keep the Raptors for your other games. I haven't noticed a vast improvement in a lot of games with SSDs over Raptors in RAID0, but you'll get different mileage with different games - depends how often they're loading - SSDs really shine for the OS and apps though.

Buy the 5870 and you should still be within your overall budget :)
 
I'd go for the 5850 and two SSD drives, largely because that's exactly what I just did a couple of weeks ago and I'm happy with the results. A pair of 80GB Intel X25s would probably be the best option at the higher end of your stated price range, with a pair of 64GB Crucial M225s coming in a bit cheaper. Shopping around elsewhere might change the balance.

Edit: As ChileanLlama correctly points out, this doesn't give you as much space as your current system, so his suggested alternative might be better if you definitely need that amount of space.
 
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thanks guys - something to look over... was just thinking today because I ordered mobo-cpu-ram yesterday to come tomorriw but left out the GFX because it was pre order.... then thought of SSD rather than raptor.

The more space I have the more stuff I collect ... so maybe smaller will be good and help keep things organised with the stuff I really need.
 
In all honesty I saw VERY little difference in most application and game loading times because the i7 is a beast as it is. I run 3D software (that is quite computer intensive) and the loading time difference was literally 10 seconds with an SSD, or 14 seconds with my samsung F1. And this was the story pretty much across the board - either my i7 is unusually fast (which I highly doubt it is) or SSD's are still a bit over-rated.

The choice is yours obviously but just something for your consideration.
 
What SSD drive have you got ?

I plugged my Samsung F1 320 in other day as a test and it was slow, big difference for me on ssd to hd.
 
Going from a velociraptor to intel SSD... I didnt really notice that much improvement in load times. Quite gutted in a way :)

Doesnt mean its not quick...
 
gonna toss a coin lol ;)

good to get both views though... not as straight forward as I thought.
 
Jabbs said:
What SSD drive have you got ?

I plugged my Samsung F1 320 in other day as a test and it was slow, big difference for me on ssd to hd.
Click to expand...

Im using a F1 1tb - the throughput is still around 90mbps read 70mbps write so as quick as it needs to be for most files really.

Even with the SSD access times of ~0.1ms I couldnt spot to much of a difference.
 
I actually find Arma 2 much more playable to what it was before with way faster load times, pretty much across the board for me, itunes for example was a chug before now it aint, /me shrugs guess its down to user systems.
 
samir_ansari said:
In all honesty I saw VERY little difference in most application and game loading times because the i7 is a beast as it is. I run 3D software (that is quite computer intensive) and the loading time difference was literally 10 seconds with an SSD, or 14 seconds with my samsung F1. And this was the story pretty much across the board - either my i7 is unusually fast (which I highly doubt it is) or SSD's are still a bit over-rated.

The choice is yours obviously but just something for your consideration.
Click to expand...

That's suggesting that most of your work is being done on the CPU/in memory, and not on the disks. Clearly whether it's an SSD or HD, it's still going to be the slowest subsystem and will never be able to pump data quick enough to an i7 to tax it.

I'm interested in what 3d software you are using, because this is one of my main uses. Photoshop (not 3d!) is significantly faster to load, not done a timed comparison, but I'm looking at a maybe 3-5 seconds, and a HD 12-15. I see similar results in Max and Vue. But of course I'm probably only loading them once per session, so that 10s per large application is not significant enough on it's own. I think where it does benefit is the responsiveness and access times, especially if you're loading multiple apps or files at once, the speed in which the system is useable after a boot, etc.

Of course it's all very subjective as the way we all use our computers is probably slightly different.

Anyway, I must say I do agree that they are a bit overrated - they are good, but for anyone who hasn't used one, don't set your expectations too high and you shouldn't be disappointed.
 
ChileanLlama said:
That's suggesting that most of your work is being done on the CPU/in memory, and not on the disks. Clearly whether it's an SSD or HD, it's still going to be the slowest subsystem and will never be able to pump data quick enough to an i7 to tax it.

I'm interested in what 3d software you are using, because this is one of my main uses. Photoshop (not 3d!) is significantly faster to load, not done a timed comparison, but I'm looking at a maybe 3-5 seconds, and a HD 12-15. I see similar results in Max and Vue. But of course I'm probably only loading them once per session, so that 10s per large application is not significant enough on it's own. I think where it does benefit is the responsiveness and access times, especially if you're loading multiple apps or files at once, the speed in which the system is useable after a boot, etc.

Of course it's all very subjective as the way we all use our computers is probably slightly different.

Anyway, I must say I do agree that they are a bit overrated - they are good, but for anyone who hasn't used one, don't set your expectations too high and you shouldn't be disappointed.
Click to expand...


I use Maya and 3DS for my work. The 10s test I done was not just loading the software, it was loading a very heavy 3D scene (which is what I would be using it for anyway rather than opening a blank document all the time). I also done tests with Photoshop and found it was a very small difference - something along the lines of 8s HDD vs 4s SSD.

Also the games I tried were Crysis (and Warhead), World in Conflict and Call of Duty 4 - none of which showed any benefit really.
 
samir_ansari said:
I use Maya and 3DS for my work. The 10s test I done was not just loading the software, it was loading a very heavy 3D scene (which is what I would be using it for anyway rather than opening a blank document all the time). I also done tests with Photoshop and found it was a very small difference - something along the lines of 8s HDD vs 4s SSD.

Also the games I tried were Crysis (and Warhead), World in Conflict and Call of Duty 4 - none of which showed any benefit really.
Click to expand...

Most of my scenes, assets and data are on the network - so I've not tried the scenario you're using.

I'm in agreement in the games side and have always said the same. It's definitely faster but not earth shatteringly so. Problem is now I'm playing games that I didn't have on HD, so it's getting hard to make a true comparison for me.
 
In the end I bought the 5870 and still gonna get the ssd.
Just looking at one now... Might keep the raptors and compare them against the ssd to see which one I like.

Looking at x25mg2
Corsair x256
Or a
Ocz vertex
 
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