It looks like my OS needs re-installing, so now is a good time for a quick upgrade.

Currently thinking...

2x2TB 7200.14 HDD's (maybe even 3x or 3TB drives)
i5 or i7 ivy bridge (I think - my friend has a 3770k and it's quick!)
Not sure on the motherboard (Gigabyte G77-D3H seems ok)
128GB SSD (Something like the Samsung 830)

Then keeping my existing ATi 4830, PSU, X-Fi and case. And running 7 until my copy of 8 turns up.

Haven't kept up with desktop CPU's for a while, what are the recommendations?

Quote from Jakg :

It looks like my OS needs re-installing, so now is a good time for a quick upgrade.

Currently thinking...

2x2TB 7200.14 HDD's (maybe even 3x or 3TB drives)
i5 or i7 ivy bridge (I think - my friend has a 3770k and it's quick!)
Not sure on the motherboard (Gigabyte G77-D3H seems ok)
128GB SSD (Something like the Samsung 830)

Then keeping my existing ATi 4830, PSU, X-Fi and case. And running 7 until my copy of 8 turns up.

Haven't kept up with desktop CPU's for a while, what are the recommendations?

Wouldn't you be better off with a 256 GB SSD? They aren't too expensive (I'm sure your going to have another HDD with it though?)

Surely that GPU needs upgrading? Then again if you don't want to upgrade for gaming purposes then I guess it's fine.

CPU wise give this a read?

http://www.tomshardware.com/re ... eview-overclock,3106.html

All my apps + Windows = 74GB.

I've got a 256GB one in my laptop where it's the only HDD, but 128 should be enough.

I only really play Supreme Commander on my PC atm where the 4830 is more than powerful enough - a new GPU would be nice but I don't need one yet.

Would be nice to have quadruple the CPU power for VM's & coding & stuff.

Quote from lukelfs :

CPU wise give this a read?

http://www.tomshardware.com/re ... eview-overclock,3106.html

i tend to ignore tomshardware now and rather check anandtech coz TH is rather biased towards Intel or lets say their CPU recommendation is for games which dont use more than 2 cores

at the moment AMD still has some quad core cpus which are indeed faster in multithreaded applications/games than Intels i3/Pentium line at the same price point because they are just dual cores.

to make it easy: if you can/want to invest at least 160-170 Euro that will buy you a core i5-3450 quadcore which will beat all AMDs CPUs

below that price point with Intel you just get a dual core cpu...

3570K CPU + 128GB Samsung 840. Availability on the 840 drives is a bit sketchy in some places now, but it's worth waiting for compared to the 830.

CPU: 2x Intel Core i7-3960X
Motherboard: EVGA Classified SR-X 270-SE-W888-KR
RAM: 12x 8GB (96GB) DDR3-1600
Video: 3x GTX690
Sound: HT Omega Claro Halo
RAID Card: LSI MegaRAID 9280-24i4e
HD: 24x OCZ Octane OCT1-25SAT3-1T 2.5" 1TB
Case: Some ginormous monster
PSU: Fusion power station

Quote from Forbin :

CPU: 2x Intel Core i7-3960X
Motherboard: EVGA Classified SR-X 270-SE-W888-KR
RAM: 12x 8GB (96GB) DDR3-1600
Video: 3x GTX690
Sound: HT Omega Claro Halo
RAID Card: LSI MegaRAID 9280-24i4e
HD: 24x OCZ Octane OCT1-25SAT3-1T 2.5" 1TB
Case: Some ginormous monster
PSU: Fusion power station

If you were going that route you'd be better off with a pair of octo-core Xeons (e.g. these) and some PCIe SSD cards.

Quote from amp88 :

3570K CPU + 128GB Samsung 840. Availability on the 840 drives is a bit sketchy in some places now, but it's worth waiting for compared to the 830.

how so? its currently more expensive only very minimally faster and being tlc has potentially shorter life

Quote from Shotglass :

how so? its currently more expensive only very minimally faster and being tlc has potentially shorter life

Read Anandtech's conclusion. It addresses the TLC concerns.

edit: Also, if you're that concerned and want the extra performance of the Pro version it's not hugely more expensive.

currently the pro is about 80 euros mroe expensive for the 256gig which imho is the sweet spot in terms of ssd pricing and size atm

also yes i read anand daily and yes the tlc will probably be fine but theres nothing that would convince me to buy it over the 830 as the 830 is currently about 25€ cheaper (256 again)

Quote from Shotglass :

currently the pro is about 80 euros mroe expensive for the 256gig which imho is the sweet spot in terms of ssd pricing and size atm

also yes i read anand daily and yes the tlc will probably be fine but theres nothing that would convince me to buy it over the 830 as the 830 is currently about 25€ cheaper (256 again)

Jakg and I both live in the UK and I clearly mentioned the 128GB model (I know that at the moment 256GB drives tend to be better value for money, but he's said that 128GB should be more than enough). At the time of writing the 830 desktop kit is £86.20, the 840 desktop kit is £109.44 and the 840 pro basic kit (I don't see an 840 pro desktop kit listed there) is £119.44. Clearly with the 840 series being so new (hence the sketchy availability) pricing hasn't stabilised yet, but from what I've read I'd expect the price of the 840 (non-Pro) models to come in line with the 830 models as the 840s become more available and the 830s become less available.

edit: The improved performance of the 840 series in most real world (i.e. non crazily high workload) tests is better than the 830. Just look at the light workload results. That's what should make you consider the 840 over the 830.

Quote from amp88 :

edit: The improved performance of the 840 series in most real world (i.e. non crazily high workload) tests is better than the 830. Just look at the light workload results. That's what should make you consider the 840 over the 830.

heres the thing though
over the years ive owned and extensively used (except for the m4 as thats in a pc i dont use all that much) a 80 gig intel postville (which presumably would be slower than the slowest on that chart) a 160 gig intel 320 a 256 gig crucial m4 and a 256 gig samsung 830 (the one i use the most as its in my main pc) and quite honestly the differences in speed are practically unnoticeable and/or impossible to feel without putting them in identical pcs (which i dont and they are/were all in vastly different pcs)

thats not to say that buying the fastest ssd on the market doesnt make sense but with that little of a performance difference and the higher price my choice would be with the older generation that has both proven reliability and a theoretically longer lifespan

Quote from Shotglass :

heres the thing though
over the years ive owned and extensively used (except for the m4 as thats in a pc i dont use all that much) a 80 gig intel postville (which presumably would be slower than the slowest on that chart) a 160 gig intel 320 a 256 gig crucial m4 and a 256 gig samsung 830 (the one i use the most as its in my main pc) and quite honestly the differences in speed are practically unnoticeable and/or impossible to feel without putting them in identical pcs (which i dont and they are/were all in vastly different pcs)

I understand that the performance differences between SSDs is very small compared to the performance difference between any SSD and an HDD (and I've said this to a number of people before in #liveforspeed). However, I fail to believe that the real world difference between SSDs several generations apart cannot be felt. You admit they're in "vastly" different PCs, so I can't see how you can separate out the I/O performance from the other differences.

Quote from Shotglass :

thats not to say that buying the fastest ssd on the market doesnt make sense but with that little of a performance difference and the higher price my choice would be with the older generation that has both proven reliability and a theoretically longer lifespan

I don't believe the price issue is fair; the inflated price of the 840 is due to low availability of a new part (as I mentioned above). Clearly there's something to be said for sticking with the old generation of hardware/firmware that's been proven in consumer-land over a significant time (in the life of an SSD at least). However, when we're discussing Samsung products I personally believe that the improvement in performance outweighs the potential for instability or reliability problems in the new model. Samsung have excellent (near-total) control of the parts in the supply chain for their SSDs and they do a large amount of QA testing to try and avoid the sort of embarrassing problems that other SSD manufacturers have had all too often (*cough* OCZ *cough*). Clearly, at the end of the day, the choice is down to personal preference as much as benchmark results, but I'd take the 840 over the 830 and I'm happy to recommend someone else do the same.

Quote from amp88 :

You admit they're in "vastly" different PCs, so I can't see how you can separate out the I/O performance from the other differences.

ultimately what the ssd advantage in daily use boils down to is does the ssd remove the lag otherwise present when trying to open your browser and other programs
and that is definitely true for all generations of ssds ive used

Quote from Shotglass :

ultimately what the ssd advantage in daily use boils down to is does the ssd remove the lag otherwise present when trying to open your browser and other programs

You don't really believe that, do you?

Quote from amp88 :

You don't really believe that, do you?

yes i do
or do you buy an ssd to marvel at the amazing sequential write speeds that benchmarks give you but you wont ever achieve in a real world scenario because nothing can supply data fast enough for them to matter?

Quote from Shotglass :

yes i do
or do you buy an ssd to marvel at the amazing sequential write speeds that benchmarks give you but you wont ever achieve in a real world scenario because nothing can supply data fast enough for them to matter?

No, I do a few things every day that I really see the benefit of SSDs from. My desktop's daily backup routine involves creating a ~3.5GB archive containing several thousand files (ranging from a few bytes to hundreds of megabytes and comprised of compressible and incompressible data). With my previous HDD (a Samsung F3 HD103SJ 1TB) the process of creating the archive and verifying its contents would take something around 15-17 minutes. During this time my PC was a lot slower to respond (obviously due to the high I/O load). Now with my SSD (a Samsung 830 128GB) the process takes around 7-9 minutes (basically half the time) and the PC remains very quick and responsive throughout this process. Also I do some work with databases (ranging from 50MB to about 7.5GB for the IMDB database). Query and update times are so much quicker with the SSD than the HDD, even with a significant amount of RAM supplied for caching. I can't give an average value for the speedup, but I would give a rough estimate at 2-300% performance improvement.

Clearly loading apps and webpages is a LOT faster too, but saying that's really all the SSD advantage boils down to is sorely missing the point.

id say your use cases are quite different form the advantages felt by the average computer user
i can think of work related ssd advantages too like receiving simulation data from number crunching servers quicker but i wouldnt consider those to be relevant to the majority of potential ssd customers

So rather than making a new thread I thought I'd ask here, I'm after a fast but reliable SSD. What SSD's would you recommend in 60, 120 and 256 GB sizes?

I've read about the Sandforce controllers being unreliable etc. Could anyone help me out here

Thanks.

Quote from lukelfs :

So rather than making a new thread I thought I'd ask here, I'm after a fast but reliable SSD. What SSD's would you recommend in 60, 120 and 256 GB sizes?

I've read about the Sandforce controllers being unreliable etc. Could anyone help me out here

Thanks.

From what I've read, the Samsung 830 & OCZ Vertex 4 seem to be the way to go - the Samsung 840 Pro seems even faster but atm the price retailers want doesn't justify the £ (although as no-one has them in stock I wonder if the price will fall once they are

Quote from Jakg :

From what I've read, the Samsung 830 & OCZ Vertex 4 seem to be the way to go - the Samsung 840 Pro seems even faster but atm the price retailers want doesn't justify the £ (although as no-one has them in stock I wonder if the price will fall once they are

Yeah I've heard good things about the Samsung 830, I think I'll go for that tbh.

Cheers