Forum Discussion

Anonymous

11 years ago

Solved

So, I'm thinking of replacing my HDD for a SSD...improvements?

Thing is that my system can run Inquisition decently well at high graphical settings and 1680x1050, given it's specs (Phenom II x4 920, 8 GBs RAM, GTX 560 Ti), but the thing that bothers me the most ...

dragon age inquisition

greyze
11 years ago
I would strongly recommend trying it, ignore Freds advice.
A HDDs performance degrades a tremendous amount over time, the problems you are having are almost entirely attributed to your poor hard drive. I agree with Fred about upgrading your other components but;
The difference you will get from an SSD will be significantly more compared to other component upgrades
The cost is minimal compared to upgrading CPU/Motherboard/RAM/GPU
Already played DA:I on specs very similar to yours, it really shouldn't be a laggy mess that your experiencing.
Seriously you wouldn't believe how much a hard drive can affect literally everything you do. People often blame a crappy CPU when something is taking a long time to load, or something is laggy/stuttering; but they never notice that the performance view in task manager will show the CPUs usage at minimal.. because it's sitting there waiting for the hard drive to do something.
Upgrade to an SSD, you can get a 240GB for £60+ these days. I could bet money on that solving almost all your problems. For the best experience you definitely should reinstall windows on the SSD so the whole system runs optimally, don't just plug in the SSD and only load origin on it. And for the very best performance you should also use Windows 8.1.

JupixFIN

11 years ago

The overall performance boost from swapping out an HDD to an SSD is incredible and not limited to just Inquisition. Your PC will be much, much faster to load up everything you do with it, particularly the initial boot but also every application. Back when SSD's were coming out, numerous tech reviewers said that the #1 upgrade to do to an old machine is to make the work disk of the machine an SSD. That's because it has a wide-ranging performance benefit over all the loading that the machine does, and because the benefit is so noticeable between an HDD and an SSD.

One of my machines is an Intel E6600 with 2 gigs of DDR2 and a GTX650. But it has an SSD so it feels incredibly snappy. Trust me, upgrading to an SSD can literally make an old machine "feel" new again.

Then the bad. It won't make the Inquisition stuttering go away. I get the same stuttering even with my Samsung 850 EVO SSD, Intel i7 5930k at 4,2 GHz and 32 gigs of DDR4. But I bet you'll be happier with the SSD overall.

Anonymous

11 years ago

I mean some -serious- stuttering, like the game taking up to 5-10 seconds to close the menus, and the scenario going slow the rest of the time until I reload the game.

Anyway, I think I'm gonna buy it. I've seen a Samsung 850 Pro 128 Gbs for 100 bucks. For what I've read it's an amazing SSD, and I've never used up a lot of HDD in my life (even now that I've a shitload of * and games I don't play installed in my system, and yet I've only used 90 GBs of my 200 GB HDD).

Fred_vdp
Hero+
11 years ago
No matter if it actually fixes your issues or not, an SSD is a must-have for PCs anyway, so it's definitely not wasted money.