I got $90 to upgrade my PC SSD or Liquid Cooling?

get the SSD... the difference in realistic operating times is night and day. I am talking about all the things we always wait for... loading times, bot times, reboot times, software installs... actual processing times will not be changed, but unless you plan to OC to the extreme, even liquid cooling will not make an incredible difference either...

for example...

I process video from time to time using my core i5 2500k processor. It already clocks up to 3.7 standard. If I get water cooling and somehow clock it 5GHz, then the best case scenario is that my processing time is reduced by @ 1/3... (math = 3.7 to 5.0 is an increase of 1.3... 3.7 / 3 = 1.23 which is very close to 1.3, thus, performance is increased by approximately one third). Real world effect of this is that the videos I occasionally process take 40 minutes instead of an hour... either way, I'm still going to find something else to do and come back later... probably much later than the 40 minutes it now takes to complete...

Lets say you make shorter videos... ok, it goes from 9 minutes to 6 minutes.... a little less painful... or in the even shorter videos, it goes from 60 seconds to 40 seconds and in that case, who cares? You are already in the position to "wait" for processing.

With an SSD, the sequential read and write speeds are doubled or quadrupled in some cases... Plus the biggest difference is the seek times... regular Hard Drives seek time avg 12 to 15 ms to "access" the data (move the arm to position the magnet over the spot on the drive in order to read the data). Seek times for SSD drives are consistently less then 1 ms (many times, less than 0.5ms). This is what takes booting windows from 2 minutes down to 30 seconds (after POST). Or loading programs in less than 1 second when it used to take 5 - 10 seconds...

This is a very real and appreciable effect in that you get a seemingly instant response from your computer when you click on something...

SSD all the way.... My Game Rig currently has a 4 Drive RAID 0 config with standard Hard Drives (Core i5 2500k @ 4.4GHz, 8GB 2133 RAM, ATI R9 280X, 4 Seagate 7200.12 RAID 0 array)... My spare computer with 3.0GHz Xeon X5450, 4GB PC3-8500 RAM and 120GB Kingston SSD NOW drive runs EVERY thing faster except for games and other items that require only processing power... but for general operation the "slower" computer with an SSD is significantly faster than my "fast" computer.

Also... I am using the original Hyper 212 cooler on my Core i5... ASUS AI Suite auto-Over clocks it up to 4.3GHz.