On order - Now what to buy 3rd party?

Hey everyone. I placed an order tonight for the rig thats listed in my signature. I was going to make the HDD that the unit is coming with the secondary drive and grab a SSD for the OS. Which SSD would you all recommend?

Also, I am going to purchase 16GB of memory. I wont only be using this for gaming, but a lot of work in photoshop, indesign, etc. I thought I read in one of the threads that a few people had purchased some DDR 1600 RAM and overclocked it to 1866. Is this the preferred method or should I just look into investing in 1866 RAM? If I wont notice much difference then maybe I should get a 1600 kit with the option to overclock it later?

*Cliff's notes*
-Recommend me a SSD
-Recommend me 16GB memory

Thanks everyone. Can't wait to join the family.

 

Crucial M4 with the SSD
Corsair usually has solid ram if you can get a kit with them

 

^this

M4 are solid. GSkill is also a brand I have used in the past that I have never had issues with (RAM).

 

I agree that the RAM is nice if you go with Corsair. Actually getting 4 of these kits is cheaper (by 2 cents) than 2 of these ones. As for SSDs, I agree that Crucial M4s are the way to go. Here's the 128GB version, and if you need it larger, 256GB.

 

For SSD, Crucial M4, Samsung 830, Plextor M3, Corsair Performance Pro (ONLY this one... not their Solid series, etc) and Intel 520.

All of those except the Samsung use the Marvell controller which are more reliable than others. The Samsung one, well Samsung is pretty reliable when it comes to their SSDs (the 470 series didn't have any major problems and was the OEM drives of Dell, HP, etc)

 

The Samsung 830 is probably the fastest and most reliable SSD on the market today, according to my sources (notably Anandtech).

As for memory overclocking 1600MHz ram will not be as optimal as buying 1866 rated ram as the CAS latency on the 1600 will also be increased to prevent memory corruption, which will still make it slower than true 1866 ram. Its a given; if it was possible to overclock without drawbacks who would buy 1866 ram? If you really care about speed buy 1866 ram, I believe Kingston makes them for laptops. Link for the lazy.

 

I don't think you can give Samsung the reliability crown over Intel. It is a little faster and cheaper though.

 

Samsung is very solid with their electronics. Their laptops are a bit expensive, but their overall electronics are very respectable. There's a reason they beat Sony within a few years. They're pretty much the largest electronics manufacturer in the market.

 

Purchasing a 3rd party WLAN card is highly recommended too

 

Only G-Skill and HyperX I found use heatspreaders. Corsair it's not a heatspreader, it's just a sticker... HyperX is overpriced. So I went with G-Skill with the heat spreaders personally.

As for SSD, don't care, I went with mSATA and got a 750GB HDD. The mSATA is 120GB, supports SATA 3 speeds and uses an unlocked firmware for the fastest controller available. I get both without having to sacrifice my optical drive.

And I wouldn't believe anyone who says can tell the difference between the SSD and mSATA speeds in actual use, not synthetic benchmarks anyway.

 

I can assure you that an SSD on SATA III performs faster than mSATA (which is on SATA II I believe). I've used an SSD on SATA II, and it does not perform the way people claim SATA III SSDs do.

As for heatspreaders on the RAM, are they really needed? I mean unless you're overclocking your RAM to ridiculous speeds, why would you need dedicated heatspreaders for RAM?

 

Completely unnecessary and does NOT give you much better temps, it's not that your RAM goes insane when gaming (assume that's the only thing one does on this forum... )

basically if you overclock to 2133 speeds, I would recommend them.. but no noticeable difference though, it's all about the machines inner cooling that matters, it's a simple trap to get costumers to fall for their false "advantages"

 

I agree. But the question is: Can the average person discern the differences in speed between the two in normal, everyday usage? I suspect not.

Mr. Mysterious

 

No, and it's more about the random read/write performance and that's unaffected.

 

I considered booting up to be part of everyday usage. On SATA II, with an SSD I was only booting up about as quickly as the fastest mechanical drives do. Usually in the neighborhood of 24-26 seconds from power button to logged in with the desktop usable.

And to the above about RAM heatspreaders, I agree. I don't think they really would do much of anything.

 

Then your SSD was not performing correctly there is no way even a SATA II SSD should boot up the same speed as a mech HDD.

That would say that a mech HDD is putting out 270MB/sec throughput even ignoring the small file throughput differences.

 

I did list the time it took in that post as well. I'm pretty sure I've seen 20 second boot times for mechanical hard drives somewhere... And I was sure to update the firmware first thing. My data is from a 128GB Crucial M4.

 

Well it's funny then, because many SSD users before SATA III reported much improved load times.

Me included.

 

User caused issues again...

 

Uhh... Not to derail the thread too much, but what exactly can you do wrong with an SSD? Having a page file or hibernation off/on shouldn't affect anything but free space, and firmware is the only thing you can really update. Since the firmware comes from the manufacturer, how could that be an issue? PM me please if there's some substantial discussion to be had about this.

 

Well boot times could depend on SSD/controller compatability, correct mode selection, driver conflicts, CPU speed, memory speed, mobile chipset power settings as well as firmware.

Also the drive being aligned properly would have an impact.

 

Wow, gone for a day and didnt expect this thread to hit 3 pages. Thanks for the info everyone. Ill be looking into a M4 SSD when my order gets closer to ship date (unless I find a ridiculously great sale that is). Still looking around on the memory I'm going to buy.

I just went with the stock WLAN card. When I had my Alienware M11x R2 a couple years ago I went with a 3rd party card. What is recommended for the 9150? Bigfoot card?

 

Will you be gaming on wireless often? If so, the bigfoot 1103 will help improve latency and ping with their software. If you want bluetooth, get the 1202 if that's available. If your going to be wired most of the time stock is fine.

As for memory 1866 with CAS latency of 10 or 11 should suffice. You can find them easily on newegg using advanced sort.