Getting the most out of my system.

af_thefragile

Last year I built a pretty cracking system but I don't think its running at its full potential.

The specs are:
- Asus Maximus 4 Gene-Z Z68 motherboard.
- Intel i7 2600k cpu
- 8GB DDR3 ram (2x4gb modules)
- Asus GTX 570 Direct CU ii 742mhz, 1280mb GPU
- 1 x Samsung 7200rpm 500gb HDD - Used as primary OS drive
- 1 x Samsung 7200rpm 1TB HDD - Used as storage drive
- Running Windows 7 64bit

So here are some benchmarks:

3D Mark 11 Basic (free version) at 720p:
Score: P5959 3DMarks
Details:
[HTML]
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 570 video card 3DMark 11 benchmark test score

Processor Intel Core i7-2600K Processor
Processor clock 1605 MHz
Physical / logical processors 1 / 8
# of cores 4

Graphics Card
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 570
Vendor Asustek Computer, Inc.
# of cards 1
SLI / CrossFire Off
Memory 1280 MB
Core clock 742 MHz
Memory clock 1900 MHz
Driver version 8.17.12.9610
Driver status FM Approved

General
Operating system 64-bit Windows 7 (6.1.7601)
Motherboard ASUSTeK Computer INC. Maximus IV GENE-Z
Memory 8192 MB
Module 1 4096 MB G.Skill 9 @ 800 MHz
Module 2 4096 MB G.Skill 9 @ 800 MHz
Hard drive model 500GB SAMSUNG HD502HJ

Detailed scores
3DMark ScoreP5959
Graphics Score5572
Physics Score9049
Combined Score6020
GraphicsTest1 24.71 FPS
GraphicsTest2 25.29 FPS
GraphicsTest3 35.49 FPS
GraphicsTest4 17.57 FPS
PhysicsTest 28.73 FPS
CombinedTest 28.0 FPS

Settings
Default settings used Yes
Edition Basic
Dxgi Adapter Luid 0
Screen Width 1280
Screen Height 720
Msaa Sample Count 1
Texture Filtering Mode Trilinear
Max Af Anisotropy 1
Tessellation Detail 5
Max Tessellation Factor 10
ShadowMapSize 5
Shadow Cascade Count 4
Surface Shadow Sample Count 16
Volumetric Illumination Quality 5
Ambient Occlusion Quality 5
Depth Of Field Quality 5
Enable Window Mode Off
Enable Vertical Sync Off
Enable Triple Buffering Off
Enable Wireframe Off
Color Saturation 100%[/HTML]

Alien vs Predator benchmark:

[HTML]*DX11 Hardware Detected*

Using Video Settings from file <myconfig.txt>:

Resolution: 1920 x 1080
Texture Quality: 3
Shadow Quality: 3
Anisotropic Filtering: 16
SSAO: ON
Vertical Sync: OFF
DX11 Tessellation: ON
DX11 Advanced Shadows: ON
DX11 MSAA Samples: 4


Benchmark Summary:

Number of frames: 4171
Average Frame Time: 25.1ms
Average FPS: 39.8
[/HTML]

I think my system should be capable of more than that.
I think its my HDDs which might be causing a bottle neck.

I have been thinking of getting a 60GB SSD and make use of the Intel SSD caching thing my Z68 mobo has.

Do you think it'ld be worth it?
What other things would you guys recommend I could do to make my system run more efficiently. My system has quite a lot of overclocking capacity but I don't wanna go down that route yet. I first wanna make it pretty efficient without having to over clock it...

So any suggestions guys?
Thanks.

Torqay

A solid state disk will load programs faster alright but it will do nothing in the way of improving the scores in above benchmarks. The bottleneck (if there is one, I did not compare them to similar systems) is more likely to be found in the board's bus/memory configuration.