Ssd upgrade worth it for gaming?

opethdisciple

opethdisciple

opethdisciple

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This ssd looks mighty tasty.


From a purely gaming perspective, is it worth upgrading from my regular mechanical hdd?

Will it improve my fps at all from my 5870?

I understand load times will be quicker, but what about minimum frame rates?

Also my motherboard only has 3Gb/s sata ports, bottleneck?

Any other ssd's in a similar price range I should consider?
 
It wouldn't increase FPS unless your system was RAM starved. It might improve loading times but it depends on the game. StarCraft II, for example, doesn't benefit much from an SSD in terms of level loading times.
 
From a purely gaming perspective, don't bother - you're probably better off putting the money towards more RAM, a better monitor or other peripherals (or even a nice chair). If you spend much time on the desktop though there's no better upgrade.

Other SSD's to consider are the agility and non-turbo vertex - there's little difference between them and the turbo in actual use. I'd probably get the Vertex over the agility as it's only £8 more and has an extra years warranty on top of being slightly faster.
 
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It will help load times of course, it will also help if you have "load-based" stutter. If eg you play WoW and walk into SW/Org, your system may stutter as it struggles to load lots of textures at once. An SSD would help with that.

If you're swapping between apps and loading/saving stuff to swap, an SSD will make that a lot faster too.
 
Fross is right, You wont get any FPS Inprovements Like you would from a Better GPU/CPU. But it does help with load times!
 
The only load based stutter I get, is on BFBC2.

When I load a level for the first time, it takes a few seconds , before I can actually move, after that however its fine, between rounds etc..

According to windows all my hardware is 7+, but my hdd is 5.4, which gives me a windows rating of 5.4!

The ssd, is something I could use in future builds as well, was planning to keep my current set up untill windows 8 comes around (2012 abouts), as honestly, although I have the cash, I cant justify upgrading for upgrading sake.

An ssd, is the only thing, I can possibly add to this system.

I wish I could push my cpu up to 4ghz... but it wont budge.
 
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opethdisciple said:
The only load based stutter I get, is on BFBC2.

When I load a level for the first time, it takes a few seconds , before I can actually move, after that however its fine, between rounds etc..

According to windows all my hardware is 7+, but my hdd is 5.4, which gives me a windows rating of 5.4!

The ssd, is something I could use in future builds as well, was planning to keep my current set up untill windows 8 comes around (2012 abouts), as honestly, although I have the cash, I cant justify upgrading for upgrading sake.

An ssd, is the only thing, I can possibly add to this system.

I wish I could push my cpu up to 4ghz... but it wont budge.
Click to expand...

All my hardware is 7.6+ Except my HDD, even with 2x Drives in Raid0 i get 5.9 :|

3.7Ghz is plenty fast enough anyway, my i7 2600k is at stock!
 
all i can say is went to ssd a year ago....couldnt believe how good it was...sold my x25 last week put a mechanical drive in....yuk...runs like a old model skoda.....cant wait for my new one to arrive they are so much better in every way apart from the cost and size...once youve gone ssd youll never ever go back believe me.
 
Br4d said:
All my hardware is 7.6+ Except my HDD, even with 2x Drives in Raid0 i get 5.9 :|

3.7Ghz is plenty fast enough anyway, my i7 2600k is at stock!
Click to expand...

Mechanical hdds are limited to a max score of 5.9 in Windows, so you won't improve on that unless you get an SSD, not that it really means much.
 
opethdisciple said:
Here they show minimum frame increase in crysis 1 using ssd...
Click to expand...

UNfortunately that could be as simple as the first second of a 5 minute level loading textures faster and speeding up essentially "opening" the level. Without a graph to see how often they occur its not altogether useful.

Whats worth noting with SSD's is diminishing returns. I've seen next to no improvement going from a indilinx drive to a Crucial C300, which in terms of benchmarks blows it away, I also used raid indilinx controller drives, older Samsung drivers and older Samsung drives in raid.

There was a massive improvement from raid hdd's to Samsung ssd's in raid(these were the old 80mb/s sustained limited, and maybe 5-6mb/s random read/writes). But there were situations those old ssd's "bogged down" with random situations, the stutter early ssd's had. Still WAY faster than hdd's but there were issues. Basically the Indilinx drives with better controllers are more than fast enough for 99.9% of people.

I'd suggest an SSD, for windows, it will make EVERYTHING more responsive, flicking tabs in firefox/ie/chrome. Gaming, load times, some games will improve some won't. Its not a earth shattering difference as lots of things happen besides a straight load from hdd/ssd.

Its one of the better upgrades for "general use" of computers once you've got a half decent cpu/memory in a computer. But for gaming performance its always a case of dump as much money into gpu's as you can, then a cpu, then memory than a hard drive or ssd. Theres diminishing returns with everything but hdd/ssd will have the least effect on overall gaming performance.
 
Its only worth it for an OS drive, I see no difference in loading and playing games between Raid 0 Samsung F3s and a Crucial C300.
 
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