SSD & Game Performance Query

andeh2 · 12 Nov 2011 at 15:09

I've a 72gb WD Raptor as my system drive and a 1.5tb WD Caviar (WD15EADS) with games/music etc... on.

The drives are both a few years old, but iirc the Raptor is 7200 RPM and I think the Caviar is as well. The rest of the system is an i7 @ 2.66, 6gb DDR3 and I've just ordered a GTX 570 to replace the GTX 260.

I'm struggling a bit with system space, so may need something bigger in the not too distant future, and was thinking about something with better performance.

I was thinking about picking up a ~120gb SSD, but wondered if it was worth it, if I'm just going to be using it as the system drive? I suspect it will improve Windows loadtimes, but I can live with those as they are. What I'd ideally like is a loadtime increase for games, but would an SSD as a system drive make much difference if the games are located on another drive? What about if the swapfile is on C:?

I understand SSD's are quicker, but I guess I'm wanting to know what makes them quicker for running games. Is it having the OS loaded on that drive, the game files or swap file?

Also worth noting I've a Gigabyte EX58-UD5 X58 mobo and it only supports SATA2, without SATA3 would I still see much of an improvement?

Sorry for the noob question, but any clarification would be appreciated!

jellybeard999 · 12 Nov 2011 at 15:46

I have an SSD for windows and a mechanical drive for games. Windows is very snappy, but I've not noticed any performance increase in game load times. I suspect you'll need the games on the SSD to benefit.

HangTime · 12 Nov 2011 at 20:04

With only 2GB RAM you are going to be getting swap file usage so you will see a massive improvement from a SSD even on SATA2.

I would strongly recommend buying some more RAM, X58 is triple channel right which means your 2GB isn't even giving you optimal performance, in your shoes I would buy a 6GB kit before worrying about SSD, this will give you far more improvement for gaming than a SSD. Should only cost £37.99 for 6GB PC12800 from OcUK.

andeh2 · 12 Nov 2011 at 20:21

HangTime said:
With only 2GB RAM you are going to be getting swap file usage so you will see a massive improvement from a SSD even on SATA2.

Gah, the 2gb was a typo - it should have said 6, sorry! But yes, it's triple channel. Basically just wondering if investing in the ssd for C: is going to give any notable gaming performance. If I've got 6gb RAM, is there still likely to be much swap file usage going on?

LtMatt · 12 Nov 2011 at 20:47

You wont see much if any fps increase because your games are on an ssd. However your load times will decrease dramatically. Its really quick, like a few seconds. I'm the first one to load the map 9 out of 10 times. The only people that load the map as quick as me are fellow ssd users. (not many)

Play battlefield 3 and l4d2 and use their load times as a basis for my results. I have all my regular played games on my ssd.

HangTime · 13 Nov 2011 at 15:43

Personally I would recommend putting OS and swap file on the SSD, and then installing the main game you are about to play onto that drive. SSDs are typically too small to hold all your games so you need to be selective. I typically install a game to SSD, complete it, then uninstall it and install my next victim.

Wucked · 14 Nov 2011 at 16:08

I have the same motherboard running an i7 920 with 6GB RAM and I recently upgraded (a couple of months ago) to a Crucial M4 256GB drive.

I have Win7 x64, Steam & Origin along with 6 or 7 games installed on the SSD, and that's about it. Personally I've found that 6GB RAM is sufficient to disable the swap file altogether, along with the other usual optimisations i.e. file indexing, defrag, etc.

So I'm running my SATA3 SSD on the on-board Intel SATA2 controller, and I can tell you that despite this it still makes a significant difference in pretty much everything I do. Its much quicker in everything from boot-up, to gaming, to installing windows updates, to... Browsing web pages... Well pretty much everything really. You'll even find that it gives a small FPS increase in games. Especially games that stream heavily from the hard drive, like BF3 for instance.

What makes an SSD feel fast in day-to-day operations is its seek time and random read write performance. People tend to throw around sequential benchmark figures like they're the only thing that matters. But actually for most people large sequential operations only account for a very small percentage of what the drive will ever do. So even on a SATA2 controller you'll be getting very good performance for day-to-day stuff. If you decide to purchase then I doubt you'll be disappointed.