SSD for gaming partition

[DarkAmeba]

I'm putting together a new build, primary purpose will be "hackintosh" running OSX for everyday use. I am an "occasional" PC gamer, so I will be dual booting windows on the system.

I've done extensive research on SSDs, and I have concluded I will clearly feel the difference in my everyday tasks. I will be buying an OCZ Vertex, as I feel the technology is too young for an investment as considerable as one of the Intel drives. I have not found a definitive answer to this question in my research, so I am asking for advice based on your experiences.

My question is simple: in your own experiences, would it be worth it to purchase a second SSD for my windows partition? I already have an older 74gb Raptor (old 8mb cache version) which I am considering using. It seems to me that since all I will be doing is playing TF2/L4D and an occasional other game, an SSD would not be worth the cost for my "gaming" partition. When my Raptor was new, I always was first to load, which resulted in me waiting on everyone else who had slower drives. Would the advantages of an SSD over my old Raptor be worth the ~$120 cost on a partition used solely for games?

Thanks in advance!

 

[alcoholbob]

If you are ONLY booting to windows to play the occasional Source-based game, then stick to the Raptor. If you're playing a multiplayer frag game you're typically waiting for the lowest common denominator anyway.

 

[DarkAmeba]

Originally posted by: Astrallite
If you are ONLY booting to windows to play the occasional Source-based game, then stick to the Raptor. If you're playing a multiplayer frag game you're typically waiting for the lowest common denominator anyway.

Basically what I was thinking. I was half hoping someone would have an earth shattering justification for me picking up two nice new SSDs, but I honestly don't see the need for more than one. My gameplay will be limited to source games, SC2, the occasional RTS, and possibly some Crysis (mostly just to see what everyone talks about) and I don't see any of these being substantially improved with a lighting fast hard drive/ssd.

 

[alcoholbob]

On-the-fly texture loading for Crysis on Very High (if that is your intent--assuming you have the hardware for it) is pretty demanding and even my X25-E can't handle it without stuttering (I'm working with i7 @ 4ghz and dual overclocked gtx 285s). My guess is some sort of crazy RAID Intel ssd setup would be necessary with very very high random read performance.

That said I *don't* have this problem when I reduce textures to High mode...my guess is its like Doom 3 Very High mode, 1% visual benefit with 50% the performance hit. If you have a gaming performance issue that's throughput limited, going from Raptor to SSD is unlikely to fix it.

 

[DarkAmeba]

Originally posted by: Astrallite
On-the-fly texture loading for Crysis on Very High (if that is your intent--assuming you have the hardware for it) is pretty demanding and even my X25-E can't handle it without stuttering (I'm working with i7 @ 4ghz and dual overclocked gtx 285s). My guess is some sort of crazy RAID Intel ssd setup would be necessary with very very high random read performance.

Yikes... I knew the hardware demands were outrageous... but geez. Ok, for purposes of this thread, "very high" crysis is out of the question. (perhaps even crisis in general.. its certainly not critically important to me.. I have lots of games to play) If one X-25 chokes on it, it's clearly out of my budget even if the video card I end up getting could handle it (9800GTX+ for OSX compat., or possibly a 4870/90)

Edit:

Originally posted by: Astrallite
That said I *don't* have this problem when I reduce textures to High mode...my guess is its like Doom 3 Very High mode, 1% visual benefit with 50% the performance hit. If you have a gaming performance issue that's throughput limited, going from Raptor to SSD is unlikely to fix it.

Yeah.. good point, and I certainly could survive with "high" textures, especially if it's like Doom's joke "very high"

 

[alcoholbob]

Hahah, well I went off-topic. There won't be another Crysis-like game until the next computer you build. The next Crysis engine (Cryengine 3) is actually less intensive and is designed to run on consoles.

For normal use, your OS partition with an SSD is a great choice. For the gaming side its not critical. Even if loads are faster, they aren't instantaneous (a 40 second load might become 30 seconds) and the additional cost is far less noticeable then spending money on a better video card.

 

[DarkAmeba]

Thanks for the thoughts sounds like my instincts were correct.