I think you can stop your "input" then Synthesis since you are obviously an outlier case, and don't need to keep derailing discussion with your special circumstances.
Once again, my Steam folder is currently about 150GB by itself, and I only have about half my games installed. And I, too, used to play Microsoft Flight Simulator and have a huge install of that with lots of add-on scenery and aircraft, so it could be even worse. Guess I'm an "outlier" whose views can be dismissed too!
Yeah, most people only have 3-4 games installed at any one point. At least in my circle of friends. Lest you get into the 4 month window of "computer is so slow because my hard drive is so fragmented from all this shit I have on there. Guess I better run a 6 hour defragment."
But we both know what would fix that issue.
bowen on
not a doctor, not a lawyer, examples I use may not be fully researched so don't take out of context plz, don't @ me
The thing about Hibernation is, with the amount of time it takes to Resume 8gb of ram, it's basically the same amount of time to boot the PC. Although I suppose you would have all your apps open already to save some time still.
The thing about Hibernation is, with the amount of time it takes to Resume 8gb of ram, it's basically the same amount of time to boot the PC. Although I suppose you would have all your apps open already to save some time still.
Ah, but here is the trick; my hiberfil.sys is on a SSD
I think you can stop your "input" then Synthesis since you are obviously an outlier case, and don't need to keep derailing discussion with your special circumstances.
Once again, my Steam folder is currently about 150GB by itself, and I only have about half my games installed. And I, too, used to play Microsoft Flight Simulator and have a huge install of that with lots of add-on scenery and aircraft, so it could be even worse. Guess I'm an "outlier" whose views can be dismissed too!
Yeah, most people only have 3-4 games installed at any one point. At least in my circle of friends. Lest you get into the 4 month window of "computer is so slow because my hard drive is so fragmented from all this shit I have on there. Guess I better run a 6 hour defragment."
But we both know what would fix that issue.
Actually, since I've never experienced it, you would have to enlighten me. Except that since I've never experienced it I'm finding it really hard to care. Although I will admit my curiosity is piqued by the idea that there are people who don't have regular defrags automatically scheduled to take place in the middle of the night.
I think you can stop your "input" then Synthesis since you are obviously an outlier case, and don't need to keep derailing discussion with your special circumstances.
Once again, my Steam folder is currently about 150GB by itself, and I only have about half my games installed. And I, too, used to play Microsoft Flight Simulator and have a huge install of that with lots of add-on scenery and aircraft, so it could be even worse. Guess I'm an "outlier" whose views can be dismissed too!
Yeah, most people only have 3-4 games installed at any one point. At least in my circle of friends. Lest you get into the 4 month window of "computer is so slow because my hard drive is so fragmented from all this shit I have on there. Guess I better run a 6 hour defragment."
But we both know what would fix that issue.
Actually, since I've never experienced it, you would have to enlighten me. Except that since I've never experienced it I'm finding it really hard to care. Although I will admit my curiosity is piqued by the idea that there are people who don't have regular defrags automatically scheduled to take place in the middle of the night.
I mean, I've just been doing that for about 15 years.
Don't get me wrong, it's cool. So are certain types of snowglobes. Paying a few extra hundred dollars for that privilege is not for me personally.
Right now you seem to be going by what you think it does as opposed to what it actually does. If you used an SSD-equipped computer -- for an extended period, doing normal people things, not silly Youtube demonstrations and game benchmarks -- you would quickly see that it is worth the investment. It's not just the boot times, and the application load times, and big file transfers. It's the seek times. Reading and writing a lot of little things from different places on the disk is really really slow on platters, and really fucking fast on SSDs. Guess what -- that happens a lot.
Mitigating I/O slowness is one of the principal challenges of Operating System development. Microsoft's solution was to aggressively cache a bunch of shit into memory based on what the OS thinks you use a lot. This is why Vista was such a memory hog when it came out, and why it would often have little "vista moments" where it would sit there thrashing away at your platters trying to dump things into memory. 7 is a little smarter about it but the most effective solution to the I/O problem is to simply tackle the problem at its source: replace the hard disk with something faster.
Like the other guy said, it's night and day and until you've used one you really have no idea, and you're like one of those people five-six years ago saying multicore isn't worth it because some applications aren't multithreaded. Except worse because this is an even bigger upgrade than multicore.
Like seriously, even web pages load faster under certain conditions. If the page has a lot of images, the browser has to hit the disk cache for each individual image. If it's just one big image it doesn't matter, but with a few dozen little ones it adds up very quickly. You really notice the difference on an SSD.
Once again, my Steam folder is currently about 150GB by itself, and I only have about half my games installed. And I, too, used to play Microsoft Flight Simulator and have a huge install of that with lots of add-on scenery and aircraft, so it could be even worse. Guess I'm an "outlier" whose views can be dismissed too!
You can use SteamTool or a similar gadget to move bigger, less-used or non-multiplayer games to your platters. It's totally seamless.
You can still play the "stored" games, they just load up from your platter instead of your SSD. Also, for some reason you can't do this with HL2, TF2 and various mods... not sure why that is. As for non-steam games, you can simply move them over if you find yourself running out of space. Some of them don't like that, in which case you can use file system links to make it appear to the OS that the program is still on your C drive when it's actually been moved to the D drive.
You can still play the "stored" games, they just load up from your platter instead of your SSD.
So if half my games have to load from my dreadfully slow platter, doesn't this bring us back to my original point of an SSD not being big enough for all of my games?
Unless you're operating under some kind of budget I would rather see you spend $150 extra on an SSD than a 4 core processor or something.
Firstly, I'm pretty sure that this entire discussion has been conducted in the context of most people building systems on a budget, and we've all agreed that if money is no object, fuck yeah, buy yourself an SSD or three.
Also, no offense, but what do you expect people to believe that what you'd "rather see" them do is relevant in their decision making process?
Thirdly, I am mystified by the seeming implication that a quad-core CPU is some sort of extreme luxury. Unless you're building a very no-frills, e-mail-and-internet-only rig for the girlfriend or your elderly parents, I wouldn't think of getting anything less than one of the AMD gimped "triple-cores." Games and other applications are already starting to make good use of more-than-dual-core processors and the utilization is only going to keep increasing. I consider any dual-core processor to be de facto borderline obsolete for a desktop system, and building a new system with one is pretty much just silly unless it's for a very bare-bones specification like the ones I mentioned above.
Unless you're multitasking a lot, an Intel 3.2 GHz processor is an Intel 3.2 GHz processor. Your bottlenecks are, generally, in this order:
1) Hard drive
2) Memory
3) Bus
We're talking Von Neumann shit though at that point. Should you be watching a movie, while encoding an mp3, while playing a video game, then, we can change that. At this point in time, no, games do not use multicore much. I think wow of all games just started, and that's with money to burn. And it's still terrible at it.
So yeah, I'd rather see you use a P4 single core machine with an SSD than a quad core and a 5400 Hard drive (lol laptops wat), sorry.
bowen on
not a doctor, not a lawyer, examples I use may not be fully researched so don't take out of context plz, don't @ me
Unless you're multitasking a lot, an Intel 3.2 GHz processor is an Intel 3.2 GHz processor.
This is...just not true.
At this point in time, no, games do not use multicore much. I think wow of all games just started, and that's with money to burn. And it's still terrible at it.
Your supporting evidence that games don't make much use of multicore processors yet is a game originally released seven years ago?
So yeah, I'd rather see you use a P4 single core machine
Go try running Metro 2033 and The Witcher 2 on that P4 single core machine that I'm sure you're using and get back to me. In the meantime, I'm sorry, but I simply can't take anything you say seriously after that last post.
In fact, as of that post, I have officially become convinced that there is nothing edifying I can still get from this thread, so I will see you crazy kids around. Boy, I sure hope Magic Pink is enjoying his new PC, huh?
You can still play the "stored" games, they just load up from your platter instead of your SSD.
So if half my games have to load from my dreadfully slow platter, doesn't this bring us back to my original point of an SSD not being big enough for all of my games?
We've been over this. The SSD isn't really for games, although it will improve game performance in certain areas. It's for everything else you do with the computer, which is going to be like 80% of your time spent on it, unless you are the type of person who somehow finds time in the day to play 10 different games and keep track of them all.
Faster map loads in your favourite multiplayer shooters are nice though.
Firstly, I'm pretty sure that this entire discussion has been conducted in the context of most people building systems on a budget, and we've all agreed that if money is no object, fuck yeah, buy yourself an SSD or three.
If you're on a ~1000 dollar budget, you would be well advised to try to find room for a $200 or so SSD in addition to the dirt cheap platter you were already going to buy because it's absolutely worth it, even if it means settling for a slightly less fancy video card and/or CPU. You may not be able to crank all the dials to eleven in a handful of the absolute latest games that have literally just come out the other week. But you will have a better computer overall, which frankly spells better value for your money.
At this point SSDs are no longer an exotic luxury part that should only be considered if "money is no object". They're very much within reach of the average consumer. Fuck, some notebooks are now coming with an SSD soldered right into the motherboard. This is mainstream computing hardware, which narrows a massive performance gap in modern PC configurations, and everyone should consider one for their next upgrade.
I think you can stop your "input" then Synthesis since you are obviously an outlier case, and don't need to keep derailing discussion with your special circumstances.
Once again, my Steam folder is currently about 150GB by itself, and I only have about half my games installed. And I, too, used to play Microsoft Flight Simulator and have a huge install of that with lots of add-on scenery and aircraft, so it could be even worse. Guess I'm an "outlier" whose views can be dismissed too!
Yeah, most people only have 3-4 games installed at any one point. At least in my circle of friends. Lest you get into the 4 month window of "computer is so slow because my hard drive is so fragmented from all this shit I have on there. Guess I better run a 6 hour defragment."
But we both know what would fix that issue.
Actually, since I've never experienced it, you would have to enlighten me. Except that since I've never experienced it I'm finding it really hard to care. Although I will admit my curiosity is piqued by the idea that there are people who don't have regular defrags automatically scheduled to take place in the middle of the night.
I mean, I've just been doing that for about 15 years.
Same here. I'm in the dark when it comes to this, since for at least five years, every time I check the pre-defrag analysis, it always says '0%'. I can see this really sucking if you spend every waking hour sitting at your desktop, but I think a lot of people, myself included, have periods of time we regularly leave to do something else (for me, it's my job), that I can schedule a weekly or biweekly defragmentation process for. Still, that's a "lucky" convenience, I guess--but I'd be willing to wager that a lot of people in this thread leave their desktops unattended for periods of time (especially those who elect to not shut their machines down on a daily basis), so I don't think it's particularly rare.
As for quantity--anecdotally speaking, like everyone else, the only people I know with gaming desktops who have less than 3 or 4 games installed on them are strict WoW addicts (strict enough to have multiple pre-scheduled commitments each week anyway). Especially due to Steam (which I'm not personally a fan for), having ten games is not at all rare, which probably has to do with the cheapness of 1 TB/500 GB drives from Western Digital and other companies. Of course, not everyone I know has a gaming desktop--though due to the fact I live in a college town, easily 90% of people who own desktops only have them for gaming, since laptops are virtually mandatory for students with any tendency to use computers daily anyway. I can no longer think of anyone who only owns a desktop without a laptop, presently, though a prior roommate did for a while (before he bought a cheap laptop).
Azio, you make a noteworthy point--apparently, SSDs are not for games, or not strictly anyway. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that at least 80% of what I use my gaming desktop for is, in fact, gaming or immediately related to gaming (space-intensive mods). Except for my brief love-affair with Adobe Premiere Pro, almost all my non-gaming activity, mostly work, is done on my laptop. Spending 80% of my time not playing games on a computer, for me personally, sucks (I'm doing it right now, on this month long "vacation"). In this area, one of the things that bothers me less is load times--I can still open a Word document in less than a second, a notepad in less than that--I'm no artist, so Photoshop's loading time isn't really a worry to me either. Brings me back to my earlier point--a lot of people could benefit from an SSD a lot more than myself (or other people with similar concerns). To me, especially for the games I play, the difference between a $100 and a $200 CPU and a $100 and a $200 GPU is not "slightly less fancy", in my experience, unless I stopped playing any game less than 3 years old. Between a $50 GPU and a $250 one, it's a huge difference. If I had the choice between buying a $200 sound card and a $200 SSD, that would be different, but that's just a reflection of my personal proprieties--I'm happy with onboard sound. Some people are happy with a $100 GPU. I'm not, myself.
Of course, not everyone is chasing DirectX 11 shaders at 1080p, in which case, spending $100 or $200 less on a video card or a CPU probably makes a lot less a difference. Similarly, I have no problem waiting for SSDs to drop in price until I'm not forced to take $200 budget from something else to enjoy one.
To me, especially for the games I play, the difference between a $100 and a $200 CPU and a $100 and a $200 GPU is not "slightly less fancy", in my experience, unless I stopped playing any game less than 3 years old.
My video card currently retails for $80-100 and it seems to be fine. It won't give me 60 frames in Witcher 2 but I can still run everything at max settings, basically, except for like a half dozen or so titles that have just come out recently. And even the newer titles, which have to be dialled down a bit from "Ultra" territory, still look decent and run well enough that I'm not bothered by the performance. For a couple years everything was targeted to console hardware so it wasn't really necessary to have anything faster than, say, a 4870. Recently though, games are getting more intensive.
But I get that you mainly use your desktop as a gaming system primarily, not everyone does that but it's not uncommon either. If you want more frames above all else then obviously you're going to want a fast video card. I got the impression that OP was looking for more of a do-everything machine, though, which means they might benefit from faster I/O
To me, especially for the games I play, the difference between a $100 and a $200 CPU and a $100 and a $200 GPU is not "slightly less fancy", in my experience, unless I stopped playing any game less than 3 years old.
My video card currently retails for $80-100 and it seems to be fine. It won't give me 60 frames in Witcher 2 but I can still run everything at max settings, basically, except for like a half dozen or so titles that have just come out recently. And even the newer titles, which have to be dialled down a bit from "Ultra" territory, still look decent and run well enough that I'm not bothered by the performance.
A month ago I had some cash to blow on an upgrade and it was like, I can replace my video card with one that will get me about 40% better framerates in the games I can already play. Or I can replace the slowest thing in my machine with something that's up to 200 times faster in certain cases. With video cards I usually wait until I can reasonably afford something that's twice as powerful as what I currently have, so I chose the SSD.
But I get that you mainly use your desktop as a gaming system primarily, not everyone does that but it's not uncommon either. If you want more frames above all else then obviously you're going to want a fast video card. I got the impression that OP was looking for more of a do-everything machine, though, which means they might benefit from faster I/O
You're not far off the mark. I think Magic Pink was dealing from a really long backlog--namely, a strict inability to play a lot of new games period. I could be mistaken, but when it was initially brought up, he had no interest in a SSD, in part because of unfamiliarity, and in part because new HDD standards are still radically faster than anything on his old desktop--again, 15 years is a long time. Hence, the reason why his setup didn't have an SSD (Dell does offer SSD on certain setups as well as their laptops, though unfortunately, those have had a lot of problems, though a lot of the complaints have more to do with Dell). An SSD, while certainly an option, is not "needs one to feel like a modern PC", particularly in MP's case, I'd say.
(Once again, lots of text!)
What you've described--the difficult choice to make--is understandable. I was confronted with a similar decision when I bought my new GPUs back in the summer. A new PSU was mandatory, so part of my budget went to that. I considered a lot of upgrades (new sound card, video capture card, also an SSD, a mix of a few). already had the best CPU available on my motherboard. I went with the GPU option for the following reason:
1) With the GPU option, I could either get an 70-80% increase (this isn't an exaggeration--I did heavy benchmark work following the upgrade) from the GPU option for all of my games that relied heavily 3D acceleration (which is basically every high-end game I have, including many games several years old that were impossible to run well when they came out, Cyrsis and FSX).
2) With the SSD option. I could get an increase of a few dozen times (maybe even 100 times, though probably not, given my options) for just under a third of my games. A 20 second loading time to bring up Windows once a day isn't an issue. A half-second loading time for Word isn't either. Games take a long time to load, so that's what I'd use a monster of an SSD drive to do.
I went with the GPU option, because it gave more more bang for my buck, and also for reasons for reliability (at the time, monster SSDs like that also had a few reliability issues here and there, versus my GPU selection, which was famed for its reliability).
I could have gone with a compromise option, but at the time, I didn't have that much free time to sit around and contemplate the options, and with gaming desktops, I've tended towards "If you're going to do something, commit to it" as of late. A pair of WD Caviar Blacks are hardly poor choices either, I'm confident. Which brings me back to my original point--the real estate cost did not warrant it for my particular needs. I can understand your own choice, Azio--you decided to play the waiting game. I'm doing the same, because SSDs, like everything else, are going to get cheaper. Eventually, they should meet my needs as well.
As I said, I'm chasing high framerates at 1080p and often with DirectX 11 shaders. Not everyone is, of course. But being able to do so is one of the reasons I buy multiplatform games on PC rather than on Xbox 360 or PS3.
Final thought: if any computer component "changes your life," then you probably need to get one. A life, that is.
Right. Cuz they're just toys. Distractions. Sinkholes for people with no purpose. Nobody's job revolves around using them, they can't do anything for you, and using one produces nothing.
Open your goddamn eyes.
The right component can allow you to do things you couldnt before, do things better, do things faster, do things cheaper.
It's like your use your computer to play games exclusively* and have zero understanding of what else can be accomplished with one.
*And still, an SSD would get you to playing games faster, and also expediting play within many of them.
Ok ok :P I guess a lot of people think that SSDs are only for fast boot times. Wuh?
With conventional drives being really cheap, I don't find it prohibitive to get both. i7 is definitely silly to get if you're going to pretty much only play WoW. An i5 2500k is currently what, $220? That's a great price for a really good processor, I could certainly find myself fitting an SSD into an i5 build.
It can be assumed that being "blight on the Earth" for leaving your PC on, and a shorter PC boot-up time being close to a life-changing experience were also facetiousness.
$220 is a little more than I paid for my (admittedly older) Intel quad core (4.0) a bit more than 2 years back, naturally there's more to it than clock speed. For a bit less than $220, you could get a 120 GB, not the fastest one out there but well-received. I'd wait for something double the size, personally, but for some people that might be all they need.
I'm a cheap bastard. I want quality but I don't want to spend a whole lot. I wrote how much I paid for everything in the build thread. To get a "good" ssd that isn't just a boot drive, I'd have to spend more on that that I did for any one of my components, i52500k included.
Without experiencing the phenominal cosmic power in an itty-bitty living space, it's really hard to justify spending 200 on a HD that's half the size of the 500gb drive I just spend $40 on.
I think the point is that when it comes to budgetary considerations, an SSD (as awesome as they are) is still firmly in the luxury category. That doesn't mean that there's no reason to get one. Or that it's a waste of money. It just means that you shouldn't make draconian sacrifices on other components just to squeeze one in.
If you're debating whether or not to buy an i5-2500k & 40GB Vertex 2 or an i7-2600k, there's certainly a compelling argument for the former. But if you're debating between an i3-2100 & 40GB Vertex 2 or an i5-2500k, you'd be silly to hamstring your CPU power for the benefit of an SSD.
If you're debating whether or not to buy a GTX460 & 40GB Vertex 2 or a GTX570, you could probably make a decent argument for the SSD. But if it's a decision between a HD5670 & 40GB Vertex 2 or a GTX460, sacrificing for the SSD would be a huge mistake.
Without experiencing the phenominal cosmic power in an itty-bitty living space, it's really hard to justify spending 200 on a HD that's half the size of the 500gb drive I just spend $40 on.
Someone's going to take you literally on the "without experiencing the phenominal cosmic power" part. In my own experience with an SSD laptop, I'd say it's still pretty hard. To others, Windows booting up in more than x seconds makes all the difference in the world. Your experience may vary.
If you're debating whether or not to buy a GTX460 & 40GB Vertex 2 or a GTX570, you could probably make a decent argument for the SSD. But if it's a decision between a HD5670 & 40GB Vertex 2 or a GTX460, sacrificing for the SSD would be a huge mistake.
Like any part of a setup, you have to weigh the costs versus benefits. Given that we were throwing around Pentium 4 CPUs not very long ago, some people will think a HD5670 is a small "price" (out of your budget) to pay for being able to start Windows and a few productivity apps much faster. I actually think it's a pretty reasonable set of markers, though my current GPU requirements were significantly higher.
Of course, a nice thing is that nothing is stopping you from purchasing an SSD later--since, as even the staunchest SSD advocates have seem to recognize, you'll be needing a large, affordable form of storage anyway--but trading out cards for an upgrade can be a bit less convenient than sticking in a new drive. And, of course, you'll have to determine whether it's worth it at that point as well.
I gotta say, loading up a L4D2 map in half a second is the bee's knees. Or clicking "enter world" in wow and suddenly Orgrimmar is pretty awesome. Though I only play 2-3 games at a time, and installing is fast enough on the SSD so I don't really need to worry about the dredge of installing games so not having them installed at a whim isn't a big deal.
I think I installed visual studio in about... 2 minutes on my SSD and with a normal drive that takes probably about an hour. So... yeah.
bowen on
not a doctor, not a lawyer, examples I use may not be fully researched so don't take out of context plz, don't @ me
for the record, I download newly purchased games from steam, copy the entire directory within /steamapps/ to my TB drive, and never worry about chewing up GBs of bandwidth everytime I want the game to be installed or not. it takes seconds to "reinstall" (move it back from the TB drive to the SSD)
I'm sure there's even easier more efficient ways of doing it. but complaints about needing to keep games installed to save time are specious, at best.
for the record, I download newly purchased games from steam, copy the entire directory within /steamapps/ to my TB drive, and never worry about chewing up GBs of bandwidth everytime I want the game to be installed or not. it takes seconds to "reinstall" (move it back from the TB drive to the SSD)
I'm sure there's even easier more efficient ways of doing it. but complaints about needing to keep games installed to save time are specious, at best.
SteamTool. It provides a GUI frontend to the whole process, and you can still play games that are stored on your secondary drive.
I think we should just leave this at where it really should have started (and nearly did, but whatever, it's forums, we do all love arguing;): SSDs are great. And they're also a luxury item to anyone who's building the best gaming PC they can build on a restricted budget (which will obviously be better served by directing the cash into a stronger GPU/CPU combo.)
But if you're happy with your system performance in gaming, and want a nice boost, or if you can spare some extra cash on your next build, SSDs bring much goodness to the world.
Speaking of number of games installed, I have 44 installed out of 142 (this is just on Steam only, there's about 5-8 I have installed from GOG.com and some other places). Good lord!
Yeah; World of Warcraft is hovering around 30GB right now, and a typical Windows 7 install might run around 20-25GB. With 60GB, you'd have to do some tweaks like moving all your user profiles/pagefile/hiberfil off to another drive, and you'd be an expansion pack away from troubletown.
Speaking of number of games installed, I have 44 installed out of 142 (this is just on Steam only, there's about 5-8 I have installed from GOG.com and some other places). Good lord!
I'm the inverse of you ~5 Steam games, and many, many times that of non-Steam games (including old CRPGs, games like OpenTTD, probably in the area of 40).
I've got about a dozen I play regularly, and I'm not in the business of rotating them, since I don't know what gaming itch I might encounter any given day. My friends have fewer games, and some make greater use of Steam, but would laugh at the idea of uninstalling a game before finishing it, or feeling obligated to finish a game before moving to another.
Synth, even rotation them isn't a deal because they install in a minute or two. I think the longest was install so far was visual studio topping out close to 7 minutes.
bowen on
not a doctor, not a lawyer, examples I use may not be fully researched so don't take out of context plz, don't @ me
Posts
Yeah, most people only have 3-4 games installed at any one point. At least in my circle of friends. Lest you get into the 4 month window of "computer is so slow because my hard drive is so fragmented from all this shit I have on there. Guess I better run a 6 hour defragment."
But we both know what would fix that issue.
I always end up pressing reset. No matter what PSU or MoBo I have.
Stupid sleep.
Ah, but here is the trick; my hiberfil.sys is on a SSD
Actually, since I've never experienced it, you would have to enlighten me. Except that since I've never experienced it I'm finding it really hard to care. Although I will admit my curiosity is piqued by the idea that there are people who don't have regular defrags automatically scheduled to take place in the middle of the night.
I mean, I've just been doing that for about 15 years.
Mitigating I/O slowness is one of the principal challenges of Operating System development. Microsoft's solution was to aggressively cache a bunch of shit into memory based on what the OS thinks you use a lot. This is why Vista was such a memory hog when it came out, and why it would often have little "vista moments" where it would sit there thrashing away at your platters trying to dump things into memory. 7 is a little smarter about it but the most effective solution to the I/O problem is to simply tackle the problem at its source: replace the hard disk with something faster.
Like the other guy said, it's night and day and until you've used one you really have no idea, and you're like one of those people five-six years ago saying multicore isn't worth it because some applications aren't multithreaded. Except worse because this is an even bigger upgrade than multicore.
Like seriously, even web pages load faster under certain conditions. If the page has a lot of images, the browser has to hit the disk cache for each individual image. If it's just one big image it doesn't matter, but with a few dozen little ones it adds up very quickly. You really notice the difference on an SSD.
You can use SteamTool or a similar gadget to move bigger, less-used or non-multiplayer games to your platters. It's totally seamless.
You can still play the "stored" games, they just load up from your platter instead of your SSD. Also, for some reason you can't do this with HL2, TF2 and various mods... not sure why that is. As for non-steam games, you can simply move them over if you find yourself running out of space. Some of them don't like that, in which case you can use file system links to make it appear to the OS that the program is still on your C drive when it's actually been moved to the D drive.
So if half my games have to load from my dreadfully slow platter, doesn't this bring us back to my original point of an SSD not being big enough for all of my games?
Firstly, I'm pretty sure that this entire discussion has been conducted in the context of most people building systems on a budget, and we've all agreed that if money is no object, fuck yeah, buy yourself an SSD or three.
Also, no offense, but what do you expect people to believe that what you'd "rather see" them do is relevant in their decision making process?
Thirdly, I am mystified by the seeming implication that a quad-core CPU is some sort of extreme luxury. Unless you're building a very no-frills, e-mail-and-internet-only rig for the girlfriend or your elderly parents, I wouldn't think of getting anything less than one of the AMD gimped "triple-cores." Games and other applications are already starting to make good use of more-than-dual-core processors and the utilization is only going to keep increasing. I consider any dual-core processor to be de facto borderline obsolete for a desktop system, and building a new system with one is pretty much just silly unless it's for a very bare-bones specification like the ones I mentioned above.
1) Hard drive
2) Memory
3) Bus
We're talking Von Neumann shit though at that point. Should you be watching a movie, while encoding an mp3, while playing a video game, then, we can change that. At this point in time, no, games do not use multicore much. I think wow of all games just started, and that's with money to burn. And it's still terrible at it.
So yeah, I'd rather see you use a P4 single core machine with an SSD than a quad core and a 5400 Hard drive (lol laptops wat), sorry.
This is...just not true.
Your supporting evidence that games don't make much use of multicore processors yet is a game originally released seven years ago?
Go try running Metro 2033 and The Witcher 2 on that P4 single core machine that I'm sure you're using and get back to me. In the meantime, I'm sorry, but I simply can't take anything you say seriously after that last post.
In fact, as of that post, I have officially become convinced that there is nothing edifying I can still get from this thread, so I will see you crazy kids around. Boy, I sure hope Magic Pink is enjoying his new PC, huh?
Faster map loads in your favourite multiplayer shooters are nice though.
If you're on a ~1000 dollar budget, you would be well advised to try to find room for a $200 or so SSD in addition to the dirt cheap platter you were already going to buy because it's absolutely worth it, even if it means settling for a slightly less fancy video card and/or CPU. You may not be able to crank all the dials to eleven in a handful of the absolute latest games that have literally just come out the other week. But you will have a better computer overall, which frankly spells better value for your money.
At this point SSDs are no longer an exotic luxury part that should only be considered if "money is no object". They're very much within reach of the average consumer. Fuck, some notebooks are now coming with an SSD soldered right into the motherboard. This is mainstream computing hardware, which narrows a massive performance gap in modern PC configurations, and everyone should consider one for their next upgrade.
Same here. I'm in the dark when it comes to this, since for at least five years, every time I check the pre-defrag analysis, it always says '0%'. I can see this really sucking if you spend every waking hour sitting at your desktop, but I think a lot of people, myself included, have periods of time we regularly leave to do something else (for me, it's my job), that I can schedule a weekly or biweekly defragmentation process for. Still, that's a "lucky" convenience, I guess--but I'd be willing to wager that a lot of people in this thread leave their desktops unattended for periods of time (especially those who elect to not shut their machines down on a daily basis), so I don't think it's particularly rare.
As for quantity--anecdotally speaking, like everyone else, the only people I know with gaming desktops who have less than 3 or 4 games installed on them are strict WoW addicts (strict enough to have multiple pre-scheduled commitments each week anyway). Especially due to Steam (which I'm not personally a fan for), having ten games is not at all rare, which probably has to do with the cheapness of 1 TB/500 GB drives from Western Digital and other companies. Of course, not everyone I know has a gaming desktop--though due to the fact I live in a college town, easily 90% of people who own desktops only have them for gaming, since laptops are virtually mandatory for students with any tendency to use computers daily anyway. I can no longer think of anyone who only owns a desktop without a laptop, presently, though a prior roommate did for a while (before he bought a cheap laptop).
Azio, you make a noteworthy point--apparently, SSDs are not for games, or not strictly anyway. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that at least 80% of what I use my gaming desktop for is, in fact, gaming or immediately related to gaming (space-intensive mods). Except for my brief love-affair with Adobe Premiere Pro, almost all my non-gaming activity, mostly work, is done on my laptop. Spending 80% of my time not playing games on a computer, for me personally, sucks (I'm doing it right now, on this month long "vacation"). In this area, one of the things that bothers me less is load times--I can still open a Word document in less than a second, a notepad in less than that--I'm no artist, so Photoshop's loading time isn't really a worry to me either. Brings me back to my earlier point--a lot of people could benefit from an SSD a lot more than myself (or other people with similar concerns). To me, especially for the games I play, the difference between a $100 and a $200 CPU and a $100 and a $200 GPU is not "slightly less fancy", in my experience, unless I stopped playing any game less than 3 years old. Between a $50 GPU and a $250 one, it's a huge difference. If I had the choice between buying a $200 sound card and a $200 SSD, that would be different, but that's just a reflection of my personal proprieties--I'm happy with onboard sound. Some people are happy with a $100 GPU. I'm not, myself.
Of course, not everyone is chasing DirectX 11 shaders at 1080p, in which case, spending $100 or $200 less on a video card or a CPU probably makes a lot less a difference. Similarly, I have no problem waiting for SSDs to drop in price until I'm not forced to take $200 budget from something else to enjoy one.
But I get that you mainly use your desktop as a gaming system primarily, not everyone does that but it's not uncommon either. If you want more frames above all else then obviously you're going to want a fast video card. I got the impression that OP was looking for more of a do-everything machine, though, which means they might benefit from faster I/O
You're not far off the mark. I think Magic Pink was dealing from a really long backlog--namely, a strict inability to play a lot of new games period. I could be mistaken, but when it was initially brought up, he had no interest in a SSD, in part because of unfamiliarity, and in part because new HDD standards are still radically faster than anything on his old desktop--again, 15 years is a long time. Hence, the reason why his setup didn't have an SSD (Dell does offer SSD on certain setups as well as their laptops, though unfortunately, those have had a lot of problems, though a lot of the complaints have more to do with Dell). An SSD, while certainly an option, is not "needs one to feel like a modern PC", particularly in MP's case, I'd say.
(Once again, lots of text!)
1) With the GPU option, I could either get an 70-80% increase (this isn't an exaggeration--I did heavy benchmark work following the upgrade) from the GPU option for all of my games that relied heavily 3D acceleration (which is basically every high-end game I have, including many games several years old that were impossible to run well when they came out, Cyrsis and FSX).
2) With the SSD option. I could get an increase of a few dozen times (maybe even 100 times, though probably not, given my options) for just under a third of my games. A 20 second loading time to bring up Windows once a day isn't an issue. A half-second loading time for Word isn't either. Games take a long time to load, so that's what I'd use a monster of an SSD drive to do.
I went with the GPU option, because it gave more more bang for my buck, and also for reasons for reliability (at the time, monster SSDs like that also had a few reliability issues here and there, versus my GPU selection, which was famed for its reliability).
I could have gone with a compromise option, but at the time, I didn't have that much free time to sit around and contemplate the options, and with gaming desktops, I've tended towards "If you're going to do something, commit to it" as of late. A pair of WD Caviar Blacks are hardly poor choices either, I'm confident. Which brings me back to my original point--the real estate cost did not warrant it for my particular needs. I can understand your own choice, Azio--you decided to play the waiting game. I'm doing the same, because SSDs, like everything else, are going to get cheaper. Eventually, they should meet my needs as well.
As I said, I'm chasing high framerates at 1080p and often with DirectX 11 shaders. Not everyone is, of course. But being able to do so is one of the reasons I buy multiplatform games on PC rather than on Xbox 360 or PS3.
Right. Cuz they're just toys. Distractions. Sinkholes for people with no purpose. Nobody's job revolves around using them, they can't do anything for you, and using one produces nothing.
Open your goddamn eyes.
The right component can allow you to do things you couldnt before, do things better, do things faster, do things cheaper.
It's like your use your computer to play games exclusively* and have zero understanding of what else can be accomplished with one.
*And still, an SSD would get you to playing games faster, and also expediting play within many of them.
I was being facetious.
It probably wasn't clear but I was getting agitated from his pigheadedness.
With conventional drives being really cheap, I don't find it prohibitive to get both. i7 is definitely silly to get if you're going to pretty much only play WoW. An i5 2500k is currently what, $220? That's a great price for a really good processor, I could certainly find myself fitting an SSD into an i5 build.
$220 is a little more than I paid for my (admittedly older) Intel quad core (4.0) a bit more than 2 years back, naturally there's more to it than clock speed. For a bit less than $220, you could get a 120 GB, not the fastest one out there but well-received. I'd wait for something double the size, personally, but for some people that might be all they need.
I'm a cheap bastard. I want quality but I don't want to spend a whole lot. I wrote how much I paid for everything in the build thread. To get a "good" ssd that isn't just a boot drive, I'd have to spend more on that that I did for any one of my components, i52500k included.
Without experiencing the phenominal cosmic power in an itty-bitty living space, it's really hard to justify spending 200 on a HD that's half the size of the 500gb drive I just spend $40 on.
If you're debating whether or not to buy an i5-2500k & 40GB Vertex 2 or an i7-2600k, there's certainly a compelling argument for the former. But if you're debating between an i3-2100 & 40GB Vertex 2 or an i5-2500k, you'd be silly to hamstring your CPU power for the benefit of an SSD.
If you're debating whether or not to buy a GTX460 & 40GB Vertex 2 or a GTX570, you could probably make a decent argument for the SSD. But if it's a decision between a HD5670 & 40GB Vertex 2 or a GTX460, sacrificing for the SSD would be a huge mistake.
Someone's going to take you literally on the "without experiencing the phenominal cosmic power" part. In my own experience with an SSD laptop, I'd say it's still pretty hard. To others, Windows booting up in more than x seconds makes all the difference in the world. Your experience may vary.
Like any part of a setup, you have to weigh the costs versus benefits. Given that we were throwing around Pentium 4 CPUs not very long ago, some people will think a HD5670 is a small "price" (out of your budget) to pay for being able to start Windows and a few productivity apps much faster. I actually think it's a pretty reasonable set of markers, though my current GPU requirements were significantly higher.
Of course, a nice thing is that nothing is stopping you from purchasing an SSD later--since, as even the staunchest SSD advocates have seem to recognize, you'll be needing a large, affordable form of storage anyway--but trading out cards for an upgrade can be a bit less convenient than sticking in a new drive. And, of course, you'll have to determine whether it's worth it at that point as well.
I think I installed visual studio in about... 2 minutes on my SSD and with a normal drive that takes probably about an hour. So... yeah.
I'm sure there's even easier more efficient ways of doing it. but complaints about needing to keep games installed to save time are specious, at best.
SteamTool. It provides a GUI frontend to the whole process, and you can still play games that are stored on your secondary drive.
But if you're happy with your system performance in gaming, and want a nice boost, or if you can spare some extra cash on your next build, SSDs bring much goodness to the world.
If I end up with another 100 bucks or so for my build I might get an SSD. Would 60GB cover my OS and WoW at the least?
I'm the inverse of you
I've got about a dozen I play regularly, and I'm not in the business of rotating them, since I don't know what gaming itch I might encounter any given day. My friends have fewer games, and some make greater use of Steam, but would laugh at the idea of uninstalling a game before finishing it, or feeling obligated to finish a game before moving to another.