[Hardware Question] SSD just for the OS?
 

I am in the process of planning an upgrade for my PC (don't bother telling me to wait, I'm still on an ancient Athlon XP 3000) and I am wondering if it does make sense to invest a bit of money into a small SSD hard disk just for the OS (which is going to be Win7 Professional). I'm thinking about a small drive, just 60GB or so (since the larger ones are still far too expensive for my taste) plus a normal 1000GB SATA-600 HDD for the other programs.

Is anyone deeper into that one? What do you think?

Personally I would go for it. Although my choice would be a slightly bigger SSD, something around 120 GB. For both OS and games. For everything else - 1TB HDD's are very affordable nowadays.

Or you can go with the smaller now for the OS and then when prices drop - buy a bigger one. In any case my vote is YES.

This is what I have done in my newest machine. I have Win7 Pro installed on an 80GB SSD. Couple that with i7-920 and 12GB of DDR3 and Windows boots in 30 seconds. This is a VERY fast computer in all other respects. I am very please with this setup and encourage you to go for it.

Cheers,

Fafnir_6

Like I said larger drives with SATA-600 are too expensive ATM but your opinions have helped me. My current plan goes for this:

INTEL Core i7 960 4x3.2 GHz BOX
Asus (Retail) Rampage III Gene Republic of Gamers iX58
12GB Corsair Dominator PC2-12800 CL8 KIT
2.5" Crucial RealSSD C300 64GB
3.5" WD 1000GB WD1002FAEX 7200U/min 64MB SATA 3.0
ZOTAC (Retail) GTX480 1536MB mini-HDMI/DVI
Creative (Retail) X-Fi Titanium PCIe
Asus (Retail) BR-04B2T BD-Rom
Windows 7 Professional 64bit OEM

Most surely on my wishlist.

The SSD got postponed by the HOTAS Warthog, though. :(

If you got 12gigs of ram you could either use a ramdrive and boost system speed or just rely on windows caching in all the data from the drive.
Most SSD's aren't that much faster than good S-ATA drives in sequential read. In gaming you may have faster load times but mostly everything is cached in the VRAM and RAM so yeah.
Of course it's nice if browsers and other software open up fast but with a small SSD you will run into trouble once it starts to fill up.
I'd recommend aiming for 120gigs or you will probably have to compromise. You can, for example, put the pagefile into a ramdrive or the users directory on the data drive (your 1TB disk) but well, if you can spend the money, sure, go for an SSD. If you really need to save money and can't afford the 120 I'd recommend to wait until they get a bit cheaper. 64gb is really a bit small. I'd consider 80 as the minimum.
But that's just my personal experience of course. ;)

http://www.anandtech.com/show/2829/21

:rolleyes:

Because I can't speak from experience, Madfish may have a point there.

Looks good. Personally I would though, go with the newer socket 1156 i7's.

IMO, this Rampage is way overpriced for what it is offering. Also, IIRC hardware acceleration isn't supported in Win7, and MBO sound cards have become much much better nowadays. Not that I would stick to the MBO sound card, but do take a look at this model before you decide to purchase a CL card: Asus Xonar Essence STX (one of many reviews)

So, unless you want to spend money for a quality sound card, my advice would be to go with the MBO one. I believe that whatever Rampage MBO sound card has to offer is equally good or even better than CL X-Fi Titanuim card. ;)

And I hope you're not pairing this with some Logitech (or any PC) speakers as this is also a waste of money (unless you're pairing Xonar Essence with a quality headphones for which it was made for).


So, my advice would be:

1. Get a cheaper MBO and use the extra money to buy Asus Xonar Essence (provided that you have the equipment to exploit what this card is offering)
2. Or loose the sound card and get a cheaper MBO - together with the 120 GB SSD

What would that tell us? Was it a question or a hint? :P Seeing your comment about the Warthog... ;)

But then again, let me say something regarding the read and write speeds sequential written there. Yes, with an SSD you might get tripple read rate but that still doesn't mean a thing depending on what kind of user you are. I never wanted to say that SSD's aren't faster in sequential reads!

However, even with modern low-rpm 2TB drives like the Samsung F4 2TB for almost NO money at all (77€ for 2000Gb = 0,04€ per Gigabyte) you get 90+ mb/s read. Yeah, you get 261 with an Intel x25 or whatever (351€ for 160Gb = 2,1€ per Gigabyte). In other words you get 3x speed for 70x the price... :rolleyes:
Or another approach: for one gigabyte of trippled SSD speed you get 52 gigabytes of mechanical drive space! So that's really something that's worth thinking about.

To each his own but let's do some gamer- /user-math.


The GPU has 1VRAM availabe in average (lower for some people, higher for others but let's just assume).
Most people have RAM at around 4GB, some a bit more but rarely a game uses more than 2GB (never seen that yet, even 1GB is rare).
So we can say for sure that the average is about 2GB data read as a max. Worst case is probably still about 3GB max. That means 22-33 seconds load time if things would depend on the drive.
Yes, you can get that down to about 8-11 seconds. But after the game has loaded things wouldn't make a difference anymore.

And to be precise this means we're back to benchmark numbers again. In the real world no game loads 3TB data after it's started. It'll load in smaller chunks and usually getting a considerable amount of the engine up and running in the background already for most modern titles. Even in shooters like Battlefield:BC2 or MoH you have low loading times because of that.


The same goes for applications. If you open and close them all the time, reboot your computer all the time and expect everything to pop up instantly then yes, a SSD is a good investment. But 64gb isn't enough for that!
On the other hand side, on my workstations I rarely close apps. I just open them, leave em running, hibernate the computer if necessary (0,5W standby). In other words: most of the stuff is in the RAM anyways. My pagefile get's either reduced to 0 or very low numbers or, if necessary, use a ramdisk/drive.

So yes, it's a user decision that has to be made individually. You can't just throw an SSD into a system that idles around all day long or only sees sequential read every now and then. Unless you don't care about the money and don't want to wait for a better pricepoint to jump on the SSD train. For gamers it's usually just not worth it. For simmers there are also better ways to spend money :D but that's another story...

Personally, I would have 2 hard drives. I would put the OS on the bigger non-SSD drive. This would give you plenty of room for other games, storage, etc.

Then, I would install IL-2 on a small SSD. You would see a marked improvement in certain aspects of the game.

*Standard hard drives are so inexpensive these days and a single 60GB SSD would fill up so fast you would need another HD anyway. Heck, my IL-2 folder alone is around 25GB...and that's unmodded...:)

Aviar

Who forced you to do so, then? ;)

The thing is:
Loading games and textures as you posted isn't sequential reading and even in that, the SSD is in the advantage in most cases. There is no game that uses a single 2GB file that is loaded as a whole into memory - that's utter nonsense and a perfectly artificial test. Especially for gaming it's random read access and here is, where the SSD can really triumph, because it simply has no physical disc to turn and no arm to swing. As a result the most important thing for loading multiple files especially for gaming is the reaction time.
SSDs usually have a reaction time of 0.1 - 0.2ms. The fastest HDD (VelociRaptor from WD) has a reaction time of 3.6ms.
That's achieved by 10,000 RPMs, a special cooling case and 37dB A.
(That's 2db above the level of noise allowed in Germany's towns during night-time!)

@Pagefile:
Try setting the PageFile to 0 in Vista/Win7. Or try to disable it and see what happens to the file.

@Space used for Vista/Win7:
I have run Vista over a year on a 25GB partition. No problem. I only installed windows on this partition, all working programs on different HDD. Works nice and BTW is recommended with most professional programs, as you can access both drive simultaneously. Most professional programs don't even install if you force them to work on the systems-drive for the same reason.
I currently have all programs stored on my System Drive. That's about 12 professional photo- and video-editing tools, webdesign-stuff, etc. Total size: 29GB.

I've just built a new i7 system, and I decided to wait 6 months+ before putting an SSD in, as prices will fall and the drives will improve. But if you don't like adding things later, I think SSDs are worth getting - certainly when looking at the spec (& therefore price) of your intended system.
I bought cheaper corsair ram, and the cheaper asus MB, cheaper i7, and I don't suppose you could notice the difference, so if you need to think about money I'd save in those areas. If you don't need to save money (= why start this thread), of course get an SSD, and make it big.

What cpu cooler are you planning on?

@Feuerfalke
No one forced me and I never did. I said not much faster. And I even did some math in case you overlooked it again ;P

Even low-rpm drives that are FAR from Velos do a decent read. That is a fact.

The problem that most people don't realize is that an SSD might give you a GREAT benchmark score but almost no real world gaming value when it comes to game load times or FPS. You linked an article from anandtech so I'll link you another: http://www.anandtech.com/show/2614/14

Now these are just examples but instead of 1 or 2 average frames per second more I'd certainly dump the 350€ into a better graphics card, for this amount of money probably doubling, tripling or more the average FPS for most systems out there.

I hope that makes the logic I want to communicate clear. Yes, in Bench apps you do get great scores. Yes, if you multitask with I/O heavy software you do get better performance. But if you work, browse and game you do not get a better performance at all compared to other tweaks that will boost gaming performance through the roof!



Ok, now the discussion about space. SSD's perform well until the fill up. You can't live on the edge with an SSD. So 64Gb are filled up swiftly. If you install your programs on a different HD you're not having faster FPS in gaming and not measurably faster program load times either. So that doesn't really make a lot of sense to me.

However, Windows itself is probably fine with 25Gb for the OS and some software. Then add a classic pagefile of about 4gb, hibernation fil about 4-12gb based on RAM and you're already seeing different numbers. Now imagine the user doesn't know how to move off the user data to another partition and we have another few potential GB landing right on the SSD.
Additionally the partinioned space is less than the capacity. For a 64Gb SSD it'd be roughly 59,5Gb available NTFS space. 74,4Gb for an 80Gb Model, 112 for an 120GB model and 148 for a 160Gb SSD.


However, as for games the space tends to vanish fast. Even IL-2 consumes 11Gb space modded.
I searched real quick and looked at a few other flightsims and X-Plane 9 would be about 71Gb without any mods, just the scenario packs. FSX has similar requirements. In other words, especially for simmers the space needed to run a game is increasing rapidly. You won't come far with an 64Gb SSD at all.



So yes, not all games load textures sequentially. However you would only benefit from that if you install it on an SSD which requires you to have a big SSD.
Secondly it's not entirely true. Sequential read doesn't mean the game needs to load a 2TB file. If you're looking at the anandtech link I posted (and there are many other around, I just chose this one because you seemed to trust the site) most games won't see a dramatic decrease of load performance. The opposite is the case! Many games don't use the read speeds of SSD's fully. In other words: they only load a bit faster.

Look at how quickly spore loads (procedural textures), almost no difference. Oblivion would load about a third faster on a SSD. Even the rescource hungry Crysis sees little increase of load times.


And now just calculate real quick what kind of performance improvement you can gain by spending 150€-350€ in processing power, RAM upgrade and / or a better / 2nd GPU.

My personal conclusion is that everyone really needs to sit down and look at these numbers and decide for himself if the benchmark numbers are worth the money.
You won't get a measurably better framerate, in most cases no reduced power consumption (unless you replace high-rpm drives, but not if you just add a SSD to your system - same goes for noise as well, unless you don't remove high-rpm drives you don't get a quieter system).
You do get faster boot though and overall better OS speed / responsiveness.
That means for gamers that need to look at what they'll spend their money at I'd recommend getting a better GPU / 2nd GPU, more RAM or a better CPU unless it'd mean getting overpriced high-end components.

But that is just my personal advice. I know things like these can be a bit emotional, especially for benchmark-oriented people. SSD's really help push the numbers in synthetic environments, that's for sure. Otherwise, stick with some real reviews and just consider what gives you the most "bang for the buck". And that's certainly not SSD's at the moment unless you really got a kickass PC already anyways.


As for the CPU cooler: I can recommend the Scythe Mugen 2. It's fair priced and really good performance for that.

I'm not yet decided on the cooler, so far I have a "safety" in my list which means a dedicated Intel cooler. I'm still hammering that out.

Oh and Thor - this is a socket 1366 CPU. I had toyed with the idea of getting myself that bad-@ss i7 980extreme but then I decided to lower my expectations a bit and shuffle a few €€ over to peripherals (the SSD and the RAM). As for the MoBo I've got to say I looked through the feature lists of the MoBos available at my dealer and I greatly prefer that one for being a bit more "future proof" (meaning for the next 1 - 2 years). I can always slap a better socket 1366 CPU in plus more RAM and I'll be fine. I wanted SATA-600 and USB 3, anyway. ;)

SSD questions aside, am i the only one who thinks that anything more than 4-6GB of RAM is way too much overkill for a gaming PC?

I can't think of anything that would use up that much RAM, unless i'm running SoW in window mode with a bunch of stuff in the background, including photoshop to edit my screenshots on the fly :-P

High end i7 CPU's are way overpriced for the minor difference in performance they offer. Yes, I know it is a 1366, and older socket than 1156 that I recommended.

There is no way you will ever convince me that Rampage III is worth the price. It is almost twice € than many of the boards that will do the job nicely. Personally I would use the difference to buy that Xonar Essence STX, but then again, I am an sort of an audiophile. :)

Also, weather you will use all of that 12 GB's of RAM is doubtful, or in near future. ;) 6 GB is a perfect choice, unless you are into video editing, where I would go with an AMD X6 and 8 GB in dual channel where according software packages can actually use the extra RAM and cores.


No, you're not the only one.

You're right -- nothing uses that much RAM at the moment.

OTOH, it's Alt-Tab heaven and RAM is cheap.

dduff

You probably could save ~$50 if you go for some OE/bulk parts instead of retail.

Retail is the same product in nicer box, plus you get some cables for free(well, they aren't exactly free...)

- Consider GIGABYTE GA-X58A-UD3R. It's cheaper, and an amazin motherboard.
- Mushkin Redline Pc3-12800 Ddr3 1600 6gb 3x2gb Cl6, it's cheaper and Lower latency: CL6.
- Mushkin Callisto Deluxe 120gb Ssd is cheap and GREAT performance. 2 x 60gb Callisto drives are 266€ but on RAID the performance is 33% more than one single 120gb.
- Consider Samsung Spinpoint F3 1tb Sata2. Amazing performance and very cheap.
- 460 it's a better option than 480. 480it's too much ineffective in terms of power consumtion and temperature. If you want 3D power, use 2 x 460 on SLI better than one single 480.
- Creative X-Fi can give you a lot of headache with drivers and computer freezes. But it's simply GREAT.

I have SSD's on work for servers. The performance is just AMAZING. Go SSD's everyday, but you need TRIM support and Windows7 to avoid the degradation problems of old SSD's.

What's the situation with SSD's, RAID and TRIM - I've read somewhere that whne put in RAID TRIM doesn't work. Or is this just for every other OS than Win7?

I have one 32G SSD for win and another 64G for simulators together with a normal 500G disc. Win loads fast, so do the simulators. As far as I know, 12G RAM would tend to higher the timings thus decreasing the overal performance of RAM...6 is far enough. As for cooler...noctua nh D-14, and I think for the price i7 920/930 + overclock is the best option. I opted for i5 750 just for the lower money needed

Thx for the opinions overall guys. I may decrease RAM to 6GB but the rest of the components is fixed now because I am limiting myself to a certain vendor who has a retail shop nearby. I have had a not so pleasant experience with online ordering a few years back so I am not going to cherry-pick components from this or that vendor just to save a few €uros. I'm sticking to one where I can actually go and kick up a stink if necessary. :mrgreen:

As far as I know there are some Intel controllers that pass Trim to Raid drives, however that is not an established method whatsoever yet so there is no guarantee. Let me make this a bit more clear. It is possible to use Trim for one SSD in a set of raid drives (e.g. 1 SSD + 1 MD). The operating system doesn't matter and it's not just Windows 7 affected. In fact that's probably part of the problem as a good raid should work on a purely hardware basis anyways.
However, TRIM in raid is already being worked on - at least Intel, Adaptec and Acrea are working on it and I assume others are too. But for now you should avoid the issue.
Also I doubt you'll need an SSD raid. Like I mentioned, even SSD's are already questionable and an added bonus. Yes, they do give performance but there are better options to increase perfomance unless you run I/O apps like databases and such.

I agree with your choice on the vendor and also to reduce the size of RAM for the gaming machine. 6gb is perfectly reasonable right now and you can always stack up with another 3 modules.

Picking a local vendor is always a good choice when you're putting a decent amount of money on the table. Sometimes there are components that are not broken but still not working perfectly either. For example coil whistle, slight vibrations etc. Depending on the vendor it can really cause some problems trying to get hardware with slight symptoms exchanged.

Go for 80 GB. Some units (namely Intel ones) are really fast but slow down when they are >90% full. Additionally with a bigger SSD drive you can install IL2 on it and enjoy fast startups ...

I bought an Intel 80 GB SSD, and I don't regret the 220€ I had to shell out, because this single upgrade resolved all my issues of slow loading of XP and IL2. There is enough space for Win XP, a couple of IL2 installs and some other stuff, and the drive is still filled at 70%.
I have also a1TB Samsung drives and a couple of 500 GB, Samsung, as work horses.

Cheers,
Insuber

+1

I would go for ramdrive, SSD are overpriced and hyped. 8GB to load game files leaving 4GB for OS. And i would buy two separate hard drives say (2) x 500 GB, i use one for windows and the second one for gaming.

LOL! I hear you. I just bought a new monitor and it had a bunch of dead pixels, it would have been a horror show to send back to an online vendor, especially since the neck for the base wouldn't come back out of the monitor; It wouldn't go back in the box!

I just walked into the store, plopped the (unclosable) box on the counter and the lady said "do you want to exchange or get a refund?" before I had a chance to even explain why I'm taking it back.

Worth a few extra bucks IMHO.

I would like to rephrase my statement about the sound card - loose it.

The thing that comes with Rampage boards is excellent, the only sound card that is better than this is the Xonar Essence, and to actually hear the difference you would need a very good system.

The X-Fi Titanium here is just a waste of money. Go with the Rampage. ;)

May I jump in as I am about to spend significant money on a new PC?
BUT This thread has raised a few of questions..

If it's inappropriate I'll post separately.

I am considering (almost decided on):
i7 950 Retail with Nehalem cooler
6Gb G.Skill NQ DDR3 160MHz (Triple Channel for ASUS board)
Coolermaster HAF912 Plus, Black, Chassis
OCZ ModXStream Pro 600w Silent SLI Ready ATX2 Modular
Asus Sabertooth X58 TUF Intel X58 (Socket 1366)
Crucial RealSSD C300 64GB 2.5" SATA 6Gb/s Solid State Hard Drive
Windows 7 Home Premium Operating System, Retail
1GB XFX HD 5870 XXX, PCI-E 2.0(x16), 5200MHz GDDR5, GPU 875MHz, 1600 Cores, DP/ 2x DL DVI-I/ HDMI (why buy PCIe 2.1?)

Plus existing:- 160Gb 7200 SATA HDD for OS, 160Gb 7200 SATA HDD for Documents/Photos/Crud and a R/W DVD.
My current 'Flight' disc is also a 160Gb WD 1600JS-00NCB1 7200 93.5MBps like the others.

So my questions.....
1. Isn't 1366 socket later/newer than 1156?
2. What's the better 'future' of these sockets/processors?
3. I was intending to use the SSD for my 'Flight' Drive (FSX at 17Gb including the SDK and IL-2/mods at 13.6Gb hopefully leaving plenty for SoW). These SSDs are quoted at something like 'up to 355MBps' vs my existing 93.5MBps. Would a new HDD really be better?
4. Does any genius know how much space SoW will take? :)

btw csThor (original poster? I'm stuck in 'Reply' :) ) The i7 950 only supports 1.5v memory not 1.6/1.65. (Source: my online chat with Intel Tech Team). Do you know what your 960 supports? I found it very easy to pick unsuitable memory.

Hoping for some replies..

klem

newer/older is irrelevant
1156 is the cutback budget version of the 1366 with less features but they are pretty much the same generation.

Probably neither. The P67 (socket 1155/2011 ??) based motherboards for Sandy Bridge will start to takeover from early next year.

Of course in terms of overclocking it seems the p67 motherboards may well have limitations with PCI bus etc locked to processor frequency which may give an extended life to the current chipsets.

Not sure what you asking here.

My tarot card guy predicts more than 5Gb and less than 100 GB ;)

If I understand you right you're asking if it was better to use an SSD instead of a regular HD. The answer is: depends on money.

One thing is for certain: If you go for a small SSD then definately put your OS on it. Not the games.
If you want to spend some money either get a bigger SSD or don't get an SSD at all and spend the money somewhere else (2nd GPU/better GPU, bit more Ram etc.).
Games do not run noticably faster / better on SSD. There are only a very few games that really run like 1% faster and load 10-40% faster. But once loaded you won't see any noticable difference anymore. (I linked a review about that in an earlier post but you can just search for one yourself)

Go SSD for sure. If you can afford it, get a 120GB to use for OS and games. Win7 rocks on SSD.

As for socket 1366, I wouldn't go down that path. Bang for buck you're better off with 1156, as the only difference you will notice will be in SLI / Crossfire bandwidth, and that will only become apparent if you're going to use 3 or more cards.

I don't know what SoW will ultimately be like on my 2 cards at 1920x1200 but I'm confident it will be more than enough.

Too late ... got the stuff yesterday and installed it right away. I'm still having issues (system runs but no pic on the monitor) but I'm taking the PC to the shop today. My guess is my 620W PSU is too weak ...

Well you won't regret it anyway, it should see through for a long time.

If you bought the system you posted on page 1, 650W should get you over the line, but only just. I'd say an 850W would be a better option.

You did remember to plug in the two molex connectors right? ;)

http://www.guru3d.com/article/zotac-geforce-gtx-480/9

Ah .. you said 620W :P, yeah you'd be pushing it I think. Good luck.

Yes, I did connect both but believe me the second one had me flabbergasted for a while. Because I hadn't installed the cable with that connector before I had to search for it in my "parts shack". Took me a while to figure it out ... and then find it. :mrgreen:

Only if you saved on the PSU, which would be a bad idea. 620 W PSU should be more than plenty to suffice your rig's power requirements. Higher brand PSU-s with 80% efficiency usually output much more than they are rated.

It's an Enermax PSU and already 4 years old. I'll take the PC to the shop in a few minutes and then we'll see ...

I have an Enermax PSU as well, albeit mine is a bit older - 6-7 years. It was the best thing money could buy at the time. I had some (fan started making too much nose) problems with mine but it is still working properly. The point is, as time passes by - electrolytes in PSU-s go. And thus the total output power goes down. Which might just be the case with your PSU.

Thanks for the replies guys and csThor I hope it's ok to continue using your thread. It may help others too.
Just to get my thoughts in order and I hope I don't offend anyone of I have misundertood....

A. HDD or SSD?

The "Negatives"
1. Cost
2. Drive Space (but I have plenty of HDD space for general purpose use)
3. "Not much faster than a Mechanical HDD in gameplay" if I understand correctly. I understand Madfish's comments about "In the real world no game loads 3TB data after it's started. It'll load in smaller chunks". But then Feuerfalke says "Especially for gaming it's random read access and here is, where the SSD can really triumph, because it simply has no physical disc to turn and no arm to swing. As a result the most important thing for loading multiple files especially for gaming is the reaction time. etc". Ermmm.......


The "Positives"
Fast loading:
I would sacrifice Windows Boot time for better gaming response (FSX, IL-2, SoW). Boot time is a one-off. For me it's all about smoother gameplay.
I know an SSD will not run the game much 'faster', that is mainly down to the CPU/memory/GPU/OS etc but I would have assumed it would help load new IL-2 maps/missions faster and remove some of those scenery update/player'joining' hesitations due to faster read speed of scenery data, a/c data etc. No?

Longer life/Reliablity
Takes a fraction of the Power of an HDD
Low (no) noise level (and there's not much demand of the HDDs while flying) although the pesky fans make most noise.

The "Uncertaintives"
The anandtech gaming load times vary from 1 second (Spore) to 21 seconds (Crysis) and minimum gaming FPS (although in Crysis) benefits from the SSD while average FPS shows marginal improvement. (Is Spore a serious benchmark?) And then this: http://www.samsung.com/global/busine...ence_Rev_3.pdf suggests only a 5-6% improvement in loading and FPS and "Although not quantifiable, there was a definite feeling of smoothness while running the system with the SSD."

Conclusion:
Given my experience with HDD failures :( and the small but definite improvements the SSD gives it seems right to go for a gaming SSD as that is my main concern. I'm not a "must load it now!" person when it comes to other applications and in any case the new rig will be much faster than anything else I have had before. If the SSD runs out of space I'll just have to relegate whichever sim is least used to a HDD or buy another SSD.

B. Socket 1336 seems to be my choice as futureproofing within a budget is one major criteria. I can't wait for the P67's early next year and overclocking is likely to become an issue in 3-4 years time. I'm sure I'll be able to overclock beyond an i7 960 so I won't double the CPU cost on one now. Also the money saved on an SSD won't get me from a 5870 to a 5970 GPU.

Any major opinions against?

Thanks again guys,

klem

@klem - maybe you should open a seperate thread :P

Anyways, games won't run smoother because they're on an SSD. Games also don't depend solely on their game folders content. The keyword here is IOPS. In- and Output operations. If you have nothing else than the game loading a regular mechanical disc is hardly slower than an SSD. Where the SSD really kicks in if the OS is loading components, messes with the pagefile etc. while the game's loading.

The biggest boost in perfomance will come from an OS on SSD. Games don't profit close as much as the OS from SSD storage.
Even Samsung testified that the average gain of LOAD TIME decrease is about 5% in fact it's 4,4 compared to a 10k mechanical disk. However, they didn't write anything about a ~5% FPS increase. Yes, if the game loads textures in the background you can gain a minimal performance increase but NO where near to 5%. Maybe 1% max. Usually it's an FPS or 2. But even that would be rubbish compared to the FPS increase you could gain by buying a better / 2nd GPU for that money spent. You could easily gain 30% or more by investing that money into a multigpu or high end gpu solution.

Let me explain it differently. If you have the OS on a seperate drive and the game loads from a mechanical drive that load time WILL be fast. However, if you load the game, load a new level and maybe record a full size FRAPS video to the same drive then things will get messy. That's something you could improve with an SSD but then again, do you know the size of 1080 fraps movies? ;P you'd fill up your SSD within 10 minutes.

So yeah, get an SSD big enough for the OS or big enough for the OS and games or just keep the money as it really won't affect game performance at all. There are better ways to spend money than an SSD for games.

Oh my ... Just as I expected the PSU is too weak for the combo of CPU and GFX card. The GTX 480 alone draws 42 Ampere under full load and the old PSU could only supply 36 Ampere. At least nothing bad ... can be solved by judicious application of money. :mrgreen:

Jagdhund kann Dir seine Erfahrungen berichten, frag ihn!

Kommst ein wenig spät ... hab alles schon gekauft. :mrgreen:

Thanks Madfish, I think I understand the bigger OS picture now and it's involvement in the game loading/running.

I am still going to get that 64Gb SSD, well you just have to jump in somewhere with the new stuff don't you :)

I'm going to load Win7 on it and transfer my Flight HDD to the new rig and see how it runs. After a while I'll move IL-2 and/or FSX to the SSD and see if there's any difference.

btw that report I posted a link for said:
Conclusions
Gamers want the game to load instantly and play at maximum possible frames per second (FPS) with all features turned on. Using that as our measurement objective we found:
• 4.4% improvement in average game loading time was obtained.
• 6.4% improvement in frames per second was measured.
• 33.5% improvement on one test and 58.3% on another was realized in system benchmarks.
Using a solid state drive will give the gamer the extra edge he or she is seeking.

The games that were used in the testing were:
• Call fo Duty 4
• Crysis
• FarCry 2
• Left4DEad
• Stalker Clear Sky

I'm not saying they're right, and it's not a great improvement, but I'll find out.

Be interesting to see what csThor makes of it too.

Speaking of whom - thanks for the thread csThor, it gave me a lot of useful info :)