Gaming I was blown away

[Joe88]

the one that interests me is http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820167093
the new Intel 520 series. i read reviews and it seems like a great pick, especially considering it comes with a 5 year warranty

can't really order it now though since I reside in China and Newegg won't ship there.
I don't know any store that has it in stock and that ships to China.

what about newegg china?

http://www.newegg.com.cn/Search.aspx?keyword=ssd

 

[Costello]

yeah thats where I usually buy my PC stuff, but they don't have the Intel 520.

 

[raulpica]

the one that interests me is http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820167093
the new Intel 520 series. i read reviews and it seems like a great pick, especially considering it comes with a 5 year warranty

can't really order it now though since I reside in China and Newegg won't ship there.
I don't know any store that has it in stock and that ships to China.

I've read the reviews on it too, and they say that it's a REALLY good SSD.

I'm probably going to get that in a year or so when I build my PC. It'll still be decent, and the price should drop like crazy in the meantime.

 

[exangel]

exangel made an interesting point in another thread: SSDs should not be used as a boot drive (since you only boot Windows once) but as a dedicated gaming drive (since games will load a lot, especially when loading maps). I may try this out some day (using a 40-60GB drive since I don't have as much time for games as I used to).

Regarding SSD, even though the OP is probably not going to get one, I really want to mention something about them because I've been using SSD for about a year now. (Went from using a 60GB SATA 2 SSD as boot, then reverted to mechanical HDD as boot with my Steam directory & a couple other games on a 120GB SATA III SSD after some testing last summer/fall.)

I often see people suggesting them for a boot drive but I disagree until the prices drop dramatically further. Especially considering the change to boot technology that Windows 8 will introduce.

Boot times aren't important for gaming unless you play competitive multiplayer games and want to be prepared for worst case scenarios of having to reboot in the middle of grouping. But that doesn't mean getting an SSD is useless. It's just that, at the current price per gigabyte, one should consider these things instead:

1. A 7200 RPM mechanical HDD for boot, for most apps, and for basic storage. Partitioning can, of course, be of help for organization. I suggest this especially since boot times will significantly speed up with Windows 8's hiberfile technology, if you're looking at it from the future-proof angle. ("Green" 5400 or 5900 RPM mechanical drives are better for archival/static file storage such as media files and ISO's & they draw less power.)​

2. A 60GB or larger SATA II or SATA III SSD for games installation directory. Depends on how many games you own, and how big they typically are, obviously. But right now I have many of my Steam games installed to a 120GB SATA III SSD, as well as Aion & The Sims 3, and I still have over 22GB free. Installing games such as Skyrim or The Sims 3 which have very noticeable load times -- even on a high end system -- is a far better use of this High-Cost-per-GB medium, than for your OS, which doesn't do much "loading" from disk after having booted.​

3. Consider using RAMdisk software to make a virtual disk dedicated to ReadyBoost; or, if you're willing to do something more advanced, just look into registry editing to increase the Windows 7 file system memory cache (which would bypass the need for the RAMdisk or the use of ReadyBoost).​

Last fall, Zetta_X mentioned something called RAMdisk just after I had maxed my memory slots with a 4x4 (16GB dual channel pairs) setup, and I looked into that as well. I wound up doing the registry edit after I got tired of having to set up readyboost every time I boot since the free RAMdisk driver I had isn't persistent (the name of the drive resets every boot, as well as the assignment to ReadyBoost.. but I couldn't be bothered to find a way to make it persist if it's even possible.)

I decided that since I reboot maybe 4 times a week, I'd just install my system to the 7200RPM SATA HDD and dedicate the 120gb SATAIII to Steam & a couple MMO's. Never regretted reverting. I could've installed Office or possibly all my Program directories to SSD but I rarely could give a fuck about the milliseconds shaved off of loading Word or GiMP.

Which reminds me one thing I want to look into now -- relocating the Win7 font cache to SSD or RAMdisk would be awesome. Loading fonts is the ONLY thing that lags noticeably between SSD as system and HDD as system with my current setup (boot time not counting).

FWIW SSD as boot in a laptop or netbook rocks my socks off. That's what happened to the 60GB until I sold my laptops.

 

[Zetta_x]

Very informative, thank you!