Curiosity cost the cat: Using an Intel X25-V 40gb SSD for gaming
By SomeJerk 1 Comments
I found that my December budget was doing better than expected so rather than doing the reasonable thing like picking up a new set of fine Italian leather shoes, a digital camera better than the 5mp one in my Android phone or treating family and friends around the world to better christmas gifts, I did what I decided against earlier in the year and bought the Intel X25-V 40 gigabyte SSD.
That's what she said - It looks so much smaller in real life. It comes with a mounting plate for setting up in 3.5" drive cages, comes with molex to SATA power cable as well as a plain SATA cable which is appreciated. Easy to install, detected by the bios, won't show up in Windows until you enter the administrative tools in Windows and set it up - tricky business that isn't covered in the simple installation manual it comes with. Give it a quick format and a partition, get Intel's SSD Toolbox and run all tests to make sure it works before going any farther, bad drives and bad RAM can be on the shelves.
Words
From the moment I placed the order, the plan was to use it as a games drive, limiting myself to 40 gigabytes might not be a bad idea. I intend to play Guild Wars 2 with the clan and being an MMO of sorts the performance should be improved by running on an SSD, possibly as much as the upgrade I gave my mostly World of Warcraft playing computer in 2005, going from half a gig to a full gigabyte of RAM - I was able to see every frame as I flew into Orgrimmar and could start running around the moment I landed, I saw shadows between the bank and auctionhouse rather than seeing a few frames of approach, waiting minutes before waking up at a barely done rendering flightmaster with completely invisible characters around me, god forbid I would turn and move towards the bank-AH area on 512 megabytes.Now. PC gaming. Either you have Steam or you're not playing many games. To successfully install Steam took the most part of an hour. A lot of uninstalling of barely gone anywhere installs, permissions changes, restarts, reboots and cablechecks took me nowhere, neither did taking the errors to Google where I got nothing but Steampowered.com drivel about how it happens if you're running a very intrusive piece of software that tries to latch onto it. Eventually I found this was common to Steam (and other) install processes on SSDs, the software is meant to switch some files around but the routine meant to do the file handling is slower than the one checking if it has proceeded as planned or not.
Once all was said and done, I realized both that I could have backed up most of the game data files, and that this was a very bad time to have to re-download over 20 gigabytes of games.
Numbers
With Civilization V kicked out of the system only to be reinstalled in the future when gamers are able to punch QC departements over the internet, I had three commonly played games of mine to try out, Left 4 Dead 2, Call of Kotick: Black Ops and Battlefield: Bad Company 2.I ran the most basic of tests, loading the game all the way to the main menu, and then opening up a map. I did do more tests in Black Ops single-player but it turns out all of your single-player process is not saved by Steam Cloud, so forget about that. I'd rather play through Modern Warfare 1 on Veteran. Again.
| Game and Test | 7200rpm SATA2 HD time | Intel X25-V SSD time | SSD to HD |
|---|---|---|---|
| Left 4 Dead 2 From pressing Play to the menu loading | 12s | 6 s | 6s / 50% |
| Left 4 Dead 2 Opening up a single-player campaign on Dead Center | 35s | 18s | 17s / 51% |
| Black Ops From pressing Play to the menu loading | 20s | 12s | 8s / 60% |
| Black Ops Opening up Multiplayer, including downloading of settings | 8s | 7s | 1s / 87% |
| Black Ops Making a private MP match, defaults (Summit) | 23s | 16s | 7 s / 69% |
| Bad Company 2 Loading all the way to the main menu appearing | 24s | 19s | 5s / 79% |
| Bad Company 2 Loading the penultimate single-player level | 19s | 7s | 12s / 36% |
I got the times by filming the entire process with my Samsung Galaxy S and investigated the video files the best I could to get the timing right. I also took the time to play around an hour of each game to try it out in practice, and indeed I experienced faster loading, also no drive-hiccups, which happened before when operating system and games were on the same drive. The loading gives me a little bit of an advantage, but outside of ensuring you won't get hit by drive-hiccups this is nothing I can recommend for FPS gamers unless you've got money to spare. If you're into MMOs, even if it's World of Warcraft, you will benefit greatly from an SSD.
Any games that have to load data regularly, something like Oblivion, a game that streams data from the drive, a larger game like APB or just any where people will be standing around you often with unique looks or combinations of items that have to be loaded to memory, which is any MMO really, you might want to consider an SSD, especially if your computer already is more than enough - an SSD is the only upgrade left.. Better load times, enemies will pop into view faster, as will friendly players, terrain, everything. Less deaths, less frustration. Just not much so for FPS games though I will stick with this for L4D2 and Black Ops, while moving Bad Company 2 back to the main drive.
What got the best speed boost was my Firefox install, that I moved from the HD to the SSD. A PHP BB post that would take seconds to edit and update is instant. Browsing is significantly faster, the limit is only the speed web server you're talking to can send to you. Pages draw and redraw so much faster it's close to when I ran Firefox on a ram-drive in the past.
I keep thinking that I could have spent this on something for my studio instead, or put it towards a new digital camera, but I'm a curious man who wants to try things out and answer unanswered questions. I found the As to my own Qs, and I hope you've found yours.
And then the talent scout asks
Intel X25-V 40gb SSD, $89.99 on NewEggAKAI ASQ10 Rating:
-
Update 1: Tried Civ 5 again since yet another patch promising fixing crashes came out, did not notice any improved performance where it counts - AI turns. Once the NDA allows me to talk I might say a few words about an upcoming game and my experience on it on an SSD, but that would be a separate post. Also gotta add that there are tiny SSDs of performance I do not know that you simply put into an IDE or SATA port on your motherboard, that could be a good idea if you want to speed up tiny pieces of software such as browsers, and yes - swapfiles are best stored on healthy, speedy HDs.
Update 2: Closed testing of a certain secret game HD vs SSD, I would not want it on an ordinary HD. Loadtimes in lower single digits, make yourself a cup of tea if you're on a HD. No loadchug, the only slow moments come from the game and the servers themselves. Using an SSD has saved my life many times in that game by allowing me to be the first one to react.