SSD vs CPU

fred246

I use a 10 year old CPU with a benchmark of 1700 with an SSD for general internet browsing, word processing etc. It's fine. No delays. Very quick boot times.
I made a PC as a christmas present with an i3 processor. CPU benchmark 4800. The SSD was a bit late so I loaded the OS onto a mechanical hard drive. It was really slow. I had forgotten how slow a PC can be. With a Samsung Pro SSD on it went like a rocket.
There seem to be so many 'gaming' PCs around with a really powerful processor but no SSD. Are the games written so the storage is never accessed? So it's just processor and RAM?
Surely people would be better with a slower processor with an SSD than a fast processor with a mechanical hard drive?

onomatopoeia99

Games in general will not need to access the disk other than at startup, or if played across multiple zones / levels, when transitioning between them.

If disk accesses are required in play these can be done in a separate thread in advance as far as possible so the game is not waiting on them. CPU and GPU performance are far more important.

fred246

I think I would still want the SSD for boot times and game loading times although I suppose you would still have the game on a mechanical hard drive and the OS on the SSD.

[Deleted User]

fred246 wrote: »

I think I would still want the SSD for boot times and game loading times although I suppose you would still have the game on a mechanical hard drive and the OS on the SSD.

That's exactly how I have it set up, I haven't got many of my Steam library installed but it still takes up over 300GB by itself so it gives me a nice balance overall.

stator

Steam now lets your move games between hard drives. So if you're playing a game lots and want low load times, you can move it onto your SSD

that

ssd is much slower than ram. Even if the next level of game has to load, the programmers can always preload the next level in advance so the game operates seamless.

The big file often copy relatively quite fast, but if you have millions of 1k or 256 byte files, they are slow to get loads across even on ssd. Often it can be quicker to zip them up and transfer and extract that zip file

arciere

As a general rule, as already mentioned here, games will mostly benefit from CPU and RAM, rather than disk. However, sometimes if the games are heavy in terms of RAM usage, they could use the local drive if the system runs out of free memory. In that case, an SSD vs a normal HDD will make some difference.

System

Most gaming PCs and even gaming laptops now have two drives in, a SSD for the OS and applications/games and a larger drive for file storage.

motorguy

fred246 wrote: »

I think I would still want the SSD for boot times and game loading times although I suppose you would still have the game on a mechanical hard drive and the OS on the SSD.

Games take up a lot of space these days so for cost effectiveness its common for a smallish SSD for the O/S and a big capacity mechanical drive for the games.

A good quality 2TB SSD drive could be £300-600. A 2TB HDD is probably £50-70.

Also a twin drive setup (one for the O/S and one for everything else) is probably most peoples preferred setup anyway.