This SSD evaluation is going to focus on advantages for gamers with Kingston’s new budget-oriented consumer SSDNow V300 as it compares to their last generation V200 series and even to their more expensive enthusiast-grade HyperX SSDs. Over two years ago, we concluded that Kingston was making performance progress with their SSD lineup and in each follow-up review since then, we have found performance increases.  This time promises even greater improvements as it is the first time that Kingston is using a custom LSI SandForce controller and new Toshiba memory for its SSDNow V300 series.

This is ABT’s sixth SSD evaluation and we are now going to continue to look at the performance differences within the Kingston SSD lineup while focusing on the new SSDNow V300 120GB SSD.  Just as with the last SSD evaluation less than a month ago, our test bed uses Ivy Bridge, Intel’s latest consumer and enthusiast platform, a mechanical 500GB Seagate Barracuda hard drive, two HyperX SSDs and a SSDNow V200 SSD. We are using our Core i7-3770K and GTX 670 at stock settings on a EVGA Z77 FTW USB 3.0/PCIe 3.0 to once again test the differences between this new V300 drive and our other drives pictured above. Kingston offers two basic consumer lines – their Kingston HyperX SSD for the enthusiast who wants extreme performance, and their VNow lineup which offers more budget-oriented performance. We will be evaluating the 120GB version of Kingston’s latest SSDNow V300 (SV200S37A/128G).

Pricing and Performance

All of these drives differ from each other in price and in capabilities – you will pay approximately $100 for a 120/128GB Kingston SSD and $200 to $400 for 240GB to 256GB Kingston drive. The standalone version of this new SSDNow V300 120GB drive is at time of writing, $109.99 at Newegg.com with free shipping.  The notebook version of the desktop bundle that we received from Kingston is ten dollars more but we couldn’t find the desktop version of the bundle as it is still quite new.

The stand-alone version of the Kingston SSDNow V200 128GB SSD (SV200S37A/128G) as we received it from Kingston, can be found at Amazon for $94.75, and the 256GB version is $200.98.  Moving up in performance over the SSDnow V200 series, the 240 GB HyperX 3K SSD costs $179.99 at Amazon which we found to be quite a bargain in our evaluation and was recommended by us.

The 240GB HyperX SSD is Kingston’s fastest SSD and it costs $408.211 at Amazon. Both of the HyperX SSDs include Kington’s “upgrade kit” – bascally the same as the SSDNow V300 desktop bundle kit sans screwdriver – which include Acronis cloning, backup and imaging software as well as hardware to make migrating to SSD from a hard disk drive, painless. Stand alone versions of Kingston SSDs generally cost about $10 less than the upgrade kit at retail.

Kingston SSDs feature an independent garbage collection function that maintains a system at optimum performance level. This is especially important for systems running on Windows XP or other OSes which doesn’t feature TRIM, and it will also help organizations extend the software cycle on their systems, delaying upgrades of operating systems and compatible applications.

The features and benefits of the SSDNow series extend to all Kingston SSDs. Two major benefits should be noted especially for notebooks – power savings and durability. A SSD uses significantly less battery power than a HDD and is also less prone to failure from dropping it.

Kington’s SSDNow V300

From Kingston’s site:

Kingston’s SSDNow V300 solid-state drive is a cost-effective way to revive your computer. It’s 10x faster than a hard drive plus more reliable, more durable and shock-proof. It features an LSI® SandForce® controller customized for Kingston and best-in-class components, and is available in kits with all the accessories needed for an effortless transition to the latest technology. For added peace of mind, it’s backed by a three-year warranty, free technical support and legendary Kingston® reliability.

 

Kingston SSDNow V300 120GB Features and Specifications:

Features   

• Fast — 10x faster than a 7200RPM hard drive
• High Quality — features an LSI® SandForce® controller customized for Kingston
• Reliable — with no moving parts, solid-state drives are less likely to fail than standard hard drives
• Economical design optimized to make migrating to an SSD more affordable
• Convenient — all-in-one kits with all the components for easy installation
• Multiple capacities — to fit your workload
• Guaranteed — three-year warranty, free technical support and legendary Kingston reliability

New controller and memory in V3oo

The 120GB SSDNow V300 is a 100% Kingston-branded solid-state drive which is their first product using the new Toshiba 19nm NAND flash memory process.  In addition, this new SSDNow V300 uses a custom SandForce LSI controller which supports the SATA 6.0GB/s specification. Specifically, the SSDNow V300 uses the SandForce SF-2281 flash storage processor and 16 modules of Toshiba’s 19nm 8GB MLC Toggle Mode NAND flash memory.

There is actually 128GB of total NAND flash memory (16x8GB) but 8GB are reserved for over-provisioning.  Once formatted, this 120GB advertised capacity drive has about 112GB of actually available capacity.

Instead of concentrating on the technical, we are going to be looking at the advantages that a PC gamer might have using a SSD over a fast mechanical hard drive. And of course, we will compare the Kingston consumer SSDNow V300 line with the (now) older V200 series and the current and more expensive HyperX 3K and HyperX SSDs.

Since our last SSD evaluation in November, we have upgraded all of our results with Sisoft’s Sandra 2013 from the 2012 version and we have added three new benchmarks with the SSDNow V300 versus the mechanical Seagate Hard Disk Drive (HDD) that will particularly interest gamers – (1) Crysis game level load times, (2)the time to install GeForce 306.97 drivers, and (3) the time to unpack for installation, 15.3GB of Assassin’s Creed 3’s .rar files. This may give us a practical reason for upgrading to a SSD over a HDD – or not.

Let’s open the box.

Unboxing

Here is the retail box that you would buy with the desktop upgrade kit. As you can see the contents are well-packed for transport safely to your door. Inside the box, the precious contents are well-protected by the soft packing material. The SSDNow V300 is rather tough anyway and Kingston even had a contest to show how durable they are.

We note the promised tech service and the 3-year warranty are printed right on the box as well as the advantages of the product as this SSD will also be featured in retail brick and mortar stores as well as online.

Here are the contents: the 2.5″ SSD, the SATA data cable, the SATA power cable, the case and the cloning software CD.  One new thing that we really like is that Kingston now includes an installation DVD.  We believe that every manufacturer should follow their example and there would be less issues with installation and less tech support calls.

Here is the SSDNow V300. This is the SSD’s other side and we see the standard connections.

The physical look and dimensions of all SSDs are the same except for their thickness (7mm for notebook and 9mm for desktop) and our SSDs all have the standard SATA power and data connectors.

Differences between Kingston’s desktop bundle, notebook bundle and stand alone units

The more deluxe and enthusiast-oriented HyperX Series notebook bundle (above) includes a screwdriver and a case to use the drive externally which makes it slightly different than the SSDNow V300 Series desktop bundle (below) which includes rails and a power connector to mount it into a PC case. With the desktop or notebook bundles, Kingston includes the Acronis cloning software so we also have the option of making the SSD the C drive and putting the bulk of the data on a mechanical storage drive.

In contrast, the standalone Kingston 128GB SSDNow V200 arrives in a blister pack (below) with no hardware nor cloning software. Unless you already have a bundle, the extra ten dollars for the kit is well worth it.

Testing the SSDs versus the HDD

Below is Thermaltake’s BlackXduet USB and eSATA hard drive dock which proved very useful in reading data from internal drives that are now accessed as external drives. Check out the review published by Leon Hyman. We also use find the built-in USB 3.0 docks on the top of our Thermaltake Chaser MK-I and Overseer RX-I are also extremely useful for transferring data quickly and for cloning drives.

We set up Windows 7 64-bit on one of our Seagate 500GB 7200.12 Barracuda hard drives along with two or three games, favorite applications and benching tools. We put about 100GB or so of data on our HDD so that we would not have any issues cloning the HDD to our 4 SSDs, the one with the smallest capacity being 120GB. We made sure to leave room for additional files and applications to its maximum of about 112GB.

We used the supplied Acronis cloning software on the Kingston-supplied CD to make a exact copy of our HDD to all four SSDs (individually, each in under a half-hour), and we were able to then boot from any of the now identically cloned drives. The Acronis cloning software is very fast and very easy to use. However, before we get to the benching, let’s recap the SSD and what makes it unique from mechanical drives.

SSD Recap

One mistake many enthusiasts make is to think of a SSD like a mechanical HDD. Instead, think of it as a giant flash drive with the strengths and weaknesses inherent to that kind of storage. MrK’s article on the previous series of Kingston SSDNow is extraordinarily well-written and detailed, and it would be good to review it if you are not familar with Solid-State storage. Also, here is his article on the faster but much more expensive Patriot TorqX 256 GB SSD which goes into even more detail. MrK explains the strengths and weaknesses of the SSD. Instead of repeating his information, this section will be the briefiest of recaps and we will focus instead on secure erase and performance degradation.

Because of the way data is written to and erased from a SSD, the write speeds will go down as more and more data is written to it. There is a definite need for TRIM and other garbage collection. When Windows 7 identifies the drive as a SSD, it enables the TRIM command for the drive when files are deleted from it. The TRIM command tells the SSD controller to delete the pages on the NAND flash block when the user deletes the data. The entire block containing the data is copied into the memory cache and then the block is erased. After this procedure, the data without the user-deleted part is rewritten back to the block from the memory cache. This results in longer delete times, but allows the write performance to remain nearly like-new.

Secure Erase and Performance Degradation

A secure erase restores your drive to a like-new state where each cell is effectively zeroed out. So its performance would be like-new also as if it was fresh out of the box. Simply cloning over from an HDD to SSD would not zero out the cells like a secure erase would. This is because you’re not guaranteed to be writing over the same cells. In a clone, information is just being transferred over, not like erasing a cell first and then writing to it. On a good SSD such as Kingston’s SSDNow V300 or HyperX series, there is simply no need to secure erase periodically, but whenever you format or re-image your drive, it’s a great idea.

This is perhaps the most detailed yet simplified step-by-step way to secure erase your SSD – something you must do (for safety) if you ever sell it. Be aware that your SSD’s BIOS may have some sort of mechanism that prevents the secure erase tool from detecting the SSD for secure erase. We had no such issues with any of our Kingston drives.

Let’s check out our test bed.

Test Configuration – Hardware

• Intel Core i7-3770K (reference 3.5GHz, HyperThreading and Turbo boost are on), supplied by Intel.
• EVGA Z77 FTW motherboard (Intel Z77 chipset, shipping and latest Beta BIOS 107 July 26, 2012; USB/PCIe 3.0 Specification; CrossFireX and Quad-SLI using PLX chip for extended PCIe bandwidth)
• ECS Z77H2-A2X motherboard (Intel z77 chipset, shipping BIOS, USB/PCIe 3.0 specification; CrossFire/SLI 8x+8x)
• Gigabyte GA-Z77MX-DH3 Series 7 mATX motherboard (shipping BIOS, USB 3.0, PCIe 3.0 specification, CrossFire/SLI 8x+8x)
• 8 GB Kingston DDR3 PC 1866 Kingston RAM (2×2, 3×2 and 4×2 GB, dual- and tri-channel at 1833MHz; supplied by Kingston)
• GeForce GTX 670, 2 GB (reference clocks), supplied by Nvidia
• 500 GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 hard drives
• Kingston VNow 300 SSD, 120 GB, retail desktop upgrade drive, supplied by Kington
• Kingston HyperX SSD 240 GB, retail desktop upgrade kit, supplied by Kingston
• Kingston HyperX 3K SSD, 240GB, retail desktop upgrade kit, supplied by Kingston
• Kingston Vnow 200 SSD, 128 GB, standalone drive, supplied by Kington
• Thermaltake ToughPower 775 W power supply unit supplied by Thermaltake
• Thermaltake Overseer RX-I supplied by Thermaltake
• Thermaltake Water2.0 Pro watercooler supplied by Thermaltake
• Philips DVD SATA writer/Sony DVD SATA writer
• HP LP3065 2560×1600 thirty inch LCD
• ASUS VG278 1920×1080 120Hz 3D Vision 2 ready 27″ display supplied by ASUS/Nvidia

Test Configuration – Software

• GeForce WHQL 306.97 drivers
• Latest drivers for Series 7 motherboards.
• Windows 7 64-bit; very latest updates
• Latest DirectX
• All games are patched to their latest versions.
• VSync is off in the control panel.
• Varying AA enabled as noted in games; all in-game settings are specified with 16xAF always applied if possible; 16xAF forced in control panel for Crysis.
• All results show average rates as noted.
• Highest quality sound (stereo) used in all games.
• Windows 7 64, all DX9 titles were run under DX9 render paths, DX10 titles were run under DX10 render paths and DX11 titles under DX11 render paths.

The benchmarks

The Game benchmarks

• Heaven 3.0
• Crysis

Other Tests

• Super Pi
• Fritz Chess Bench
• Custom PC Benchmark
• Cinebench
• x264 HD
• Crystal Disk Mark
• AS SSD
• ATTO2.34
• Crysis 2 folder copy
• HD Tach 3.0.4
• HD Tune 2.55
• Windows startup & shutdown

Synthetic Benching Suites

• SiSoft Sandra 2013
• PC Mark Vantage – HDD tests
• PC Mark 7

Synthetic Gaming Benchmarks

• Vantage
• 3DMark11

New Benchmarks

• Crysis Game Level Load time
• Install GeForce 306.97 video drivers time
• Unpack 15.3GB Assassin’s Creed III .rar files for installation

We have got an interesting project going. First we look at synthetic and real world benches before we head for gaming results.

Synthetic Tests

CrystalDiskMark

Crystal DiskMark version 3.0 is an excellent way to test your motherboard/HD’s performance. CrystalDiskMark is primarily a HDD benchmark utility for your hard drive that enables you to measure sequential data and random read/write speeds in 4k blocks and 512k blocks.

Here are two key features of “CrystalDiskMark”:

· Sequential reads/writes

· Random 4KB/512KB reads/writes

And now we put the sequential read/write information into a comparison chart:

All of the SSDs leave the HDD far behind in this benchmark. The SSDNow V200 is slower in this test than the HyperX enthusiast SSDs overall whereas the SSDNow V300 is the very fastest in Read speeds but slower than V200 in Writes.

HD TACH

HD Tach v3.0.4.0 is a hard drive benchmark utility which will measure the average read speed, the random access time, and the CPU utilization. Here is the VNow 200 128GB SSD result:

From looking at the chart, what is impressive is the performance in HD Tach of our HDD. First we look the HDD’s sequential read speed test is graphed along with the random access time and CPU utilization – average read is 110.5 MB/s, which we shall see is less than half that of the SSD: at the sequential read speed of the 128 GB SSD is graphed along with the random access time and CPU utilization – average read is 223.5 MB/s.

The SSDNow V200 scores surprisingly weak compared to the HDD in this test. In contrast, both HyperX SSDs score far higher and the new SSDNow V300 120GB hangs right in with them.

HD Tune 2.55

HD Tune is a hard disk utility. We are using the default setting of 64KB blocks for testing.  We run the standard benchmark with all of our five drives.

Now the chart.

There is absolutely no comparison in these synthetic tests. All SSDs are much faster than the mechanical HDD but the performance Kingston HyperX simply blow away the SSDNow V200’s transfer rate performance in this test whereas the SSDNow V300’s rate is quite respectable even compared to the much more expensive Hyper-X drives.

ASSD

ASSD is designed primarily for Solid-State Drives. There are four synthetic and three practice tests. The synthetic tests determine the sequential and random read and write performance of the SSD and are carried out without use of the operating system caches. In Seq-test the program measures how long it takes to read and write a 1 GB file respectively. In the 4K test the read and write performance for random 4K blocks is determined. The 4K-64-thrd test corresponds to the 4K procedure except that the read and write operations on 64 threads are distributed as with the usual start of a program.

In the copying test following folders are created: ISO (two large files), programs (typical program folder with many small files) and games (folder of a game with small and large files). These three folders are copied with a simple copy command of the operating system. The cache is turned on for this test. The practice tests show the performance of the SSD with simultaneous read and write operations.

Here is the chart comparing the scores:

As in most of our tests, the SSDs leaves the HDD far behind in the benchmarks and the HyperX SSDs are significantly faster than the SSDNow V200 and V300.

ATTO

The ATTO Disk Benchmark is an aging performance measurement tool which measures storage systems performance with various transfer sizes and test lengths for reads and writes. Several options are available to customize the performance measurement including queue depth, overlapped I/O and even a comparison mode with the option to run continuously.  Here is the SSDNow V300  SSD’s results:We are way ahead of Kingston’s published conservative figures of 450MB/s for Read and Write!

Here are the results of the HDD benchmark. 

 Here is the results of the ATTO Disk benchmark results for our 128GB VNow 200 SSD: V200 is quite a bit slower than the V3oo but still faster than the HDD.

Here is the Hyper3K SSD And finally, here is the HyperX SSD results:

It doesn’t really prove anything, but synthetic benchmarks are definitely faster on the SSD vs the HDD. We also note the continuing trend of performance differences between the consumer and the enthusiast-grade SSDs until the SSDNow V300 series where the consumer-grade SSD comes close to the HyperX enthusiast SSDs in performance. In some areas, one is faster than the other, but we want to know practically if one is faster. Perhaps PCMark Vantage may provide a clue.

 

PCMark Vantage

PCMark Vantage is a PC benchmark suite designed for Windows Vista and 7 that offers one-click simplicity for casual users and detailed, professional grade testing for industry, press and enthusiasts. A PCMark Vantage score is a rough measure of your computer’s performance across a variety of common tasks. The measurement for the PCMark Vantage hard drive suite is the total score with the scoring for each test further broken down. There are a total of eight hard drive tests within PCMark Vantage and all eight are run to measure the relative performance of the SSD vs the HDD we tested.

The HDD Test suite in PCMark Vantage consists of the following 8 tests and we are going to be paying particular attention to the disk drive tests:

• HDD 1- Windows Defender
• HDD 2- Game HDD
• HDD 3- Importing pictures
• HDD 4- Windows Vista start-up
• HDD 5- Video editing
• HDD 6- Media Center
• HDD 7- Adding music to Windows Media Player
• HDD 8- Application loading

First we run the standard PCMark Vantage benchmark suite using our new SSDNow V300 SSD:.

Now we run the same benchmark suite with our Kingston SSDNow V300 but we pay particular attention to the drive scores.If you want to compare these detailed scores with the HDD and the other Kingston SSDs, check out our last evaluation which uses exactly the same test bed and conditions.  Here are the overall scores expressed in a chart:

In all cases, the SSDs are faster with PCMark Vantage than with the mechanical hard disk drives and the HyperX drives are faster for some applications than the older SSD VNow 200 series but not the new SSDNow V300.

We also see from the chart above that the kind of drive used in the benchmarking will affect the final score of most benchmark suites but we have to look at the actual drive test to see the differences between SSD performance.

PC Mark 7

PCMark 7 is Futuremark’s updated verion of our last benchmark suite but for Windows 7. Just as the overall score is affected by the drive used in Vantage, the same applies to PCMark 7. The standard version of the suite does not give a breakdown score for the SSD/HDD tests. Here is the overall chart.

As in all synthetic suites, the overall score depend a great deal on the drive used. However, there is not a lot of difference in the scores between a consumer SSD and a high-performance enthusiast drive running the entire benchmark suite.

SANDRA 2013

SANDRA, short for the System ANalyser, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant is an information and diagnostic utility. It provides a tremendous amount of information about every hardware and software component in your PC. It also provides various benchmarks including for measuring and reporting disk performance.

Although we used the last verson of 2012 in our last SSD evaluation, SANDRA 2013 came out last month and we have updated all of our SSD benchmarks for this current SSDNow V300 evaluation.  Sandra 2012’s overall benchmark score is generally higher than the overall Sandra 2013 score. We find Sandra 2013 is an incredibly useful suite which we use regularly as a diagnostic utility.

Here is a summary chart of SANDRA 2013’s benchmarks:

As usual, all SSDs are significantly faster that the HDD for synthetic benchmarking when benching physical disks and file systems; very little else is affected. We do see huge differences between the HDD and the SSDs and although the HyperX SSDs are faster than the VNow 200 series the performance gap is nearly closed by the new Kingston VNow 300 series. Let’s head for real world testing.

More Testing

CustomPC Benchmark

CustomPC benchmark use widely available open-source applications to carry out the tasks that most of us perform on a regular basis. There are three tests, each of which measure different aspects of a PC’s performance. These tests themselves are not synthetic benchmarks but instead they use real world image, video and multi-tasking tasks to test the performance of your computer. We are looking to see if tasks are faster on the SSD than the HDD.

The tests are:

• GIMP Image Editing
• H.264 Video Encoding
• Multi-tasking

Here are the results expressed in a chart:

All of the SSDs are a few seconds faster than the HDD in each task, the biggesst difference being in multi-tasking; and there is really only slight variation overall between the SSDs, the SSDNow V300 has caught up with the HyperX SSDs.

Super Pi

Here is Super Pi which calculates Pi to 32 million places if you like. We ran Super Pi on our HDD and then on our 3 SSDs to see if there was any difference.

Let’s compare the speed of the drives to see if there is any difference.

No difference really. Please continue on to Fritz Chess Bench.

Fritz Chess Bench

Fritz Chess Benchmark is found within the game’s program files and basically it crunches numbers to test your processor’s speed. Deep Fritz takes advantage of massive calculations and multi-threaded performance to work any CPU fully. It loads all threads 100%.

Besides showing relative speed when compared to a P3 1.0GHz CPU, it also shows the nodes completed. The faster your CPU, the more nodes completed.

The HDD makes no practical difference.

CINEBENCH

CINEBENCH is based on MAXON’s professional 3D content creation suite, CINEMA 4D. This latest 11.5 version of CINEBENCH can test up to 64 processor threads accurately and automatically.

Now we run the benchmarks and chart our results:

Of course, there is no difference in the CPU test and only slight variation in the OpenGL test.

X264

Basically this test encodes a HD video clip into a x264 video file. The first pass is very quick and the second one is much slower and much more demanding of a task as it does the actual encoding. This benchmark is heavily multi-threaded.

Here is the chart of our results.

The end user can feel free to use his HDD for x264.  Generally a lot of storage is needed anyway.

Game-related benchmarks

The synthetics

3DMark 11 and Vantage are useful tests to track changes within the same system and they are often used to give a rough comparison between platforms.

Vantage

First up we look at Vantage on the HDD using our GTX 670 and i7-3770K at stock speeds. Looking carefully at each of the tests, all drives fall within a very small margin of error.

Here is the chart.

There is no difference running a SSD or a HDD for Vantage.

Now let’s look at 3D Mark 11.

3D Mark 11

Now lets check out the score with the SSDNow 300 SSD:

Here is the chart of our results:

There is no difference running a HDD or a SSD. Let’s look at Heaven Benchmark and Crysis to see if there is any difference in frame rates between SSD and HDD.

Heaven 3.0 & Crysis framerates

We run Crysis at 1920×1080 on Very High setting with 4xAA/16xAF.  Heaven 3.0 is run as below on all 5 of our drives.   Everything is at identical settings under the same conditions:

We compare identical runs and chart the result:

 

No difference outside of benchmarking “noise”. We cannot substantiate the second part of Kingston’s claim that “Kingston’s HyperX SSD lets users load games and applications faster, increase frames per second (FPS)”.  We do not find any difference in the frame rates.

Now we will look at three new very practical tests for gamers.

3 New Benchmarks

Three of the following four benchmarks are new since the last ABT SSD vs. HDD evaluation, last month.  Besides updating to Sandra 2013, we also added three benchmarks that regularly affect every gamer in a practical way.

File Copy: Crysis 2

In this test, we are using MrK’s method of installing the Crysis Warhead game to the drive being benchmarked. The game folder is copied to another folder on the same drive using Microsoft’s Robocopy GUI and the time used is noted. This real world benchmark tests both the read and the write speeds of the drive at the same time. This time we choose Crysis 2 for this purpose as this game has 10GB of files of various sizes. This should test the hard disk transfer speeds across vast sizes of files and is indeed a real world scenario.

Here is the chart of the copy time reults in seconds.

 

The SSDNow V200 took 2 minutes and 6 seconds on average to copy nearly 10GB. The HyperX 240GB SSDs only averaged 1 minute and 35 seconds and the new SSDNow V300 only took ten seconds longer; a significant improvement over the older series.  And the HDD took 5 minute and 32 seconds.

Need we say more? Here we see a practical difference demonstrating the advantages of SSD and even the advantages of the faster HyperX SSD over the older consumer grade VNow 200 series, but far less with the VNow 300 SSD.

We have already seen very slight improvements in video editing and multi-tasking when the drives are accessed and huge gains in copying big files.

Game Level Load Times

Solid-state drives won’t increase game framerates but they can certainly reduce game startup times and save/load times. This means less time waiting for the game to load and more time playing the game. There is also the issue of “immersion”. If it takes a long time to load a level or an autosave, it may cause irritation, and getting back quickly into the game after your character dies is important for staying immersed in any game.

There is an incredible variation in game loading times between the HDD and SSDs, depending on the game engine used. Some games bring you almost instantly back into the game, with very little difference between HDD and SSD. The ones that take longer, tend to favor the SSD and load noticeably more quickly. The differences between the two HyperX SSDs is imperceptable and the SSDNow V300 has got faster than the SSDNow V200 drives.

Here is a new benchmark for us since our last evaluation.  To represent loading a level in Crysis, we time the average length of time it takes to load the GPU benchmark after the first time.

If you are into saving time, the SSD is definitely faster in loading PC levels and autosaves. The SSD will not improve your framerates – or your aim – but it may improve immersion by getting you back into the game a bit more quickly.

Installing Video Drivers

A gamer often installs WHQL drivers as soon as they are available.  Beta drivers may be released weekly and installing drivers for a video card is a common task.  This is also a new benchmark for us.

Here is the chart showing the time difference in installing downloaded drivers from a HDD versus on a SSD.

It takes nearly twice as long to install video card drivers from a HDD than it does from the SSDNow V300 drive.

Installing a game from downloaded compressed files.

As the world moves to digital downloads as the preferred method for installing games, the importance of a fast drive in saving time becomes more important.  We recently downloaded Assassin’s Creed III and installed it to our drive which reminded us to make it a new benchmark.  After you download all 15.3GB in .rar files, they must be uncompressed to install the game.

Let’s see how long it takes to uncompress over 15GB of files.  There is no contest as the SSD is more than twice faster.  Again we ask, how do you value your time?

Benchmarking and testing overclocks

One thing that a reviewer or overclocker will note is while pushing hardware to its limits, it will often cause a display driver to stop responding or the operating system to crash. Using a HDD takes quite a while to recover and return to testing compared to benching with a SSD. This editor estimates that using a SSD over benching with a HDD for a major CPU or video card evaluation, saves twenty percent of his time!

Windows Startup and Shutdown

Now we come to what is arguably one of the most frustrating part of Windows – waiting for it to start-up or shutdown. For some of us, it is not important as we rarely start-up or shutdown our PCs. For others, it is a painful process to watch – while others of us do something else while our programs start-up or shut down.

The average shutdown time represents an “average range” for the test PC as there are so many variables when you shutdown your PC (installing updates will prolong the process). From the chart, basically you are saving nearly half the time, on average, with a SSD over a HDD.

Startup on an SSD offers even more time-saving – you will spend one third of your time waiting for an SSD to load Win 7 compared to using a HDD .

The charts speak for themselves again and power users will love this feature as no one wants to go make a cup of coffee while Windows sets up. Windows 8 mitiages this issue somewhat for HDD holdouts as it boots much faster than Windows 7. Let’s head for our conclusion.

Conclusion

As we concluded last year, SSD technology is still one of the most rapidly improving while their price is dropping. With more and more motherboard manufacturers offering SATA 3 6Gb/s ports, the ceiling for maximum transfer speeds for disk drives has been nearly doubled from the SATA 2 3Gb/s standard. We have seen the SSD develop improved new controllers that bring faster speeds – especially beginning with the enthusiast HyperX Kingston drives and now migrating to the consumer SSDNow V300 drive.

We have watched SSD technology also get slowly cheaper over time and it is much more accessible to the regular consumer and not just for enthusiasts. Since last year’s Thailand floods which crippled HDD production, SSDs have dipped below the $1-per-gigabyte MSRP pricing regularly and sales frequently go well below this pricing once considered breakthrough. The Kingston SSDNow V300 series offers a great bang-for-buck for consumers at regular pricing and for less than $110 you can have a fast 120GB drive that comes very close to the HyperX SSDs in performance.

It is absolutely not “mandatory” to have a SSD if you use your PC only for gaming. A hardcore gamer would more likely save his money by buying a large fast mechanical drive and upgrading his graphics instead. A 1TB drive can again be had for $50 on sale. Mechanical HDDs have got quite fast for gaming and their only disadvantage compared to the SSD is waiting a second or two longer for your autosave to load; or longer for an entire level to load. However, if a gamer is impatient and wants to get right back into the game, then the SSD will definitely improve immersion and decrease frustration.

It is a matter of valuing ones time compared to what one spends on a relatively small-capacity drive; one has to choose their games and applications to put on the SSD wisely – Less than 80GB after an OS installation with a 96GB SSD or 119GB for a 128GB, or 112GB for a 120GB drive, is not a lot of space and you can only have a few modern games on your SSD at any one time.

With a low-capicity drive SSD , gamers will constantly be installing new games and uninstalling them after playing them to make room for even newer games. At 240GB to 256GB, many gamers will be satisfied with the amount of storage and it is a good compromise size for a budget conscious gamer with $200 to spend on an SSD.

Pros –

• The SSD is of a magnitude faster generally than the mechanical hard drive in almost every way. Windows startup is blazing fast and shutdown is noticeably quicker!
• Kingston’s SSDNow V300 120GB drive has improved over the previous V200 series with a new custom controller and memory that brings it up to near HyperX performance.
• SSDNow V300 is great bang for buck at $110 for a 120GB standalone drive or ten dollars more for a kit bundle
• TRIM support and garbage collection keeps your drive “like new”. The SSDNow 300 SSDs also offer advanced wear-leveling technology, S.M.A.R.T. tools and DuraClass Technology.
• Excellent bundle for notebook or desktop in a single package makes setting up your SSD a breeze and well worth the ten dollars more over the standalone drive . However, standalone offers a good option for those who already have the cloning SW and HW.
• 3-year warranty and superb Kingston support stand it out from the “SSD crowd”

Cons –

• Price per GB is still high compared to mechanical hard drives.
• Limited storage compared to HDDs
• 120GB is too small for a hardcore gamer; 240-256GB makes a difference to a gamer

The 120GB Kingston SSDNow 300 deserves the ABT Great Value award. It is a good drive for gamers who don’t mind its limited capacity, there is plenty of room for Windows, applications and perhaps five or more of your favorite games. It is also highly recommended as a time and frustration saver in starting up and shutting down Windows and for anything to do with file access, copying, or loading game levels.

Our 500GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 drives continue to performe admirably and demonstrate improvements in every way over our older 7200.10 drives. We even filled our drives to capacity as we tested over 80 games for our original 3D Vision evaluation, and they still perform as they did over a year ago when they were less than half-filled! They are awesome for storage and we will upgrade them to 1TB drives as we are already feeling capacity constrained by our 27-game benchmark suite.

It pays in every way to keep up with ABT and the best way is to follow us is on ABT forum.  Expect a OWC HDD/SSD dock and 256GB SSD evaluation, a Genius PC speaker review, a good exploration with the new Thermaltake Level 10 mouse … and much more as ABT prepares for CES with two reporters this year.

Mark Poppin

ABT Senior Editor

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«1. Introduction 2. Unboxing & Bundles 3. Test Configuration & Benchmarks 4. Synthetic Tests 5. Benchmark Suites 6. More Tests 7. Game Related Benches 8. 3 New Gamer's benches & Win 7 Startup & Shutdown 9. Conclusion 10. View All»