Join for quick access. Enter your email below and we'll send confirmation plus sign you up to our newsletter.
By submitting your information, you confirm you are aged 16 or over,
have read our
Privacy Policy
and agree to the
Terms & Conditions. Geographical rules apply.
Stay On the Cutting Edge: Get the Tom's Hardware Newsletter
Get Tom's Hardware's best news and in-depth reviews, straight to your inbox.
You are now subscribed
Your newsletter sign-up was successful
Join the club
Get full access to premium articles, exclusive features and a growing list of member rewards.
An account already exists for this email address, please log in.
Time To Upgrade, Part 2: Picking The Parts To Replace
After looking at whether or not it makes sense to replace a PC built back in 2007 with a more modern machine, we decided to examine three component upgrade options—graphics, storage, and the motherboard/CPU/RAM platform—separately.
This third option may not appear as significant as the previous two. However, SSDs have overtaken hard drives in terms of synthetic and real-world performance, so it makes sense to consider a simple hard drive replacement. A modern SSD is still rather expensive per gigabyte, but it delivers tangible performance gains, nevertheless.
The G.Skill Phoenix is based on the popular SandForce SF-1200 controller. SandForce solutions work without additional cache memory, unlike Indilinx, Intel, Samsung, or Toshiba architectures. Instead, it utilizes part of the flash memory to handle wear leveling and performance management features, such as algorithms that deal with operations to minimize write amplification.
This SSD, like many others based on a similar architecure, delivers more than 200 MB/s of read and write throughput plus excellent I/O and application performance. We examined how this would impact our 2007 system.
