Re: SSD - a worthwhile upgrade?
Please don't flame me for being new here (long time lurker but only recent poster). I'm on AVF too with tons of posts there, but realised that there's a stronger modding community here.
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Having read through all the posts on here, I thought I would give my tuppence worth.
Over many years, my computing hobby has gone up and up to the point where I'm a bit of a connoisseur of pc building.
When cpu's got to the i7 920s level, I've found that any subsequent CPU upgrade hasn't really benefited much for what I use my PC for (gaming, media, work). If anything I do requires a little bit more oomph, I just OC the thing to 4ghz and it's sound.
Likewise, after getting a 5970, I've not upgraded my GPU for 2 odd years as nothing out there is really worth dismantling my pc for to replace it with (I hate draining and refilling the darn thing!).
SSD's on the otherhand have made a huge impact to my system as everything just feels so much more responsive. Clicking on Photoshop or even Word, and having it appear a second or so later is a revelation. You just get used to most things loading almost instantaneously.
I jumped on the bandwagon with a 120gb Intel Gen 2 when TRIM and Win7 support came into play. After that I was so impressed that I gave this to my missus and upgraded to a 256gb C300 so that I could put everything on the drive.
Did a OS reinstall last week, and reverted back to a previous image of my OS on my Samsung F3 1tb whilst my C300 was out of action. To say the difference in performance was noticeable is an understatement! I started getting frustrated when I was saving large images or video encodes and my pc would just freeze whilst it went about it's business. Dont even get me started when my antivirus kicked in. I would've thrown my TJ07 outta the window if it weren't so darn heavy :)
Like others here, I'd happily go back down to a Q6600 and a 4870.... just as long as I can take my C300 with me!
Re: SSD - a worthwhile upgrade?
Sorry shaithis - I hadn't realised the whole story there. I'll still stick to my opinion though :)
Re: SSD - a worthwhile upgrade?
As I mentioned before, I've not noticed a massive improvement in the start-up speeds of apps. i might be that i've just not noticed them or maybe it's just that my PC was running pretty nicely anyway.
I will say that recently I went back to using my P4 @ 3GHz laptop with 512MB RAM and GeForce FX Go5200 graphics card.
That thing was really slow. Not so much with programs starting by themselves, but when I was trying to do more than 1 or 2 things at a time it really did slow down. I really started to miss having a multi-core CPU and a decent amount of RAM.
When i tried playing an old game and was subjected to 12fps framrates I started to miss my GTX 480.
At no point did I think those problems would've been solved by a faster hard drive.
This is why I said before it depends on what you want to do as to whether an SSD will help much. If you wan to play Battlefield 3 at 1920*1080 on High or Ultra High, I'd say a GTX580 and Samsung F3 would give you better framerates than a 8800 GTS 512 and Crucial M4.
If you're going to load a program, close it, load it again, close it and then load a different one, then an SSD may be more noticeable.
To compare with what bobfoc said re his i7 chip, I'd say that I don't notice much difference between my OCZ Vertex SSD and my M4.
the reasons SSD might seem to make such an impact is the sudden change. If we'd all used hybrid drives between HDD and SSD the impact might have been less.
If you compare the best CPU, GPU and SSD from today with the best CPU, GPU and HDD from 15 years ago I imagine you'd see a massive jump in the performance of all 3 in the right circumstances.
Re: SSD - a worthwhile upgrade?
Quote:
Originally Posted by
GoogalyMoogaly
To compare with what bobfoc said re his i7 chip, I'd say that I don't notice much difference between my OCZ Vertex SSD and my M4.
the reasons SSD might seem to make such an impact is the sudden change. If we'd all used hybrid drives between HDD and SSD the impact might have been less.
If you compare the best CPU, GPU and SSD from today with the best CPU, GPU and HDD from 15 years ago I imagine you'd see a massive jump in the performance of all 3 in the right circumstances.
Agree with you on the above points.
I dont notice any difference between my Intel Gen2 and my C300.... but I do notice a difference between my Samsung F3 and any half decent SSD.
Randomly, I switched on my old Dell Pentium 333Mhz the other day before formatted it and threw it out. Cost me £2,000 back in the day. I had time to make a cup-a-soup and some toast before the darn thing was in a state where I could use it :surprised:
Re: SSD - a worthwhile upgrade?
Quote:
Originally Posted by
bobfoc
Agree with you on the above points.
I dont notice any difference between my Intel Gen2 and my C300.... but I do notice a difference between my Samsung F3 and any half decent SSD.
Randomly, I switched on my old Dell Pentium 333Mhz the other day before formatted it and threw it out. Cost me £2,000 back in the day. I had time to make a cup-a-soup and some toast before the darn thing was in a state where I could use it :surprised:
My point was that you said that after the i7 920 that newer cpus haven't really added a lot. Now until January 2011 when Intel released the SandyBridge chip, the i7 9xx chips were the enthusiast chips, the top of the range chips. So to say that in just under a year they haven't become redundant seemed odd. I suspect the difference between a December 2010 SSD and a current SSD isn't a big jump either.
Yes SSDs are faster than a HDD, but HDDs have been around for I don't know how many years. I had a mechanical 3.5" HDD on my 486 PC around 15 years ago. While HDDs have undergone some improvements in that time the basic architecture hasn't massively changed (from what I can tell). I suspect that if up until December 2010 Intel had stuck with the original Pentium architecture with just tweaks being done (and a single core) that the difference between that and one of the new SandyBridge-E Hex core chips might also be a little more noticeable!
So yeah, an SSD is faster than a HDD, but I don't think that was ever in doubt. The difference is, to some people, probably just more noticeable because we didn't really get anything in between a HDD and SSD. At least not to the extent we got stuff in between the Intel Pentium and the Core i7.
Anyway, I'm afraid this is starting to become trolling so I'll say that the only person that can really judge if an SSD is a worthwhile upgrade for any individual is that individual. The only way you're going to know is to try it.
Re: SSD - a worthwhile upgrade?
I think this thread's run its course now - unsubcribing - thanks for all the replies, very useful and informative :-).
