Solid state drives and gaming... worth it?

I have a gaming laptop that has a dual core, 4gb's of ram, NVIDIA ® GeForce ® 8400M G 1,2 GPU with 256 MB of dedicated GDDR2 VRAM and up to 1 GB of TurboCache™1.90 ghz, and I haven't came across too many games I can't run decently. I had no idea that the solid state drives were out. So I'm thinking of buying this:

Lexar EX16GB-431 16GB(SSD) from newegg.

My question is about value. This card cost about $50 bucks for a side plug into my laptop. If I install, for example, Empire total war, on this solid state drive. Will it run that much smoother and faster or will it show no difference?

 

Load times will be much faster, and so will starting up the program.

What games really depend on is your graphics card or your processor.

 

If you are reffering to a PCI-E, then it is not is not worth it since you will limited by the bus. however if you are reffering to using a SSD as a primary hdd like intel or OCZ then check out the forums there are multiple threads around it

 

Won't help the game the way you're hoping it will, at all.
Your video card is the main bottleneck, followed by your CPU. Unfortunately, there is probably no way to upgrade your laptop so it can play those games, unless you have a Dell Inspiron 1520 or Vostro 1500.

 

An SSD won't help for two reasons:

1) Much higher cost per GB of space, yet you'll be installing games (which require a lot of space) = huge cost

2) Upgraded performance in the HD department will only decrease load times for the game but will have no effect on in-game frame rates.

 

How about this one?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231220

 

that's one of the cheaper SSD's out there. It's not bad. I own it. you just need to tweak it to get it's full speed. It will help in loading games faster, but will make no difference to frames per second(fps).

Over all it's a good SSD for the price. I can load Ubuntu 8.10 in less than 10seconds. (Vista still takes it's sweet time).

 

Unfortunately there is no SSD that will help your laptop play games better just install/load them faster. Your GeForce 8400 is what's keeping you from gaming. However i have a 64gb samsung SSD on the way for OS and gaming because warhammer online makes you constantly stair at a loading screen when flying places entering instances and scenarios. So although it won't really help my FPS it should drastically improve my experience with the game especially when i am the first to get anywhere and others are still stairing at there load screens =)

 

hey guys, im running VM's on my laptop. will putting the vms on a SSD allow them to run better? im imagining that they have a constant use of the hdd.

 

That lexar drive is pretty much worthless as a SSD. Actual write speeds are abysmal, and running programs off it won't help in the way that you're hoping for. The only advantage that this drive could have over a regular hard disk drive would be its low latency, cutting down program boot times. Besides that, other aspects of running programs won't be enhanced.

 

SSDs are the best thing since sliced bread.
games that load textures on the fly such as MMO's(WoW, LotR:O) are significantly increased in performance when a SSD is used as a primary drive, its because the access times of a SSD are its strongest attribute and will help stable fps and prevent hitching.

map rotational FPS shooter type games like TF2 also have their map load times greatly decreased.

i'm in the process of getting one myself for my laptop after physically seeing its performance from a friends laptop.

 

There are slow ssd's and there are fast ssd's. If you get one, you need the fast one, else dont bother. But you will pay a lot more for the fast ones over the slow ones.