SSDs and other impulse buys

I went a little nuts on computer upgrade purchases last night, and in addition to picking up a second used eBay Radeon so I can try this crazy Crossfire thing all the kids are talking about, I ordered one of the Gen2 Intel SSDs. It's not huge, but it'll be big enough for Windows 7 and a few key applications. Anybody else tinkering with these?

Since it's going to house the OS, I've decided to do a clean install of Windows, it looks like cloning is a bit of a pain, and I've got the storage space to back everything up before hand, format my current 640GB HDD and use it as bulk storage.

Also picked up a better-than-stock cooling fan/heatsink for the i7 920 CPU, as I overclocked it midly on a whim (3.0GHz base clock, 3.2 turbo) and decided it was so easy that I'd be a fool not to push it up to about 3.4GHz base.

I mean, if you're going to build your own with good parts, you might as well rev it out a little bit, right? I keep telling myself I'm not going to go nuts, but it seems akin to having a big rotary knob on the dashboard of a turbo car that says "BOOST" that glows red and beckons you closer to turn it up just a teeeeny bit more.

Back when I started working as a professional programmer, PCs tended to have a 'turbo' button...

LOL

SSD, is great for Reads, slow for writes, so just make sure the data is relatively static.

There is also a total number of writes limit on them, so again, make sure the data doesn't change a lot.

otherwise, it will make no noise.

also, with SSDs put your swap file on a legacy drive (10-15K spin sata)

Anandtech's SSD guide/musings convinced me to take the plunge, and the Gen2 drives should be able to keep the "used" slowdown to a minimum.

And I actually had a 386/33 with the "Turbo" button, I totally forgot about that. I'm talking about the i7's built-in overclock feature when using a single core, in this case :)

This must be the new ignore thread.

5 posts of complete gibberish!

haha the turbo button was great for those games built around the 8088 or the 286 :)... funny to think dad spent over $300 for a 300mb drive back in our 386 days and was laughed at because we'd NEVER use that much space...

Funny that I spent $1500 on a laptop with a 22mb HDD...ok, maybe sad is a better word.

In reply to John Brown:

Agreed I have no idea what any of this means. I think they are talking about magic.

pete... did it have one of those nifty track balls that you hung on the side of it?... or did you just get to use tab alot?

96DXCivic wrote: In reply to John Brown: Agreed I have no idea what any of this means. I think they are talking about magic.

The Gathering? I saw a TV ad for that once!

ONE POINT TWENTY ONE JIGGOWATTS?!?!

My Dell Mini9 hackintosh that I'm typing this on has an 8GB SSD drive in it. Over the last year or so that I've had it the drive feels like it's slowed down just a touch but this is mainly a web browser only machine with minimal other usage so no big deal. Having a silent little machine is nice though.

Turbo button on a computer? Was that like VTEC?

Maybe it was so slow it struggled to run a GUI, until the fan speed hit 5500 rpm, then it was so fast it could play COD?

Dude! I remember the turbo button. Made Deathtrack crazy fast (yo)!

I swear, the turbo button on my old machines was always pressed in. Never had an issue with heat buildup, and they all lived lives that were well past their usefulness as machines. Generally, they were replaced when I couldn't run any current software.

let's see....3.5 GHz target for stability with air cooling, carry the two...and...

gunning for the CPU equivalent of 210,000,000,000 RPM. My Type R will be soooo jealous.

Okay, I can't be the only one who's first thought was Super Star Destroyers?

Heh, the SSD Executor would be pretty cool, but my garage is kinda cramped as is.

(Nerd-o-meter shudders violently and breaks, a-la the airspeed indicator in the Bell X-1 in "The Right Stuff.")

I was thinking SDF Macross.

I had one of the old school PC's that had the turbo button.... was some sort of 386 IIRC. Blew my mind when we went all the way to 8mb of ram. And when we got that 28.8kbps modem, hooboy.... we were rockin. So I'm not gonna lie that when I bought my Asus g73 recently, I was a little more than geeked out to find out that when I hit the little tach lookin button on it, it said TWIN TURBO. I was happy as HELL with that. Musta hit it like 20 times just to see it say that.

YESSSSSSSSS!

4cylndrfury wrote: ONE POINT TWENTY ONE JIGGOWATTS?!?!

Scott Lear wrote: I went a little nuts on computer upgrade purchases last night, and in addition to picking up a second used eBay Radeon so I can try this crazy Crossfire thing all the kids are talking about, I ordered one of the Gen2 Intel SSDs. It's not huge, but it'll be big enough for Windows 7 and a few key applications. Anybody else tinkering with these? Since it's going to house the OS, I've decided to do a clean install of Windows, it looks like cloning is a bit of a pain, and I've got the storage space to back everything up before hand, format my current 640GB HDD and use it as bulk storage. Also picked up a better-than-stock cooling fan/heatsink for the i7 920 CPU, as I overclocked it midly on a whim (3.0GHz base clock, 3.2 turbo) and decided it was so easy that I'd be a fool not to push it up to about 3.4GHz base. I mean, if you're going to build your own with good parts, you might as well rev it out a little bit, right? I keep telling myself I'm not going to go nuts, but it seems akin to having a big rotary knob on the dashboard of a turbo car that says "BOOST" that glows red and beckons you closer to turn it up just a teeeeny bit more.

I recognized a few of those words.

I thought he misspelled STD