Re: [OT] It's Xmas - time for new gaming PC, advice please

On Sat, 7 Dec 2024 08:00:45 -0800, Justisaur <justisaur@gmail.com>
wrote:

On 12/6/2024 5:00 AM, Geeknix wrote:

On 2024-12-05, Ross Ridge <rridge@csclub.uwaterloo.ca> wrote:

Geeknix  <usenet@apple.geeknix135.net> wrote:

Haha that was luck, I just searched for gaming optimised HDD and
WD_BLACK came out top.

>
There's no such thing as a gaming optimized hard drive.  Get the WD
Blue 8TB drive instead.  It's also a CMR drive, you just save money by
getting a blue sticker instead of a black one.

 
I see, hmm, wonder why I see so much discussion on the topic. I'll check
out the basic stats between WD_BLACK and Blue versions.
 

You really don't want to be playing games off a hard drive anyways
these days.  It's fine for older games and smaller ones, but most new
games list an SSD as a requirement.

 
Good tip, I'll check requirements when deciding the drive to install on.
He has a lot of older games, or things like Ravenfield, Minecraft,
slower moving games.

>
If you do go SSD, see if the board has an m.2 slot, as those are between
2-5x faster than a 2.5" SSD and cost barely any more now.  I'd try not
to buy any that are really off brand as I've been having a lot of
trouble with the ones HP especially but to some extent Dell and Lenovo
are putting in that have brands that I've never heard of.
>
2tb is fine if you don't mind uninstalling larger games now and again.
I don't know that I'd get any lower than that as some games can be very
large, and between the os and a couple really big games you'd fill up a
1tb.  Definately not a 500gb or lower though.

Also, the faster your M2 SSD, the more important that it has some sort
of cooling, whether active (a fan blowing air over it) or passive
(some sort of heatsink). Heat kills the tiny transistors and too many
cheap M2 SSDs are sold as bare cards.

You can use the hard drive to
store the games you're not playing though, as Steam makes it easy to
move installed games from one drive to another.

It should be noted that a lot of modern games still work quite well on
spinning rust. As well as on SSD? No. You'll see the occassional pause
or jerk as the game streams more data from the spinning rust, but the
games are generally still quite playable. If you're massively into
online gaming playing the most modern and top-end games, and where
every millisecond counts then these jerks can be a bit of an issue but
for a lot of games you'll barely notice.

And as much as I dislike SMR on modern drives, it mostly affects
WRITES, which is not something that games do a lot of. A 7200 RPM SMR
is fast enough for a lot of games.

TL;DR It's not the end of the world if you buy a slower spinning rust
drive to save a few bucks ;-)