Ideal Power Settings, SSD Questions and more.

[Prag]

Hey all,

Just built my first rig. Had a blast and learned a lot! I just had a few questions about settings to ensure I keep this thing running well.

First - the important specs:
i7 3770k - not overclocked. Using stock Intel CPU fan.
ASRock Z77 Extreme4
HX750 PSU (Certified Gold)
Kingston HyperX SSD (120gb)

Now, in regards to those items:

1. What are the idea power settings? Windows seems to default everything to "Balanced" and it puts my Hard Disk to sleep every 20 minutes... Does this play nice with SSD's or should I be manually adjusting this?

2. What do you direct to your SSD? Just OS stuff and games you play often? Do you direct your downloads, non-vital apps and documents to your HDD?

3. I pretty much assembled it (external build first, then internal), installed the OS, transferred critical updates from Flash drive and then plugged it into the network and started updating/downloading software and games. I didn't change any configuration or settings in my BIOS. With my straightforward setup are there advanced settings I need to adjust?

Thanks all! If you have any other tips for newly built computers, I'm all ears.

[DeltrusDisc]

1. Use High Performance. Edit the settings so that nothing gets shut off. Especially SSD. Turn off Hibernate, move page-filing to a HDD/turn off, if you see fit.

2. Put any games you play often on your SSD. Put your OS on your SSD. Put programs on your SSD. Downloads, non-vital apps, documents all go on HDD.

3. You should be fine, if I understand what you did correctly.

Here are some helpful pages on how to maximize your SSD's life, efficiency, and performance: http://lifehacker.com/5802838/how-to...fe-of-your-ssd

If you want to know the general life remaining on your SSD/other info like firmware version, use this: http://ssd-life.com/

[Prag]

1. Use High Performance. Edit the settings so that nothing gets shut off. Especially SSD. Turn off Hibernate, move page-filing to a HDD/turn off, if you see fit.

2. Put any games you play often on your SSD. Put your OS on your SSD. Put programs on your SSD. Downloads, non-vital apps, documents all go on HDD.

3. You should be fine, if I understand what you did correctly.

Here are some helpful pages on how to maximize your SSD's life, efficiency, and performance: http://lifehacker.com/5802838/how-to...fe-of-your-ssd

If you want to know the general life remaining on your SSD/other info like firmware version, use this: http://ssd-life.com/

This forum really needs a +rep.

Thank you so much. This is incredibly helpful and I really appreciate your time.

[DeltrusDisc]

This forum really needs a +rep.

Thank you so much. This is incredibly helpful and I really appreciate your time.

Hey, no problem and thanks for the complement! Always happy to help! If you have any more questions, feel free to post them, there's quite a few people on this board with more knowledge as well!

[Deleted]

You could consider disabling CPU State Support C1E and C3/C6 and bench your SSD performance. Some people have reported SSD performance gains with these CPU sates disabled, but in all honesty I think it's unlikely you'll see a benefit so probably best to ignore this unless you have a reason.

Personally, the best thing you can do to ensure optimal performance is not run a messy bloated Windows. Be strict about your OS and the applications and services running. Keep the whole thing lean and clean. Spend some time learning about how to control which services and applications load at startup (if you don't already know) and how to keep your Windows in an efficient working condition.

[Killora]

1. Use High Performance. Edit the settings so that nothing gets shut off. Especially SSD. Turn off Hibernate, move page-filing to a HDD/turn off, if you see fit.

2. Put any games you play often on your SSD. Put your OS on your SSD. Put programs on your SSD. Downloads, non-vital apps, documents all go on HDD.

3. You should be fine, if I understand what you did correctly.

Here are some helpful pages on how to maximize your SSD's life, efficiency, and performance: http://lifehacker.com/5802838/how-to...fe-of-your-ssd

If you want to know the general life remaining on your SSD/other info like firmware version, use this: http://ssd-life.com/

This. Hibernate takes up space on your drive equal to the amount of ram you have. And the page file is rather un-necessary on an SSD.

Also make sure any indexing and superfetch is turned off. Windows should auto detect that it's a SSD and turn these off aswell as defragmenting, but double-checking won't hurt.

And on the note of defragging, never do it on an SSD.

[DeltrusDisc]

Indexing can just be put on an extra HDD, that's where mine is. :P