What are ALL the benefits of an SSD in a PC?

obieone
obieone Posts: 5,077
edited February 2011 in The Clubhouse
I'm starting to research upgrades for my next rig, and am looking at SSD's, along with other components, and tryng to figure out how best to utilize it?
From what little I know, they're good at loading an OS's and app's, but how do they help with gaming, etc.

I'm currently looking at a Gigabyte MB with SATA III/ USB 3.0, a Phenom 6 core, BD-ROM, and either 8 or 12 gb of ram.
I have a 500gb hdd and a Nvidea 8800GT that will be sticking around.

TIA:wink:
I refuse to argue with idiots, because people can't tell the DIFFERENCE!
Post edited by obieone on
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Comments

  • ysss
    ysss Posts: 213
    edited February 2011
    SSD is generally known for low power consumption, cool operating temperature and very fast random access. They used to be crappy for write operation, but the latest gens have very fast write access too.

    If you put your OS on SSD, your machine will boot up faster and most operations (task switching, etc) will be faster and smoother in general. It may also crash less when you have many things running, because of the faster swapdisk. (Some apps times out and exits involuntarily when it's waiting for slow swapdisks trashing).

    If you put your apps on SSD, your apps will load up noticably faster.

    I haven't done much test with gaming, but some games are already optimized pretty well to take advantage of normal HDD operation (resource files are put sequentially in big files), but I know that games like Sims3 (with many addons, modules, etc) will speed up GREATLY when run from SSD.
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  • Sherardp
    Sherardp Posts: 8,038
    edited February 2011
    Fast, fast and faster. They are extremely fast to load anything you throw at it. Insane speeds.
    Shoot the jumper.....................BALLIN.............!!!!!

    Home Theater Pics in the Showcase :cool:

    http://www.polkaudio.com/forums/showcase/view.php?userid=73580
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  • cokewithvanilla
    cokewithvanilla Posts: 1,777
    edited February 2011
    in that setup, your HD will probably be the weakest link, followed by the video card.

    As far as performance, you will see a difference in everything that uses the hard drive. In games, the biggest difference should be noticed in loading maps.

    Your hard drive is accessed quite regularly, it will make an improvement. However, if you are asking "where could i best spend $300 for gaming improvement", id probably say buy the best video card you can afford... that is, if your goal is to max out all settings in all modern games at high resolution and still get good FPS. If you're using a lower resolution monitor, you'd be surprised how far an old video card can take you.
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  • Shizelbs
    Shizelbs Posts: 7,433
    edited February 2011
    Last time I did a fresh install of my OS I also threw an SSD in the mix. I thought I was hallucinating at how fast everything was popping up on my screen. Lower power consumption, quiet and FAST.
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