The Hidden Forest

My new PC specs gamer point of view hows it look my first true gaming pc.

Processor AMD FX-4300 CPU (4x 3.80GHz/4MB L2 Cache) - FREE Upgrade to FX-6300
Processor Cooling Liquid CPU Cooling System [AMD] - Standard 120mm Fan
Memory 16 GB [8 GB x2] DDR3-1600 Memory Module - G.Skill Ripjaws X
Video Card AMD Radeon R7 250 2GB
Motherboard ASUS M5A97 R2.0 -- AMD 970
Primary Hard Drive 1 TB HARD DRIVE -- 32M Cache, 7200 RPM, 6.0Gb/s - Single Drive

my current pc i 12-14 box on is:
3gb ram
dual core
1tb hdd
1gb graphic (not really made for gaming)
???? rest of it was custom build in 1903 i believe

Specs look good, but I get the sense that you're severely bottle-necking the system with that hard drive. Were I in your shoes, I would be using a 250GB+ SSD. To be fair... the SSD won't offer you very much performance gain in games. Night and day difference with the system, in general, though!

Thanks bill just got the 1TB cause its free and I download alot of tv series and movies

Based on that, you could still spec in a smaller SSD; 64 or 128GB to store your OS on and keep the 1TB for storage.

825th_tomcat wrote:Based on that, you could still spec in a smaller SSD; 64 or 128GB to store your OS on and keep the 1TB for storage.

This, as long as your OS is on your SSD having EQ etc on it doesn't matter as much. Last I was really into researching this stuff some were claiming running your games off your SSD actually wore them down faster as you're flashing it more often or some such thing.

Esildor wrote:

825th_tomcat wrote:Based on that, you could still spec in a smaller SSD; 64 or 128GB to store your OS on and keep the 1TB for storage.

This, as long as your OS is on your SSD having EQ etc on it doesn't matter as much. Last I was really into researching this stuff some were claiming running your games off your SSD actually wore them down faster as you're flashing it more often or some such thing.

In response to smaller SSDs:
Performance and longevity of the drive generally scales with capacity. A 256GB SSD will have faster read/write, both sequential and random, than a 128GB SSD of the same model for almost every single make and model I've seen out there. I, personally, don't think it is a significant boost in performance, but it is documented across the board. There is a secondary performance benefit to the larger drives, too. The more free space a drive has, the more likely it is to have flash cells ready for writing. Readiness of a flash cell to be written means consistently high performance over the lifespan of the drive. Further, higher capacity allows for more efficient wear leveling, and thus a longer lasting drive.

In response to the lifespan of SSDs:
Every write to a flash cell (which is what SSDs are made of) causes physical wear, ever so slightly. Thus, there are a limited number of writes you may make to a drive before it can no longer function. For home use, it's a non-issue. The numbers I read compel me to believe that modern SSDs of a reputable brand will last a very very long time. This isn't so different from hard drives, either. Every revolution of the disc, every movement of the head, causes physical wear and heat that will lead to its eventual failure.

My advice? Get a solid state drive and use it where you do random read/writes. Run it hard, don't change your life trying to adapt to it. It's designed to speed up your life, and it can only do that if you use it, and use it often. I use mine for the OS and all programs and documents. Large media (videos) I keep on spinning hard drives, for capacity.

Be sure to align the SSD. It's usually a non-issue as long as you're not creating the partition with Windows XP. A misaligned partition can reduce your performance by nearly half on some drives. Check out my alignment tools by googling "techspec6 ssd alignment".

Jason