Bring me up to speed - Socket types & CPUs

[Arfur Schrunkunpecker]

Yea a SATA3 SSD will run on a SATA2 connection just fine but it will limit the speed.

Modern SATA3 SSDs can produce 400+ mb/s sequential read speeds but a SATA2 interface will only give you half that. Though that will still be nearly 50% faster than an HDD.

Yes it would be measurably slower but not particularly noticeable unless data speeds is a 'thing' for you which for most people it isn't. In general a better GPU would be a more sensible upgrade.

Thanks Master&Puppet,

I'm tempted to do a complete rebuild soon. Cheers.

 

[Master&Puppet]

Actually I just upgraded my 2500k to a 3770k on Saturday, Now I'm looking for someone willing to straight swap a 2500k for a 8320 or 8350 and hopefully I can grab a decent mobo for $50 - 80. Where I will then proceed to swap everything on my Intel build onto the AMD one and run some tests.

Btw if anyone on here in the Toronto area is willing to do the swap PM me.

That's good news I hope you can pull this off. In the future I hope to be able to do similar things but I'm not quite there at the moment.

Thanks Master&Puppet,

I'm tempted to do a complete rebuild soon. Cheers.

No worries, here's a practical example to make it more concrete. I'm just in the middle of upgrading the platform on a friend's pc. The specs stand at:

MSI z77 mPower
3570K @ 3.3Ghz (BeQuiet Dark Rock Topflow)
6Gb Gskill 1333 RAM
Samsung 840 120GB SSD
EVGA GTX570
OCZ ZX series 1000w PSU.

The SSD is SATA III capable and the motherboard has both SATA II & SATA III slots. I used CrystalDiskMark to illustrate the difference with the SSD plugged into the different ports:

You would loose half the read speed (and suffer write speed loss too with certain SSDs capable of a higher write speed than this). HDDs wouldn't be affected because they tend to only operate at 100-200Gb/s speeds which is well within SATA IIs bandwidth.

For reference SATA II and SATA III are also known as SATA 3Gb/s and SATA 6Gb/s respectively. The Gb/s is reference to Gigabit NOT Gigabyte and each Gigabit is roughly equivocal to 100Mb/s.

Therefore SATA II 3Gb/s has a theorectical transfer rate of upto 300Mb/s and SATA III 6Gb/s would be near 600MB/s. The latest SSDs are close to, if not already, saturating SATA III so they won't be getting any faster until a new interface comes along.

 

[Arfur Schrunkunpecker]

Great reply, thanks.

I'd feel like I was losing out now to upgrade parts without going Sata III.
I believe I had the option of Sata III with my last upgrade (with a few available motherboards) but didn't feel the need. This time I should definitely replace the main part of my build. I'm not into the numbers too much, but I always like the idea of `feeling' like it's faster. Obviously as you've stated before, the SSD change from an HDD and even the GPU will provide that.

Not sure why, but I'm thinking of going with Gigabyte this time instead of Asus, for a change.

Thanks.