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| IL-2 Sturmovik The famous combat flight simulator. |
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#1
10-12-2010, 10:54 PM
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@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. 
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#2
10-13-2010, 04:16 AM
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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. 
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#3
10-13-2010, 10:03 AM
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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 
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#4
10-13-2010, 01:37 PM
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OTOH, it's Alt-Tab heaven and RAM is cheap. dduff
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#5
10-13-2010, 01:50 PM
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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...)
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#6
10-13-2010, 11:41 AM
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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.Quote:
__________________
LEVEL BOMBING MANUAL v2.0 | Dedicated Bomber Squadron 'MUSTANG' - compilation of online air victories
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#7
10-13-2010, 05:39 PM
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- 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. Last edited by SG1_Gunkan; 10-13-2010 at 05:41 PM.
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#8
10-13-2010, 05:48 PM
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Quote:
__________________
LEVEL BOMBING MANUAL v2.0 | Dedicated Bomber Squadron 'MUSTANG' - compilation of online air victories
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#9
10-13-2010, 08:12 PM
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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
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#10
10-15-2010, 05:19 AM
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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. Last edited by Madfish; 10-15-2010 at 05:21 AM.
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