You remember my Opteron Workstation Gaming Rig Hybrid aka Scylla right? It’s been almost 2 years since I built my rig and I think it’s time to look at a upgrade. What to upgrade though, the 9800GTX video card still runs all games very well, the processor and RAM is rarely fully utilised, however there is definitely a bottleneck after a little bit of digging around like most modern computers the hard drive is a clear bottleneck.

One of the major trends in the last couple of years is the use of Solid State Drives (SSD), from Wikipedia:

“A solid-state drive (SSD) is a data storage device that uses solid-state memory to store persistent data with the intention of providing access in the same manner of a traditional block i/o hard disk drive. SSDs are distinguished from traditional hard disk drives (HDDs), which are electromechanical devices containing spinning disks and movable read/write heads.”

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I thought I’d update you as I finally got round to selling the redundant parts from my little experiment.  I’ve also been using the rig for about 6 months and I’m really pleased with it.  One problem to report is that the DVD drive sticks every so often probably because it comes out vertically.

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So finally I get the system to post and thought that would be the end of my problems…

Firstly let me update you I brought the final parts a SATA DVD R/W costing £16.98 and a brand new BFG 9800 GTX+OC 512MB costing £176.13, because I can only use one graphics card I wanted the GTX 260 H2OC but am going to wait for the price to come down.

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