Sirian's Day One of Diablo 3

[Kevin]

I'm a bit surprised you'd have a machine with those specs/abilities, without an SSD to go along with it. I can't recommend an SSD enough; once you have one as your primary drive and game on it, you simply can't go back again. You'll see a much larger performance boost than anything else on your machine just by picking up an SSD.

This. Though some games I still put on my mechanical drive (which actually does quite well for a spindle based drive) but yes, I still can't get over how much it impacts performance (and boot times, I can literally do a restart in Win7 in under 20 seconds, that's a log out, shutdown, restart, login).

That being said I notice a lot more rubber banding and little lag things in the first 15 minutes of play in D3 than I do later on in sessions, even with it living on an SSD, I do think it's load/caching lag which is silly. It's not been bad enough to stop my hardcore progression (of course I'm only 18, but I'm seeing content for the first time hardcore, not softcore) but I've debated a few times.