Show Us Your WEI

Here's mine, guess a Barracuda 7200.12 is slow, lol.



A Guy

I did a little bit of tweaking in my BIOS last night... Managed to get my graphics card score up by 0.2 in WEI (they were 6.7)... Seems increasing my Pci-e BUS speed made a nice difference to my machine.

Coincidentally I was just listening to the pcper.com podcast. #103 last viewer question it's at around 1:14:30. It asks about this exact conversation, raptors in raid 0 versus 1 ssd. Something like "even if all you can fit on the cheapest ssd is the os and you put every app and game on a storage spinning disk you're going to be much better off". Raptors are like 50cents/gb and the best ssds can be 3-4$/gb and yet they still sell tons, it's not an accident. Reliability is better, performance is insanely better.

mbreslin said:

Coincidentally I was just listening to the pcper.com podcast. #103 last viewer question it's at around 1:14:30. It asks about this exact conversation, raptors in raid 0 versus 1 ssd. Something like "even if all you can fit on the cheapest ssd is the os and you put every app and game on a storage spinning disk you're going to be much better off". Raptors are like 50cents/gb and the best ssds can be 3-4$/gb and yet they still sell tons, it's not an accident. Reliability is better, performance is insanely better.

Yeah, SSD performance is pretty incredible hey... Before I'm done with my current build, it'll get a new CPU (AMD Phenom II X3), better RAM (Corsair Dominator PC8500), new primary graphics card (NVidia GTX285 or GTX 295, keeping my soon-to-arrive 512mb 8800GTS for Physx) and a 32GB or 64GB SSD for primary drive with four 500GB Seagate Barracudas in RAID0... Then I should see a solid 7.5 at least across the board.

But..... It'll take me a while to get there. Lol.

I have a problem. My processor score dropped from 5.9 to 4.2 after switching to Windows 7 64 bit from 32 bit. What's wrong?

mbreslin said:

Coincidentally I was just listening to the pcper.com podcast. #103 last viewer question it's at around 1:14:30. It asks about this exact conversation, raptors in raid 0 versus 1 ssd. Something like "even if all you can fit on the cheapest ssd is the os and you put every app and game on a storage spinning disk you're going to be much better off". Raptors are like 50cents/gb and the best ssds can be 3-4$/gb and yet they still sell tons, it's not an accident. Reliability is better, performance is insanely better.

And that's where we don't agree.
I don't see the point in having windows boot fast from an SSD and having to wait "ages" for games/apps to load from a slow HDD.
Technically you'll get a WEI/usability of 7.2-7.5 because of your SSD, true, in practice it will be alot lower, 5.*, because every other thing you have installed loads from a slow HDD.
I'd rather have an overall score of 6.* with a raptor, less then an SSD but I'll have alot more usability because on a day to day basis my apps/games will load faster and that will make me alot happier then windows booting fast and whatever else I want to do loading slow.

That they sell tons is easy to explain, alot of people don't want to be "left out". It's fashionable to have an SSD.
They also don't think what they need to install, again, most will go on a slow HDD. If I didn't have the cash for an 80GB SSD, and I actually counted what I wanted to install to be sure it would fit on 80GB, I would've bought a raptor and not a 40GB SSD.

And just to make it clear, I hadn't build a computer in years (last one was a dual P2 1000 with scsi disks and a FireGL 1000 Pro GPU I used for 3D) so I did read up on the new hardware because I wanted to know what I needed and what was overkill.
That's why I have a 5770 crossfire setup and not an overpriced 5870/5970 because the 5770 CF has the best performance/price for my resolution, same for the amount of ram and the CPU.

No need to apologise for being confrontational it happens in a discussion, apart from the last comment but no hard feelings

Beemerke said:

And that's where we don't agree.
I don't see the point in having windows boot fast from an SSD and having to wait "ages" for games/apps to load from a slow HDD.
Technically you'll get a WEI/usability of 7.2-7.5 because of your SSD, true, in practice it will be alot lower, 5.*, because every other thing you have installed loads from a slow HDD.
I'd rather have an overall score of 6.* with a raptor, less then an SSD but I'll have alot more usability because on a day to day basis my apps/games will load faster and that will make me alot happier then windows booting fast and whatever else I want to do loading slow.

I see your point there, but at the same time, games and programs will read most from a drive when loading something, other than that most of what they do is in resident memory. Having a SSD for your main drive and a standard mechanical spinner (RAID or not) for a secondary drive will still improve overall performance compared to two straight drives.

The basic concept is that the most commonly used data should be stored on the SSD, so that would be OS, background applications (those that auto-start with Windows), and the swapfile.

Although I have to admit an all-SSD setup would own any other HDD configuration, even if the SSDs aren't RAIDed, an SSD/HDD combo setup isn't really governed by the rule of 'only as fast as the slowest component'. There are certain exceptions to that 'rule'..

Now you'll have to excuse me while I go day-dream about the all-SSD RAID0 setup than I will possibly never be able to afford... Lol.

dw96 said:

fatedquest said:

I have a problem. My processor score dropped from 5.9 to 4.2 after switching to Windows 7 64 bit from 32 bit. What's wrong?

64-bit requires hardware acceleration (If that's the right way to say it). Since 64-bit is supposed to take more out of your PC to bring you better performance it's usually normal for the numbers to drop a little bit. Interesting how you got down with more than a whole point though... (1.7 exactly).

That's what I'm worried about. Maybe something with my Windows installation went wrong