Still don't think I need an SSD

[Carfax83]

I you mentioned 8GB as an optimal number, as though more RAM was detrimental to performance. The only benefit of having 8GB is that it's cheaper. If you ever want to start toying with VMs while doing large photoshop work, and then be able to fire up a game without closing them, then you'll run into issues.

That's because we were talking about gaming setups. 8GB is optimal for a gaming machine, and most of us here are gamers.

Now if we were talking about workstations or something, then by all means, 24 or even 32GB of memory can be considered.

I hate waiting. If I click on a button, I should get a response. 10 seconds to load a level is an eternity for me. I would switch from one system to another in the ME series in at most 2 seconds.

And this is the crux of the matter I suppose. Everyone has different tolerance levels when it comes to waiting for their computer to do stuff.

According to the event viewer, my average boot up time is anywhere from 25 to 35 seconds (the RAID screen makes boot up slightly longer plus I have a ton of stuff on my drives). To me that's a non issue because I usually press the power button and then walk off and do something else. It's not like I'm sitting there looking at my screen..

And for Crysis 3, a fast SSD would probably load that same level in about 7 seconds. A 3 second difference.

Mass Effect 3 also loads quickly generally speaking because the textures and map sizes are relatively light. A level or area may load in 5 seconds on my machine, hardly time consuming.

I understand very well how memory management can minimize disk access. Windows generally has very good memory and cache management (thread balancing is another matter). However, everything still has to be read from disk at some point. If you load up Crysis3, then load up BF3, then FarCry3 (three's seem to be my thing today), the initial loads are going to take larger. Your 12GB of RAM is insufficient to prefetch even all three of those games, their textures and models, and any other associated data. Prefetching will also only load executable data into memory - not static textures and models. Most of the I/O you experience while playing a game isn't loading the code - it's loading models and textures. That will stay in cache afterwards, but it won't be loaded when you start up your computer.

Everything that you say here is true.. But when you look at the overall load times of modern games, most of them load in well under 20 seconds.

A far cry from the old days when loading games could take 40 plus seconds on average and over a minute in many cases cases.

I suppose the reduction in load times is due to the fact that the hardware has evolved at a much faster rate than the software over the years.

It also happened to be released in 2003. The present expansion has improved graphics a fair amount from the original, but the underlying game engine is the same as it was at release. Blizzard isn't in a position to re-write the program to take advantage of modern operating system functionality. Like Zap said - it's a gigantic world, and then you're dealing with other users entering and leaving your rendered region, each of them with their own character customizations and equipment.

Well in this case, I can certainly see SSDs helping a great deal. It's a good thing I don't play WoW then eh?

Again, cache only helps if the memory isn't needed for anything else. The moment the RAM is needed for active pages, cached data gets destroyed. If you had more than 8GB of RAM, you could load up several games in sequence, and chances are they'd still have some data left in your cache.

Most of the memory in my machine is utilized for cache. Like I mentioned earlier, most games use under 2GB. Only a handful go over that limit and not by much, so for all intents and purposes, most of the memory in my machine is underutilized on a daily basis.

Unless I'm constantly loading up different games all day, the cache will never be used up.

The bottom line is that you'll get better overall performance from a system with 8GB and an SSD than another system with 16GB and a spinning hard drive. Prefetching and superfetching still happen on both systems, but the moment you have to access something not in memory, SSDs win.

Yes, as I've already admitted many times before, an SSD would increase the performance of my machine..

However, the question is would the added cost and much lower capacity of an SSD be worth the performance increase over my current setup?

For me the answer is no. I'm the kind of guy that's a minimalist, in the sense that I just like to have one main drive for everything. Going to an SSD would change that, because unless I get a terabyte drive, then I'm going to have to manage multiple drives.

Certainly this will eventually change as SSD prices become lower and their capacities increase, ie the Crucial M500.

So I'm certainly getting there, just not now :biggrin:

 

[Hellhammer]

Everything that you say here is true.. But when you look at the overall load times of modern games, most of them load in well under 20 seconds.

A far cry from the old days when loading games could take 40 plus seconds on average and over a minute in many cases cases.

It should not be forgotten that while the evolution of hard drives has not been at the same level as the evolution of SSDs, the progress has not stagnated. A hard drive from five years ago is not really comparable to a drive bought today (assuming we look at similar price points, small hard drives are still slow).

 

[jaqie]

For what it's worth, I have an IBM x41 tablet laptop, which has a little 1.8" pata 60gb drive, a 1.5GHz intel pent mobile cpu (P3 based), and 2GB DDR2... I installed windows 7 32 bit on it and then optimized it quite thoroughly software side...

It starts up in about three times the time my win7 x64 6 core thuban @ 3.5GHz with 16GB DDR3 1600 and OCZ agility 3 SSD does.

Never underestimate the power of thorough software optimizing...

That having been said, I recently tuned up my desktop to be SSD optimized, though I have absolute crud-tons of things running on it along with turning on tons of options in the OS which slow things down but make things nicer, and some things use the HDD (500gb seagate 7200.7 sata2) instead of the SSD, though the OS is installed on the SSD as are almost all my apps.