So, I've had £300 burning a hole in my pocket for a couple of months now. It's earning no interest there so I may as well help the economy and buy a new GPU and a SSD. I'd been keeping an eye on things for several months, and made a shortlist of a M225 Crucial SSD and a 5870 Vapor X. However the NVidia 460 and these smaller, cheaper 60Gb SSD's have now hit the market and seem to both offer really good value - something that's been missing in PC hardware for a while. My shortlist is now: GPU - 1Gb GTX460 (Gigabyte) SSD - 64Gb Crucial C300 I use my PC for gaming (1920x1080), browsing, very occasional office work and very occasional video and picture editing. I'd be grateful for any thoughts and feedback, looking forward to making the purchase midweek. Many thanks in advance, Cleggy.
Yes i think that would be worth it at ssd's are now using up all of sata 3GBps. There is a fair difference in the cards so watch out. Something like this would do the trick although it is nearly 40 pounds. http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/High...-v2-x1-to-SATA-6Gb-s-non-RAID-controller-card
I think the Crucial C300 is a fine drive for a boot SSD. Read speeds for a drive that cheap are crazy. I think its worth buying the SATA3 card because Q4 onwards I expect all the new drives will be SATA3. Your graphics card choice is also spot on as everyone is raving about the Gigabyte atm. The C300 is £112 at Scan afaik.
the gigabyte 460 is a good shout, and represents very good value. But CPC just did a group test and the gainward 1gb version came out on top (only just) might be worth looking at (see issue 85 of custom pc)
Yeah, but that was partially based on the 64GB C300s low write speeds (which i really do think are an issue) & the 50/60GB V2 being £150 (+p&p) rather than ~£130 inc p&p which it is now - since the R60 seems to be ~£128 inc p&p then it's pointless buying a worse SSD to save ~£2 (it having been replaced by the F series - also Sandforce like the V2 - so seemingly ltd availability). You have to remember that the highpoint card is *only* viable for a single high spec SSD as, whilst you 'could' do software raid, it would be bandwidth ltd reading from 2 SSDs simultaneously - 1 lane pcie v2 gives a theoretical max bandwidth of 400MB/s after 8b/10b encoding... ...so it would basically become a pos (worse than connecting the same 2 SSDs to a decent 3Gb/s SATA controller) if you ever decided to add a 2nd SSD to raid. The problem though is that to get anything significantly better then you start looking at comparatively large sums for the lsi 9260 controllers (the recommended high end cards for SSD arrays atm) - even the 4i would be a significant proportion of your budget... ...& that's without the battery (highly recommended for reliability when using write caching) or the FastPath key (doubles the iops of SSD raid arrays) which would be an extra ~£260 on top.
I wouldn't get the Corsair Reactor R60 when the Force F60 will most likely give you better performance for day to day usage and is only £10 or so more nowadays. I would say today's prime candidates in the 60GB range are: Crucial C300 64GB: £115 Corsair F60 60GB: £109.85 OCZ Vertex 2E 60GB: £119.98 The Sandforce drives (Vertex and F60) will perform pretty similarly but there are various reasons why you might want to chose one manufacturer over another. The C300 requires the 6Gb/s SATA3 card to get full benefit of its massive read performance.
I just went and ordered myself the Vertex 2E I linked above. Ebuyer were very prompt in notifying me that the drive comes with a 3.5" mounting bracket but that I need to get my own SATA cable. Can't argue with that kind of service
Well I went with Ebuyer in the end because they were just a wee bit cheaper than Scan but for what it's worth, their service guys just got back to me with exactly the same information (that the OCZ drive includes a bracket but not an SATA cable) so I'm equally happy with Scan's prompt service
This thread has been a great help to me as i've been eyeing up a second SSD to put in my system to replace my OCZ Summit Series 60gb as a boot drive and use the Summit for my Steam folder. In real world applications will I really be able to tell the difference between the current onboard Sata 6Gb/s controllers and the Highpoint Rocket 620 card everyone seems to be recommending? Drive wise with it being destined for a boot drive (thus minimal writing to be done after the initial install) will the Corsairs awful write speed become noticable? Better off opting for the Vertex 2E?? Sorry for the hi-jack but it seemed relevant to your interests aswell
I believe it is quite rare for a motherboard to have an onboard SATA3, 6gb/s controller. You'll only notice a difference with the Highpoint card if you have a drive that can make use of it (i.e. one of the new Crucial C300 drives) I assume you mean the poor write performance of the Crucial C300 64gb? The Corsair Force drives have equally good performance as the OCZ Vertex 2 in benchmarks. From the feedback in reviews it seems that the benchmarked 'poor' write performance of the Crucial 64gb drive doesn't actually make that much of a difference in real world usage. Have a look at this response to another thread from Baz: http://forums.bit-tech.net/showpost.php?p=2387011&postcount=6 I decided to go with the Vertex2E but that was mainly because I don't want to shell out for a SATA3 card to go with the Crucial drive.
I say you get the 128GB C300 with the SATA 6GB/s upgrade board, then buy a GTX460 later? Slightly faster SSD, you won't have to worry about running out of space on it either
Yep, just saw the review: http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/storage/2010/08/17/ocz-vertex-2e-review-120gb/8 Looks like I'll be doing exactly as you suggest. Good call!
Well this sucks, both ebuyer and Scan have dropped their prices for the Corsair and OCZ drives by about £10 just after I placed my order. I guess that's the inevitable progress of technology...
