So the trick is not to buy into every new little thing.

Price vs. gain.

If you have something that is nearly close to the next best thing - don't buy into it.

If you are 2-3 gen's behind and you want to play or use the latest that requires the best, then upgrade.

$300 for a 'high-end' card is nothing. No high-end card can be had for a mere $300.

And no high-end card can be beaten by a $300 card.

Actually I got the fastest graphics card available when I bought one for about that amount. It must have been a pricing error though. Never seen a shop run out of stock so fast

Graphic cards are indeed very (too) expensive. There are always people that will buy them though, just because they can and/or they want a better PC than their neighbour. Graphic cards now do beat old one hands down by a mile, but only if you have one, like you said, 3 or more generations behind. A simple card now can beat and old FX5xxx card by a factor of ten. So that would be a nice upgrade for $300. But if you want the newest and fastest card every generation you'd be spending $500 or more every year, maybe even more often, for only an improvement of 10%-20% each time. That is a steap price to pay.

If I had any money I'd be willing to spend now I'd get a new cpu/mobo/RAM, but it all depends on what your system is like.

I'm not starting arguments, I support everything I post with solid arguments. Yes, I disagree with him. Everyone is free to disagree with me. That doesn't mean we start arguments. You only start arguments when you try to flame, which brings me to..

 

What you said is, and I quote: "Instead of just crying its to expensive .." That, kind sir, is a flame. No one was "crying it's too expensive", some just stated that they didn't think the upgrade was worth the money. Please just respect other people's opinion, and don't call it "crying".

Perfect response Jafo !!  

Sir Astral and kona0197  need to understand it's not about the applications/games of today, but moving everyone towards 64bit means developers can provide us greater applications and PC games of tomorrow.  So while you might be content using a 32bit OS you'll never know what developers could have provided if the majority of people were using a 64bit OS.    It's unfortunate some individuals cannot see beyond today.

This is my opinion " I could careless what is the price!" I'm waiting for a certain advancement to be made and then I'm going all the way with most everything. Totally new system with all the trimings. But not sure I'll go with Windows 7 and the way it is. That unless I wait long enough to buy OEM builder OS software. Only because everything on my new system will be top of the line and I would more like to think the next OS Windows 8 is more of what I'm going to be looking for. But with an OEM machine built by myself I may go with OEM builder software for this next one and build another later for Windows 8.

I actually get off to building the system and then testing it. Sure I'm concerned with price... but I'm not going to let that stand in my way of doing what I want to do.

Presently I'm hoping that with the SSD HD out there. I can get an OS which will secure that system drive without using it for programs. Only the OS and have programs complete installed on another drive. Now sure I know of ways to fix that with the regs being changed and such. But that can cause an OS to go out of balance. Then there is this thing called Virtual Drive. I'm looking into using a small SSD HD for the original OS and then have it virtually copied to another drive. Thus startup and boot would all come from the non virtual drive [SSD HD] till it loaded and the virtual was mounted. Perfectly protecting my system and making it very secure.

I actually dream of the day the OS comes on a SSD or chip and it fits right to the board as does the cpu. Some would say keep dreaming; but it may happen here soon. I hear Windows 7 is going to be shipping for Netbooks via a flash drive. This since a netbook usually does not have a cd/dvd drive.

Which is another very deep subject about optical drives and where will it go next? It is mind bending to really see all the new advancements for the next computing age to come.

Nice bit of discussion you people are having here about this new advancement. Everyone has an opinion for what they want or do not want. Lots of people are out there like myself; who care only about the advancement and not really what they got to pay for it. Sure that is a concern even so; but not going to stop those that want it. People will pay for what they want. They always have and always will.  

Actually there are cards out there, much like you'd put in a videocard or sound card, which has an image loaded of your hard drive. That image is fixed (you can change it ofcourse, and then tell it that this is your final image and you don't want it changed) and you can boot off it. You can then run the OS normally, install pretty much everything you need, but when you shut down the computer all the changes made are thrown away. When you boot up again, you boot from that 'fresh' image. That might also do what you want, though I'm sure there will be more elegant ways in the future. But lots of places use those cards, for instance schools and colleges. Students can pretty much wreck everything so a read only image is quite helpful. There are also software solutions for this, but I generally don't like them, they tend to slow down the computer a lot.

I am still seeing a lot of people missing the point on my post.  So I will address some of the comments as best I can.

If you complained about the price tag for SSD, I have already stated that I can understand that.  My comments are provided within the context that someone is looking for a "performance" upgrade to their machine, especially if that considered "performance" upgrade is RAM.

To Jafo & NTJedi:

Your comments make no sense.  If this is all about moving forward, then are you saying that SSD's are taking a step backward in technology?  Additionally, just because the "OS" is 64-bit does not mean that the software is 64-Bit.  I do understand what you are trying to say, but you are trully being short sighted on the issue.  I would explain it to you in detail but that will take some time.  Let me know if you really want me to make a lengthy post on why you are not correct!

To twifightDG:

Disagreement is fine, but I posted #'s and facts to back my claims up.  Please provide #'s and facts to backup your disagreements.  Otherwise you are just disagreeing for disagreements sake.  There are lots of opinions in technolgy, but only one is correct.

To the "but HDD has much more storage" crowd:

Yes HDD has far more storage, but I am not advocating that you drop HDD use.  I am only advocating the you utilize SSD for your performance needs.  Use it for System and Gaming, but still keep your HDD for those non-performance items.  How many folks on this board know that there are actually 4 to 6 different types of RAM on your computer?  There is RAM that is built right into your CPU for cache purposes traditionally refered to as L1, L2, and sometimes L3.  Your CPU alone can have 3 different level of cache all with different capacities, speeds, and purposes.  Then there is your motherboard.  CMOS(BIOS) is a non-volatile RAM module.  Then there is the RAM for your System board that you use as workspace for running applications.  And now for the never thought of HDD.  It also uses RAM inside its own buffer to help improve performance.  As you can see, there are several different arrangements of RAM in your computer already.  Do not think of it in terms of SSD vs HDD, instead, think of it in terms as SSD+HDD.  All I advocate is that you make an arrangement similar in designed to your RAM with your drives so you can enjoy the best of both worlds.  A small inexpensive SSD at 30 gigs for system and your most demanting games and HDD for everything else.

And finally, most of this is not really about opinions.  It is about what you want from your machine.  Using an SSD is very much like adding RAM to your machine because of the Latency aspect.  So of course make sure you have at least 3~6 gigs of RAM.  But 6 gigs of RAM will be good to last for a little while... at least 3~4 years.  Programing has not changed fundamentally enough to warrant more.  And we all know, that programing does not move anywhere near the speed of hardware.

And to the guy that made the rather lame comment about 640k being more than anyone will ever need.  You should probably not comment on this topic anymore.  I don't think there is a single post in this entire thread from anyone that indicated that any amount of anything would be more than anyone would ever need.

I know exactly what you are talking about - but I do not want it where things are lost at restart. There are other ways to contain them in the virtual system and then remove them at your needs be reasons. I'm waiting for the real thing as this with a protected OS able to be updated only by the system or original installer. Updates have to work and I hate having to switch stuff to do updates to a virtual system. Thats the main problem they are having at MS right now with the newer windows 8 being completely virtual and system independant. Thats what I want but gona take a little more time to get it to where it comes that way with a new OS. Soon I hope...

Thanks twifightDG

Sir-Astral,

I've been looking right at that amount a 30gig SSD and a 160gig sata HD. But I'm still figuring the virtual end of my system and may want something more like a 60 gig SSD and have my virtual system run on a related partition there. Then all my programs and games what not... on the regular 160 gig. Then I have a server I use other larger programs via home networking. Plus everything gets backup on a daily basis via the server to a larger hard drive there. That being the ssd and the regular hd complete.

Your idea is good... but everyone has their own ideas. So be it ...

As for that guy making that comment Sir-Astral; he was only referring to past experiences he has had. Plus he is welcome to inculde his ideas here or anywhere on this forum. Anyone that has any opinion or idea can voice that here. Can I hope we keep this simple and nice for everyone.

Myself I would agree to some of what you have to say. Then again in some sorts do not see everything you are trying to say completely. No matter I still will keep my ideas and yours along with many others here who have voiced their opinion to what they think. Right or wrong we still have a lot out there to see the light at the end of the tunnel.

I find when I think I'm completely right on one thing something changes and it was right and now it is just not complete. If you get my meaning there. Personally I do not need the facts you want to give here... much of that is known to a lot of people. Plus those things do change and when they do we have to change with them.

Let people have their ideas and for sure their opinions. I do and I know for sure you do also.

It's quite possible to run an SSD and a conventional hard drive in the same machine, of course.  Then you can have blazing speed and cheap storage.  Trouble is, the most disk-intensive operations for games is the loading of data from large files, it can be textures in particular.  To get the best possible performance for a particular game you're going to have to either copy the game folder across before playing, or install it fresh from an image and apply the latest patch when you want to play.

I think that SSDs will prove to be a hit if they're used in consoles though.  No more Loading screens (or at least, very short load times) just get back in the action right away.  The Xbox 360 can already make good use of a conventional hard drive to improve load time.

His comparing my post to Bill's comment on 640k being more than anyone will ever need is being nice in your book?  It appeared to me that insult was his intention.

It's fine for people to offer their comments yes, but offering comments that do not really apply to the subject matter is pointless and detracts from the topic.  We are talking about performance options with SSD vs RAM as an upgrade.  The issue of wether or not the choice you make now is going to be more than you will ever need is not even appropriate to the subject.

Just to avoid confusing from my post I'll clarify. I've never responded to the SSD vs RAM discussion. Both can be useful depending on your current system config.

I've responded 1) to sir astral's claim that one OCZ can beat 3 or 4 Raptors in Raid0. I've posted numbers that that is nowhere near true, but I'll chalk that up to being overenthousiastic. No harm done. SSDs sure are fast and I like them too. And 2) I've responded to Makerz (or something) that the whole "we need more RAM" argument is the fault of Windows and we should still be able to suffice with 512 MB.

I did not see it that way at all...

Knowing the person does help to understand where they are coming from a bit Sir-Astral.

But if you see that way ... then that is the way it is then. People have that right here to say what they want.

Me either completely twifightDG. I usually keep a lot of opinions to myself because a lot of people do not see my ideas.

Thanks though and you keep on trying to place your point of view; I like that.

And Sir-Astral I'm not arguing with you about how you see things or such. Just that anything and everything is not always as it seems is all. OK do not get me wrong... which I more than likely am; but a descussion always has it's flawed area and things are always said in a wrong view. So in a way I agree with you to some way or another.

I got my Nvidia 9600 for free. I love you, Tiger D!

No one ever said that or even implied such a statement.  SSD is a step forward as we've been agreeing with the OP of this topic.

Once again no one ever said the 64bit OS  means 64bit applications.  If you've been following the games being developed by Stardock you'd know they are currently developing a 64bit version for their game Elemental.  It seems your views are stuck in a today only mindframe and just unable to see the purpose of tomorrow... hence completely missing the statement regarding 640k.  lol

The purpose of moving everyone towards a 64bit OS would allow developers to provide greater games and even a few greater applications.  You don't realize how the 4gb memory limitation of a 32bit OS is limiting developers in their creation of games.  

That "guy" is at least a Stardock moderator on the forums and may even be one of the developers at Stardock.  Considering you've completely missed his point about 640k, I doubt your  19 year old personality could even grasp the points we're trying to describe.

I said nothing about SSDs...at all.....other than somewhere maybe wanting to try them out......certainly nothing about 'a step backward'.  Possibly you have me confused with someone without a brain....;)

Oh....and about the 'guy who said no-one needed more than 640k ram'....perhaps you should Google exactly who said it....might be enlightening....and it is PARTICULARLY relevent to the comment that 6gig is 'enough'.

Oh....reading down further...to #115 .... I quoted the statement....I didn't make it.....Google just who did....and you will understand.....;p

 http://www.google.com.au/search?imgsz=huge&hl=en&q=no-one+needs+more+than+640k+ram&meta=

There you go....even save you the effort.

It's unfortunate some individuals cannot see beyond today.

I can see beyond today I just can't afford new hardware. That's all there is to it.

From reply#88:

Actually, this is not totally accurate with Vista and Windows 7. Microsoft is now using a technology they call "SuperFetch" to preload applications and data into memory based on the usage patterns of the user.

But anyways - my opinion is that both have their places, depending on the needs of the user.

I made the claim that it would beat 3 to 5 HDD's.  This is not a mistake or a false claim based on enthusiasm.  You cannot base who is the baddest drive in town on "Synthetic Benchmarks".  Synthetic Benchmarks are helpful in determining which drive is over all faster in a perfect world yes, but it will not give you a realistic measurement against day to day operations, and I will explain why.

Synthetic Benchmarks often push the drive to its maximum speed by utilizing sequential/linear reading and writing.  But most of the time a drive does not read in linear & sequential patterns.  Most of the time the drive is doing linear and random R/W operations.  This is the primary reason for "Defragmenting" HDD's.  Getting the data on the drive to be as linear as possible so that performance is improved!  But even with that, the chances that the next file you have to read/write being the exact next sector behind the current one is very small.  But with at least some defragmentation you can at least read the current file it is working on at maximum speed thus yielding a performance gain.  In all truth the more random activity that your drive experiences the less performance it actually has.  I have seen HDD drives of all kinds drop to just 10% of their peak performance when the going gets tough.  SSD's do not experience this sort of performance decrease.  Lets do a little math here to show some numbers.  And lets do this with a very nice Velociraptor.  Let assume a 3ms latency.  Now as we know often times most files are not very large.  Typically a file will be just under a megabyte.

At 0.1ms latency the SSD will have that file available 30 times faster than the HDD which is 3.0ms.  Now imagine that you have 1000 files to read at 100kb size each for a total of 100megs.  An SSD will be able to read all those file in 0.1 seconds where it will take the HDD a whole 3 seconds to read them all.  And this will be if the HDD does not suffer additional peformance hits during read.  The Average sustained read speed of the Velociraptor is at least 100MB/s in linear operation.  The OCZ Vertex is 230~250MB/s sustained read.  Obviously the SSD is already avg over 2 times faster in thoroughput in a 1 on 1 senario.  Now if we combine 3 Raptors in RAID0 that should be 300 MB/s for them.  Now think about this.  How expensive are Raptor drives?  3 will easily run you over the cost of a 120gig SSD.  Right now newegg charges $159 for a 150gig Raptor until 7/12 in which it will go up to $179.  If you buy 3 it will be $477.  You can get the 120gig SSD for $385 just about $100 cheaper than 3 Raptors.

Now, in a perfect world you would get 300mb/s because your data files would be in needed read order all the time, which is simply not going to happen.  In reality RAID0 drives do not give you full performance in a 1+1+1 senario.  You will lose about %20 per drive and will most likely get a 250mb/s average linear read.  During random operations the raptor could easily go down to 50mb/s or even lower, while the SSD keeps plugging along at 200mb/s or better.  This is where you will see performance being to equal the work of 5 HDD's.

The reviews and benchmarks are in.  I have see the results where a single SSD has out performed 8 yes 8 SAS drives all by itself.  That is how bad Random IO can hamper a spinning disk's performance.

http://it.anandtech.com/IT/showdoc.aspx?i=3532&p=6

Check out this article.  I want you to pay special attention to the section where Random IO test are performed.

A single SSD stomped 8xSAS drives and beat 16xSATA drives in RAID configurations designed to work best with OLTP databases.  Now of course people will not be running OLTP databases for gaming and general computing which is why I said you would experience 3 to 5 HDD's in performance for a single SSD.  Additionally I would like to mention that the OCZ vertex drives are even faster than the SSD's used in the benchmark in the link up there.  Also in that review on the very same page a single SSD still beat 4xHDD's in a sequential read.

If you can read that review and still tell me that my claim of 3 to 5 times performance is due to over enthusiasm then there is no help for you.  This test simulated real working senarios.  The synthetic benchmarks can only show what a drive can do in perfect conditions.  They never show you what you will actually get when the rubber hits the road.  Only a test that simulates real world disk activity will show you what you can expect to get from your disk.  You can post synthetic numbers all day long, but they will still be just synthetic numbers.  What your drive is actually going to do for you is something else.

Ladies and Gentlemen, if you have the funding with the desire to spend it, SSD over a RAM upgrade.  The experience is truly something else.

Thanks for the link, it was enlightening.  I do appreciate you correcting me regarding the matter.  However if you go back and read my post I said "6 gigs for now".

If an english teacher were standing here they would tell you that the words "for now" do not equate to "forever".  My failure in my quote was believing in hearsay without verifying facts, yours is not being able to understand the words in front of your very eyes.

I do not care who is a developer or not, if you take something out of context then its your own fault.  And job description means nothing.  There are probably 10 year old children in Japan that could out perform/out grasp said developer and myself, but no one would give that 10 year old genius any credit because he does not have a title.

Yes the purpose of moving to 64-bit is for more power.  But do you think a developer is going to become lazy just because you have Phat Loads of RAM to run your applications?  No, they are going to continue to optimize code and minimize RAM usages, because all to often your machine will be sharing space with other programs.  Furthermore an application will not just launch ALL of its modules because that would waste resources very unnecessarilly. You are being far to short sighted in the matter.

It's ridiculous to think that just because you have RAM that your machine is going to use it!  Even if it is 64-Bit.  A program will only use as much RAM as necessary.  If you look back at the is 6gigs enough article you will find that Windows loads up RAM a little bit more based on a Ratio.  If you have 3 gigs of Ram it uses 880 megs for system.  If you have 6 gigs of RAM is used 1.11 gigs and if you have 12 gigs it used 1.43 gigs.  Futhermore boot times and load times were not affected very much.  Regardless of prefetch, superfetch, or dogfetch... SSD will add more performance.

The proof is here in front of everyone, but just as you can bring a horse to water, you can't make said horse drink it.

This is not opinion.  If you have at least 3 gigs of RAM, you WILL get more performance out of your machine if you upgrade to SSD instead of upgrading more RAM.  It's fact, not opinion, and more than enough tests and benchmarks prove it far beyond any shadow of doubt.  All that remains is the question of cheap, capacity, performance.  And you only get to pick 2 of the 3!  You can have capacity and performance, but its not cheap.  You can be cheap and have good capacity, but you won't get performance.  You can have cheap and performance, but you will not get much capacity.

What are you talking about?  I've personally built over 40 rigs for high/mid high end use in the past 4 years.  I get a new rig every 4-6 months for my own use.  A particular component's generation is a nonsensical argument (outside of gen 1, which I'd agree - avoid like the plague).  Price vs power is the argument - $300 for a high end card is nothing and no high end card for a mere $300 doesn't make a lick of sense.  Really? 

Here's how I buy new components.  Look at specifcations. Use Tom's hardware for most reviews of performance.  Decide on a performance factor and price.  Research price at newegg, zipzoomfly, tigerdirect.  Chose the best deal there.  Check deals on bing.com, fatwallet.com, slickdeals.net.  Review pricing/discounts/rebates at each site.  Go all the way back to Tom's hardware and decide if you are barking up the right tree.  Research again if needed.  Purchase. 

Also... who are you talking to?  If its a laptop end user, then SSD are great.  If you are talking about a desktop, you are barking way up the wrong tree.  Here's a current topic on SSD drives and their price/technology level.  http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/256gb-samsung-ssd,2265.html... and here's another article, from dec 2008 re: SSD drives magically taking over standard HD http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-hdd-sata,2115.html.  Both are good reads.  SSD is awesome - but only once the prices comes down more ($ per gb) and performance increases. Until then, enjoy great prices on standard hard drives... probably only 1-2 years left to do so.

Pacov:

Those articles are too old now.  Newer, cheaper, and faster SSD's are here.

price vs performance info?  The 1st article is from June 18th (eg this month, 11 days ago)... I'm curious if I'm missing something, but I don't think so...

Also - I do see that you know what you are talking about re: tech from previous posts, but anything you'd like to direct me to would be appreciated.  Something that clearly indicates the performance of SSD beats stardard drives at X price point would be highly helpful... I'm not upgrading for another month, so the input would be useful.

SSDs Replacing HDDs Soon? Not A Chance

12:00 PM - 12/29/2008

Hot or Not? New Samsung and Solidata SSDs

2:00 AM - 04/30/2009

I have already placed links regarding my comments in past posts.  Please go back and read again since you missed them.

If you think I do not know what I am talking about regarding Technology then you should go to school. 

I sit in a room chating and arguing with Professionals that have more certifications than you have letters in your name.

I argue your reading comprehension then...   I'll check your additional posts as I must not have read them all.  If only I had more certifications to my name to be able to discuss topics like this with you!  Thanks!