Hard Light Productions Forums
Off-Topic Discussion => General Discussion => Topic started by: sigtau on December 26, 2012, 03:46:48 pm
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So, I just installed this SSD (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820239046) as part of my Christmas presents from the family, and I have discovered the wonderful world of sub-10-second boot times, instant program startups (even Internet ****ing Explorer starts instantly), and virtually no waiting for game levels to load.
I'm interested in hearing you guys' opinions on SSDs in general, and if there's any caveats I need to be on the lookout for.
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SSDs own, i like running an SSD with my OS and a regular hard drive or two with everything else
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Yep, despite trying to keep the costs down, I was absolutely adamant about having a SSHD in my PC when I built it in the summer. I would never go back, NEVER. Mine is 120GB, more than enough for Windows, web browser, other commonly used programs like 7zip, and even a game or two that is bottlenecked at the HDD. It's rare, but one that comes to mind is when SWTOR first came out. No idea if it's still like that. Now, if only they could fix the slowdowns over time and the obscene cost, we could get rid of one of the most common sources of frustration and broken moving parts that is a magnetic HDD. Well, for home PCs, at least. Large HDDs would undoubtedly still be used in business applications.
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Think it would boost FS performance to have it on the SSD as well?
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Anything that uses disk access while loading would be positively affected by using an SSD, at least that's how I've found it. Virtually all of my loading times were eliminated or shortened to negligible.
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I'm looking for a SSD myself. :nod: Does OCZ make good drives? I do like Samsung better, but their warranty is not what I would have expected. They replace your broken drive with a recertified one. What do you guys suggest? (120gb-128gb). :pimp:
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I'm looking for a SSD myself. :nod: Does OCZ make good drives? I do like Samsung better, but their warranty is not what I would have expected. They replace your broken drive with a recertified one. What do you guys suggest? (120gb-128gb). :pimp:
EVERYONE does that.
anywho, i'm not a believer in SSDs at all, but i don't really care to get into that argument again so i'll just leave it at that.
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That's a shame, I was hoping to hear what your thoughts were. (Genuine interest; I don't know a lot about SSDs other than what's been said already.)
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the gist of my reasoning is the insane price for what i consider to be trivial benefit of loading times, that i already don't notice. also, i'm not terribly impressed with a technology designed around limited life and ever-decreasing performance.
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I do want to get a shiny new Intel SSD, but it's simply the lack of any form of secure erasure for the majority of them that leaves me with cold feet. It's one reason I've stuck with hard disks for both security and reliability purposes.The other is data recovery being problematic as well when the drive goes bonkers.
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ive yet to use one so idk. im still waiting for prices to go down and capacity to go up. on the other hand the quality of mechanical hard drives seems to be diminishing. every hard drive i bought over the course of the last decade has never given me a problem, and they all still work, with the exception of my most recent terabyte drive, which damn near cost me a bunch of data. when i switch over it will be an all or nothing affair (and by then most software should be smart enough not to ravage them).
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Yeah I'm still waiting for better $/GB. I might splurge on a tiny one and just put all the mostly read only OS components on it and use an HDD for everything else. I imagine it would be more difficult to do a symlink equivalent innawindows though.
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Yeah I'm still waiting for better $/GB.
So am I. It might take a while, Polish currency being what it is, but I hope to have one next time I do a major upgrade to my PC.
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I heard there were some OS tools that automatically placed everything that required constant HDD use into the SDD while resting all the other stuff in the larger slower disk. Macs apparently have this ability now too.
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I do want to get a shiny new Intel SSD, but it's simply the lack of any form of secure erasure for the majority of them that leaves me with cold feet. It's one reason I've stuck with hard disks for both security and reliability purposes.The other is data recovery being problematic as well when the drive goes bonkers.
The only truly secure data erasure method has always been and will always continue to be a liberal application of thermite to the hardware in question.
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yay thermite!
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I'm still a little iffy on the lifespan idea of an SSD operating as an OS drive, what with all the atomic timestamp updates and the like.
My next build will have one, however, it will be mounted as a mapped folder or as a dedicated drive for all of my game installs (Steam, GoG, etc) under the theory that outside of a few updates, will essentially be "write once, read a lot" which should (theINory) allow it a slightly longer lifespan.
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most of the datasheets for flash ram ive used (these are smaller lower end units as well, probibly not what gets used in ssds) say about 10k cycles. but ive hered thats a very conservative estimate. some chips have been seen to perform about 100k cycles before breaking. also consider the fact that most of your data will be essentially static data. things on my hard drive that take up memory are things like movie files, music files, and code libraries (they eat space because large allocation unit in modern drives + large number of small files == a lot of wasted space), and installed games and other software. most of that data doesn't change once created. it just sits there.
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That's good news, nuke.
Although I still remember the promises made about CDs and their "eternality" and so on. But I was naive back then.
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there is no perfect storage medium. they all have their quirks. but given the expected and practical life of mechanical hard drives, i suspect ssds are an improvement in terms of long term durability. when a hard drive wears out its a catastrophic failure, but when an ssd wears out, it only gets smaller.
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Thermite wins the thread!
So yeah, I'm waiting for the $/GB to go down, too. And I've also heard that for regular write/rewrite it will still wear and slow down, so those are my biggest concerns at this point.
My current desky is getting prety ancient (7 years!) and had to replace the GPU once, and I think the disk and or ram may be slowly starting to go as well. Dad wants to put in an SSD, which would be pretty awesome, but I think at this point it'd be more economical to just get a brand new compy instead and leave this one as a backup. :V
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I'm certainly going to get a solid state drive this year, although it is likely to be a small one. From what I've read an SSD drive under fairly hard use would last for 10 years. That's longer than I have ever kept a regular HD.
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most of the datasheets for flash ram ive used (these are smaller lower end units as well, probibly not what gets used in ssds) say about 10k cycles. but ive hered thats a very conservative estimate. some chips have been seen to perform about 100k cycles before breaking. also consider the fact that most of your data will be essentially static data. things on my hard drive that take up memory are things like movie files, music files, and code libraries (they eat space because large allocation unit in modern drives + large number of small files == a lot of wasted space), and installed games and other software. most of that data doesn't change once created. it just sits there.
Yep. With the newest memory controllers, the degradation in performance over time has been pretty drastically decreased from when SSHDs first started popping up for home PCs. This is why most people use them as a system drive. Besides updates every so often, there's not a whole lot of writing or overwriting going on once you've installed your most important programs on it.
I think having a SSHD is one of those things that you sorta have to just do. And then you'll probably understand why they're getting really popular. It's like how most people don't realize how much of their life they waste sitting at traffic lights.
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Isn't there some trouble with the Windows page file and SSDs? As in keep them away from each other or you burn out your drive? Or has that been resolved somehow?
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According to the Windows Team (http://blogs.msdn.com/b/e7/archive/2009/05/05/support-and-q-a-for-solid-state-drives-and.aspx), having the pagefile on the SSD is a good idea. The cautions against doing that come from the first few generations of SSDs, where average cell life was low and wear-levelling algorithms not as widespread.
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I have a 240GB SSD as a system drive and couldn't be happier with it, or at least I started to be once I figured out that my drive and intel's rapid storage drivers hate each other. No intel driver, no BSODs, works fast and reliable the way an SSD should.
After reading a lot of arguments for and against keeping the page file on the SSD, I decided to keep mine on the drive. Since an SSD is still a relatively expensive piece of equipment (at least compared to regular HDDs), a good assumption is that it's not being put in a low end, no RAM system. Having more RAM doesn't mean the system won't use the page file, but it will mean a smaller one that is used less. The kinds of reads and writes Windows performs on it are exactly the kind of operation the SSD is good for. So maybe it'll wear down and slow down in 4 years instead of 7. By that time the drive I have will be worth about zilch anyway and I'll be able to pick up a much better one for less money. So in the mean time, I'm using it in a way that will speed up the system by having Windows run faster - exactly what I bought it for.
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According to the Windows Team (http://blogs.msdn.com/b/e7/archive/2009/05/05/support-and-q-a-for-solid-state-drives-and.aspx), having the pagefile on the SSD is a good idea. The cautions against doing that come from the first few generations of SSDs, where average cell life was low and wear-levelling algorithms not as widespread.
if you have an insane amount of ram, you could always cheat and put the page file on a ramdisk :D
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Someone on another forum I visit made a detailed write-up (http://www.descentbb.net/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=19662) about SSDs and the practicalities of using them. According to his own data how often individual memory units were being rewritten, it would have taken his drive about 275 years of normal usage for most of the units to hit their stated rewrite limit.
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The issue at hand, Mongoose, is even now--not all SSDs are rated for many Petabytes of writes. Assuming you could do a constant 300 MB/s write, that's 17.578 GB/minute. 1.03 TB/hour. 24.72 TB/day. If you held that rate up for 180 days, you'd have written roughly 4,449.46 TB or 4.345 PB. That point is beyond the endurance of most drives--which are rated for 10,000 cycles of their memory cells (and thus is directly associated with the amount of memory in use). If a 10K rated 256GB drive was used, then the assumed endurance would be roughly 2,500 TB (2.44 PB). That's assuming that write leveling is working correctly and that the cells can actually withstand their ratings. They do degrade over time--the average cell may be rated for 10K write cycles, but that means that cells will go bad both before and after that 10K cycle rating hits. And the matter isn't so much when the cells go bad but rather how many bad cells the controller can handle without data loss or performance loss.
Under normal use, things should be just peachy. But normal use isn't sufficient for enthusiasts or professional applications. Even recent enterprise SSDs have failure rates several times higher than the 15K RPM disks they replaced. (And those 1.2M hour MTBF drives DID fail pretty often.)
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Think it would boost FS performance to have it on the SSD as well?
Just want to add - if you're worried about having to boost FS performance, then a SSD is more than likely not your bottleneck :)
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Think it would boost FS performance to have it on the SSD as well?
Just want to add - if you're worried about having to boost FS performance, then a SSD is more than likely not your bottleneck :)
While you're right about SSDs not likely being the bottleneck, I don't know how recently you've played FSO or whether you're aware of how much eyecandy and (especially) mission density has been added. Collision detection can strain mid-range CPUs pretty bad.
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Under normal use, things should be just peachy. But normal use isn't sufficient for enthusiasts or professional applications. Even recent enterprise SSDs have failure rates several times higher than the 15K RPM disks they replaced. (And those 1.2M hour MTBF drives DID fail pretty often.)
I'm certainly not suggesting that SSDs are currently suitable for every application, but the fact of the matter is that home desktop users probably aren't engaging in activities that would involve terabytes' worth of rewrites per day. And indeed, activities that require that usage aren't the applications that SSDs are recommended for in the first place. The general wisdom I've seen is that the stuff you want on an SSD is your OS, your programs, and maybe a few frequently-played games...basically all the stuff you use on a daily basis and want to load as quickly as possible. You then couple this with a big traditional HDD, where you put all your assorted media: music, videos, documents, etc. Items in that category are generally loaded into memory linearly anyway, which partially mitigates the main data-access issue of HDDs.
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Think it would boost FS performance to have it on the SSD as well?
Just want to add - if you're worried about having to boost FS performance, then a SSD is more than likely not your bottleneck :)
While you're right about SSDs not likely being the bottleneck, I don't know how recently you've played FSO or whether you're aware of how much eyecandy and (especially) mission density has been added. Collision detection can strain mid-range CPUs pretty bad.
i read fs as file system. idk. but as far as the game is concerned it might affect load times but once loaded everything runs from memory. you will get faster load times, not that load times are very long even with a mechanical hard drive. freespace (even with full mediavp assets) and its mods are actually quite small compared to other more modern games/mods. but i doubt it will do anything for your framerate.
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It won't do anything for your framerate. Collision detection is irrelevant to this issue. Personally speaking, I'd only have SSDs for my work computers, which are continuously reading 15 GB sized libraries of object data for my projects. It used to be a pain in the ass when the office people thought it was okay to have those libraries in the server (and then take 25 minutes to load any project), but even after I set up a synchronized net where you have these things on the local disks, it still takes 3 to 4 minutes to load everything we want in any given file.
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I'm not saying SSDs would ever help your FSO performance, just noting that 'I'm having trouble running FSO' isn't automatically a flag for 'I have a terrible obsolete computer' any more
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But he said FS, not FSO, yes?
If you have trouble running any 15 year old game, your problem is not your hard drive, and I will stand by that.
Running FSO may be a different story
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its my experience that your video card will **** you more often than your hard drive when it comes to running games on old machines. worst thing a hard drive will do to a game is make loading times really long. a 10 year old machine will easily run fso if it has a decent video card and enough ram. also if you use appropriate graphics settings for your hardware (dont max everything and expect it to run on a geforce < 7).
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its my experience that your video card will **** you more often than your hard drive when it comes to running games on old machines. worst thing a hard drive will do to a game is make loading times really long. a 10 year old machine will easily run fso if it has a decent video card and enough ram. also if you use appropriate graphics settings for your hardware (dont max everything and expect it to run on a geforce < 7).
Nah, the FSO stuff that will **** a ten year old machine is mostly out of the player's control in terms of graphics settings - collision detection in big missions like in Diaspora for example
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theres not a whole lot you can do hardware wise to fix that bottleneck aside from a cpu upgrade. if it comes to that then its just better to get a new machine. because that sometimes involves replacing other things like the mobo and memory, and sometimes the psu (this not so much given the declining power requirements in cpus). for what an 128gb ssd costs you can do a core components upgrade (cpu/mobo/ram) to something that can run freespace. wont be a top of the line rig but it will get the job done if you have a decent video card.
maybe 10 years was a little to far. for machines that are around 5 years old, single core performance wont be that much different from a top of the line rig, as single core performance hasnt really improved that much since the start of the multicore era. it is also likely that single core performance will not improve much in the future and may even have reduced performance in favor of moar cores.
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Actually, the problem with single core performance seems to be caused by the chips reaching physical performance limits. I don't think it'll drop, but it certainly isn't gonna get much higher in the coming years. And yeah, 10 years is much too long. On a computer from 2002 you'd most likely do better just playing retail at max settings.
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of course single core performance hit a brick wall, thats why we moved to multicore cpus. and thats why ~5 year old single core chips should run the game fairly well. if you own a 10 year old comp that you use as a primary computer, drop you ssd money on a new* cpu and a new* mobo and new* ram.
*relatively speaking
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Yeah, this is why I usually recommend light overclocking to people building new PCs, or at least to consider building in the capability. The CPU manufacturers don't seem to realize that yes, more cores are nice, but older programs that were already maxing a single core are going to suffer from lower overall clock speeds. It's especially noticeable in games with lots of physics calculations, furball missions in FS2 being one example. SoaSE in long games is another that comes to mind (fecking trade ships!).
Thankfully, even relatively inexpensive CPUs overclock like champs, and whatever else may be said about the UEFI BIOS'es, it makes the process a lot less intimidating for people that have never done it before.
Solid-state drives are getting less expensive and more reliable, CPUs are excellent these days, main storage drives are massive and cheap, power supplies are getting more efficient...it's a great time to be a PC enthusiast. :D
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What we would need would be a clone of Valathil that was more interested in multithreading than graphics. That issue would be gone from all HLP discussions from then on.
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I'm looking for a SSD myself. :nod: Does OCZ make good drives? I do like Samsung better, but their warranty is not what I would have expected. They replace your broken drive with a recertified one. What do you guys suggest? (120gb-128gb). :pimp:
OCZ has some good drives, but most are crap. Samsung's 830 series is excellent. And yes, everyone replaces your broken one with a re-certified.
Actually, the problem with single core performance seems to be caused by the chips reaching physical performance limits. I don't think it'll drop, but it certainly isn't gonna get much higher in the coming years. And yeah, 10 years is much too long. On a computer from 2002 you'd most likely do better just playing retail at max settings.
Almost every single desktop CPU on the market is capable of a 25% or higher performance boost from what is sold now. The limits are cooling, and people crying about power efficiency, not chip design. It's called Overclocking, and it's a real thing. All Intel "bridge" CPUs (Sandy and Ivy Bridge) and all AMD BD-based CPUs (Bulldozer, Trinity, Piledriver) are fully capable of 4.5Ghz with ease, many reaching 5Ghz, yet the highest stock-clocked CPU either of them sell is 4Ghz, and that's only a few chips, most being around 3.3 to 3.5Ghz.
This is all on reasonable cooling too, you do not need Phase, Chilled, DICE or LN2 to reach that, just an H60 or Antec 620 if your aim is 4.5. Heck, some Intel and AMD CPUs sell with AIO water coolers much like the H60 in the box.
Also, both sides of the fence are aiming at improving performance per watt, not just performance, because people want longer battery life in their laptops not performance they won't see. As it stands, CPUs have gotten "good enough" so Intel and AMD do not need to increase performance by 20% each year. A small boost and 10% more battery is "good enough" for them.
Intel has been holding a 5-10% increase in IPC every year while keeping their clock speed about the same. AMD just pulled a 7% IPC increase with PD, but comparing BD back any farther wouldn't help because of the massive design difference. Both next-gen CPUs are rumored to have the same increase again next year. They also pull this off while dropping power usage by a significant margin.
Yeah, this is why I usually recommend light overclocking to people building new PCs, or at least to consider building in the capability. The CPU manufacturers don't seem to realize that yes, more cores are nice, but older programs that were already maxing a single core are going to suffer from lower overall clock speeds. It's especially noticeable in games with lots of physics calculations, furball missions in FS2 being one example. SoaSE in long games is another that comes to mind (fecking trade ships!).
Thankfully, even relatively inexpensive CPUs overclock like champs, and whatever else may be said about the UEFI BIOS'es, it makes the process a lot less intimidating for people that have never done it before.
Solid-state drives are getting less expensive and more reliable, CPUs are excellent these days, main storage drives are massive and cheap, power supplies are getting more efficient...it's a great time to be a PC enthusiast. :D
They realize it just fine. Thing is, most people don't care.
OCing can shoot power usage through the roof. Well beyond limitations set by the FCC or whoever handles those things. A FX-8350 at it's stock speed is already in the 125w segment. Care to guess where it would be if AMD decided to sell one as 4.8Ghz, which many of them achieve easily? A lot more then a 20% performance increase is worth. Especially for people who will not see any difference and just complain about the power bill.
Not that I'm against OCing mind you. I have my FX-8320 at 5Ghz right now. That 43% boost is very nice. But it's also not something that your average user will see. People who do need that kind of speed will buy it, or they will do what we do.
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i dont like to overclock new hardware beyond what overclocking settings reccomended by the manufacturer, i use turbo boost and i think my ram is overclocked by factory spec. but im not going to run beyond that until the hardware starts showing its age and several mobo bios revisions have come to pass. im pretty sure it decreases device life expectancy.
What we would need would be a clone of Valathil that was more interested in multithreading than graphics. That issue would be gone from all HLP discussions from then on.
i wonder if you can div up space into sectors find all the objects in each sector, then collision detect objects only with objects in its own and adjacent sectors. collision detection jobs are now isolated to a 3x3x3 sector reigion of space. you then divide sets of non-overlapping regions into multiple threads and collision detect them in parallel. for this to be effective you would need a lot of cores, my hyperthreaded i7 with 8 logical cores would be nice, but better would be to do it on the gpu as you could cd a lot more regions at once. downside is a lot of stuff gets collision detected twice, but the upside is a bunch get done all at the same time. this imposes some limits, like no object can be larger than a sector, but that should be manageable. but this belongs in another thread.
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Almost every single desktop CPU on the market is capable of a 25% or higher performance boost from what is sold now. The limits are cooling, and people crying about power efficiency, not chip design. It's called Overclocking, and it's a real thing. All Intel "bridge" CPUs (Sandy and Ivy Bridge) and all AMD BD-based CPUs (Bulldozer, Trinity, Piledriver) are fully capable of 4.5Ghz with ease, many reaching 5Ghz, yet the highest stock-clocked CPU either of them sell is 4Ghz, and that's only a few chips, most being around 3.3 to 3.5Ghz.
This is all on reasonable cooling too, you do not need Phase, Chilled, DICE or LN2 to reach that, just an H60 or Antec 620 if your aim is 4.5. Heck, some Intel and AMD CPUs sell with AIO water coolers much like the H60 in the box.
I know what overclocking is, I'm using it myself to get much more of my old-ish dualcore than I'm supposed to. Due to the way my computer is placed (almost no space behind the back) and the fact I never really needed such performance I'm not using a watercooler, but thanks for suggestions (would've been better if you made them before xmas though :)).
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i dont like to overclock new hardware beyond what overclocking settings reccomended by the manufacturer, i use turbo boost and i think my ram is overclocked by factory spec. but im not going to run beyond that until the hardware starts showing its age and several mobo bios revisions have come to pass. im pretty sure it decreases device life expectancy.
Makes sense. It's a way to prolong having to upgrade for many people, and a sensible one at that. If you can get even one more year out of it, then it's worth it.
I know what overclocking is, I'm using it myself to get much more of my old-ish dualcore than I'm supposed to. Due to the way my computer is placed (almost no space behind the back) and the fact I never really needed such performance I'm not using a watercooler, but thanks for suggestions (would've been better if you made them before xmas though :)).
Well, no point in investing if you don't need it. Especially if you've got Intel, they change bracket dimensions every socket, so if you buy it now it might not work with your next one without new parts.
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i dont like to overclock new hardware beyond what overclocking settings reccomended by the manufacturer, i use turbo boost and i think my ram is overclocked by factory spec. but im not going to run beyond that until the hardware starts showing its age and several mobo bios revisions have come to pass. im pretty sure it decreases device life expectancy.
Makes sense. It's a way to prolong having to upgrade for many people, and a sensible one at that. If you can get even one more year out of it, then it's worth it.
I know what overclocking is, I'm using it myself to get much more of my old-ish dualcore than I'm supposed to. Due to the way my computer is placed (almost no space behind the back) and the fact I never really needed such performance I'm not using a watercooler, but thanks for suggestions (would've been better if you made them before xmas though :)).
Well, no point in investing if you don't need it. Especially if you've got Intel, they change bracket dimensions every socket, so if you buy it now it might not work with your next one without new parts.
No they haven't, not in recent years at least. Mainstream LGA1156 (1st gen Core i7) and now mainstream LGA1155 (2nd & 3rd gen Core i7) are using the same exact mounting systems. The high-end workstation stuff is changed--LGA771 was replaced by LGA1366, which was replaced by LGA2011. Those are significantly different sockets with significantly different technologies in play.