Best SSD for my needs?

Hello Tom's Community,

I'm trying to figure out what the best SSD is for a serious gamer, under $300. This is only going to be used as a boot drive, will only have Windows 7, WoW, and Firefox installed on the main drive. Been looking at [/url] mainly, with [url=http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820167005] also an option. I tend to over research my hardware, from what to expect for performance and what needs to be done to maintain that performance. I'm also at this time picking up a new northbridge cooler and an Antec Nine Hundred Two case... and would like to buy the best drive. From what I've been reading, the OCZ support, updates, and community are amazing, and the Vertex Turbo's tend to be the fastest out there. The Intel's are solid, fast, and have Intel's rep to back them up. Any thoughts on either, or perhaps a different drive around the same size/price/performance?

Current System Specs:
e8400 @ 3.8ghz, 6gb PC6400, 2x500GB WDYS drives, XFX 4870 1GB, AGI 580 Watt PSU.

Yeah, finally decided to go with the Intel due to reviews and the fact that the Vertex turbo real world performance gains are under whole seconds. Of course now EVERYWHERE it's sold out. I can't even get it through our distributors... they're all back ordered till the end of the month. Figures. Good news is it's worth the wait, since I can get the drive for a lot cheaper than online.

More on the new Generation (yeah, is a new Gen for Micron and Crucial with a brand new proprietary controller that will be used exclusively with Micron’s (Crucial branded) latest generation of SSDs).
"While Crucial will focus on consumer sales, Micron itself will focus on the tough OEM SSD market"

Crucial C300 (also known as Micron RealSSD C300) with 5 year warranty.
Read 355MB/sec
Write 215MB/sec

"will be available for sale in early February"

Intel X25-M
Read 250MB/sec
Write 70MB/sec


The Crucial C300 natively supports SATA 6Gb/s and is backwards compatible for the SATA 3GB/s interface.

quote by lensman0419 here on Toms news article: "Actually, if you have EVER seen the random read speed on this drive, you will be impressed! It's 2X the Intel speed on random read and writes."

"Expect to pay big bucks though: the current 256 GB SATA II SSD costs $799.99, and its smaller 128 GB cousin costs $449.99."

Hmm, though at this price I might just wait and hope the Intel one drops some in price... still all good to me

The X25-M is now slightly outperformed by same-class competitors.

Contiguous read and write speed means very little about performance. So many Ssd with big throughput were simply bad. Check rather latencies on small files.