SATA II vs SATA III - Load Times

[aeffertz]

Hi guys.

I've recently upgraded my PC to allow for higher detail gaming and am happy where I'm sitting as far as quality and performance goes. However the downside now is that load times are very long (almost 2 minutes) when loading in to the game. Where the hang up is, is when it's loading in all the user skins rather than using the games stock skins that are all the same, so they load once and are repeated for everyone rather than loading 50 different 2048x2048 images/skins.

I have a 6 gb/s 7200 RPM HDD although my motherboard only has 3 gb/s. If I purchased a new motherboard with SATA III slots, would this help with load times or am I looking at replacing the processor?

I'm running an AMD-FX4300 overclocked to 4.3 ghz with a GTX 970. 8 GB 1600mhz DDR3.

I'm just at a wash. Replacing the motherboard would be the cheapest option and I'm kind of on a tight budget. Replacing the CPU would require a new CPU and motherboard since I'd go with an Intel this time around. And if I went with an SSD, wouldn't I want to replace the motherboard as well so I can get the most out of the SSD with the SATA III ports?

Any help is appreciated!

 

[ComputerSecurityGuy]

Hard drives, even the top end ones haven't pushed much past the original SATA. It only really matters for SSDs.

 

[SuperSoph_WD]

Hey there, aeffertz!

It's highly unlikely that a new mobo with SATA III would help with a 7,200 RPM HDD even if it's SATA III-compatible. Mechanical hard drives are limited in terms of platter density and RPMs which actually prevents them from exceeding the SATA II (3Gb/s) bandwidth.
If you do plan to update your HDD to an SSD, then you'd most definitely benefit from a mobo upgrade. Otherwise, the SSD would be bottlenecked by the SATA II connection. Usually solid-state drives can reach up to ~ 550 MB/s depending on the PC configuration, which is where a 600 MB/s SATA III-compatible motherboard could come in handy.

Good luck!
SuperSoph_WD