Windows 7+SSD drive= gaming goodness!

[Skoshi Tiger]

Hi there, just thought I'ld pass on my experiences with my upgrade.

My system specs are

CPU e8500 @ 3.8GHz
M/B XfX 790i Ultra
4 Gig 1333Mhz DDR3 RAM
9800GTX graphics card

I was running Vista Home Premium 64Bit from a WD500GB HDD.

Running Il2 black death track at 1680x1050 I was getting about 60FPS for most of the run with it dipping down to the low 20's when there are the explosions at the airstrips towards the end of the track. (High Settings except 3D gunners disabled)

Yesterday I upgraded to Windows 7 Ultimate running on a 64GB Super Talent SSD.

Now I'm running at 60 for most of the track and it's only dropping to 45 FPS at the slowest Spots! I'm also getting to a useable desktop in about 38 seconds from hitting the power button. (Yes I've got a stop watch!)

I am really blown away by the difference.

I got the Windows 7 (legitimately) through a deal at work, though the SSD is very expensive at about $260AUD.

Well I'm happy at any rate. The over all smoothness of the game has improved alot.

Now to start saving up for a graphics card for SOW, Though I will have to move MS-Office onto a HDD to install SOW on my SSD! (It's already 3/4 full! 64GB is so SMALL!!!!)

Cheers

[zapatista]

congratulations

so now in 2010 you have just paid top dollar for the state of the art technology of the day, and you can finally run il2-1946 in all its glory (a game released in December 2006, based on a gfx engine created in 2000)

and your hopes for running BoB smoothly on this are based on what exactly ?

sorry, couldnt help myself, but somebody had to say it

ignore my post, enjoy your new pc, it sounds great !

[Baron]

I think he had the pc for quite some time, its just the SSD thats new

[Skoshi Tiger]

As Barron said , just the change in OS and the SSD are new. After going to all the trouble of installing a new OS on my pc the jump to SSD for a system drive is a no-brainer. It gives my ancient system (over a year old) a healthy boost in startup and load times.

This change has given me 10FPS on my minimum speed in a track that is used to bench mark IL2-1946, and as you have pointed out Zapatista the sim is not optimised for dual CPU's and modern graphics cards.

Until BOB comes out anyone would be silly to buy a system for it. My post was just to inform people of the improvements I experienced in my upgrade.

Since then I've had a chance to fly online some more and the improvement in minimum frames gives the sim a smoothness that I have not experienced in the past.

Sure my systems will have HDD in them for the forseeable future, the cost makes them ideal for Photo's, music and videos. But after seeing the improvements in performance I can see that the SSD are the way to go for systems and programs like flight sims.

I personally didn't think $260aud FOR 64GB was too bad, I remember when I got my first computer way back when, an Apple ][+, and the hard drive was $1000US for 10 Megabytes! That was too much and had to do with 160K floppies!

Cheers!

[Baron]

Been thinking of getting a ssd myselfe. Seems the most logical step before desiding my pc is to slow.

Think many people overlook ssd`s as a big part of a fast gamingrig nowdays.

[zapatista]

skoshi,

how fast is the hd read access on the ssd drive ?

sata is in the usually in the range of 100-150 mb/sec (burst speed), and 70 to 120 average read (my sata drive runs at 117 burst and 80 average for ex)

a good free proggy to benchmark it with is hdtach (http://www.simplisoftware.com/Public...request=HdTach)

would be interesting to see what the sd drive does in a modern pc.

[Gnomie]

With regards to SSDs an gaming: loading times can of course be improved dramatically, but the framerates should be the same. Why? Because as long as you have plenty of RAM (which you do) there is no reason why the game should be accessing your harddrive during play. All the necessary information is transferred to your RAM during loading, after which the harddrive is not used much anymore.

So I think the improvement in framerates is the fact that you're now playing on a clean install of Windows 7 instead of an old, cluttered install of whatever you were using before.

Anyway: I agree 100% that an SSD is far the best thing you can invest in to get a quicker and more responsive PC in general!

[gprr]

Originally Posted by Gnomie

With regards to SSDs an gaming: loading times can of course be improved dramatically, but the framerates should be the same. Why? Because as long as you have plenty of RAM (which you do) there is no reason why the game should be accessing your harddrive during play. All the necessary information is transferred to your RAM during loading, after which the harddrive is not used much anymore.

If you just look at your bussy HD led while running Black Death track...
My self with 6GB RAM + 2GB V.Card memory buffer and it still holds my game

gprr

[Skoshi Tiger]

Originally Posted by zapatista

skoshi,

how fast is the hd read access on the ssd drive ?

sata is in the usually in the range of 100-150 mb/sec (burst speed), and 70 to 120 average read (my sata drive runs at 117 burst and 80 average for ex)

a good free proggy to benchmark it with is hdtach (http://www.simplisoftware.com/Public...request=HdTach)

would be interesting to see what the sd drive does in a modern pc.

Hi, tried to download HDTask, but it doesn't run under windows 7 64bit.

Using HT Tune Pro 4.01 my SATA II SSD drive measured a transfer rate of Minimum 136.9 MB/s (right at the begining of the test, most of the other lows were over 150 MB/s), Maximum of 209.5 MB/s and an average of 178.5 MB/s. It had a Access time 0f 0.1ms, and a burst rate of 211.7MB/s.

Trying to fit a useful system on 64GB drive is very hard! It fills up to fast!!!!


Gnomie, Hi! You could be right, I didn't test IL2 under just windows 7 without the SSD. But all up It was all a move in a positive direction.

Cheers!

[gprr]

Hi all

Found this SSD performance game benching:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/2614/14

Cheers
gprr