Rennn Posted January 17, 2013 Share Posted January 17, 2013 (edited) My motherboard is an Asus M4N68T-M V2. I think that model only supports Sata 2 connections, but I'm not sure. My current HDD has a read of 220mb/s. Do you think it'd be worth adding an SSD for a few games? Or would I have to get a new Sata 3 mobo to notice a large difference? Edited January 17, 2013 by Rennn Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BaronofHe11 Posted January 17, 2013 Share Posted January 17, 2013 No idea but I just bought one that should be here tomorrow. I couldn't find one big enough for all my games that was also in my budget. So I'm just going to put skyrim, the sims and anything else that takes up a large amount of space or looks like it could use a boost on it. If you are not seeing long load times it probably wont make a different. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RitualBlack Posted January 17, 2013 Share Posted January 17, 2013 I would say they are worth while. I have an OCZ Agility 3 (480gb) as my boot drive and compared to my old drive there is a very noticeable difference in terms of boot/shutdown times, game load times, and texture loading while in game. My old drive was a 500gb Hybrid Drive (currently the storage drive in my laptop) so it wasn't a slow drive either. A ssd is very nice for games like Skyrim (and MMO games) where texture loading would cause the game to have those fraction of a second stutters whenever a new grid is loaded. Also it really helps with unreal engine games which are plagued by texture pop-in as it becomes much less noticeable and if it does happen it isn't there for long :laugh: . Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
hoofhearted4 Posted January 17, 2013 Share Posted January 17, 2013 i love my SSD. i have a 128gb drive split almost down the middle into C: and D: with C: just being my OS and stuff and D: being a few games and commonly used programs. only BeyondTom though, i havent noticed any difference in game load times. idk about Texture Popin Rates, but im playing DAO right now, and i notice no difference at all in load times. start up time is a bit faster, and the initial Resume is faster, but in game inbetween map loading is the same as with a regular HDD.....also i noticed no difference in in game load times in games like StarCraft 2 and DA2, both of which are on my SSD. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rennn Posted January 17, 2013 Author Share Posted January 17, 2013 Thanks, but that doesn't really tell me if a SATA 2 motherboard is going to remove most of the benefits... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
hoofhearted4 Posted January 17, 2013 Share Posted January 17, 2013 im not sure if your numbers are right, as 220mb/s seems a little hard to believe for a 7200RPM drive. considering, from what ive read, an average drive lies somewhere between 60Mb/s and 100Mb/s with 10kRPM drives hitting around 120Mb/s. the 220Mb/s you describe are SSD speeds. as for your question of SATA 2 and SATA 3, there wont be but a small small difference, since there isnt much you can do to use the full throughput of those connections (300Mb/s and 600Mb/s) just make sure you get a SATA 3 SSD as those tend to be newer and have better firmware, which will ultimately make them faster then SATA 2 SSDs no matter the interface they are connected to Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RitualBlack Posted January 17, 2013 Share Posted January 17, 2013 I mainly notice the load times with MMO games (WoW for example) loads much faster on a ssd. I am sure there are videos of load time differences online somewhere. Just as hoofhearted said, recent firmware is very important. If you buy a sandforce drive make sure to update the firmware to the most recent version before you install your operating system (unless it is really close to the latest version I suppose, you may be able to get away without doing so). You can type sandforce bsod into google and read about all the fun people had with them :laugh: . Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dan3345 Posted January 18, 2013 Share Posted January 18, 2013 Regardless of whether or not his write/read speeds for his drive are correct, an SSD will most certainly increase performance (for the computer over all) by a very noticeable margin. Even if you are only using it on SATA 2, the difference from a conventional HDD will be major. Just make sure the SSD you get is compatible with SATA 2 first, most are but it always is nice to be sure. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
FMod Posted January 18, 2013 Share Posted January 18, 2013 Sure that they all are. Anything not compatible with SATA 1 or 2 is violating the standards and therefore isn't really compatible with SATA 3 either. The only way you could get a USB, SATA, PCI-E, etc. v1, 2 or 3 (or 4) device not compatible with every other v1, 2 or 3 device is in something really obscure deep from mainland China, with a manual in Mandarin, only sold there or by mail order, and even then the chance is tiny. Anything even borderline reputable (that is anything you can buy via actual retailers) will be compatible with every other version of the above standards. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rennn Posted January 18, 2013 Author Share Posted January 18, 2013 (edited) I should have specified...My write speed is 53mb/s (on average), and my read speed is 220mb/s (also an average), at least according to DiskMark. It could be wrong.My model of HDD is a low-end Hitachi HDS721010CLA, with 1TB of storage. Thanks for the feedback. I think I'll get an SSD then. I probably won't get the full benefit with a SATA 2 mobo, but if it'll noticeably improve performance, it's worth upgrading. Normally I'd wait, but my two favorite games are either stressing my cpu or my HDD. My HDD benchmarks lower than my cpu, so my HDD is probably the limiting factor. If that's the case, I would gladly pay for an SSD to improve performance in those two or three games. Edited January 18, 2013 by Rennn Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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