Is it possible to upgrade ps3 hardware

Do the above steps to do PS3 hardware upgrades if required. The Professional edition provides more features like migrate OS to SSD without reinstalling, real time file sync to network path, restore to dissimilar hardware computer, and more. PS3 compatible hard drive is any 2. Do you need any more help?

Have you solved your problem? We felt this feature was incomplete without assessing the same drives on the updated version of PS3 Skyrim, so we went back to the labs, updated the game on each drive and got back to work. The results are encouraging. With the new patch 2. The 60GB stock drive red line still has a small performance penalty, but it's not the game-breaker that once it was.

The results here suggest that Skyrim's intense reliance on the hard drive has been significantly reduced with the new update and the hybrid commands very little advantage over the stock drive, with the SSD only providing a small boost in these test clips. We tested out a number of other titles that heavily stream game data from the hard drive to see if hybrid or full SSD upgrades can make a difference.

We recently tested Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, loved the game, but weren't too impressed with the pop-in both geometry and textures in the open-world areas - in this regard, neither the hybrid nor the full SSD made a jot of difference to the game performance level.

Gamers shouldn't need to 'buy' better performance with expensive hardware. Similarly, Battlefield 3 seemed to be identical - though loading times did appear to be significantly improved. It was the same story with Assassin's Creed: Revelations, which can lag badly on the PlayStation 3 compared to the Xbox version. Concerns that this was down to our 60GB launch drive can be ruled out - the game played identically with the title running from SSD in common with many Ubisoft titles, a big chunk of the disc gets copied onto hard drive , though the interminable loading times did seem to be improved.

Elsewhere we saw minor gains. We chose Ninja Theory's Enslaved as a suitable workout for texture pop-in issues with Unreal Engine 3 games and found that textures moved through their mip-map levels around 40 per cent faster on SSD than they did on the stock drive. This tidied up the presentation in some cases, but was still noticeable - hardly worth considering an upgrade for.

In truth, this is exactly what we would have expected and as consumers, what we should be demanding - an equal experience regardless of hardware. The drive you get with your purchase should be good enough for all games, all eventualities. While Sony shifts between hard drive suppliers, it does seem to stick with a particular model for a set SKU. So in terms of stock hard disks at least, developers should be testing out their games on a fairly limited range of different devices.

From a tech geekiness perspective, we're a little disappointed that the SSD didn't perform better across a wider range of games, but at the same time, it's obvious that gamers shouldn't have to buy improved performance and perhaps we should be thankful that games like Rage are the exception rather than the norm. The bottom line is that main advantage of the technology remains the ability to install and load a range of games much more quickly than you can on hard drive, and while real performance gains can be found, it's only on a very limited number of titles.

But there's still an opportunity to get good value. SSD prices are dropping, but the feature set of the drives is also improving in parallel - they're getting faster and faster, and incorporating new technologies such as TRIM, which aims to constantly maintain performance over time, something the older SSDs didn't do so well. The PS3 can't stream data quickly enough by virtue of the fact that data needs to be buffered, and RAM is a finite resource on console.

It's in the 0. What this means is relatively straightforward: older SSDs are being dumped onto the used market, and because they don't possess the latest and greatest features, bargains are there to be grabbed. We'd just recommend setting up a boot disc with HDDErase to ensure that the drive resets to factory performance levels and you should be set.

It's a dinosaur in SSD terms, but it's hard to imagine that any newer drive could do better - there are too many bottlenecks on the PS3 to get the most from a fully featured new drive. In short, an SSD upgrade will be expensive, but may not be quite as wallet-damaging as you may think. What you will get for your money is improved install and loading times on a great many games - but not all - and in key titles that really hammer the hard drive, there may well be some performance improvements, but not enough to justify the expense, unless you really, really like Rage.

Upgrade your laptop with an SSD and that's where you'll really find value - the difference in running an OS, apps and a browser with a solid state drive is phenomenal when compared to a standard HDD.

What we would say is that if you feel that your drive is lagging, consider backing up your PS3 data and re-formatting the drive. We experienced a big improvement in installation times by carrying out this procedure - the bottom line is that the PS3 file system fragments the drive just as a PC would, and while this job is a real pain in the arse, we found that install times on games were slashed on a drive that had seen a few years of continual service.

In the here and now, SSDs remain an expensive luxury, but they clearly represent the way forward for console technology - if not now, then definitely for next-gen machines. Both Xbox and PlayStation 3 currently cache data to their hard drives, but with flash memory collapsing in price it makes sense to include a few gigs onboard for caching purposes - if the experiments on this page prove anything, it's that zero latency access to game assets can provide a hugely useful tool for developers.

Indeed, if the rumours are true and Wii U ships with 8GB of flash RAM, it'll be interesting to see how much of that Nintendo dedicates to the cache - after all, there's no hard drive on the unit, and the notion that the machine ships with no cache at all scarcely bears thinking about. In our tests we've seen some advantages in how solid state drives can benefit console gaming - whether as a consequence of a design better suited to other platforms Rage , or through what appears to be a woefully inadequate caching system pre-patch 2.

Developers often talk about the constrictions of console RAM, and next-gen, game-makers are still likely to battling limited throughput from Blu-ray optical drives.

A sizeable, flash memory-based cache could make a lot of sense Digital Foundry specialises in technical analysis of gaming hardware and software, using state-of-the-art capture systems and bespoke software to show you how well games and hardware run, visualising precisely what they're capable of. In order to show you what 4K gaming actually looks like we needed to build our own platform to supply high quality 4K video for offline viewing. So we did. Rather than delete your downloads to make space for new ones, why not expand?

Go from 20GB to GB. For your shopping list, you'll need a 2. Many tinkerers suggest one that spins at 5, RPM to match the PS3's original drive and to keep the new one from running too hot.

It's not plug-in-and-play simple -- y ou can't just pull out the smaller HDD, insert a new one into the PS3 Slim and play away. After backing up your current setup with the console's backup utility, you'll need to remove a few screws and gingerly switch out the drives. The only tricky part is remembering to put a system update file on a USB stick alongside your backup data. Thankfully, SCE has provisioned all the instructions needed here , for all three hardware iterations.

Make sure you know what you're doing here, too. Proceed at your own risk, although despite our apprehension, our own installation went without a hitch. Protip: You saw our first suggestion right? May as well throw in a GB -- nah, make it a 1TB drive. Game download binge. Sony's newest DualShock is just so much better. It's more comfortable, looks better and even comes with a smartphone-baiting touch panel and share button, although those last two features aren't going to work here. The rest of the controller, surprisingly, does work.

There are some caveats: There's no PS button, so it's really only for use during a game, and it won't connect to the PS3 wirelessly -- you'll have to keep it tethered while you play. Handily, Reddit users have also compiled a list of games that will and won't work with a PS4 DualShock, and for the fantasists among you, you can pretend that you're playing on a PS4.