Can Kingston SSDNow M Upgrade Kit put SSDs in mainstream?

Performance:
Now that we have moved all of our data over it is time to see if the new SSD is worth the price in terms of performance.

To test this we took our trusty Asus G2S-X1 laptop and ran the Kingston SSDNow M head to head with a Seagate Momentus 7200.2  7200RPM 160G HDD.
The Specs on the G2S-X1 are as follows:

Intel T7500 2.2GHz CPU
4GB Kingston DDR2-800 RAM
Intel 965M Chipset
Discrete nVidia GeForce 8600M GPU (256MB memory)
Seagate Momentus 7200.2  7200RPM 160G HDD
Windows 7 RC1 Ultimate x64

testing broke down into a couple of categories
Synthetic and Real-World - Our synthetic testing includes FutureMark’s PCMark Vantage, Everest Ultimate Engineer Edition, and Hyper Pi 0.99.
Real world testing consisted of Lightwave 3D (version 9.0 x64) and two games - Crysis Warhead and FarCry 2.

The Synthetics -
First up at bat is FurtureMark’s PCMark Vantage. 


PCMark Vantage  - Seagate Momentus 7200.2 HDD


PCMark Vantage  - Kingston SSDNow M SSD

As you can see the overall PCMark suite score jumps by a little over 1700 points just with the addition of the SSDs.


PCMark Vantage Disk Test - Seagate Momentus 7200.2 HDD


PCMark Vantage Disk Test - Kingston SSDNow M SSD

The Disk Drive test is even more impressive with a score difference of over 20,500. The SSD simply smashes the HDD in these tests.

Next up on the list is the Everest Disk Bench.


Everest Disk Benchmark - Seagate Momentus 7200.2 HDD

Here again we see the SSD simply trounce the HDD with a random read of 270.6MB/s

Our final synthetic is HyperPi; this test runs an instance of SuperPi on each detected CPU core.  HyperPi is a good test of moving large calculations from the hard drive, to memory, to the CPU and back again. If one of these legs is slow your times will suffer accordingly.


HyperPi 0.99 - Seagate Momentus 7200.2 HDD


HyperPi 0.99 - Kingston SSDNow M SSD

Here is our first indication that dropping an SSD into your system will not improve everything. The HyperPi scores were almost identical in fact the SSD is a tad slower. 

Real-World -
Our first real-world test is Lightwave 3D Version 9.3.0 x64, for this I ran the Moon Base Scene [available on the Lightwave 8 content CD 1] and rendered frame 32 with using a 7-pass PLD AA filter and Gaussian Sharp for the reconstruction filter.  Segment memory was set to 512MB and Render resolution was 1920x1080 [1080i HD]. Classic Cameras were also used.


Lightwave 3D Rendering - Seagate Momentus 7200.2 HDD


Lightwave 3D Rendering - Kingston SSDNow M SSD

Lightwave 3D shows no improvement with the SSD over the HDD. This is another test where the Drive speed does not seem to make a difference.

Gaming -
Although I know that the actual frame rates should not change between the two drives. However, where I do hope to see a great improvement is in the load times of the two games. In Warhead there are times when you can get up walk away while you wait for a level to load. The same can be said for FarCry 2 when you begin the game and when you rest up for your next errand.

The Settings for the two games used are shown below:
Crysis Warhead



FarCry 2

As you can see the average FPS were within 1 FPS of each other for both games but the level load times were dramatically different. I was shocked to see the Crysis Warhead level load in less than 30 seconds. It was simply amazing.



Power Consumption:
An Added bonus to using an SSD in your system is lower power consumption. With the SSD in the Asus G2S-X1 I saw a 22% reduction in power draw from the wall at idle and a 24% reduction under load. now these numbers are really in the single digits in terms of actual watts saved but do illustrate the fact that an SSD can help to conserve power over time. Battery life on the Asus G2S-X1 was increased by roughly 12 minutes with the SSD over the HDD



Concluded on the next page