SSD for OS only or games too?

[dgiles79]

I have a customer looking to upgrade his gaming PC. He already has an i7, 12GB RAM, and SLI Graphics, so his hard drive is probably the only bottleneck.

I'm going to recommend an SSD, but I wanted to see if there is any benefit to installing games on the SSD, or if I should just stick to the OS only? After searching online, there seems to be mixed opinions on this.

If I go with OS only, I will suggest a 120GB SSD, but if it will help with games, then a 240GB.

I am planning on the OCZ Vertex 3 SSD, but if anybody else has a better alternative, I am open to suggestions.

Thanks.

 

[Slaters Kustum Machines]

Put the games on the SSD as well and the Vertex 3 is the one to go with. As for game performance the most notable difference is loading between levels. However if the games are very "light" you might not notice a difference. Either way put them on the SSD.

 

[Slaters Kustum Machines]

Also if to save some space you could out rarely played games on a conventional HD. This would keep costs down. Personally I put the game I currently play on my SSD and when I am ready to play something else I uninstall a game I no longer play. This may not be ideal, but it works for me.

 

[16k_zx81]

Put the games on the SSD as well and the Vertex 3 is the one to go with. As for game performance the most notable difference is loading between levels. However if the games are very "light" you might not notice a difference. Either way put them on the SSD.

What he said^

Its about game load-times and level load-times. Putting games on the SSD will address both of these aspects.

The issue will be that customer won't have much room on there for many games, and so he will need to juggle a bit.

He may or may not be up for that. Should probably be his choice as to how its set up.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

Depends on the game(s)
Certainly loading the game......
Some games with huge maps being changed for the next level...you'll get a shave in time for level changes.

Also....if you can, leave a SATA drive on there and put his pagefile.sys over to that. Having the virtual memory on a spindle other than the main OS, and programs...can give a nice boost.

Antivirus exclusions for the games media directories.

 

[dgiles79]

Sounds good. Thanks for the help guys. I will recommend the 240GB Vertex 3, and have him install his most played games on there.

 

[SnoSalmon]

Just to chime in - I run a dedicated gaming PC with an Intel 510 series 250GB SSD, as well as a 2TB WD black drive.
All my popular games - ones I actively play most days - are on the SSD. This makes a massive difference to load times between levels etc. I can be gaming within 30 seconds from switching on the PC.

Another option would be to look at 2 120GB SSD's, and RAID0 those suckers. Not only is this adding something 'cool' to the build, it'll also really give the PC some cred and a performance increase over a single SSD.
Also, running SLI, suggest considering widescreen gaming - Surround with 3 screens. (This works well with GTX580 cards)

 

[Slaters Kustum Machines]

RAID 0 is good for performance, but from what I understand it doesn't support TRIM yet which in time would slow down the performance of the drives. Granted it would take a long time before they were "slow" given the speed of SSD's and RAID 0 I don't think for this situation it is a good idea. Plus it would take huge amounts of data being transferred to notice much difference between a single Vertex 3 and 2 or more in RAID 0. Gaming will unlikely make this happen. The Vertex 3 series is very fast and one of them should be more than enough. However if the customer wants the to have an uber cool rig with more bragging rights then go for it.

 

[SnoSalmon]

Good point.

One thought - does the mobo support SATA3?
The SSD itself won't care if it's connected to SATA2 or to SATA3, but there's a huge performance difference there too.

 

[dgiles79]

Good point.

One thought - does the mobo support SATA3?
The SSD itself won't care if it's connected to SATA2 or to SATA3, but there's a huge performance difference there too.

Yes, the motherboard has SATA3 ports on there, so it can get the max performance from the SSD.

 

[SnoSalmon]

Mean. This will be a real eye opener for your client.

 

[NETWizz]

Disable BIOS Boot and enable UEFI, too.

Obviously, totally re-partition and format his hard drive as a GPT disk and put in two SSDs in RAID 0...

That should cause his system to boot like 4x faster.