By fast he means it loads up windows in 20 seconds rather than a minute. It's 5x as fast! just don't go expecting miracles. I did and was rather dully amused. A striped down Windows without all the compatibility loads in about 20 seconds so I was hoping for better. Still maybe I'm being too hard. It can also raise battery life a tad as there is no thrashing around in there. It's also quieter if HDD noise bugs you. A RAID-0 array is just as fast in reads but much slower in writes. An SSD practically saturates the entire SATA spec so an SATA RAID array, for the sake of speed not storage space, makes little sense.
I don't know. My brother has one in his desktop and did a demonstration of some load heavy games like Skyrim and Fallout 3, and the SSD made a massive difference in how those games ran. Everything was instantaneous. It actually changed how those games played in a very dramatic and noticeable way. When there's no loading, it's easier to get immersed in a game.
I got this one when it was $30 cheaper last week. We will see if I can last on 240GB in the long run. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227727
I think the fact that I have a raid 0 striped setup going here and I still see big performance gains in an ssd means quite a bit.
Personally I LOVED the elevator rides in ME1. Creative uses for load times (giving good tips that rarely replay, cracking jokes, offering an 8-bit game) gives it personality. ME2 had no personality, no Mako no load times (smaller maps), it just felt like a sell out. Not to mention that guy you worked for. Everything about that game screamed sellout.
Did you play ME2 on the PS3? I don't know about PC and Xbox versions but the load times were unacceptable in my version of that game, even with it being installed. The stupid bits on the ship were a chore as you'd sit through a long loading screen to talk to Miranda and she STILL isn't ready to fuck yet so you have to sit though another long ass loading screen to get back to the bridge. Those loading screens destroyed any atmosphere the game may have had. I wish I'd jumped in from the beginning but I didn't. I played ME2 on the PS3 and still haven't finished it, stopped playing it months ago and have no drive to put myself through the boredom that game creates. Sure I had fun a couple of times but that game did not get me interested in the franchsise. Based on the reactions to the ending of ME3 I'm glad too.
Load times are really quick in the PC version of ME2, and virtually non-existent with an SSD. The slow laptop hard drives and lack of ram in the consoles make load heavy games a chore to play. I'm amazed you got so into Skyrim playing it on a console. I don't think I could have dealt with the load times. Of course, you could throw an SSD into your PS3 now that they're getting cheap and given the fact that they're identical in size and interface to sata laptop hard drives. You'd still be dealing with a system that has only 512mb of ram, but the SSD would cut down on load times immensely. If you still play Skyrim or other load heavy games, it might be a worthwhile purchase. A 120GB can now be had for $80 to $100. Also, the new endings to ME3 in the extended cut DLC are perfectly fine. I'd even go as far as to say that the new "destroy" ending when done with a high readiness rating is pretty good. The video is long I know, but he claims ME2 loads at least twice as fast on an SSD on the PS3.
I like the way he starts the video by saying he's going to do something fun. Ok mate, comparing loading times is fun, yeah. The loading screens actually did put me off Skyrim for a couple of days as I was sick of fast travelling to Whiterun, going to Belethor's, selling my loot, leaving Belethor's, fast travelling back to the cave i was about to enter, then entering the cave. That's 5 loading screens just to do something that shouldn't take long, but it did. What I ended up doing was simply turning off auto save on travel, that actually cut the loading times in half, now I have no complaints.
I had to build a computer for my wife's grandparents. They couldn't spend any more than $300, LOL. I went with an AMD A6-3650 Llano APU that was part of the AMD/Rosewill ghetto special of the week on newegg. Parts haven't arrived yet. How terrible is this processor going to be? Pretty awful I'm guessing. What does it compare to in terms of a real (ie Intel) processor? Probably an Atom? I'm also fully expecting the Rosewill PSU to either arrive dead or pop as soon as I put any real load on it. For that price it was either this or an eMachines. This is probably (?) better.
Thats not a bad choice as you wont need a video card. Speed wise it's a little faster than an Atom and similar to an old low end Intel Core2Duo. Should be fine for the grandparents. Congrats on beating the $300 mark.
This was the kit, which was $291. You even get a 120GB Kingston SSD, which should speed things up a lot I would imagine. Seems almost ideal as a grandparent or mom computer because with an SSD, it won't require much maintenance to keep it from slowing to a crawl. http://www.newegg.com/Product/ComboBundleDetails.aspx?ItemList=Combo.1050541
an atom?? seriously? seiously?? C'mon it's gonna be at least (close to) Phenom II perf. no i5 and barely i3 but quite enough for senior citizens. Groupon is always trying to get rid of HP DM1z laptops think their down to 200 bucks now! That woulda' been a HECK of a deal if their still remotely active at all. For Senior Citizens unless they know their way around a computer I might have instead gotten them two tablets. Touch input is a LOT more intuitive than point and click. Seriously you can even say Brazos (HP DM1z... though I believe the one on sale is the 1.45ghz one not the 1.35ghz original one) is atom level (though it's not), Llano is a step ABOVE that, a LARGE (4-core and like 2ghz+!) step above that capiche?? Atom and Brazos is for the 5w crowd, Llano is 85w+! That's like saying 'oh hahaha! Core i3? It costs less than Ipad so obviously it couldn't eat iPad's dust!' Get real with that dudebro crap.
They absolutely did NOT want a laptop. I wanted to get them an off-lease Core 2 Duo based Thinkpad T-series for $250. Actually, ideally the best thing for them would have been a Mac, but they aren't rolling in money. For a sub $300 desktop, this was the best thing I could come up with. All of the prebuilts in that price range belong in a dumpster. The Llano will probably be about on par with the Atom and other ghetto processors, but that's still better than the Pentium 4 Wiliamette they're using now. Almost anything is better than a Williamette. Well assuming the horrid Biostar motherboard and equally horrid Rosewill PSU actually work, which might be assuming a lot. $400 would have gotten way better hardware, but whatever. For $300 you get the AMD/Rosewill ghetto fabulous special of the week...or you get an eMachines.
I live on the Williamatte yo! Don't be bustin ma waterin hole! When I read Rosewill I read it as Roswell... anybody else did that?
You know I'm totally joking about the Atom stuff, right? I'm in character as the rabid AMD hater you all think I am. Just like the Apple hater thing is mostly me playing a role to get alterego riled up. I actually like a lot of Apple products, I'm just too poor to buy them. Anyway, I know the LLano is basically a Phenom II and entry level DX11 Radeon 6 series card on a chip. It's a good choice for people who want to do light gaming on a budget. However, I still would have preferred an i3 in this case, as I really think for elderly people who don't game CPU power is going to be more important than GPU power. Regardless, a Llano is still going to seem like a rocket ship compared to a Williamette.
Just got done moving my computer into a Corsair Obsidian 650D. I really haven't seen a case I've liked better. It has the metallic fit and finish of a Lian Li, with the "neato" innovative features of an Antec. It's absolutely huge inside, and has two 200mm fans. My CPU temps dropped by 10C just by switching cases. It's also pretty quiet despite the massive fans. Quieter than my old P180 actually, which was advertised as a silent case. I'm not normally a fan of toolless stuff in cases, but what Corsair has done with this case is pretty awesome. It has air filters over everything, even the power supply, which vents down to the floor. I've also never been able to do the kind of impeccable cable management I did with this case before. I can't get over how clean it is inside. If my temps are any indication, everything is getting great airflow. I can't overstate this enough. This is seriously like the most awesome case I've used. I've never seen a case that was so well made and so thoughtfully put together. I think AKS is also using this case? He'll reaffirm its awesomeness. I don't know, my P180 just kept annoying the shit out of me, and this was one of the best reviewed cases I could find. I give it a 10/10. I really couldn't find anything I didn't like about it. Well, it's a bit pricey at $150 after rebate, but you get what you pay for.
$150 for the best fucking PC case on the planet. And it's normally $200. I got it on sale. Seriously, why do you even comment on these threads anyway if you have such disdain for the PC enthusiast crowd?
I paid about $170 for my Antec twelve Hundred. it's definitely worth it to invest in a super high quality case when you plan on doing some work inside it every now and again. It makes life so much easier. i'm already thinking of getting the new revision of my case too. I'm in dire need of easy access usb 3.0 front ports, and apparently usb 3.0 hubs are utter garbage currently.