Permanent swap file

[chattius 2,526]

Bought a 32gb ssd with a good cache controller for 35 euro. I noticed a very nice system boost in my ram intensive math pograms. Any one made good experiences with games? Since these small ssd's are currently cheap, the small capacity is still enoughto use a full ssd for the swap file.

 

35 euro and benchmark look as if I bought a new cpu for 500 euro. Cheapest performance win?

[lujate 578]

Are you saying you are using an SSD for your Windows page file? I never would have thought of that as a way to increase performance. I guess that would effectively increase your RAM.

 

I have my OS's on an SSD, but have moved my Windows page file off the SSD to save wear.

[chattius 2,526]

My math pograms are running on a unix-like realtime system. I was wondering if I should upgrade the kids game machine this way too. The motherboard of the game machine has a intel z78 controller which supports any ssd as a fast extented cache for solid state disc. For non z78 boards there are pci cards with ssd and a cache controller chip to do same job.

[Dragon Brother 619]

I know SSD's can make a computer feel brand new for general useage, but I don't know how effective they can be at increasing gaming capabilities, sure if you need to do a lot of loading from a hard drive (but in most games you only periodically load a new level for example), but once in game the CPU and GPU are the limiting factor by far.

[masteff 64]

This article might be helpful:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-gaming-performance,2991.html

 

And this article says that "write endurance" is becoming less of a factor with SSDs:

http://www.storagesearch.com/ssdmyths-endurance.html

 

Of course a few articles suggested that as PCs come with ever increasing amount of RAM, the swap file will be less and less important... of course software will then catch up and make use of it and more.

 

And for gaming, keep in mind the elite graphics for Sacred 2 took like 7GB of space, that's a lot of data to get moved around so every performance edge is a plus. I remember Crysis was designed for hardware that was barely on the market yet and people were building ridiculous gaming rigs with quad-disk raid and such. (It appears from at least one interview article that they learned their lesson for Crysis 2... Crysis lost out on sales because not everyone can buy a new rig just to play the latest game. Of course it did make them THE graphics benchmark for several years.)

[lujate 578]

If your pc does a lot of paging to disk, having the page file/swap space on an SSD would most likely help performance.