SSD or System upgrade?

Dougiebabe2003

Dougiebabe2003

Dougiebabe2003

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31 Oct 2005
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Howdy all,

Getting itchy feet and want to upgrade my main machine again after many years of not touching it. Recently upgraded my ageing 4870 to a 7950 and am now loving games on it again.

So I am now left with:

Q6600 @ stock, have had it 3.2ghz stable in the past but lowered it to stock and under-volted while I wasn't using it that much.
8GB OCZ DDR2 Ram
Asus P5k Pro
500GB Sammy F3
620W Corsair PSU

So, what would you do? I have been contemplating an SSD as I think I will see the biggest increase in everything across the board BUT I want a 500GB SSD minimum and the Crucial 960GB M500's at their current price has been getting a lot of my attention... For an extra £100 ish I could have a new CPU/mobo/RAM but would I actually see that much benefit from it?

Cheers in advance,

Doug
 
Its up too you personally,are you feeling throttled in tasks you use/gaming (how does the 7950 hold up with a q6600?

Additonally looking at your motherboard it only seems to have sata 2/3gb ports with modern ssds reaching the upper limits of sata 3/6gbs in certain circumstances, personally I'd probably go for a newer system but again.up to you, if your stilk able to play games etc at a level your happy with then maybe save some money and get a sata2 ssd :-)
 
Going to the latest CPU architecture would deliver a significant performance gain but I suspect you'd "feel" it more by moving to an SSD. It's a difficult one really if your budget is limiting you to one or the other.
 
Get your Q6600 OC back on and get an SSD and you will see an improvement, the 7950 will hardly be used with a stock Q6600, and windows will be much faster loading off an SSD.
But ideally a newer CPU and mobo would make a bigger difference in games if you could afford it, all down to your budget.
 
Just re-read the OP...what makes you want a 500GB SSD? You'll gain the most from an SSD using as an OS drive and a few games that benefit most from fast load times but there's really nothing to gain is moving from HDD to SSD for data storage. Save some dosh by getting a smaller SSD (60GB is adequate for OS, 120GB for OS + the odd game, or 250GB for OS + decent bunch of games + some storage) and put the rest towards a system upgrade as proposed by Idleman
 
I know you said you want at least a 500gb but if your use is primarily gaming, then I'd go for a smaller ssd for boot drive and a few games, leaving money for a system upgrade.

I currently have an SSD for boot and another for games. Almost regret not putting money towards something else, in regards to the latter.
 
The reason I'd like at least a 500gb ssd is then I can have anything I want to run on it. All my movies/TV shows/music etc is stored on my micro server so the pc is only used to 'do stuff' on. Personally, I don't understand why you would only have half your stuff on an ssd and the other half of apps on slower storage but that's just me. A 500gb ssd should last me a few years with no reinstall, but as I understand it you always want 20% free on an ssd which just puts a smaller ssd out of the question. As for the sata 2, yeah my mobo is only sata 2 atm so I wouldn't see the full sequential reads and writes but I can live with sata 2 speeds for the moment as long as the ssd's are backward compatible.

My Q6600 seems to be chugging along nicely, there are times when I think it might be holding me back but I haven't had the OC on since I've had the graphics card. I might do that now and see if I can hold off the urge to upgrade.

Many thanks for the replies.
 
I had effectively the same system a few months ago, and I got the SSD I still have now. It was so worth the upgrade, but be careful as my motherboard (the P5NE-SLI) didn't have AHCI so every few days the SSD would just simply wipe and erase all data, so I had to buy a SATA PCIe controller card for the SSD to plug into, as I just couldn't do with reinstalling Windows every other day. Looking to get rid of that controller card, no need for it any more.
 
as above just buy a decent 250gb ssd for os and a few most played games and use your current hdd as storage for games/films/programs ect
 
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