Why My Computer Would Benefit From an SSD Upgrade

My computer and I go back a long way. It's lived in several countries and it's served as both a work machine and a gaming rig for over four years.

I first built it way back in 2007 with an Intel BadAxe 2 mainboard (D975XBX2), an Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6850 chipset and 4 gigs of RAM. It first sported an nVidia 8800GT, and I upgraded it late last year with an ATI 5850HD. It sits comfortably in a Lian Li computer case.

The computer is a capable rig, but it has always been bottlenecked by its hard drive—a Western Digital 1TB Caviar. It is capable of running most modern games at high settings, but the load speeds and boot up times could be greatly improved with the inclusion of an SSD. In fact, it's difficult for my computer to hold its own against gaming computers without an SSD.

Were it not for the contest on TechSpy, I would seriously consider saving up to invest in an SSD to pick up by the end of the year.

The SSD would happily serve as my computer's primary hard drive, for booting up and running the games I play most often—Battlefield 2: Bad Company and Team Fortress 2, and Battlefield 3 when the time comes. It would also allow me to work with large PSD files in Adobe Photoshop by cutting down the amount of time it takes to load and save documents.

It's for all these reasons that I feel my computer would most benefit from an upgrade to an SSD, more so than anything else.