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willyjwebb wrote:

just wondering if everyone builds their pc for way more than they need it for...

My builds aren't overkill; my budget won't allow it.

In my case, I always find a way to use the extra power.

Forge wrote:

Why buy a 250$ SSD if you can get 1/8th the SSD in system RAM for the same price?

Haha, I think you just answered your own question. (1/8 the capability for the same price is not very economical) Plus, you need to open a program once before it gets cached in the RAM, SSD gives you that performance the first time.

DPete27 wrote:

Forge wrote:

Why buy a $250 SSD if you can get ¹/₈^th the SSD in system RAM for the same price?

¹/₈^th the capability for the same price is not very economical.

Do both. 8 GiB DIMMs are $4 per GiB.

Note that system RAM is used for everything, not just for buffering one specific file.

DPete27 wrote:

Forge wrote:

Why buy a 250$ SSD if you can get 1/8th the SSD in system RAM for the same price?

Haha, I think you just answered your own question. (1/8 the capability for the same price is not very economical) Plus, you need to open a program once before it gets cached in the RAM, SSD gives you that performance the first time.

1/8th the capacity, sure, but more than 8X faster, and much more flexible. I have really nice SSDs and the impact has been underwhelming.
Old: WD Raptor 10K RPM 300GB, used only for first boot and first launch of any given app, then everything runs from massive amounts of system memory, at many thousands of GB/s.
New: Samsung 830 256GB SSD, used only for first boot and first launch of any given app, then everything runs from massive amounts of system memory, at many thousands of GB/s.

You see how that works, now?

When you can stuff 16GB of quality DDR3-1600MHz into your laptop for 100$ US, the SSD goes from being a major factor to being a supporting argument.

Unlike you, even though I do have plenty of RAM to spare, I usually close programs after I don't need them anymore... I use alt-tab a lot, and alt-tab can get unwieldy with lots of programs, and the taskbar fills up quickly.

Forge wrote:

You see how that works, now?

(Defense required)
Yeah, I got it the first time. You've got a 16GB RAM cache (for example) that's not explicitly dedicated to program loads, but functions similarly to a SSD cache drive, just faster and of less capacity. (and probably doesn't reduce your cold boot time to <20 seconds?) Perhaps it's because I've never invested in copious amounts of RAM (8GB in all my systems) but I think there's a happy medium.

For me, a 120GB SSD for $90 is more economical than 16GB MORE ram for $65. I shut my computer down frequently because I dont use it every day, so I like the short boot times and initial program load times. After that, sure, superfetch does emmulate the responsiveness of an ssd on repetitive program loads. Superfetch does have a finite limit to how much info it can cache depending on how much unused RAM you have avaiable though. This is obviously why you'd want/need more RAM to get the responsiveness you're talking about, but $4/GB for RAM as opposed to $0.75/GB on an SSD seems like a steep hill to climb.

Mine is! Just built an i5 3470, 16 GB RAM, 120 GB SSD, 660Ti, mostly following TR's Sweet Spot recommendation. This thing is crazy fast. My old Core2 Quad 9450 with Radeon 5850 wasn't doing too bad, except for video encoding, but I figured it was time. SATA3 and USB3 are nice bonuses, and I can finally load up on cheap DDR3 (relatively speaking... I sprung for the CAS9 stuff). The new one does everything way faster than what I "need." It's also way quieter than the Core2 system.

Although, now that I have all this processor and disk space, I'm encoding a lot more of my movie collection to stick on the media server. I'm also actually using anti-aliasing now in games...

Z