SSD only helps loading times?

If it only helps loading times I dont think its worth it, should I get one?

If you don't think its worth it,why bother getting one then?

up to you?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfUe81ThddM

Does it help stuttering and ocassional lag in games?

No

Depends where the lag/stuttering comes from. In certain instances if you're out of RAM or need to load tons of info, yes. Going into a very crowded place in a MMO for instance.

An SSD is the biggest single upgrade you can give your computer.

And yes, it does help with stuttering in a TON of games if that stuttering was due to texture loading. The only person who would tell you not to get an SSD is someone who doesn't have one as it speeds up your pc so much no one with one would ever go back.

My Win 8.1 loads in under 2 seconds =)

Yeah, this is always true regardless of your other hardware. /sarcasm

for general computer use it is

unless you're running a pentium 4 @2.0ghz~, it will be... even then it would help a lot

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TgYw4lBwrIQ

Putting FSX on my SSD helped it a lot. When you get into large cities with a lot of scenery, a lot of lag is caused from loading the scenery off the HDD. When it was on the SSD, that didn't happen.

You obviously don't have an SSD as it is.

Yeah SSD's do reduce stuttering in a lot of games, as of DX10 most games started using dynamic asset loading (such as texture streaming). Which means that the game is loading stuff from the drive to the RAM when it's needed. You'll find that this really improves modern open world games and will basically eliminate texture pop-in.

it might if the game loads textures as it needs them and not all at once like at the beginning of a level. so it might help for a game like an mmo where the game may load player textures as it needs them. or in a game where it doesnt use ram or video memory very effectively. so your definitely right it may help with random lag in some types of games because i've seen it with some games in the past. i remember it helped me with Aion back when i did play it. And also slightly with TERA but mostly for loading times in that game.

What I can tell you is I had a Western Digital drive for 2 years and then switched to a Samsung 840 Pro and the boot times and loading times are now almost non existant compared to 10 minute boot and up to 1 minute load times for games such as Path of Exile and Company of Heroes.

SSD is worthless and overpriced IMO, if you want your computer to boot up faster just put it on sleep mod instead of turning it off

10 minutes boot? That's pretty long. Using my ASUS laptop (Win 8.1) with the default 750Gb 5400RPM SATA drive, it took 3 minutes 55 seconds from the time I powered up the lappie, logged in, waited for the applets to show up in the tray, postponed an Adobe Flash update, fired up Uplay, fired up Far Cry 3, and reach the point when I can control Jason.

Using the same procedures as above, my desktop PC (Win 7) which has beefier specs took 3 minutes 50 seconds using the old 500Gb 7200RPM SATA drive.

Only someone without an SSD would say that. An SSD speeds up EVERYTHING about your pc.

With Win 8.1 the boot up time is so fast it's comedic. Under 2 seconds from when my bios is done loading to being at my desktop.

The very instant my desktop appears I can click on 5 things as fast as possible and they will all open instantly. I will NEVER go back to a normal HDD

This. I was in the same boat as @PredatorRules, but once I tasted the sweetness that an SSD brings..never going back. I've used one for about 3 years.

Better reliability

Faster boot times

Faster read speeds

Faster write speeds

Non-mechanical drive = quiet

Faster load times

No need for defragmentation

A) I own SSD

B) It speeds up the boot and shutdown.

C) yes it may improve gaming by loading times. but you'll need to have a big SSD enough to place all your music, vids and games including the system.

It's not worth it by price - speed ratio.

Ridiculous statement, anecdotal evidence ftl.

Ah, here's the guy who talks about things he has no personal experience with. Here's my pcs bootup. Why don't you time how long it takes to boot up once my bios is done...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVgCCxfPASY

Only on the Gamespot PC forums would people argue an SSD isn't worth it.... lol

To Predator, if you actually owned one you'd know it speeds up everything you do. You can try to open 10 things at once and they'll all pretty much pop open instantly. It isn't a minor difference. I say this having a spare Caviar Black HDD.

The thing is I use my PC for both work and everything else. This is why I can buy great components as the budget is combined, it had over 2 years of heavy use and buildup on it.

Seriously?? That entire post you blathered about how it improves game performance and said it was the "biggest single upgrade" and I you thought I was talking about your bootup time? Are you dense? That is ALL you get with an SSD, fast bootup and app loading. The rest of the crap you were blabbering on about is just that, crap.

This is what I see....you ROFL actually bought an SSD thinking it was going to be for gaming, and now you are trying to sell that same crap to everyone else. No it is not worth the money yet to most people, I rather live with my load times and improve my actual in game performance. Someday I will get one....but NO WAY are they the "biggest single upgrade you can give your computer." Not on a GAMING forum dude.

You can say all you like, every SSD owner knows it's more than worth it.

Look at what you quoted. Why would I think you were talking about anything else?

I bought an SSD because my computer does most things instantly now and in terms of gaming, I GUARANTY in any game we play, I'll be ingame before you.

It also does load things faster in open world games. You obviously don't own an SSD.

Here's a quick question for you. Name one thing in terms of performance a HDD does better than an SSD. Cmon, just one..... lol

Seriously, are you argueing against SSDs?

If you use a PC for anything other than gaming an SSD is worth it - it's the most satisfying upgrade I've ever done to my PC.

You're something else dude, seriously. You are the one who came in here SSD fanboying it all over the place telling us how stupid we are, own it. My only point to you was to call BS on your "biggest single upgrade" crap and how you said it helps with game performance. That is total BS, period. Yes you will load your game before me, but too bad my video card I chose to upgrade over your precious SSD will blow your game performance and visuals out of the water. But yea, you got in to see your subpar graphics and fps before me.....cool story bro!

I am not arguing against SSD's, I am arguing against SSD's vs. other upgrades which actually matter IN GAME. Now if you are smart enough to comprehend this you will move on, if not you will come in and brag how you can start your PC faster than me again.

I'm now going to go bang my head against a brick wall to try and forget this stupid debate.

Wth? I have a nice Vid crad and cpu as well, you know like a gamer should. A gamer should also have an SSd. Is there some unwritten rule I can't have an SSD with a nice cpu amd gpu? Not quit sure what you are argueing..... lol

I can do everything faster than you if you're on a HDD, it's just how it is.

SSDs do not improve in game performance unless you have like 512mb of RAM. They can't. If you think you saw an improvement, you're seeing things.

At this point you must be trolling because no one can be this stupid. It is quoted up top, you said "single biggest upgrade" which would mean no matter what your cpu or gpu is SSD is the way to go. You also said it improved your game performance. Those were the two statements I was calling BS on. I am done with you.

My OS is installed on a SSD but it doesn't really have space for games. I don't think it's necessary to have one for gaming but I do see a huge difference when Windows is installed on it.

An SSD critically speeds up your load/rendering times etc, as long as your m2 cache on your motherboard, data transfer rate of your ram, and speed of your processor are also of a reasonable standard and that the software you are running is also on the SSD.....

After building PC's for a living, I would say the single most valuable piece of hardware for speeding up games is close between the RAM and GPU. an SSD should be one of the last upgrades you consider as they are not value for money.

An old hard drive can cause you major problems though

GPU is far more important than RAM. As long as you have enough RAM the game will run fine and adding more won't make a difference in performance; whereas with the GPU getting a better one will always give better performance (assuming the CPU can keep up). I would say that CPU is probably more important than RAM, for a similar reason. Pretty much any modern PC will have 4GB RAM (probably 8GB these days) which is enough for pretty much all games.

RAM is a non-factor imo since it is so cheap, there is no reason to not have 8GB in your system. Saying that, if you have 2GB then RAM just became your most important upgrade lol. I do agree video card is probably the key component for gaming, pretty much a no brainer. Most games today are gpu dependent so you can get away with a lower end cpu much more than you could a lower end gpu. Hard drive would be prioritized just above dvd-rom for me. Yes it would be nice to have an SSD, but it certainly is not the go-to upgrade as some suggested here. Not on a gaming forum anyway. I am not saying skimp on your HD, you should still get a quality one, but SSD is a luxury right now for gamers.

Right now on Newegg the lowest price decent sized SSD is a 750GB for $500. If your system is already in top shape performance-wise and you have the money to burn, why not? But $500 could net you a serious cpu or gpu upgrade, or if you already have a high end gpu you could grab another for SLI. Seriously....SLI with a $500 gpu or a faster boot/load time? Is this something to even think about? "Single biggest upgrade" my arse.

@Endgame_basic: I'm with Endgame on this one. Sure it helps your load times with the OS and most games (GTA 4 takes forever no matter what you put it on) but for games where texture pop-in is an issue because they load on the fly it help. For games where you might get a stutter when an autosave occurs it helps. The overall responsiveness of clicking through your OS is improved significantly, especially on a fast system. There are a lot of little things you just get used to like maybe wating a second before the start button menu shows when you click it or folders taking an extra second or two to open. When you move to SSD, many of these things become instantantous as long as you have a halfway decent system.

As for OS boots, here's an old BIOS based 2nd gen i7 that boots up in seconds: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NhuNtSn7dHE This is an old laptop so I have to wait for the BIOS startups and self-checks.

My new Haswell based EUFI laptop boots up in under 10 seconds from when I hit the power button on a cold boot.

A $100 on a 128GB SSD for the core OS and maybe a couple games you play frequently is a very good investment for your machine. After I saw how fast my primary gaming rig was with an SSD, the first thing I did was go out and buy one for every PC/Laptop I have. Is a $500 SSD going to boost your framerate more than a new $500 GPU? Of course not, but that's not the question.

-Byshop

You're with the dude who says it is the "single biggest upgrade you can get for your PC" huh? lol. Awesome.

To answer your last sentence.... that is EXACTLY the question because your buddy who you are "with on this one" said an SSD is the best upgrade for a PC, which would put it over a gpu.

If you have a good system and you maintain it you should have no delay's with your start button or any menus, nor should you have stuttering in your game due to your hard drive. You must have had a crappy HD before or you did not maintain your system, because I get none of that. The only thing an SSD is going to improve is boot and app load times.

Do we really need another video in this thread of someone's PC booting up fast? lol. We get it, SSD's improve boot time, and most PC gamers could not give two shits about it because they rather spend their money where it really counts......gaming hardware.

Why you guys cannot get this is beyond me. If you have the money to burn and the rest of your system is in top shape an SSD is a no brainer if you are itching for an upgrade. Personally I have all the money in the world I desire to upgrade my PC and I have yet to waste a dime on this piece of overpriced hardware (just my opinion). When I can get a 1TB for a few hundred dollars it will be worth it to me, but at $500+ ......no way.

Bottom line, it may be the best upgrade in the world for you guys, but to say as a fact on a pc gaming forum it is the best upgrade anyone can do is absurd. The guy still sporting the 9800 GTX disagrees as well.

For gaming an SSD won't make a significant difference in some games, but it will make games start up much faster and the computer will be a lot nicer to use in general. For a workstation PC where you're frequently opening different software and moving files around, it's a huge upgrade.

Maybe a slight exaggeration, but not a ridiculous statement.

Here's a video of my Haswell-based gaming laptop running an mSATA SSD for the primary OS with Win 8.1. When fully shut down, from hitting the power button to a login prompt is 7-8 seconds. From when the splash screen appears to the login prompt, about 3 seconds.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TiJlCa2shHA&feature=youtu.be

-Byshop

Obviously from my post I don't agree with everything end_game is saying because he tends to rely on hyperbole, but in this case so are you. Blanket statements like "if your game stutters then you have a bad hard drive" are ridiculous because they assume that either all games are equal or that you (the person making the statement) is familiar with the performance of every game in existence. I don't know about you, but I have about 500 games in my Steam collection alone and they range from brilliantly engineered PC-exclusive titles all the way down to terrible console ports. I've seen frame rate dips (usually just for a second or less) in games that are constantly streaming data from the hard drive, usually when entering a new area. Even Half Life 2 had a known stutter issue when the game would autosave that was acknowledged by Valve, so don't pretend that if I have ever seen stutter it must mean that I don't maintain my computer as well as you.

Regarding your $500 price point, I said this in my last post but I'll say it again. You can get a lot of the benefits of an SSD for $100. You don't need to buy the largest, most expensive drive. Just putting the OS alone on SSD makes a huge difference in general OS responsiveness. Of course you would want a second hard drive for storage, but you still get a lot of the benefits even if all your content isn't on SSD.

"...and most PC gamers could not give two shits about it because they rather spend their money where it really counts......gaming hardware."

See, the difference here is that I'm not going to pretend that I know what every gamer wants from their machine. Would a $500 GPU be a better upgrade than a $500 SSD for game performance? Sure, but I already said that. I'm providing the information so that someone can make an informed decision themselves about what they should get, rather than telling them what they should get based on my own opinions.

I will say this: Over the years I have upgraded many, many parts. Motherboard replacements to faster chipsets and new slot types, dozens of different CPUs, at least a dozen video cards over the years, etc. Moving the OS on my primary rig from a conventional hard drive to an SSD was one of the single biggest "night and day" difference upgrades I had ever seen in terms of how my system behaved overall, and it only cost me $100.

-Byshop

Hey guys I got a question and I dont want to a create a new thread about it. are there any charts showing the comparison between ssd and hdd for video games?

My next PC, for sure, will have an SSD for booting up the OS. However, I held off on getting one for this PC because the boot times with the regular SATA hard drive haven't really deteriorated with a bit of maintenance and it's the same Win 7 install from 2009.

I would have had to make a choice between buying an SSD and having a few days downtime for my primary PC or stick with my current slower hard drive and keep going as usual. If my current hard drive was taking 10 minutes to boot up (like yours) no matter what I did, I probably would upgrade to an SSD as a last resort.

when i brought my pc it came with a 120gb ssd and a 2TB harddrive

i only install games onto the hard drive as it really deosnt bother me how long load times are

really the best perk of an SSD is installing you OS onto it and watching your pc boot up real fast with a satisfied smile on your face

2 seconds from the bios to desktop?, i'm gonna go and call BS on that if that's what you meant. My record is like 12seconds.

Perhaps he meant 2 seconds from login to usability. The best time I get for my lappie (using a 5400rpm SATA HDD) is 36 seconds from power on to login screen and another 12 seconds from login to usability. 2 seconds for the latter (with an SSD) isn't far-fetched at all.

Yeah was thinking that myself hence the "if that's what you meant".

Once you've had an SSD you won't go back.

The one thing holding me back initially was the size / cost as I wanted to put all my games on it. If that sounds like you, have a look into ISRT (Intel Smart Response Technology). In short it allows you to partner an SSD to a traditional disk giving some of the benefits of each. You get the much faster boot and load times from the SSD, with the storage capacity of your traditional disk. Rather than manually moving installs onto the SSD, it learns what you are using the most frequently and has it act as if those were installed on the SSD. For programmes you don't use as frequently, or for the first couple times, it will have traditional disk load times.

I have mine set up with a 60GB mSSD linked to a 1TB 7,200rpm disk. Power on to logon screen in about 14 secs, and login to usable and opening programmes in another 4-5 secs.

A pure SSD install would probably get slightly faster results, but I don't have to worry about space and get a large amount of the benefits.