That ought to give the old girl a boost until I can do a proper upgrade in the Spring.

Is this your first SSD?

Yep, they've been too small and too pricey till now.

Well, yes, if all you ever had your eye on was Intel drives...

My 120GB Vertex 3 is starting to fill up a bit but it seems to be alright as long as I manage it some. For instance if I'm done with a game for the foreseeable future I'll remove it from the drive. Still 240GB would be nice, but they were out of my price range when I was buying last.

Do you have SATA3 on your motherboard Dr? I only have SATA2, and was worried it might be a bit of a bottleneck, but it feels plenty fast and I think my drive scores weren't bad either - even though I can't remember the numeric results anymore.

It's an old P45 board so it's only SATAII, I should be doing a proper upgrade about May or so though, this Q6600 is getting old.

I've been saying that for two years now but I still can't seem to justify it when things run fine. It's horrible.

I did get a small upgrade over the holidays though when a friend upgraded and had some leftovers for me:

e4500 > e8400
9600GT 512MB > 8800GT 1GB
2GB DDR2 > 4GB DDR2

Civilization 5 seemed a bit smoother (nothing major but noticeable nonetheless) but the biggest difference would have to be that alt-tab'ing in and out of a full screen game seems much faster. I'm thinking the extra system memory is responsible for that.

Hmmm, zippy

Just popped a cheap 120gb kingston ssd in my machine today. Makes a big difference, regardless of the r/w speed.

I went the way of Adata - the drive I picked up on sale has enterprise level nand flash, thus they dont keep that 8gig cell ( that all other 120G drives have disabled). So you get the full 128GB. Read shit tons of awesome reviews too.

alot of other drives use that 8 gig cell for caching to give the impression of a slick fast drive AND in case a cell dies then it would kick in.

The Adata 128 GB does give its rated 550MB/s read write. its THE fastest SSD I ever used - I used OCZ, and a couple versions of corsair. They all suck in comparison. There are also several online head to head comparisons against this drive and they all lost.

Zomgies Jay, you finally dug out of the pile of snow! Welcome back to online!

I bought my two SSD's when they cost too much.
Funny enough the 120GB SSD in the laptop runs faster than the 240GB SSD in the desktop even though the desktop is a much more capable system.
Both are Corsair Force 3's.

It took a bit longer than expected, stupid house, but anyway, first new CPU since 2007.

Nice buy Doc.
First new CPU since 2007 really says something about the power of the core2quads and the fact that software really hasn't been pushing hardware advancement in recent years.

Only 8GB? yer selling yourself short Fancycache is calling!