I've got a desktop PC and not afraid to admit it thread

[TameRacingDriver]

singlecoil said:

That's not the issue.

Maybe not but the bhfest is spoiling the thread.

[ManicMunky]

Yeah... anyone who thinks SSDs don't benefit every part of user interaction with a system clearly doesn't know what they're talking about! Every single person who I've upgraded with an SSD has exclaimed about how much faster the PC is.

Anywho.... my (getting on a bit now) box:

i7-4770k @ 4.2Ghz
Corsair H100i cooler
16GB DDR3
500GB SATAIII Samsung SSD
Radeon R9 290
Fractal Design R4 case

[Jinx]

thewildblue said:

Its laptops I find benefit the most from the HDD-SDD upgrade, they become nice and snappy.

Blame the OEMs for that. They tend to dump 5400 rpm HDDs in laptops (lower power) so seek times become sloooooow.

[Zod]

Jinx said:

thewildblue said:

Its laptops I find benefit the most from the HDD-SDD upgrade, they become nice and snappy.

Blame the OEMs for that. They tend to dump 5400 rpm HDDs in laptops (lower power) so seek times become sloooooow.

That's because 7200 rpm drives run hot, as well as consuming more power. In any case they are barely quicker than 5400rpm drives. I still have a 10000 rpm raptor in my gaming machine. It is barely quicker than the 7200 rpm drives and nowhere close to either the SATA 3 850 Pro or the NVME 860 EVO in the same machine.

[bighop]

Ryzen 7 1800x @ 4Ghz
MSI X370 XPower Gaming Titanium
Noctua NH-U12S SE-AM4
G Skill TridentZ 2x8GB @ 3200Mhz
MSI GeForce GTX 1080 ARMOR
FD R5 Black
Samsung 960 Evo M.2 250GB, Crucial MX300 700GB plus couple of regular HDD's for storage
550W EVGA SuperNOVA GS

That's mine at the minute.

[Mr_Yogi]

Just upgraded from a now ancient (but still pretty fast) 3770K@4.6GHz.

Ryzen 5 2600
ASUS Crosshair VI Hero
32GB (4x8GB) G Skill Ripjaws V 3200 C14
MSI Sea Hawk EK GTX1070 and MSI Gaming X GTX1070
250GB+1TB Crucial SSDs (no M.2 yet)
Fractal Design R5
800W Be Quiet Straight Power 10
EK and XSPC Custom Loop

[ZesPak]

I'm now looking to replace my 8yo 2500K.

I didn't think it needed replacing until I started to look for extra RAM (needed to run a big VM and only had 16GB in 4x4GB modules ) and realized it was this old...

I haven't gone easy on it either and the only things upgraded during it's lifespan were the SSD and GPU, I bought a couple of big monitors 2 years ago and the old GPU wasn't up to the task. I'm probably going to migrate both the GTX 960 and SSD.

Edited by ZesPak on Thursday 6th September 08:36

[AlexC1981]

Dead_Donkey said:

Waiting for X5670s (6 core 12 thread CPUs @ 3+ ghz) to come down in price a bit - currently a matched pair go for £100. Once they get down to £50 - £60 I will buy a pair and double the ram to 32gb.

I don't think you need a matched pair as long as they are of the same type. I bought two X5690 chips for my Dell T7500 to replace the E-something chips it came with and they work perfectly. I don't remember what I read exactly so you would be wise to double check, but some of the Xeon chips have different stepping. I don't know about the X5670, but all the X5690s are identical so you don't have to worry about matching them.

This is the seller I bought my X5690s from. He's got the X5670s for £24.98 each.

https://www.aliexpress.com/store/product/Intel-Xeo...

Or X5690s for £61.22 each.

https://www.aliexpress.com/store/product/Intel-Xeo...

[anonymous-user]

Perhaps matched pair was the wrong wording - matching pair might have been the better expression.

Wow, that price from Aliexpress is great! still around £50 each on ebay at the moment so that is great. My mobo is only listed as taking up to X5670s so not sure a pair of 90s would work. 3.3ghz on overclock would be fine and dandy for me! Would almost double the performance of my current setup. I also found a cheap supplier of 8gb sticks of ECC ram so looks like my upgrade plan might be happening sooner than I thought!

Cheers.

[anonymous-user]

Regarding SSDs - show me a video of a PC that will cold boot windows 10 to the desktop quicker than it can complete the logo animation (the rotating flag logo) that runs a hard disk drive and I'll eat my hat :-) (mine doesn't manage a full logo animation before being presented with the desktop)

I've worked in IT (as an It manager and an IT director) for most of my working life and the failure rate of physical HDDS is infinitely higher than my experience with SSDs.

On my desktop PC I run my main (win/boot) partition on SSD, a second drive on SSD, and a huge drive is a decent HDD. The games I have to put on the HDD are horrifically slow to load in comparison.

Not an argument - just wanting to make sure those that are considering an SSD upgrade know it is not a risky proposal and is hands down the biggest improvement you can make to a Windows computer (well, that and a GFX card if you game).

On topic (well that kind of was). I run an i7 with SSDs (!), a GTX970, Win 10, Oculus Rift, 3 sensors for room-scale, and spend far too much time not getting any better at PUBG. I used to build water cooled PCs back in the days when it was worth it for the performance. They run so quiet and fast now I don't bother (algae build up put me off in the end!)

Then I had a Dell XPS monster. Now I prioritise quietness and performance in a discreet case cooled with big, slow turning fans. Three monitors.

[snuffy]

RogerDodger said:

.

On my desktop PC I run my main (win/boot) partition on SSD, a second drive on SSD, and a huge drive is a decent HDD. The games I have to put on the HDD are horrifically slow to load in comparison.

I use one of my SSDs for games so once I've stopped playing whatever I then move it to my HDD. And running VMs for work off an SSD makes a huge difference in performance as well.

[captain_cynic]

RogerDodger said:

I've worked in IT (as an It manager and an IT director) for most of my working life and the failure rate of physical HDDS is infinitely higher than my experience with SSDs.

"Infinitely"?

So for every 1 SSD that fails, every HDD in the entirety of man fails.

As someone who also works in IT and has an idea of what is actually going on the difference isn't that great. Most disk failures aren't actually from failed disks, they're usually from false positives or minor issues like a SMART error or in the worst case, a head crash. This is why most vendors give you free unlimited HDD replacement with any support agreement on a storage platform. Most drives end up being refurbished because there isn't actually a problem with them.

The chance of any drive failing to the point of data loss is infinitesimal, especially without warning. The difference in failure rates between SSD and HDD is purely academic, you get bad batches of either and that's just luck of the draw.

Last SSD that failed on me was a Crucial M4 in 2014 when it reached the 5000 hour bug. Fortunately Crucial had a firmware update that fixed it.
Last HDD that failed on me was in 2007... And it was the electronics as I pulled the control board of an identical drive and recovered the data (it was an ancient 80 GB HDD as well).

[TameRacingDriver]

As someone else who's worked in IT for ages, I strongly disagree SSDs "don't make much difference" as you put it.

A few years ago rather than upgrade machines earlier we just bought a load of SSDs and they made a huge difference to the performance. Turned sluggish machines into decent ones.

Also I've had noticeably more mechanical disk failures than SSDs, in fact i don't even think I've seen a failed SSD yet in my job.

I can't even see why people are arguing this really.

[snuffy]

[redacted]

[TameRacingDriver]

Thanks

[anonymous-user]

snuffy said:

That's a fair price comparison for large drives (say 2TB) but not for smaller ones (say 500GB). A 500GB SSD is around twice the price of a 500HDD.

But no one is suggesting replacing a 2TB HDD with a 2TB SSD. What's being suggested is adding an SSD for the OS. A 250GB is more than adequate for the job and will cost around £50.

And putting the OS on an SSD will transform the performance of a PC so many people (including) me would say that for £50 you can't argue that it's not worth it. It would be the best performance increase you can imagine for 50 quid.

Exactly. (My dektop has a 125Gb boot / OS drive) I think some people just want to argue the point. For reasons unknown.

I've dealt with many an HDD failure, and on several occasions we could not get anything out of them. You can often get them recovered but its damn expensive. Most people at home don't have the knowlege or inclination to restore failed HDDs. They get problems, you bin them

And when I said "infinitely" - it's a figure of speech. Seriously.

[anonymous-user]

No pics (yet) but I do have a PC and use it a lot.
Home PC
GTX 1080 Ti
4770k
16GB DDR3
1TB of SSDs (2x 256, 1x 5512)
1TB HDD
Acer 4k G-Sybc monitor

My office has much more
Multiple i9 7900x with lots of fun stuff, 1080, 1080 Ti, TITAN Xp, TITAN V's etc.
Its some pretty cool cases, In Win D Frames, In Win 301s, Meshify C White etc
2 G-Sync screens + 2 G-Sync HDR

[Slushbox]

Shamed by some of the giant pooters on here, I splurged out on a Dell Outlet 'Dent & Scratch' Inspiron 3268, with an 3GHz i5-7400, 8GB of rams, DVD,Wifi-thing, and a 1TB spinner. £300 with discounts.

It's 'slimline' so just expandable enough to take the beloved low profile Quadro card, and not much else. Upgrade to 16GB from Crucial in the post.

As to discounts, D.Outlet. have got a 10% off at the moment, often with more offers on their Twitter feed. Got that up to 15% with an academic discount. *

As the price for a motherboard bundle only with the i5-7400 and 8GB of ram is £330 from Amazon, it seemed rude not to buy it. Windows 10 Home, though, which will do.

• Other brands are available.

Dell pic.

[Funk]

TameRacingDriver said:

As someone else who's worked in IT for ages, I strongly disagree SSDs "don't make much difference" as you put it.

A few years ago rather than upgrade machines earlier we just bought a load of SSDs and they made a huge difference to the performance. Turned sluggish machines into decent ones.

Also I've had noticeably more mechanical disk failures than SSDs, in fact i don't even think I've seen a failed SSD yet in my job.

I can't even see why people are arguing this really.

As someone who works in IT for ages and sells enterprise storage (servers, SANs, NAS devices etc) I completely agree with this; there's categorically NO reason not to put SSDs in machines these days. I said earlier in this thread that SSDs are incredibly reliable and their failure is easy to predict; besides which data should NEVER only be in one place so even a failure shouldn't set you back.

[droopsnoot]

That's an interesting point - I have wondered about reliability in SSDs, especially for those of us buying down to a price. I used to work in IT, do a little bit of development work now, but have no stomach for messing around having to fix stuff left right and centre.