The OCZ Vertex 3 promises to be almost twice as fast as the Vertex 2. Icrontic runs OCZ's SSD through the benchmark suite. How does it stack up?
Maximum PC: Boy oh boy, with the free promotions out there adding up, it's starting to look like if you paid for Far Cry 3, you're doing it wrong. Far Cry 3 was featured in AMD's "Never Settle" game bundles, Samsung was giving it away with the purchase of its 840 Series solid state drives (SSDs) during Cyber Monday, and now OCZ is working the free Far Cry 3 promotion with the purchase of select Vector SSDs.
Every gamer at this time knows that the world of PC gaming is heading towards downloadable content. Downloadable content as in full PC games
"Even though HDD space is incredibly cheaper ($200 will buy you a 500GB HDD), when it comes to gamers, the SSD is the best choice for storage."
lol no, just no. At the minute SSD are a terrible choice, extremely expensive, abysmal write speeds and their life expectancy is somewhat questionable at the minute. The only thing going for them are the great read speeds.
Maybe in future they'll be a worthwhile option, but at the moment they are far from it.
Abysmal write speeds? What year is this? I bet you haven't taken a look at SSD:s for a while, I have 3.
I only have one ssd but yeh I would NEVER go back either. Everything is so much faster from booting to starting programs. Love ssd.
Lol you are mistaken if you think SSDs are not reliable. Sure u need to be a bit careful as to which one you buy. I hear OCZ SSDs had some reliability issues.
I been using Intel SSDs since last 3 years now. They are rock stable. As for performance i would never go back to HDDs again.
However i would say that SSDs make sense as an OS harddrive. I wouldnt buy one again for a gaming drive, as about the only time it does come in handy is during load times which are very low on PC anyways.
SSDs for system boot is a must! Makes everything fast and it stays fast. Never tried SSD for gaming though, my HDDs raid is still holding up. But when it dies, chances are I'll setup a SSD raid.
...and $200 will buy you a 500gb hdd"?? what year are we in? cause i could have sworn i've been seeing 1 terrabyte drives selling for about $80-$100 within the last year or so.
I Have a Vertex 4 512gb SSD, will never go back to HDD. Always check what kind of warranty the SSD has, my Vertex 4 has a 5 year warranty which is insanely good, but I agree they are expensive tho.
I love my 240GB Corsair Force 3 SSD. It wasn't cheap when I got it, but it has been worth it to me and the price on it has come down so much recently that I'm considering adding another to my system.
My system boots so fast that it takes longer for my BIOS to POST than for Windows 7 to load. It makes a huge difference in some games and almost no difference at all in other games, so you gotta do some testing and then evaluate whether you feel the decreased load times justify the space it takes on the SSD.
I have not had any issues with write speed nor life expectancy. It still reports 100%. I use it as my C drive which without doubt has the most write activity on it and I use my computer a LOT. Since February when I got it, the drive has seen a total of almost 2000GB (that's 2TB) written to it, which in the scheme of things isn't much when you consider the size of the drive. At that rate, the drive will be obsolete and replaced before lifespan becomes an issue.
So yeah, SSDs are worth it IMHO (assuming you can afford it of course) as long as you use it in a rational way. Use it where it matters and leave the porn on a much cheaper HD :)
SSDs will only really help load times anyway, they do not add any FPS benefit over a standard HDD in all tests I've read.
SSDs are great sure but I don't think its a gaming requirement however I would not build a new computer without one.
True about the FPS for the most part. There are some games which load textures and such on the fly however. Those games are likely to be less prone to stuttering or texture/object popping when on an SSD. It's not going to make or break a game though and I agree that it's not a gaming requirement. Just something nice to throw into your PC once you got everything else covered.
Yeah I use an SSD for my OS and a few games like Oblivion, Skyrim, Sleeping Dogs etc. Mainly just open world games and my most played games
Do you know someone who owns one of these hardware fails?
Wouldn't this article be better suited on tech radar?
But even then it's a bit late, I mean the drives came out in April if I remember correctly, and they've been tested and benched by just about everyone since.