It's not hard to believe that buying OCZ can be detrimental. After all, I for once did not buy anything from them since one of their certified PSUs fried my MB and my CPU.

Still, I don't think that intel is that superior to crucial, patriot or corsair

Just to add my experience.

I got a (probably more expensive) Samsung 830 SSD. It works great and came with a code to download Arkham City from their own website.

The attraction of the Samsung is pretty low power draw, relatively.

The tech sites mention that most companies get their NAND memory, the controller, and other parts from separate companies and rebadge them. Intel and Samsung are some of the few companies that do everything themselves. I have no idea if that truly affects performance/reliability, but it makes me feel better? :P

A world where Intel isn't superior at making... anything is a happy world. Twats.

Well, there's always their graphic, audio, and generic I/O ideas (all consisting of "shove everything to the CPU rather than using dedicated controllers and offloading the former") to fall back on if you need something to bash. Although, I hear their graphics have improved a little bit.

Sure, but to get an HD graphics 4000, you will have to purchase an Ivy bridge i7.

Now, just try to guess the %age of Ivy bridge i7s who will actually care about the integrated GPU ...

At least, with AMD APUs you get the possibility of Radeon dual graphics

When I was building my new gaming computer, I was doing much research, and I was immensely grateful when I stumbled upon the site linked below. They have articles for DIY builders, as well as the best [component] for different price ranges.

Here's one specifically for SSDs, updated this month:
http://www.hardware-revolution.com/best-ssd-hdd-january-2012/

I find it quite odd that no-one has said anything about this..

I get 80MiB/s on my HDDs...

EDIT: Unfortunately, I don't remember what the 2 SSD drives I have got when I tested them. They were significantly faster though.

Yeah, LOL. I think they miss the days when all you needed was a P133 and no GPU whatsoever. Trying to claw back those days is something that will only really work in the mobile devices market though. Which admittedly is a pretty damn lucrative market, but one I have limited interest in.

That depends on the benchmark you use (read or write speeds, sequetial or blocks, larger or smaller blocks ) , whether your HDDs are in raid , whether you refer to peak rates or to average rates over an sustained period etc. For all clarity, the speed I mentionned come from one of the PC Mark.tests. My Velociraptor get 30 something in this test, where other benchmarks rate it at an average read speed of 100 something and a peak speed of 150 something

Eventually, the speeds above are meant to show the relative difference between the 3 techs . If you prefer, the PC mark indexes are in the lower 5000 for SSDs, in the 3000 for hybrid HDDs and in the 1500-2000 for HDDs
Yes, but there is little point putting a top of the range GPU with an APU. A 38xx APU with a discrete 66xx Radeon gives you a cheap and solid system, not a top of the range gaming PC. If you want something better, you probably get a better CPU too. Anyway, even without a discrete GPU, the APU provides an acceptable acceleration.

Now, with Intel you either end up with an integrated GPU you will never use or a powerful and expensive CPU that gets limited by its integrated GPU. The gap in perf between the CPU and the GPU is indeed greater.
and on this more specifically, my experience ( on a laptop, so a faster GPU is not an option ) , Dual Graphics do improve FPS in DX10 games ( and make things worse in some older games )

Intel isn't so stupid as we think their record with integrated GPUs makes them out to be. They are not catering to us and don't intend to. They're catering to the 99 percent or so of the market that doesn't give a damn about the GPU, so long as it will run Aero and Office and play Flash videos, or really doesn't give a damn about the GPU because they run headless servers. That market wants the cheapest GPU that gets this very limited job done, plus "nobody ever got fired for buying Intel", and it's not true that the GPU ends up limiting the powerful CPU, because the GPU isn't asked to do anything that even approaches its limit.

But will it blend?

Yes, buy Intel or forget it. I've been over it in other threads, there's been serious problems with the quality of drives from OCZ and the like and they have not treated the customers well who've had issues, up to and including refusing to honor the warranty on a non-functional product because they had a firmware update that was "supposed to fix it" coming out (but they couldn't say when, oh yeah, in OCZ's case their first 2 tries didn't fix the problem). Note you lost any data on the drive by loading the new firmware.

These people don't deserve your money and you may be very unhappy with their products. Buy Intel, this is one time when the name brand actually means something.

You said transfer speed, which is the fastest one possible (sequential read).
If it was in RAID, I would have said my RAID gets 80MiB/s, not the HDD :P
That's worrying. I haven't had any problems with the 2 OCZ drives that I have. Must have just been very lucky by the sounds of it :/

I think the models you mentioned in a previous thread were just before the problem children drives.