PS3 Intel SSD upgrade: Faster game loading, but at a cost

We already know Intel’s 80GB X-25 SSD is fast, but what if you’re more interested in supercharging your games console than you are your notebook?  ExtremeTech have ripped the standard HDD from their PS3 and replaced it with Intel’s solid-state drive, then run through the benchmarks to see what effect it has on game loading speeds and other activities.

The answer to that is a mixed bag.  In the case of game loading, it depends on whether it’s a downloaded title or one on disc; the former will see speed increases of up to 40-percent, while the latter is more affected by the Blu-ray drive than it is the storage.  Once installed, startup and loading times are also decreased, with ExtremeTech finding anything from 25 to 40-percent improvements.

As a viable upgrade, then, the Intel SSD makes a lot of sense.  As a financially realistic one, however, it falls well short; Intel are currently asking anywhere up to $700 for the drive, where the console itself (with an identical capacity 80GB HDD) costs just $399.