I sometimes feel there is a bit of a "real world" factor that gets missed when benchmarks are reported. I understand the need to eliminate all other sources of interference to get true results. However, I do not use my video card, CPU, or SSD in a lab.
What I want to see included are results that reflect my personal computer use.
I was looking into SSDs and saw where someone reported how much faster his SSD loaded World of Warcraft. When I watched the YouTube video, the SSD loaded in about 18 seconds; the HDD in almost 60. I used a stopwatch to check my own V-Raptor system and found - hmm, about 18 seconds. No way that makes sense.
Well, it does. I only reboot about once every few weeks or so, but I play WoW about once a day. I'm certain Windows 7 has prefetched most of that into the 8GB of ram I've got on board and that's what's allowing WoW to load so fast.
So, unless I'm switching applications frequently or frequently rebooting (which I'm not), it doesn't seem an SSD is going to make nearly the profound impact for me that reviews show it does? I can't always tell because most of the reviews state something like "and we rebooted every time to avoid the impact of caching". What happens when I DON'T reboot my computer after running every application??
It would be nice to see something like this reflected in one page of the reviews. I think (lately) graphics card reviews have started to reflect this by showing benchmarks with all of the graphical features turned on or up (AA, AF, etc). I don't want to know how many FPS I'm going to get in Dragon Age with all the eye candy turned down. I want to know how many FPS I'm going to get when I turn all the eye candy UP.
Point being - I'd like to see at least some benchmarks on how hardware is going to impact performance on an everyday computer too, not just in the lab.
What I want to see included are results that reflect my personal computer use.
I was looking into SSDs and saw where someone reported how much faster his SSD loaded World of Warcraft. When I watched the YouTube video, the SSD loaded in about 18 seconds; the HDD in almost 60. I used a stopwatch to check my own V-Raptor system and found - hmm, about 18 seconds. No way that makes sense.
Well, it does. I only reboot about once every few weeks or so, but I play WoW about once a day. I'm certain Windows 7 has prefetched most of that into the 8GB of ram I've got on board and that's what's allowing WoW to load so fast.
So, unless I'm switching applications frequently or frequently rebooting (which I'm not), it doesn't seem an SSD is going to make nearly the profound impact for me that reviews show it does? I can't always tell because most of the reviews state something like "and we rebooted every time to avoid the impact of caching". What happens when I DON'T reboot my computer after running every application??
It would be nice to see something like this reflected in one page of the reviews. I think (lately) graphics card reviews have started to reflect this by showing benchmarks with all of the graphical features turned on or up (AA, AF, etc). I don't want to know how many FPS I'm going to get in Dragon Age with all the eye candy turned down. I want to know how many FPS I'm going to get when I turn all the eye candy UP.
Point being - I'd like to see at least some benchmarks on how hardware is going to impact performance on an everyday computer too, not just in the lab.