Hardware Upgrade!

I've been ridiculously busy for a long while. I won't get into details and I don't want to make any excuses. I should be getting into a better and more regular schedule very soon though. Either way, I'll be doing some long awaited upgrades to my computer. I just installed a drive that adds 3 USB 2.0 ports and several SD card format readers that I can access from the front. I have ordered a USB gaming headset and most importantly a Sapphire 5770 ATI graphics card. I'll have an updated gaming equipment section with photos soon and hopefully more frequent new articles and posts coming very soon.

How much would you pay to reduce load times on your PS3?

It's amazing how big games are getting these days. Big-budget next-gen titles can occupy up to 50Gb thanks to the Playstation 3's BluRay drive*. This allows games to include large amounts of uncompressed textures, video and audio. The downside of the Blu-Ray drive is a rather limited read speed that has led to the practice of installing large portions of games to the PS3's hard drive. Even with large portions of games installed to the hard drive, you may still have to wait for anywhere from six to ~thirty seconds.

I don't find those load times to be a big nuisance. However for those ADD-riddled gamers who can't sit still for that long, ExtremeTech has tested the effects of installing a high-performance solid-state drive, (SSD), in a Playstation 3. They find that load times are reduced quite a bit. The difference between the PS3 HDD and the SSD"anywhere from 33% to over 40%. The question is, are you willing to dish out $600-700 for such an upgrade?
Check out ExtremeTech's article here.



*Let's put 50Gb into perspective. Back in 2001 I was absolutely shocked that a full install of Baldur's Gate II was going to occupy 2Gb of my 10Gb hard drive. That's a 2,400% increase in the size of what we consider a 'big game.'

My Gaming Equipment

To help understand what I'm playing on: here's the equipment I'm working with. (Click for larger images).
Last updated: 02/10/2010

Xbox 360 20Gb launch edition and my TV: Vizio 47" 1080p LCD

My PC, the guts have changed but the case has remained the same for seven years.


The guts of my PC: Xigmatek 750W PSU, Athlon 64 FX 52 (overclocked to 3.0Ghz), 4GB OCZ Reaper PC2 6400, Radeon HD2600XT, Sound Blaster Audigy X-Fi Fatal1ty Edition, MSI K9A2-NEO, 500GB Western Digital HDD, 500GB external Hammer MoreSpace HDD


My PC monitor: Acer 22" 1680x1050 resolution LCD


My Laptop: Dell Inspiron 1501, 17" screen, Turion 64 X2 Mobile (1.6Ghz), 2GB PC2 5200, Integrated Radeon Xpress 1150 256MB, Windows 7



I've added a Playstation 3 Slim 120Gb to the mix.