One of the more compelling arguments for gaming graphics degrowth is that all those extreme-fidelity moss textures and Master Chief helmet dents are producing some horrifically engorged installation sizes. That’s a recipe for an SSD upgrade, and if it’s space you’re after, then Amazon Prime Big Deal Days has the 4TB Crucial P3 Plus on some big discounts. It’s down from £250 to just £192 in the UK, and down from $360 to $210 in the US.
That’s not an exaggeration about file sizes, by the way. 150GB for Horizon Forbidden West. Nearly 200GB for God of War Ragnarök. Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 and all its Warzone trimmings are something like 235GB, and adding all the DLC maps to Ark: Survival Ascended blows it up to over 400GB. And because games increasingly run like dogshit on mechanical hard drives, a bigger and better SSD is the only real long-term hardware solution. Luckily, the P3 Plus is a good’un – higher-end drives like the WD Black SN850x have it beaten in our game loading tests, but it’s still impressively competitive in general file-moving benchmarks.
UK deal:
US deal:
As this is a PCIe 4.0 SSD, it’ll need a motherboard that supports the 4.0 standard for its best speeds, but that’s easily doable unless your PC is grey haired and bereft of all its original teeth. The more limiting limitation is probably the need to be an Amazon Prime member to get the lower price; Prime Big Deal Days is, like the main Prime Day even in the summer, a kind of exclusive club for subscribers. Though you could always just sign up for Prime’s free trial.
Prime Big Deal Days runs across October 8th-9th, so keep an eye out for more hardware offers to come. Likely including some other SSD options, if you fancy something faster but without quite as much capacity.
