This is copy/paste from a personal discussion:
RE: That dudes rig.
Sent: seconds ago by Peltz yes but that will not happen in the next 10 years, so by that time im pretty sure we have changed our computers. thats a theoretical statment which i cant overrule but its so far fetched and unrealistic that it is on par with rubbish. Even then, today i get the same performance for 100$ less. I play games today and even so, with my 8800gts i actually get more frames per second out of a game than he does. He wasted what 3 times the money that i did and actually performs or par with my computer, if that isn't wasting money then ..

RE: That dudes rig.
Sent: 15 min ago by Calard I realize that once quad cores become necessary there will be better cores available, but that doesnt change the fact that once quad cores become necessary to game well, dual core owners will have to upgrade while quad core owners will not. This means that if he has a quad core rig and you have a dual core rig his will end up outlasting yours and you will end up spending more money than he did because you had to buy parts twice. A quad core will never be worse than a dual core of the same clock speed, and it will last much longer as well, so I fail to see how that investment is a waste of money.

RE: That dudes rig.
Sent: 1 hr ago by Peltz You are mistaking power for potential, yes the quad has more potential but in real life test like a computer game, that generation quad will never outperform a c2d because there are no games that are optimized for quad and once those games do appear, we will have 8 or 16 core processors and this discussion begins again. And seeing how more and more developers are reducing the recommended sys requirements so the game is more accessible to a wider audience the pointlessness of 4core becomes even more apparent. You can dream of some mystical advantage the 4core has or its hidden potential but the in reality, its just a rip off, designed for people who dont understand benchmarking.

RE: That dudes rig.
Sent: 2 hrs ago by Calard If you would read my previous message where I said they would be better n the future when more games are optimized to use their additional power. Quad Cores and more ram is more powerful, it's just the games fault foe not being optimized to take advantage of that additional power

RE: That dudes rig.
Sent: 3 hrs ago by Peltz Please read this before talking about the future. http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/memory-mo ... 31549.html
4c vs 2c:
1st one: intel quads lose in world of conflict to c2d: http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/athlon-64 ... 544-6.html
2nd: here out 3 games in 2 the c2d wins over quad: http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/athlon-64 ... 544-6.html

The truth is you dont get s h i t in games for quad or 8gb of ram. Its lost money on egoboost.

RE: That dudes rig.
Sent: 3 hrs ago by Calard The quad core and ram might not be used to full capacity now but it will be in the future. And anyways, even now it is better than a dual core with the same clock speed.

That dudes rig.
Sent: 3 hrs ago by Peltz MSI P45D3 Premium
Intel Quad core Q9550 2,8GHz - Any 4core for gaming is a waste of money (futureproof = fail, because by the time any game actually uses 4cores they will pulverize the one he has)
8GB DDR3 - 99% games that use more than 2 - 2,5 gb of ram instantly crash. The performance gain is so little over DDR2 800, and to think he has 8gb. Either he doesn't know [filtered] about computers or he has more money than he should have.
Geforce 9600 GT 1GB - And he compiles the above with this [filtered] that shouldnt even exist, its the worst card ever built. Read the black screen of death topic on EVGA forums, its the only topic that has around 30 pages of replies and complaints.
1,3 TB striped SATA2 - It takes ages to defragment a 200gb disk, i dont want to know how long it takes to defragment a TB disk.

I dont want to spam the forum or to cause flamewars thats why im posting this directly to you.

Sounds like a retard allright. 4 gig of ram is all you need (when running a 64 bit system) right now, I agree. And the quad core argument should be obvious...once the 2 extra cores are really utilized there'll be much better and cheaper CPU's around.

Of course, ram is so cheap these days that getting 8 might be a nice little egotrip if you can spare the money. But when it comes to that, you're probably better off with (also ultra cheap) HD's in a raid 0 setup. You'd get an actual speed gain, as opposed with the 8 gig of ram.

Or be a real man and get an SSD. Save the money on the quad-core and RAM and get an SSD... the real-world performance difference would be much better.

Yea but he has 8gb of DDR3

and the icing on the crapcake is the 9600 which is like utter shit compared to the rest of the rig.

Yea, I didn't read it all, so I missed that. geforce 9600? What an idiot. I assume it's a gaming rig. 8800gt or 9800gt at a minimum... 260gtx core 16 or better if you want some real performance. And damnit, an SSD for your boot drive and a game or three. It'd be nice if my games loaded instantly (or more instantly). Load times for empire:tw are slow...I wonder how much that would improve if it were running on a high-throughput SSD.

If you love SSD so much then why don't you marry it?!!


hehehe...no but seriously - how would SSD compare to those small, expensive super-fast traditional HD's? You know the raptor and the likes.

Speed- and qualitywise I mean.

Way faster, way less likely to fail. The only exception is writes (unless you really want to drop the bucks on an Intel SSD). Here's an article on the subject with pretty graphs.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd ... 913-5.html

It's showing HDD vs SSD performance on a Mac, but you can extrapolate that performance to a PC. Of course, it's not as simple as that, but I doubt you want me to go off on the differences.

Basically a +50% speed improvement then...and given the little I know about Macbooks, that means it's probably even faster compared to a HDD on a 'regular' pc.

So...when can we start seeing these things as viable options? That is, when are they cheap enough to justify the performance gain?

In my opinion? I'm already willing to shell out $200-$300 for a mid-range graphics card and about the same for a processor. I'm willing to drop the bucks on an SSD... just not as my only storage. Basically run a 128GB SSD as your boot drive and to put your time sensitive apps on (games, large applications you launch a lot) and have a cheap secondary drive for the rest of your storage.

That's my attitude on it, at least. In my experience, hard drive access time and read speeds have been a bottleneck for a very, very long time. Finally, FINALLY there's an answer... at least somewhat. It's still slow in comparison to RAM, but it's better. Seek times are practically gone and read speeds are much faster for both sequential and random reads (basically the same thing for an SSD). Write speeds are slower in many cases, but in reality as a user we don't write a ton of data to drive except during application installs.

What I would REALLY like to do is run a pair of SSDs in RAID-0. Talk about fast boot times. Though since SSDs behave so differently from traditional hard drives, we may need some new RAID levels designed specifically for SSDs. I dunno.

BTW, on the SSD failure thing, basically noone REALLY knows how long these things can run before they fail. The individual flash cells can fail, but the drives are programmed with algorithms to distribute write cycles fairly evenly across the drive. So you may only ever be able to write to a single cell X times, but because of the wear leveling this equates to writing out the entire drive X times. The manufacturers claim MTBF (mean time before failure) on these things in the millions of hours. Some people did some math on those stats and you're look at years of writing the entire hard drive before it fails. If that holds true, then SSDs last significantly longer than traditional drives. Additionally, since they're solid state and have no moving parts, they're not really affected by physical trauma like traditional drives. You drop a HDD and the head can smack the disk, causing physical damage. These things are much less apt to blow up as a result of physical trauma.

/me stops talking

Mmm, ok, interesting. My next build might feature an SSD drive too then, though I doubt they'll be as available on the Belgian market as in the US (or at those prices anyway). Might have to order online. It'll be a while before I really let loose on a system anyway, but I could always try and adapt this one. Use the SSD as the boot/run drive and current HD as storage/slow applications drive. We'll see.

Thanks for the layman's explanation in any case. Would what you said about the SSD failure mean that instead of actually going FUBAR all at once (as often with HDD) it would gradually lose more and more actual capacity (working memory if you will) before finally burning out? Cause that's kind of awesome.

I really couldn't say. If it's just a matter of the individual cells failing and the onboard controller notices and flags them as bad, then yea, I think so. Of course, that's what a HDD is supposed to do, but as we know they typically don't. They usually just have some sort of massive critical failure.

SSDs just haven't really existed long enough to know what'll happen, in my opinion. As far as the manufacturers are concerned, the suckers won't fail before you throw them away for being out of date, but I'm not so convinced.

Kinda like how we can't really conclusively say that there is a connection between cancer and cell phone use because they haven't been around long enough and the effect is hard to measure over time then. Which is not to say there is or isn't a connection. Gotcha.

Even if it craps out much the same as a HD, it still sounds tempting with its speed and physical properties. I assume it's a lot smaller than a HD too, even if those are getting a lot smaller too. I remember the Quantum Bigfoots that were the standard back in the day.

http://img268.imageshack.us/img268/7640/bigfoot31vi.jpg

(And throwing bananas at a monkey at another building or playing snake on a Commodore. And messing with Windows 3.1. And upgrading my RAM from 16 to 32MB to be able to play Dungeon Keeper, which always crapped out with a lack of memory when too many monsters appeared on screen). Man. We're old. Compared to today's whiz kiddies we must sound like dinosaurs.

I'm still a whiz kiddie, but yea. I remember talking my dad into getting a Soundblaster (the original) for our 8088XT. I remember upgrading the modem from 1200 to 2400 baud on that same box. I remember switching out 5 1/4" floppies. I remember taking apart a dot matrix printer in an attempt to fix a problem with some of the pins getting stuck. I remember buying a 500MB hard drive for like $200. Also a 28.8k modem for the same.

Anyway, regarding the SSDs they typically try to keep the form factor similar so it fits in the existing HDD slots. The main use seems to be in laptops so many are in laptop form factor.



If I had to guess, that's SSD in laptop for factor, a laptop HDD and a desktop HDD going left to right.

Dude, it has SSD written on it

yes yes, I know the left-most is an SSD. I was guessing as to the form factor and what the other two were.

/me curses Peltz