Maximum PC

HI! I have a 60GB OCZ Agility III SSD and a 4 year old Western Digital Caviar Green HDD. I was down to about 700MB of space and the only thing I had other than drivers on my SSD was a video game called FUEL (HUGE FAN!!) and sadly I had to uninstall it to free up space. I then reinstalled it on my about 4 year old Western Digital Caviar Green SSD and I got the same loading times as with my SSD!! Is my SSD acting as cache for my HDD?! I have no idea what is causing it to run so fast on my HDD! I have Test Drive Unlimited 2 (TDU2) and I always thought it loaded really fast (about 8 sec.) off of my HDD and the same for my other games. If anybody knows why it is so fast please let me know! Thanks!

Specs:

ASUS Rampage III Extreme

Intel Core i7 960

EVGA Nvidia GeForce GTX 580 3072MB GDDR5

24GB Kingston Hyper X 1600

No, it's not caching. You have to set up SRT manually.

OK! Thanks for the reply! I don't know what SRT is could you please tell me!? I really appreciate the help!

Smart Response Technology is Intel's fancy caching thing on the z68 chipset. I don't think your hardware even supports it. That said, I still kinda wish I had your PC. I'm still rocking a P4 processor.

Thanks! I don't have a motherboard with z68 but if you like my PC I am selling my CPU and Motherboard. Figured I would get the Intel E-series CPU with 15MB of cache and six cores and uses the LGA 2011 and z69 (not z68) technology with 5 PCI-e 3.0 slots and 8 memory slots. Thanks for your help!

Not a Z68 board.


You may want to benchmark your SSD. If the results come out as expected, then you may have a bottleneck somewhere. Whats the clock speed of the 960?

My stock speed is 3.2ghz on four cores with turbo boost up to 3.85ghz. Where could I find a benchmark program for my SSD? Thanks!

I use this:
http://crystalmark.info/software/Crysta ... dex-e.html

1) When you get down below a Gig on an SSD, it will really start to drag down exponentially.
2) Even if it's a S/ATA3 SSD, it's connected to a S/ATA2 motherboard. The 960 is a 1366 board, uses an X58 chipset, and has no onboard S/ATA3 connectors. You run a 960, it's a S/ATA2 connection.

So you're basically limiting the SSD from the get go. To run out of space and restrict the utilization of the Agility's design on top of that...well, that's kind of it. A few years ago I was fine saying to get the $300 60G drive and get on the forefront of technology, but with $150 120G OCZ's out there ($88 a few weeks ago for a Vertex3) I'd go with capacity and skip the entry levels. You still have to be frugal with a 120, but not as much as you do with a 60.

What you can do is to remove the programs that you don't NEED the speed of an SSD for and toss them to a secondary drive...like that WD spindle. Sure I can eat up 15G with FSX and all it's mods, but it just doesn't need it. Install it to the spindle and all that's on the SSD is (thank you MS) are the profiles and other document stuff. It just takes a bit of touch over plug and play to run a smallish drive.