The PC (Personal Computer) is a highly configurable and upgradable gaming platform that, among home systems, sports the widest variety of control methods, largest library of games, and cutting edge graphics and sound capabilities.
@mclakers: Hey, I was thinking about getting a cooler master V6GT cooler for my cpu, I have the exact same mobo. I was wondering by any chance to you have an antec 900, 902, or 1200 and does it fit? I worry about the side panel or if that cpu cooler is too big because of the side fan or the side fan holders on the side panel.
What type of ram are you using and can you get it up to 1600Mhz?
How is the western digital using the 6 gig per second on the mobo? Is it loud as I heard it was? I was going to buy a samsung spinpoint 1TB instead because i've been reading the reviews on newegg for reliability and WD now seems kind of sketchy. If I don't notice the difference, it's just a newer format without the speed and louder, i'm okay with compromising to a samsung spinpoint instead for pc games.
Lastly what SSD drive are you using? What brand? Should I refund the kingston SSD and get a ocz vertex 2 sandforce SSD? it cost like $50 more and i'm not sure if I want to spend that kind of money. Or is it good enough with the slower read and write speed? I just need a reliable drive that's fast enough, considering I only spent like $104 which isn't very much. Your input is very important because you have parts that I was going to consider buying.
Great i'm part of a dying breed of gamers who likes things fast, higher resolution, triple the framerate and without limitations. I'm sure i'm getting a better response here than posting on tested.com where everyone is probally clueless. You realise none of this is helping me make a decision.
"
lol, probably the opposite my friend. We most likely have more pc gamers, that is.
Anyway, the SSD will definitely be faster than any mechanical hard drive as random access, and reads. I would say that if all you are going to do on your computer is gaming, then you might be better off going with the larger hard drive (my steamapps folder would never fit on my intel ssd!). However, if you multitask and do any content creation, an SSD can be a valuable upgrade.
As an example:
My computer has gone through several upgrades, the most recent of which was an upgrade to the Gen 2 Intel 80gb SSD (this was before sandforce and the c300 drives came out).
I do a lot of multitasking, and in general the speedup in programs starting and just the "feel" of the system was very noticeable. When games were installed on the SSD, they did load faster but not enough to really make that much difference to me as they loaded quickly already (much, much faster than some of the console load times I've experienced. Not to diss them at all, just saying that those load times being, acceptable my computer before the SSD already had good load times, so the SSD really wasn't worth the marginal upgrade just for that. OTOH: I mostly play single player, but if you play a lof of multiplayer, i believe Loyd Case wrote an article that states SSD's can help in multiplayer gaming (it may even be posted on tested? I dont remember where i read it tbh).
The upgrade was worth it to me because read and random access times were greatly improved, aiding my surely adhd like multitasking :p
My storage subsystem is setup as such, using mklinks mostly
SSD: Windows Install, and any disk intensive applications (mainly photo, audio, and video editors). 320gb Seagate Sata II: Users folder(s), non-disk intensive applications, Steamapps folder 80gb WD: downloads, project files backups, and virtual machines, mostly temporary/dynamic storage that can change daily.
External 500gb WD: Media, music, video, audio, (I copy videos and other media I'm editing to the SSD and then the finished project will be stored here for permanent storage)
Hopefully that helps, basically if you find value in the SSD, then by all means go for it as it will be an improvement, it's just that some people will find value and others won't. But at $100, that's not too bad for an SSD :). I'm glad to see they have come down a lot in price!
EDIT: @OP: " If I installed all the games on a sata 3 western digital hardrive and all the programs on the SSD drive, it's going to be fast. Isn't sata 3, with X58 mobos for i7 cpus faster than normal hardrives? Like twice as fast? I'm not sure, I didn't research this. Might be the best of both worlds. "
Just in case ur still curious about that: SATA 3 (6gb/s) has the potential to be much faster than SATA 2 (3.0gb/s), but a mechanical hard drive can barely (if at all, the raptors may come close when bursting) saturate the SATA 2 (3.0gb/s) standard, much less SATA 3 (6gb/s). An SSD, OTOH, can utilize that extra bandwidth. An example is the c300 SSD, it will be bottlenecked on SATA 2 (3gb/s). If you have a SATA 3 drive and supporting mobo, you may as well use it but otherwise I wouldn't worry too much right now. The kingston drive you proposed would work fine either way.
I finally am using this drive, 30 seconds to load windows. Read speeds are fast, however updating windows 7 completely took 30 gigs of that. If you bought a 40 gig SSD drive, ouch, you have no memory left for programs.
I am using my western digital 6 gig per second drive, I was running the FFXIV benchmark on it, I actually got a slightly higher score than my SSD drive for the game. It's still a good drive I suppose, however I doubt it loads windows as fast. I was looking on the mobo box, it advertise that the sata 3 6gigs per second is better for using two of those hardrives in raid. I doubt it's going to make much of a difference on a single hardrive. It's also quite quiet dispite the misconceptions, then again maybe I can't hear it over the fans of my pc case. I can sort of hear it a bit though, that might be my third drive which is sort of loud.
Overall the SSD drive does make my life easier, everything loads fast, however the write speeds aren't great for this kingston SSD drive. I mean sure it might only take a fraction of the time to install programs, however i'm sure it's twice as fast with better SSD drives. That's the only weakness, however i'm not always going to be writing stuff on it, most of the benefits will be derived from the read speed for me.
My point is, when the SSD drives are cheaper eventually and your building a new system, also you have a 1tb hardrive as your second drive, I recommend getting a SSD drive for your main operating system drive. It makes my life so much easier compared to waiting for windows to load forever, or restarting from an upgrade of drivers takes forever. Also everything is instant, well my drive isn't the fastest however it's nice to have programs like photoshop open in a few seconds. I don't have that many programs installed right now for testing purposes yet. Until I do, i'll post more about it and my experiences with it.
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