Bottleneck advice

[Rennn]

I have the chance to buy an SSD, and that could help since my HDD is completely awful for games. However, I don't know if it's the bottleneck of my system (specifically in Dark Souls) because I don't know how much games rely on HDD performance.

 

Specs

Graphics: GTX 460 GC 768MB GDDR5, 700mhz overclocked to 800mhz

RAM: 8GB DDR3 G.Skill Ripjaw RAM at 1600mhz

CPU: AMD Phenom II 955 quad-core at 3.2Ghz

Motherboard: M4N68T-M-V2 (AM3)

HDD: Hitachi HDS721010CLA SCSI (77% filled)

PSU: Antec 750w Modular psu of some kind (Should not be the problem)

 

Rated on the Windows Experience Index, my components are all rated 7.3 or 7.5, except for my HDD. My HDD is only rated at 5.9.

 

I'm not sure how HDD intensive Dark Souls is, but I know it uses predictive loading in the background, which at least sounds like it would stress a hard drive, especially a slow one like mine. However, I'm not going to get an SSD unless I'm certain it's actually bottlenecking my system in some noticeable capacity. Is there any practical way to tell if my HDD is actually causing slowdown in Dark Souls? If it means anything, supersampling in Dark Souls does not noticeably affect the framerate, but ambient occlusion does. Physics do not affect the framerate, but white fog gates kill it.

[RitualBlack]

There are almost no games where you will be bottlenecked at the hard drive, let alone any console port. New Unreal Engine games (like Chivalry: Medieval Warfare) should be played with a ssd to reduce texture pop-ins. Games like ARMA supposedly run noticeably nicer on a SSD and demanding MMO's will load up the worldspace and players faster on an SSD, but other than that I don't think there are many other situations where a ssd matters for performance except for improved load times. That being said I would highly recommend getting one as a boot drive, it really makes a difference in the overall feel of your system and how responsive it is.

It sounds like your are using your Nvidia Control Panel to adjust settings. For Dark Souls I would try just setting everything to use the 'application controlled' preset and if that doesn't work you could always try updating your drivers.

 

(also if your HDD is 77% filled it wouldn't hurt to clean it up a bit)

[FMod]

Only MMO are IOPS-critical today. Ordinary games have somewhat shorter load times, but not much more than that.

 

That said, your system is OK in all regards and I don't see any cheap upgrades for it. WEI is useless BTW. A 128GB SSD should cost $100-ish and significantly improve OS performance.

 

For a video card upgrade you'd want HD7870 and that starts at $220. CPU is OK, not top of the line, but about average in *new* PC.