$1000 MAX - Gaming Rig

[BigTerminator]

Just RAID 0 some F3 drives. I have 2 500gb Samsun F3's and they do 250mb/s read and write. i will note the access time is nowhere near an SSD and IOPS are a lot slower but it's still pretty fast for good money and amazing storage.

 

[Mark617]

I hear ya, but no joke, this CPU is only used for gaming. I have another computer out in the living room for entertainment / work value.

Pretty much went with the setup here but switched to rat's gigabyte MB + recommended GPU since I didnt need everything the other options had to offer - changed ram to the normal ripjaws since they are on the compatibility list and I missed the shell shocker anyway.

Upgraded to win 7 64bit and the a3 ocz ssd. I think I can rt7 the install and then with only one game installed take up ~ 1/2 the drive max. Plenty of room for TRIM / Pagefile / excess apps etc.

You guys helped a ton. Total came to less than $1100 with the new cpu water block ($90 spent here for swiftech block, mx-2, tubing and adaptors).

Again, much love. Really saved me a headache!

 

[wingman99]

Yeah, well, stuff like booting and running programs.. How often do any of us do that stuff?

Could you post some bench tests links were i can see the savings in time for the Z68

 

[ratbuddy]

Could you post some bench tests links were i can see the savings in time for the Z68

Just google z68 caching review or something. I think every site under the sun has tested it.

 

[wingman99]

Just google z68 caching review or something. I think every site under the sun has tested it.

QUOTE: anandtech

The Downside: Consistency

To put eviction to the test, I ran through three games—Portal 2, Starcraft 2 and World of Warcraft—then I installed the entire Adobe CS5.5 Master Collection, ran five of its applications and tried running Starcraft 2 again. All of Starcraft 2's data had been evicted from the SSD cache resulting in HDD-like performance:

Even boot time was affected. For the most part performance didn't fall back down to HDD levels, but it wasn't as snappy as before when I was only running games.

 

[ratbuddy]

Is that quote from the review with the 20GB SSD? If so I'm not surprised..