Well SSD's aren't that magical, but they do help for MMOs, not as much for FPS. 7200RPM drives are pretty speedy since they are packing 334GB a platter on them now.SpaceDrake said:Now, as a caveat, there is one area where I think splurging a bit is worth it for gamers, and where I plan on dropping some benjamins when I build my next computer: solid-state drives. On load-heavy games (like FPSes or MMOs), it's seriously like the invention of the warp drive. Load times disappear when you play from an SSD, so it can definitely be worth it to load up a nice big SSD (or even put multiple drives in or RAID-0 them together) to play your most load-intensive games from. Especially with Intel's next-gen drives coming out (which push the write-limits into "this will last as long as a comparable physical drive" territory) there's really no downside to them, aside from the price.
So those are confirmed prices, excellent. Definitely making the right choice on waiting for the 2x00s then. Is there a confirmed price/date for the G3 SSDs yet or are those still a nebulous "Q2 2011" deal? (I tried looking for this stuff, but for some reason you guys seem to know stuff the rest of the Internet doesn't, partially because you follow the Chinese Bothans I suspect :V )
I do hope the 560 is under $300, though. I was hoping that'd be more a refresh of the 460 the way the 6850/70s were price refreshes for their respective predecessors in the 5 line. I'd really like to pop an Nvidia in the rig I'll be building soon (partially since it'll serve as another testbed rig), but if the 560 is up near $300 I might just have to go with a 460 and save a benjamin (for diverting into pimpin' SSDs of course :V )
As for the intel stuff, the leaked document says Q1 and all the models will be doubling in capacity, taking the place of their old counter parts. It's my guess that the prices will stay around the same, and we get the benefits of 2x the space and faster drives to boot. Sandforce is around that time, but probably later so I say early 2011.
GTX560 I'd expect $280-$300. Maybe wait a week and AMD will play another card at that price point, who knows. With suspected delays for the new stuff I'm willing to plunk down $300 on a GPU next month.