OWC Premium SandForce-Based Mercury Extreme Pro 6G 240GB SSD is Blazing Fast!

4 Practical Benchmarks for Gamers

Besides updating to Sandra 2013, we recently 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 results in seconds.

The OWC Mercury EXTREME Pro 6G 240GB SSD is the very fastest of our drives, beating the second-fastest SSD time by 5 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 premium SSD over the slower consumer grade SSDs.

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 over using a mechanical drive.

Game Level Load Times

Solid-state drives evidently 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.

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.

Here is the chart showing the time difference in installing downloaded drivers from a HDD versus two SSDs:

It takes nearly twice as long to install video card drivers from a HDD than it does from an SSDs.

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 slower Kingston consumer-grade SSD is more than twice faster than the HDD.  And the OWC Mercury EXTREME Pro 6G 240GB SSD is significantly faster than Kingston’s SandForced-based SSD SSDNow V300.  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.  Since we are keeping score, the OWC Mercury EXTREME Pro 6G 240GB SSD is the fastest drive.

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.