HD and game performance...

[Fel]

I'm about to buy a top of the line gaming system, and i need to know weather a 250GB 8MB Cache 7200RPM HD is going to hold me back..

 

[tsonka]

8MB casche is awful low ..... 16mb is common and Seagate has 32mb on thier new 7200.11 HDD and thoes are not even thier "high preformance" Cheeteah drives


As for how it will effect your gaming preformance. Yea, it could hold you back but there are other things that could hold you back more.


Where are you ordering it from? What are the other spec?

 

[EQTakeOffense]

I'm about to buy a top of the line gaming system, and i need to know weather a 250GB 8MB Cache 7200RPM HD is going to hold me back..

Hard drives are the slowest componenet in any modern PC, so yes, it will hold you back. However, compared to a CPU, or a GPU, it's trivial.

The only way to speed up a hard drive is make it rotate faster 10k or 15k or get ride of it entirely and go for a Solid State Disk.

The only consumer 10k drive is WD Raptor, and 15k drives are SCSI based and have generally low storage space.

So, the lesson? 7200RPM is fine. You only other resonable option is Western Digital Raptor.

 

[evilcartman]

You can also gain a nice boost in performance by placing your Windows page file on a separate HD (particularly if you have two drives of similar speed). So instead of one HD writing the page back on itself, it'll be writing to a separate drive, spreading the load between both the drives.

 

[-=Antimatter=-]

The hard drive won't limit your FPS or real-time performance, but you might notice a difference in load times between game levels or when launching programs.

 

[Fel]

The hard drive won't limit your FPS or real-time performance, but you might notice a difference in load times between game levels or when launching programs.

Thanks, that's exactly what i needed to know.

 

[Kaldskryke]

The hard drive won't limit your FPS or real-time performance, but you might notice a difference in load times between game levels or when launching programs.

What about games that try to load data dynamically? Take Oblivion for instance: travelling on a quick horse can get stuttery at times... wouldn't a higher performance disk help alleviate that? That game also has a lot of small load screens here and there (every time you travel or use a door) which interrupt the gameplay and immersion.