SSD or HDD for gaming laptop?

Hi, I decided to join because I am planning on buying a laptop for gaming sometime between now and about October or November or so and I have a lot of questions.

One thing I am not sure about is whether to get solid state drives or the regular 7200 rpm hard drives. This laptop would be mostly just for gaming for about the first year to two years of use, after that I would use it for school purposes and gaming.

I don't really care about startup time or speeds for installing software or w/e, what matters to me would be heat, energy consumption, and performance in video games as well as overall reliability and lifetime.

Any help is appreciated, thanks.

 

Welcome to the NBR forums.

go for a standard HDD since the new ones perform quite well and have large storage.

SSD's do not affect gaming performance at all, just improves load times... overpriced for storage IMO.

SSD does produce less heat (most of them).

the main performance in a videogame will be determined by the videocard (a 256-bit GPU is the best way to go)... like Nvidia 8800M/9800M/GTX 200M or ATI 38xx/48xx

 

I'll say SSDs for everything except for as a file storage device. But hey, what do I know?

 

My advise is to get the HDD for gaming.

HDD speed does not actually effect the performance of games in any way, once the level is loaded its all gpu/cpu/ram.

A SSD may give you faster load times but not by huge amounts it seems in real life tests. As a person that puts all of his games on his laptop myself I find the biggest loss of an SSD is storage space. Games now days eat like 4-8gb or so each and if you had 10 games thats 40-80gb of space + you need more for programs & OS.

So your going to need a large SSD to hold all of that, unless you intend to only have a few games.

Heat - Wont matter normal HDD run cool especially the larger more data dense ones, gaming machines generally have better cooling too.

Energy Consumption - Wont matter again, as gaming machines have poor battery life and any gaming is going to have to be done with the AC plugged in.

Performance - Mentioned above

 

Ok great, thank you so much for all the responses. I will certainly get HDD's for my laptop then.

 

I have SSDs (SLCs) in both of my ultraportable 12.1" laptops. For gaming and normal use laptops, get a regular mechanical hard drive. In my experience SSDs arent really much faster. maybe like a 7200rpm drive. However i will say that in my ultraportables, they only use a 1.2ghz ULV Dothan 2mb, so maybe that is why the SSDs don't seem as fast as they could be.

 

ssd will help the games load faster.

 

Also consider putting your purchase off for a while and wait for the next generation of vid cards. The existing Nvidia ones are pretty stale and ATI ones are not terribly faster

 

I dont think the 4870 crossfire in my W90 is stale

Also not even the desktop market has new cards yet (or even leaked information on them) your talking a new wait for the next wave of cards on laptops.

 

The speed of an SSD is most apparent when it is constantly being accessed - this is not the case for games, and the performance difference would be minimal, if any.

 

It's farely common knowledge that SSD's help make the games load faster.. but one benefit that people seem to overlook is stuttering caused by loading while IN GAME. Anything from textures loading, drawing of a new scene, or a new monster type suddenly appearing on screen. If you're picky like I am, I'm looking for smooth framerates possible 99% of the time.. half second pauses while already in-game are irritating. SSD's really help here. Also.. game really DO load way faster depending on the SSD you get. Call of Duty 4 as an example would essentially take up the entire cinematic sequence before finally loading a level using a seagate 7200 rpm 200 GB drive. With an SSD, I'm in and playing in under 10 seconds. That IMO is a big improvement.

Keep in mind though.. SSD's aren't mature just yet and the performance varies greately from a Samsung SSD vs Intel vs Indilinx vs Jmicron controllers. It pays to research before you buy.

 

@Grey, most SSD are not showing huge gains in gaming load times, and I have never had this studder of things loading in game, sounds like you had a page file hit, you need more RAM to prevent that.

Also my CoD4 load times are much faster with even a 5400rpm drive than what you stated, sounds like your setup was poorly optimized or your over exaggerating greatly.

 

Well, I would say they're not showing huge gains in loading times for first gen SSDs.. In particular, Samsung SSDs showed little to no benefit vs a normal hard drive.. as they focused more on reliability of the drive than the speed. (You can read all this off anandtech, I'm lazy to look it up but I'm using his material as reference) But while using my OCZ Vertex, I'm IN THE GAME in 10 seconds or under. I guess I can youtube this if you don't believe me.

However, using a 7200 seagate.. with COD4 and not much else on the drive, the load time is drastically higher. I haven't exactly benched that, you're right.. I could be exagerating buts its definately not faster than 20 seconds.

Now if you want a specific instance of loading times within a game, try Bioshock with High Detail Post Processing on (Or basically have all eye-candy enabled). The detail post processing enabled makes this game just about unplayable do to all the loading it does no matter how low I set my resolution to. With this setting off, everything is smooth as silk even at 1920x1200. The point is, with my SSD, I don't feel the loading sluggishness that occurs in game. With the Seagate, I do.

As for the Pagefile hit you mention causing my stutters: I never thought of that and I'll have to look into it. I'm running on windows xp 32 bit.. I have 4 gigs installed already but only 2.5gigs usable. There's not much more I can do unfortunately. Hopefully this answers my stutter issue and not the brute force 'throw money at it' fix I normally try to do.