![]() The best SSD for gaming. How we tested SSDs and others we tested. SSDs make your whole system faster and more pleasant to use. ![]() ♦ CHEAP GAMES: http:// ♦ Drop a LIKE rating if you enjoyed! Can we hit 1000? PC Specialist: https://www.pcspecialist.co.uk/ Nvidia. Item is eligible: No interest if paid in full within 12 months with the Amazon.com Store Card. Apply now. An SSD is now an essential component of a modern gaming PC. With your operating system and applications stored on an SSD, Windows will boot faster than you can grab a.But they matter for gaming, too. A fast- loading SSD can cut dozens of seconds off the loading times of big games like Battlefield 4, or MMOs like World of Warcraft. ![]() 10 best gaming laptops 2015: top gaming notebooks reviewed | These are the best gaming laptops you can buy, based on our comprehensive reviews, always updated. These. Update: we rake the Lenovo Y510P on the first place on 5/2 2014, it’s graphic card Nvidia GT755M SLI is best of these five gaming laptop. It performs similar to a. ![]() ![]() An SSD won't affect framerate like your GPU or CPU, but it will make installing, booting, dying and reloading in games a faster, smoother process. When shopping for a good SSD for gaming, one of the most important factors is price per gigabyte. How much will you have to spend to keep a healthy library of Steam games installed, ready to be played at a moment's notice? To find the best gaming SSDs, we researched the SSD market, picked out the strongest contenders, and put them through their paces with several benchmarking tools. We also put in the research to know what makes a great SSD great, beyond the numbers—technical stuff like types of flash memory and memory controllers. SATA SSDs, the standard internal drives most PC gamers are accustomed to. There are newer, faster SSD form- factors (M. PCie) that can deliver far greater performance than SATA drives. But right now, there are very few of them, motherboard support is limited, and they tend to be far more expensive than SATA SSDs. M. 2 will likely be much bigger by 2. Testing SSDs. To test the SSDs, we used a PC with a 4. GHz Intel Core i. GB of DDR3 memory, an Nvidia Ge. Force GTX 9. 70 graphics card, and an Asus Z8. Windows 7 was installed on the main system drive, AHCI was enabled, and all the drives were connected to the motherboard’s SATA III ports. We used a combination of synthetic and trace benchmarks. This included AS SSD, Crystal. Disk. Mark, and PCMark. SSD Technology. The single specific advantage that makes an SSD so much faster than a hard disk is exponentially shorter access time. A hard disk depends on a mechanical arm moving into position to read data from a platter, while in an SSD, data is stored and accessed electronically. Although modern hard disks are astonishingly fast at accessing data, they’re no match for an SSD. An SSD is a physically simple device. It’s made from an array of flash memory chips and a controller, which comprises a processor, memory cache, and firmware. But like most things in computing, it starts to get complicated when you look at it in more detail. NAND flash chips store binary values as voltage differences in non- volatile memory, meaning they retain their state when power is cut off. In order to change the state of a single cell, in effect, writing to it, a strong voltage is applied to it. But because of the way the cells are laid out, it can’t be done on a cell- by- cell basis: an entire row has to be erased at once. Each cell is insulated from its neighbours to preserve the value it holds. But every time a cell is written to, the insulator becomes slightly less reliable. Eventually, after a certain number of writes, the cell becomes unable to hold any values, which is why SSDs have a limited lifespan. In the early days of flash memory, this limited number of writes was a concern, but clever tricks, improved technology, and software improvements means it’s no longer a real issue. If you want further proof, then have a gander at the SSD endurance experiment over on Tech. Report. In one of the only tests of its kind, they set about continuously writing data to select SSDs, until the drives became completely unusable, in a test that went on for months. Although the odd bad sector crops up relatively early, at 1. TB of writes, most of the drives survived until nearly a petabyte of data or more was written to them, far beyond the manufacturers’ rating, and it took months of non- stop writing to reach that point. The best drives managed 2. PB of writes. It’s fair to say endurance for all but the most extreme workload is no longer an issue. SLC, MLC, and TLC memory. A given quantity of physical flash memory cells can be programmed to hold either one, two or three bits of data. A drive where each cell holds a single bit is known as SLC. Each cell can only be in one of two states, on or off, and only needs to be sensitive to two voltages. Its endurance and performance will be incredible but a large amount of flash memory is needed to provide a given capacity, so SLC drives have never really taken off beyond expensive server and workstation setups. MLC memory is currently the most popular kind used in consumer SSDs. Each cell holds two values, with four binary states (0. The same amount of flash memory provides double the amount of space, so less is needed and the SSD is more affordable. TLC memory goes even further, with three values per cell. Now each cell has to hold eight binary states, and performance and endurance begins to really suffer as there are eight distinct voltages that represent data. A TLC cell will be erased more often, and therefore wears out quicker. And since it needs to hold eight voltage values, reading them reliably requires more precision. But you get even more capacity from the same amount of flash memory, resulting in even cheaper SSDs, which is something everyone wants. As we’ve found from testing some SSDs, manufacturers are using tricks to mitigate these negative effects with TLC flash memory, so prices can continue falling without impacting performance. Sequential Transfer Speeds. Whenever you read about an SSD, or look at a review, the first figure you’ll usually see is a headline- grabbing transfer rate. Read and write speeds up to around 5. MB/sec, or even faster in the case of a PCI- Express SSD. These numbers always look really impressive. This will certainly be referring to sequential file transfer rates, which means the speed a storage device can read or write a file if all the blocks are laid out one after the other. In the real world, most software applications deal with both large and small files, while at times, a program might be waiting for input before it carries on, so you’ll never be getting the maximum sequential speed of your SSD all the time. You might see these speeds when writing a large 1. GB movie file, but things will be a lot slower when copying a folder full of 1. HTML documents. These smaller files could be spread all over the disk, and will be slower to transfer. In the case of a hard disk, that entails moving the disk head over the correct position on the platter, which adds a really long delay. SSDs are far quicker to do this, which is where the real improvement in overall responsiveness comes from. To further complicate things, some SSDs handle uncompressed data much faster than compressed data. Specifically, there has been a big difference in performance with these two types of data with SSDs that use older Sand. Force controllers. If there’s a difference, the faster speeds when dealing with uncompressed data are the ones that are quoted. Therefore, although faster sequential speeds are always better to see, it’s best not to judge an SSD on these figures alone, as you’ll never get these speeds all the time. IOPS. IOPS is another term that is often used in relation to performance of storage products, usually quoted with SSD specifications, but its direct application to real- world use isn’t simple. Put simply, IOPS means input- output operations per second. The more a device can manage, the faster it is. Except, not all IO operations are the same. Reading a tiny 5. KB block from a 1. GB movie. There’s no standard for how figures should be advertised, but the general agreed format is that companies quote the QD3. KB block size figure, that is the IOPS when 3. KB read or write commands are queued. In the real world, applications won’t be constantly queuing up 3. KB blocks. It will likely be a random mixture of block sizes, reads, writes, and times when the storage device is idle. Much effort goes into measuring IOPS for patterns that simulate databases, web servers, file servers and so on. For gaming, it really depends on the application, since no two games will be identical. Some might involve huge textures being loaded from disk, while others might be structured differently. Although the 4. K QD3. 2 IOPS figure is relevant, it’s best thought of as an indicator of SSD performance rather than a definitive, comparable benchmark for overall performance. Competitors. We narrowed our testing down to 9 SSDs by researching the most popular and competitive drives around. Of course, there are plenty of other SSDs out there, and new ones arriving regularly, like the OCZ Vector 1. Samsung 8. 50 Pro. We focused on SSDs known to be reliable, consistent performers, and the best value options. Looking at the benchmark results, and particularly the PCMark. SSD seriously outperforms another in real- world tests. Even the differences between drives in synthetic benchmarks are fairly narrow, with differences of ten percent or so. Even if you buy an SSD that's not included in our testing, it will be far faster than a mechanical hard drive—it just might not quite match the speed and endurance of a drive like the Samsung 8. EVO. At the high end, it seems clear that the SATA bus is now the serious limiting factor in SSD performance. Fortunately, SSD manufacturers can take advantage of the PCI- Express bus, and much faster speeds, with a new standard called M. I’ll explain in a moment. But even the affordable SSDs are really good. Sure, they might be a bit slower in synthetic benchmarks, but in real- world tests, you'll find little reason to complain about their performance. For the entry- level choice, it was a close call between Crucial’s BX1. San. Disk Ultra II. As of this writing, the Ultra II has a lower retail price, but it’s based on TLC flash, and it came out ever so sightly lower in the benchmark results. We went with Crucial’s offering, but if you end up with an Ultra II in your PC, you won’t be disappointed. OCZ’s Arc 1. 00 is also absolutely fine, but its retail price pushes its price per GB slightly above Crucial and San. Ti BEAST PC! | 2. Best Mini Gaming PC Review.
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September 2016
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