Hey guys. I was wondering what is the minimum sized SSD you would recommend to be soley used as a boot drive for windows 7 (64 Bit Home) and perhaps a browser? Would 40Gb be sufficient (including pagefile etc) or is 60 really the minimum I should be looking at? Thanks guys!
40gb would be enough but i would stretch to the 64gb just to have that bit of space. How much are you thinking of spending?
64GB is defo the minimum, windows bloats right up after install. You could get away with a 40Gb just, but as soon as you get a few apps on there you'll be kicking yourself.
Well I've already ordered £460 worth of my build and at the end of this month after working overtime like a dog I should have another £1000 - £1100 to spend . But this has to cover everything. The problem is this is the first desktop I'm going be making myself and my previous dell bought gaming desktop has nothing really to offer me so I'm buying everything from scratch . As it stands my build is looking something like this: HAF X (ordered) Coolermaster Silent Pro Gold 800W (ordered) MSI p67a-gd53 most probably as it seems to be as good for my purposes as the Asus pro board that is £40 more. i5 2500k Samsung Spinpoint F3 1TB (with a view to get more as and when required) 8GB of Corisar XMS3 1.5v @ 1333Mhz (2 X4) (ordered) Twin Frozr III 6950 (with a view to get another relatively shortly for Crossfire fun) - I was tempted by the Twin Frozr II Nvidia 560ti but I decided the extra Vram of the 6950 was very useful for Shogun 2 Total War which is a major game I am intending to play (not to mention it sadly imho is biased towards ATI perpetuating a dichotomy that really overall hurts us the buying community caught between Nvidia/ATI) Asus Xonar DG Soundcard A Corsair A50 or A70 - would the A70 be worth the extra cost? I'm planning to go up to the 4.0 Ghz figure with my i5 2500k initially as I've not overclocked before and then work my way up to 4.5Ghz assuming my processor is happy to do that. Samsung DVD-RW (ordered) Samsung Syncmaster P2450H Then throw in all the other stuff like Headphones (Corsair HS1A's) TIM/TIM remover Gaming Mouse/Keyboard/Mousepad Portable HDD to move stuff from my laptop. I'm looking at something around £1k as it stands discounting the money I've already spent. So I can probably throw in a decent SSD but that will leave my bank balance dangerously close to the under £100 mark as I a destitute apprentice content editor with a online retailer .
i'll possibly be going against the grain here, but... since you're not an ssd user yet, i would suggest holding off and get whats in your list above first. save up and get a nice higher capacity ssd later on something +80gb so you can actually use it for your apps and games too. in my opinion theres no sense in having one for just the os.
Id swap the gigabyte board out for the MSI P67A-GD53 as its has a better bios and sli/crossfire. The hsf will be fine and getting 4.5ghz will be dead handy. Is the MSi card a standard PCB? Because if it is then it can be unlocked to the 6970
If your spending £1500 and your not getting an SSD your doing something wrong. Your ploughing hundreds of pounds into making a super fast rig, but its going to be as slow as your sisters dell bought desktop to boot windows, open applications etc etc. I'd drop the Xonar DG and put the money towards an SSD, then if you're not happy with motherboard audio further down the line, go ahead and replace it. An SSD is the single biggest upgrade you can make, that will benefit you outside of games.
Agreed, I don't see any point in a SSD only for Win7 itself. To see a major benefit from a SSD you want one big enough to cope with your most used applications / games. This is why I waited until I could get a 120GB SSD for a reasonable price (Vertex 2E 120GB for £153). It is big enough for all of my "most used" applications and 5/6 games which is all I have installed at any one time but was priced well enough that I could justify the expense. Personally at the very minimum I would be looking at a 60/64GB SSD but would bypass raw speed to get a 120GB decent model as overall it would be more beneficial.
You can easily OC that with the stock cooler, I would reccomend the Hyper 212+, Gelid Tranquillo or BeQuiet Dark Rock. Corsair's air coolers are a bit lacking!
Thanks for all the helpful replies fellas ! I am certainly going to be doing a bit of tweaking around to get aside some extra dough for an SSD.
Okay guys I've just put up all the bits I still need on Scan and I have fitted in a 120GB OCZ Agility 3 SSD, Read 525MB/s, Write 500MB/s, 50K IOPS. It seems to be rather good! Will this mean it will load up windows even quicker than older SSD's :O? What sort of speeds are we looking at cold boot - workable desktop? I've heard crazy figures. Could you give me a link to how I would put stuff like the pagefile mypictures etc on the mechanical HDD? And is there any way I can somehow put some of my steam games on my SSD without putting my whole steam folder on there? Oh and I take it I need to include a SATA III cable myself? Or will one come with the box? I'm getting a 100cm one anyway as my case is pretty big and better to be safe than sorry! Cheers! Build has come to about £1550 overall so that should leave me with about £200 when all is said and done which is great and pretty soon down the line I reckon I'll get another MSI Twin Frozr III 6950 and whack it in Crossfire. Can't wait to order this at the end of the month!
http://www.crescentelectronics.co.uk/corsair-a70-air-series-cpu-cooler.html ^A70 for £26? nice cheap cooler. if you really want to overclock I'd look into something like the thermalright silver arrow or noctua d-14 but dunno how warm SB gets personally thought and i agree with the general idea of saving for a larger SSD later
sata cables are exactly the same whether labelled sata2 or sata3. it makes no difference in speed just price and the companys bottom line. I would hold off getting an aftermarket heatsink and soundcard for now. make sustainable upgrades. noctua nhd-14 is an amazing cooler. also said above get a soundcard when required later, this allows you to spend more on the core rig and things that will make substaintal differeneces to your computer experience
Technically speaking yes a top end SATA 6Gb/s SSD will load Windows faster than an older 3Gb/s SSD (assuming you have a compatible motherboard), however the difference will be very small. Once you move to a SSD a mechanical HD will "feel" slow however moving to a faster SSD from an already fast SSD won't feel much different. The easiest way I have seen to ensure your "media" is on the mechanical HD is to move the individual folders within the "user" folder to the mechanical HD and then link them up using the Libaries. Shortcuts can be added back into the "user" folder to make it look like the folders havn't moved. You could also just create media folders on the mechanical HD and add them to the libraries. Either way is simple and transparant to the end user. There are ways to get the actual "user" folder moved to a different location other than the boot drive but it seemed very complicated given the end result is basically the same as the above. There are different ways to have your Steam games split across different drives. I don't use it myself as I only have games installed that I want to play (everything is backed up on my external drive for install at "short notice") but I think it is called Steam Mover or something like that.
