Anandtech wrong on on not including SSD in Performance Midrange recommendations?

[Tiltevros]

i was searching for some results but
where is the 3Dmark06=27719 score?????

http://service.futuremark.com/search...ingsystem=-100

[GullLars]

@Coldon: 3 HDDs in RAID-5 is not even close to the cheapest (new generation) SSD you can find performance-wise.
An x25-M 80GB owns 2R0 Velociraptor 600GB for general OS+app usage.

For you, i'd advice an x25-M 80GB for OS and most used apps, and whatever spinning platter drives you already have for the rest of your stuff. Using a short-stroke partition on them, possibly on a RAID array, for the apps that don't fit the SSD, VMs and games, and having a larger partition for media files, downloads, etc.
There's no need to buy a new HDD if you already have one. If you however is building a new system and don't have HDDs, a small SSD + a large "green" harddisk with 2 partitions (f.ex. 25%/75%) makes sense cost-pr performance wise.

[Ourasi]

i was searching for some results but
where is the 3Dmark06=27719 score?????

http://service.futuremark.com/compare?3dm06=13655379
http://service.futuremark.com/compare?3dm06=12837812

I have a million results, but I never make them public, but for you I made an exeption

I have moved away from the dual HD5850 setup to a single HD5970, so I need to update speccs here I see...

[Coldon]

@Coldon: 3 HDDs in RAID-5 is not even close to the cheapest (new generation) SSD you can find performance-wise.
An x25-M 80GB owns 2R0 Velociraptor 600GB for general OS+app usage.

For you, i'd advice an x25-M 80GB for OS and most used apps, and whatever spinning platter drives you already have for the rest of your stuff. Using a short-stroke partition on them, possibly on a RAID array, for the apps that don't fit the SSD, VMs and games, and having a larger partition for media files, downloads, etc.
There's no need to buy a new HDD if you already have one. If you however is building a new system and don't have HDDs, a small SSD + a large "green" harddisk with 2 partitions (f.ex. 25%/75%) makes sense cost-pr performance wise.

the point of the article is to recommend a decent midrange PC. Yes, SSDs are crazy fast and so on, but will i honestly notice a massive difference in my daily usage? no, not really. My boot times will be shorter which doesnt mean a thing since i have rebooted twice in the last 3 months, my common apps are already cached in my RAM thanks to prefetch. My game load times will be shorter, yes but does that really justify the cost?

The point I was trying to make was that for less than the price of 1 ssd and a green (ie slow) hdd, i can get 3 drives and enjoy slighty better HDD speeds in addition to redundancy and double the space. For most users an SSD is pointless, and is unnessesary, especially users that are buying a midrange PC.

For a midrange PC adding in an SSD at the expense of ram, cpu, video card makes no sense especially since you will need to add an additional storage drive anyways. Especially if you have a girlfriend (my friend's) that just bought a 21mega pixel camera and snaps away as fast as the damn button can be pressed, she goes through a 4gb sd card faster than I go through a can of soda And she is the type of person that buys a midrange PC. This is extreme systems, we dont buy midrange...

[Tiltevros]

I have moved away from the dual HD5850 setup to a single HD5970, so I need to update speccs here I see...

sure i think that u r the only one who has gain 180MB/s via Overclocking really thats unique!!!!

[GullLars]

This is extreme systems, we dont buy midrange...

Well said
Although, that's only true for our own main riggs. I have built and helped other set up shopping lists for at least 10 mid-range riggs the last year and half.

I won't advocate picking a SSD over 4GB of RAM (if it would mean reducing RAM to 2GB.), but i WOULD recommend a 40GB SSD over another 4GBs of RAM, or even more RAM. I would also recommend a 40/80GB SSD over 5850/5870 vs 5830/5770 for a midrange performance rigg if it's not explicitly a gaming rigg for a demanding gamer on a budget always playing new releases.
Also, with regards to RAM/CPU/SSD, i would sacrafice some CPU for an SSD bootdrive for "most people", 75%+ of all people on the street that will look at you strangely with blank eyes if you showed them this thread. Most of them would get by fine with a 3Ghz dualcore or 2,5Ghz low-cost quad (EDIT) and always responsive system.

[GullLars]

Ourasi, would it be a big inconvenience for you to run the entire PCmark Vantage Suite and post results? I would love to see how your old (and minimalistic) setup stacks up against Nizzen's older 24/7 and the other guys here's extreme 980x riggs.
Do you pass 20K with a margin?

[Coldon]

Well said
Although, that's only true for our own main riggs. I have built and helped other set up shopping lists for at least 10 mid-range riggs the last year and half.

I won't advocate picking a SSD over 4GB of RAM (if it would mean reducing RAM to 2GB.), but i WOULD recommend a 40GB SSD over another 4GBs of RAM, or even more RAM. I would also recommend a 40/80GB SSD over 5850/5870 vs 5830/5770 for a midrange performance rigg if it's not explicitly a gaming rigg for a demanding gamer on a budget always playing new releases.
Also, with regards to RAM/CPU/SSD, i would sacrafice some CPU for an SSD bootdrive for "most people", 75%+ of all people on the street that will look at you strangely with blank eyes if you showed them this thread. Most of them would get by fine with a 3Ghz dualcore or 2,5Ghz low-cost quad (EDIT) and always responsive system.

if those people are fine with a 3ghz dual, what benefit does a SSD offer them? thats my point, if someone is happy with a low end quad then the speed boost is often not going to be noticed. I've seen guys say how fast my rig boots (around 30~40 seconds from a cold boot) when I KNOW that it is slow but they dont know any better. Rather build a machine that will last longer by putting in a beefier video card, CPU than an SSD. right now i have the money for an SSD but i'm rather going to buy a gtx480 instead of an SSD and lets say a gtx470 or 5850, why because in 2 years time the gtx480 will still be able to run most things, just like my 8800gtx can still run most games, while the SSD will probably be obselete size wise or even nearing the end of its flash memory lifetime.

[GullLars]

You are looking at it from the wrong perspective.
When i say they would be fine with a 3Ghz dualcore or 2,5Ghz quadcore, i'm talking about CPU performance alone, not any other part of the system. Meaning they would not get any noticable benefit of a 4Ghz dualcore or a 3Ghz+ quadcore, since most of the stuff they do isn't really bottlenecked by the CPU, and the stuff that is would only get a 20-30% speed increase by such an upgrade. The HDD as bootdrive (OS + Apps that is) would still be the major bottleneck in the system, and make it hang for seconds unresponsive whenever multitasking against storage happen (like background virus scan or automatic updates), even if the CPU is (to take an extreme example) 10Ghz 8-core with 16GB 10Ghz RAM.
Going for a slower but still fast enough CPU + SSD will ensure you don't get periods with the system being unresponsive, and in general interacting with the system is instant, with app loadings near-instant (compared to really fast for well tuned prefetch/superfetch with 8GB RAM). Basically, you increase the worst-case performance by 10x+ and average performance by 2-3x+, while sacraficing 20-30% best-case performance for CPU-bound scenarios.

The same way, the point of using an SSD is removing (or lessening) the IOPS bottleneck for the applications it is usefull to do so for, not mass storage. In most cases it's better to make sure your system is always responsive and snappy at $100 extra cost, than getting 20-30% higher best-case performance or 10fps more at max graphics (you could just lower the settings a notch). Programs that don't fit a $100 SSD can be placed on a HDD and keep the same performance as earlier.

There is a couple of interresting points:
The faster the CPU, the more you gain from an SSD through reducing idle CPU time for IO requests (upper mid/high end).
And the less CPU bound your general usage is, the more value is in using an SSD since all other upgrades will have a minor impact (low/mid end).

[Ourasi]

sure i think that u r the only one who has gain 180MB/s via Overclocking really thats unique!!!!

I have done 614mb/s sequential with these E's on Crystal Seq, so even if the ICH inflates the score somewhat, it's not by mutch, appart from that rediculous 2700mb/s... With normal settings, WBC off, the subtests stay aprox. the same appart from the 2.7k one wich drops a bit... Anyway, the new RST kinda gives the pro PCM Vantage setting almost the same IOPS/IOMeter, so they are now more usefull for everyday use...

But, it's a bench, so we take it for what it is, don't we...

[Tiltevros]

I have done 614mb/s sequential with these E's on Crystal Seq, so even if the ICH inflates the score somewhat, it's not by mutch, appart from that rediculous 2700mb/s... With normal settings, WBC off, the subtests stay aprox. the same appart from the 2.7k one wich drops a bit... Anyway, the new RST kinda gives the pro PCM Vantage setting almost the same IOPS/IOMeter, so they are now more usefull for everyday use...

But, it's a bench, so we take it for what it is, don't we...

614mb/s to 680mb/s is 66mb/s difference.... a single x25E scores 45k on PCmV HDD suite if u r in perfect scale then u will go to 90k ...
As we all know here appart from 2700mb/s speed that u got whitch is cached dont make me belive that an X25-E on ICHxR can score 300+mb/s in Cystaldiskmark... except if u think that i am a foul and i will belive it..

[mbreslin]

Dear this thread,

Overall computer performance is improved noticeably from having os on ssd. Even with every app on a different spinner storage drive. This is not opinion and is easily verified by giving it a try, all your apps/games/blah use windows dlls and services and the use of these is dramatically improved by having the os on ssd. "Worth the price" is subjective and up to the individual, "Better performing" is simply fact. I see no point in arguing over cost/benefit as it's different for everyone. 100$ barely gets you anything these days but it will get you a noticeably better performing computer even if all that fits on it is the os.

Regards,
-mbreslin

[Ourasi]

614mb/s to 680mb/s is 66mb/s difference.... a single x25E scores 45k on PCmV HDD suite if u r in perfect scale then u will go to 90k ...
As we all know here appart from 2700mb/s speed that u got whitch is cached dont make me belive that an X25-E on ICHxR can score 300+mb/s in Cystaldiskmark... except if u think that i am a foul and i will belive it..

I don't understand why you are discussing this, either you believe the score or not under the conditions it was taken, no need to get defensive or snappy. It's a bench, and to get the best scores you do what you need to achive them, right (not even hard, if you know what settings Vantage HDD likes)?

The ICH somtimes on some benches inflates scores in Raid0 under the right conditions, not a secret, and hardly worth arguing about... While doing the entire PCM Vantage suits, it actually inflated that subtest even further, to 745mb/s ish, so it's hardly accurate E numbers, not a big surprise... The difference from the test I took now and the 110k score, is the RST v9.6 drivers FYI, perhaps there are room for an improvement on that score....

[YukonTrooper]

I don't disagree with the article. $100 for a Blu-ray drive is well worth it, if you enjoy movies. There is no going back to DVD for me. Ever.

[Movieman]

Whoever is using Windows 7 on a 32 GB SSD and has free space left fails for using a 32-bit OS.

I have win7 64 Ultimate on a 36 gig WD Raptor and no issues..

[bot@xs]

a SSD for a mid range rig might not be viable or justifiable but then on the other hand, $1700 is a bit high for a mid range rig.

most certainly you would feel the difference of an SSD in a mid range rig, even in a low end rig and even in a netbook.
it might not be as significant as in a high end rig but certainly noticeable.

anybody spendng $1700 on a computer for whatever reason should take SSD at least in consideration.
there might not be a point of choosing lower end parts in order to accommodate a SSD, like going from a quad core down to dual core
but there is also no point of getting better parts if everything is held back by the HDD.
finding the golden middle.

a vraptor would have been at least in my recommendation for that typ of system

[Computurd]

@ourassi--
its just that is an obvious non-bootable solution, or ram drive, or hybrid ram drive. or raid 0+0. its obviously not believable. i dont think its your result that is the problem, i think it is the manner in which it is presented. it is submitted for others perusal as something to compare other systems to. as if it was an ordinary result. it is neither. when it comes to storage, You cannot compare results with obvious "tricks" to other systems.

(sorry but i've decided to put that in bold very time i type it now, as i find myself saying it constantly)

if you post something that is obviously above the stated specs of the devices, then you have to expect that people will comment about it. especially something as egregious as that.

[Computurd]

oh and a ssd would turn a 1700 dollar midrange computer into performing like a high end 3000 machine!

[GullLars]

They updated the article to mention SSD as a viable upgrade/modification, and mentioned removing the BD in favour of a DVD burner if you don't need it. This calms me down and makes me pretty content, but not happy, since the SSD is stil not listed as a part of the original setup. As it stands, it's a gaming rigg with a BD player, for some reason... Not a performance mid-end (upper mid end) rigg.
Any computer with a 58xx/59xx card (or GT4xx or >=280) is a gaming rigg to some extent, and should be explicitly stated as such IMO.

[GullLars]

Also, Ourasi''s 2R0 x25-E got 88,5K marks in the HDD subtest when he ran the entire suite (and got 23K points). That is an old OS installation in degraded "as is" state with 24/7 settings. The scores where meassured speed is higher than single drive speed * number of drives can be explained by caching of some sort (like WBC, wich is bootable). I hope you don't get mad i shared this

[Computurd]

well yes, it is like wbc, which is bootable. but 2R0+0 x-25e is not.


of course it is cache.


of which the ich10r has none.


it is a exploit to get cache used. no one should be mad you shared it, we already know

and btw, if the means to achieve the performance has to be held in secret, 95 percent of the time, said "trick" is unsavory.

[Ourasi]

@ourassi--
its just that is an obvious non-bootable solution, or ram drive, or hybrid ram drive. or raid 0+0. its obviously not believable. i dont think its your result that is the problem, i think it is the manner in which it is presented. it is submitted for others perusal as something to compare other systems to. as if it was an ordinary result. it is neither. when it comes to storage, You cannot compare results with obvious "tricks" to other systems.

(sorry but i've decided to put that in bold very time i type it now, as i find myself saying it constantly)

if you post something that is obviously above the stated specs of the devices, then you have to expect that people will comment about it. especially something as egregious as that.

The only "Tricks" I used to get 110k on 2 E's, is the preferred stripesize for Vantage and IATA/RST driver settings (WBC) and an unused state.. Completely bootable on an ordinary ICH with an regular ICH raid config, so no magic addons or other aids used...
To get equal conditions in our benchthread for Vantage HDD subtests, we do it with clean drives. The 2 E's comes very close to 100k with OS on them in a full test suite under good/perfect conditions, so the optimal score is not that far ahead after all...

Thats about all there is to say about this "story", and anyone that follow my adwised settings for Vantage with similar drives and ICH, scores about the same, every time....

[Computurd]

do you have a link for the PCMark Suite test? maybe i am misunderstanding.

[GullLars]

Ourasi's pics:
http://www.diskusjon.no/index.php?ap...tach_id=366830
http://www.diskusjon.no/index.php?ap...tach_id=366831
It's not the 110K score, but 88,5K from 2R0 x25-E running OS during the full suite, wich got 23K.

[Ourasi]

do you have a link for the PCMark Suite test? maybe i am misunderstanding.

Posted a couple of screens here: http://www.diskusjon.no/index.php?sh...ost&p=15643216 or just follow the links posted by GullLars

The ~90k HDD score is on somewhat used drives, and far to much used space (my reguar apps and stuff included on the drives for a 24/7 setup)... Saved the result if anyone absolutely denied it's validity, just incase