Water cooling or SSD?

[paceman]

About to order new components and down to deciding between water cooling or an SSD. I have a nice zalman air cooler I could reuse on the new CPU. Best bang for the buck - water cooling or SSD - discuss!

[Qicmee]

Overclocking gives faster game play -> water cooled supports aggressive settings
Faster load times for maps (and PC reboots) is good -> SSD

So, are you willing to overclock?

[paceman]

I have before. But probably not on this one.

[juneau]

SSD all the way. They have given the single biggest performance improvement to PC's in probably close to a decade imo.

While water cooling can give you a better overclock it's still just the luck of the draw as to whether your CPU is up to it, and even then, an extra 300Mhz on each core might only equate to 3 extra FPS in a game.

[Grisu]

I would go for the SSD. Much faster load times are more important to me than 5-10% overclocking.

[Apache Warrior]

I have to agree with Juneau and Grisu.
Apache

[paceman]

Thanks everyone. Order for new parts goes out today.

[WalkinTarget]

SSD all day !!! I actually did not buy my H80 to get a better OC, I wanted to get rid of the terrible fan noise I had with my ZeroTherm Nirvana NV120. Mission accomplished on that front.

The SSD is hands down the best bang for the buck upgrade for pretty much any gamer build. If you were given $100 to upgrade, you can buy a 128gb SSD and achieve that goal. A $100 video card won't do much of anything these days.

Edit: Pace, why oh why aren't you interested in overclocking ?? I cant remember the last time I ran an Intel chip at stock. Even my wife's rig that I built for her 2 years ago has had three different Intel chips in it, each has been overclocked and all she uses it for is work stuff.

Intel e2180 @ 2.7ghz (default 2.0)
Intel e6600 @ 3.0 (default 2.4)
Intel e7400 @ 3.5 (default 2.8 )

[paceman]

To impatient.
Change a setting - reboot
benchmark
Change a setting - reboot
benchmark - repeat till nauseous

Crash a few days later -

Give up and go back to default settings.

[WalkinTarget]

I never bother to bench after an overclock. I know what each chip is capable of with good cooling, so I give it a mild OC and check temps. Only one PC in the house is used for gaming - everything else is internet/email general purpose. Its easy to find out what is a safe OC for any Intel chip. Using the Intel 2500k as an example, its default is 3.3ghz, and with a budget Cooler Mater 212 Evo HSF, I'd run that at 4.1 all day as long as you don't screw up and apply too much thermal paste.

Gone are my days of squeezing every last megahertz out of a chip - I like it simple now - crash-free and reliable, and don't try and push a chip too far.

[Ravijn]

SSD. I have one of the original Intel X-25 80gb SSD drives and it still going strong. I only use it for games but it a HUGE improvement over a standard HDD.

[Nilesjones]

I'm going to be honest here and say that overclocking in my opinion is a waste of time. There's a reason we're capped a certain level of GHz at the moment.. The FSB isn't fast enough yet, so your bottleneck is going to be there. This is coming from a real world point of view. I understand the people who go out of their way to really overclock their CPU's for competition benchmarks, but it's definitely not needed as an end user or gamer. In fact, the only place I would see an advantage of overclocking your CPU is with an AutoCAD application. Even then, you're still wanting a better video card for rendering purposes. Most likely a work station card.

Overclocking is cute and all, but definitely a waste of time and effort for that minimal change in performance. My advice is definitely on the SSD. Keep in mind though that you're going to want to have a HDD as your primary source. As fast as SSD's are, they still have their weaknesses.

But... I'm sure you already know all this lol

[Ravijn]

Nilesjones, I use a hybrid SSD/HDD for my boot drive. It works great and it's pretty damn fast. Not as fast as a SSD as a boot drive but faster than a HDD.

[AmazingRedd]

for me both, for you probably ssd if you not into oc'ing.

[Duke{CLR}]

I have recently noticed the difference with the SSD, it take my son at least a minute longer to join a game.