Too many component selections are made based upon factors of little relevance. Not just gamers either. For example ... a user wanted 3 PCs for her office and she did the research and based her component selection based upon performance in office suite performance. Now these office suite benchmarks generally consist of a script which times the peformance in a series of office app operations. Each of these operations require user input in between each operation. So of what relevance is the 0.054 seconds in benchmark performance when each keystoke or mouse movement eats up a minimum of 10 times that ? We also talked bout boot time and I booted a box in my office from the SSD and SSHD.... 1st time we just watched and both seemed same ... 2nd time I asked her to use here stopwatch app on her phone ... the two boots were 0.9 seconds apart. I told her to sleep on it a few days and let me know on Monday.
But I also asked her to observe each employee's activity as they arrived. Generally the 1st thing they all did was turn on their PC. Things they did before they touched the KB included making / getting cofee, listening to their phone messages and returning calls, looking at mail, hitting the bathroom. She called asking ... could we eliminate the SSDs for now and put them in later ? So we built the boxes w/ no SSDs and put the OS on a small partition on the SSHD... Few month later wanted to add photo and video editing and said it was time to add the SSDs. What we wound up doing is adding two SSDS to one box (1st for OS and programs, 2nd as a scratch drive) and a GFX card. Added a 2nd SSHD to the PC and moved all the data files from all PCs to that new drive. Mapped it to F:\ on all PCs so they could all there *F*iles there. Last thing we did was add a HD Docking Station ... for off site storage. My son just built himself a new box.... his pre-play routine runs from 25 seconds to 5 minutes ... from hit log-in button (puter on 24/7) take headset off charger, remove USB dingle thingie from storage cubby, close cubby, insert USB to... to adding grabbing a snack, cooking, feeding the cats. I have 2 SSDs in my build ... I also don't really see any real world gain, but being geekish, I just like knowing it's there is "needed"
If ya remember the kid in HS that when ya pulled up to the light, he'd rev the engine ... when light turned he'd blast off the line so to speak and then you'd be along side him again at the next light .... and you'd pull into the school parking lot right behind him.... and you'd be standing right behind him handing your tickets in for the spring dance. He had the faster care, but what did he gain besides bragging rights ? The geek and all of us wants the fastest components possible under their budgets ... but it's worthwhile determining just what that impact is the real world ... if the money is there, by all means grab it, But if it's forcing a compromise in another component, say dropping from a Z / X series to H / B series, then stop and think.