Another important thing to note is that hard drives break down at wildly unpredictable points in their lifespan. So while glo may have put his raptor to work for 6 years now, other people's hard drives may break down in half the time. Flash is much more predictable that way.
With the new SSD's coming this year, running anything in a raid 0 won't be as economical, or fast. the Vertex 3 is going to do 500/mb write and read, and the new Crucial coming in Feb will do 425-450 read/write. On power consumption and heat alone it would be smarter to get an 80gb SSD and a second drive for storage then trying to build a Raid that will come close to comparing.
Raid 0 has the obvious problem of being twice as likely to fail; also, note that you have to use hardware-offloaded RAID for this to really work; you need your CPU for WoW. I didn't specify the raid scheme because, well, that's dependent on the best available from your hardware.
You're trying to argue a point using games that don't thrash the CPU as much as WoW does, and at the same time assuming I treat my computer like crap? You're a funny guy.
I'm sure the E8400 beating the 955BE in 2 out of 5 synthetic Sysmark tests, and Fallout 3 by barely 1% is going to make a whole lot of difference in a 25man raid.
red panda red panda red panda!
Actually he is right, just go ahead and check your affinities in task manager for WoW, turn some off and on and experiment, you'll notice there's very little difference. You are right however about the situation, in a combat situation with a lot of people a stronger cpu (Not more, just a stronger one) will show more improvement.
Actually the thing that slows you down in cities is the loading of textures, like logging in does. A GPU doesn't increase framerate unless the drive allows the textures to be loaded quicker which is done through the SSD not the CPU. Thus a CPU won't be a bigger upgrade unless you are below a certain treshhold.
Everytime you switch from characters or you enter a dungeon bg or arena it has to load; which increases your enjoyment from having an SSD while a CPU may grant more of an improvement in overall gameplay, it'll also be a LOT bigger of an investment to get such a change as going from HDD to SSD.
As I said above, it is if you look at it money-wise and you have a half decent computer, upgrading a CPU first of all is NEVER worth it and a GPU upgrade goes along the same line. Why drop 300-400 bucks when you can buy an SSD for 100 and have an improvement you actually notice? I mean if I have to buy a new CPU I'll just buy a new computer with everything upgraded, obviously the better choice seeing as replacing a CPU is like cutting your own arm off financially.
---------- Post added 2011-01-17 at 09:13 PM ----------
I work at a computer store repairing computers and I gotta give it to the HDD's for having weird errors. The SSD's sometimes simply quit working while HDD's sometimes just seem to be in a bad mood and then work again the other day allowing us to retrieve data before it dies out again.
Odd things they are, them drives.
1. That benchmark doesn't apply. WoW isn't included and reacts to CPU/GPU differently than most games.
2. If you can't tell a difference between a Phenom II and Core 2 Duo in a raid environment, I feel sorry for you. The difference is quite large.
3. Again, WoW uses more than 2 cores. Check thread usage in Process Explorer. See how many there are? Because there are that many, some can spread to new cores. Also, my i5 750's 70/30/30/70% usage disagrees with your statement.
4. Don't insult other people by assuming that they don't know how to maintain their machine. Asera is a long-time poster in this forum and has brought valuable information.
5. Don't tell people when they can and can't comment. It makes you look like a jackass... and in this case, you're wrong anyway. Besides, that's my job.
No, actually, he's wrong. The program can make use of as many cores as you put in front of it and is optimized for three. As I said, use Process Explorer. If you see WoW using only 2 threads, then yeah, it'll only use 2 cores. If it has any more than 2 threads, it can spread over more than 2 cores.
On initial load, yes. After initial load, it's the CPU keeping track of people's placements, movements, spell casts, etc, etc.
I never said it wouldn't speed up load times. In fact, I believe I said multiple times that it would. My argument is that the decrease in load times isn't more valuable than more framerate during a boss fight.
I would much rather spend $300-400 and have better raid performance. I don't care how anyone else spends their money. I just want proper information put out. If all of the SSD enthusiasts convince the guy running an Athlon II to get an SSD, he's probably not going to be too happy when he finds out that he zones in really fast and still sees shit framerate when they engage. If the same person has all of the information available and still buys the SSD, then he only has himself to blame.
-- Separate from quotes
This is why I hate SSD arguments. People react to my statements like I'm trying to call SSDs snake oil. I'm not! They are good pieces of hardware. I'm thinking of getting one myself. I, however, don't like the people who say that they are the single best upgrade anyone can get. It's simply not true. Anyone with a CPU more than one generation old will generally benefit from a platform update much more than an SSD.
I'm not saying people are evil for advocating SSD usage. Not at all. I'm saying that for anyone looking for system performance, then they'd be better off with upgrades to CPU, GPU, and RAM. Loading into the instance faster is all well and good, but if you're system doesn't give you decent framerate in the boss fight, then what did you really gain from the SSD?
Spend some time in this forum. The vast majority of posts don't consist of "man, these instances load too slow and I don't know what to do about it". The vast majority of posts are "my framerate sucks, help!". If even one of those people stumbles into an SSD thread and sees people spouting the wonders of SSDs, they can pretty easily spend $150-200 getting one and see zero improvement in the area they were concerned about. I post in the SSD threads to prevent that. I want people to realize that while SSDs are great, they only help with load times.
Bottom line: SSDs are a great quality of life improvement. Things load faster. Wonderful. They won't help with a computer that performs poorly in raids, though.
And I think this is where the problem lies.
How to define "performance".
I don't wish to insult anyones playstyles, but to me..
Decreasing loadtimes is infinitely more important than increasing FPS on boss-fights.
I raided through Vanilla and BC. EU-top 20 kills on C'Thun, Kel'Thuzad, Illidan, Kil'Jaedan. But frankly, I don't see the point in this casual, easymode content (ie, todays PvE). I haven't raided in WLK or Cataclysm, apart from VoA and Baradin Hold. I also did Obsidian Sanctum once-or-twice. Bleh.
My computer never bring me below 50FPS. I raided Baradin Hold with full ultra not dipping below 58. Stormwind? 58+.
An SSD is a bigger increase in fun playingwise, than the difference of maintaining 60fps and 30. Because for someone who nowadays PvP, there's quite a bunch of loadingscreens.
(This is not meant to insult you or your arguments, so please don't take it as such.)
That old tired bullshit qq almost invalidates the rest of your post outright, but I'll do serious reply anyway.
If the difference is 20 seconds vs 2 seconds load time you pay $100 for, it's rather badly spent money. Especially considering you spend several minutes to several hours inside the instance where SSD will not help, but CPU does. It's just damn poor use of resources all around, unless there's there's nothing else left to upgrade.
Never going to log into this garbage forum again as long as calling obvious troll obvious troll is the easiest way to get banned.
Trolling should be.
I'm pretty sure that's exactly Cilraaz's point. Since your computer is already running the game at 50+ FPS most of the time, the SSD was probably the best upgrade for YOU. But it certainly does not mean that it's also the best upgrade for another person who would read your stuff and think "this guy said that an SSD would fix every performance issues that I have, I'll buy one". They might just need a new video card or CPU, you don't really know that.
Playstyle will definitely have an impact on what component is best for a person. Anyone who has seen a lot of my build suggestion posts has seen me say more than once that building a system is an intimate thing and requirements will vary person to person.
This has no bearing on the argument, but if OS was the closest you got to raiding in WotLK, how can you comment on the ease or difficulty of raiding? Also, try some Cata content. It's well ahead of WotLK in difficulty already.
You fall into the group that I'd mentioned as being an exception (current generation or one generation out setups). An i5 760 isn't necessarily worth the cost of upgrading to an i5 2500K. You also have a GTX 460, which is a great card for WoW. At that point, an SSD is a potentially good option.
That goes back to playstyle.
Debate is a much better thing than insults. I like the people on this forum who can debate and debate "properly". Don't worry about any insults being taken.
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That's pretty much exactly my point.
Useless retort.
Last edited by BicycleMafioso; 2011-01-17 at 09:22 PM.
Last edited by vesseblah; 2011-01-17 at 10:38 PM.
Never going to log into this garbage forum again as long as calling obvious troll obvious troll is the easiest way to get banned.
Trolling should be.
BG's and arenas won't rely on an SSD once you're actually inside, so spending money on a better CPU is definitely going to help a lot more. Oh, and what gives about the raiding "argument"? Ulduar hard modes when they were current were actually quite difficult. Getting Insanity 25M when it was current was quite difficult(well, not in full 258 gear). Heroic LK was pretty hard from no buff to 15%, at which point I quit as well, but the requirements for AoE on valks was ridiculous.
Best part is, most of these fights are more taxing on a CPU than Sartharion, anyways! =D
Last edited by Badpaladin; 2011-01-17 at 10:57 PM.