What do you think of this setup for child's gaming pc?

I'm going to echo the NVME sentiment. From my experience 500GB is going to get tight if your kid wants to snag every meme game they see on youtube. It shoudl be fine if they stick to the holy kid game trinity of roblox, minecraft, and fortnight.

What are you looking at for a CPU cooler? That's a place where cost and effectiveness are all over the place and not strictly correlated.
 
I'm going to echo the NVME sentiment. From my experience 500GB is going to get tight if your kid wants to snag every meme game they see on youtube. It shoudl be fine if they stick to the holy kid game trinity of roblox, minecraft, and fortnight.

What are you looking at for a CPU cooler? That's a place where cost and effectiveness are all over the place and not strictly correlated.
Games are mostly from Steam; will a NVME help the games run better; is NVME ok for a primary drive with everything going on it, including OS; or do I need separate drives?
 
Games are mostly from Steam; will a NVME help the games run better; is NVME ok for a primary drive with everything going on it, including OS; or do I need separate drives?
NVME is fine as primary. Most laptops are that way these days. What it will help right now is in system boot time, malware checks, for steam specifically it will greatly speed up the pre-allocation of disk space prior to download as well as verifying contents on disk via steam. It also is poised to have significant impact on game performance when directstorage hits, which is still slated for both windows 10 and 11. With the current crop of games, the benefit in game was not as large as I'd have liked. Even with a gen 4 drive I'd argue the overall performance boost for things like level loads and such going form SATA ssd to this was similar to the bump going from spinny disks to SSD.

Given the price is similar, I'd go with NVME 100%.
 
NVME is fine as primary. Most laptops are that way these days. What it will help right now is in system boot time, malware checks, for steam specifically it will greatly speed up the pre-allocation of disk space prior to download as well as verifying contents on disk via steam. It also is poised to have significant impact on game performance when directstorage hits, which is still slated for both windows 10 and 11. With the current crop of games, the benefit in game was not as large as I'd have liked. Even with a gen 4 drive I'd argue the overall performance boost for things like level loads and such going form SATA ssd to this was similar to the bump going from spinny disks to SSD.

Given the price is similar, I'd go with NVME 100%.
It's nowhere near that bump for game loading. It's like 1-2s difference in most games.
 
It's nowhere near that bump for game loading. It's like 1-2s difference in most games.
Granted, I haven't sat there with a stopwatch, and when moving storage it also came with a CPU upgrade, but spinny disk to SSD was disappointing and SSD to fast NVME was also disappointing. But it was faster in some games. It was not huge. I think you are assuming that I was claiming huge gains, and you were assuming I got non disappointing gains with the move from spinny disks to sata SSDs. Some games get zero improvement, WTF they are doing when you throw150% cpu performance, extra threads, and double disk speeds at them and they can't load anything faster is beyond me. THe other thing that will matter that I will leave off is that games that aren't optimized well and have hitches on asset loads may have shorter hitches.

But there is zero point in arguing against NVME. It's not going to be a huge win in games right now, but will matter within a year, and 4x the max SSD rate will be noticed everywhere else. ANd it's a couple bucks cheaper. Unless that chipset has some FUBAR implmentation of NVME support, it is 100% the right move, especially in SFF.
 
Granted, I haven't sat there with a stopwatch, and when moving storage it also came with a CPU upgrade, but spinny disk to SSD was disappointing and SSD to fast NVME was also disappointing. But it was faster in some games. It was not huge. I think you are assuming that I was claiming huge gains, and you were assuming I got non disappointing gains with the move from spinny disks to sata SSDs. Some games get zero improvement, WTF they are doing when you throw150% cpu performance, extra threads, and double disk speeds at them and they can't load anything faster is beyond me. THe other thing that will matter that I will leave off is that games that aren't optimized well and have hitches on asset loads may have shorter hitches.

But there is zero point in arguing against NVME. It's not going to be a huge win in games right now, but will matter within a year, and 4x the max SSD rate will be noticed everywhere else. ANd it's a couple bucks cheaper. Unless that chipset has some FUBAR implmentation of NVME support, it is 100% the right move, especially in SFF.

Not arguing against NVME. It's just there is a very noticeable difference going from mech drive -> SSD and at the current time very little going from SSD->NVME. When they start implementing that direct storage tech it should be a lot better, but that could be a year from now.
 
Not arguing against NVME. It's just there is a very noticeable difference going from mech drive -> SSD and at the current time very little going from SSD->NVME. When they start implementing that direct storage tech it should be a lot better, but that could be a year from now.

For games, I noticed only a marginal improvement on average going from fast mechanical drives to 400+ MB/s SATA SSDs. Almost no improvement between those and 1GB/s NVME, and a marginal boost once you head into the 2GB/s range. For things outside of games, there was a bigger difference, but 2GB/s plus nvme makes a real difference in boot times. Going from 2GB/s to 4GB/s drives didn't help boot times much, but damn near everything else outside of game loads feels near instant and is an improvement on the ~2GB/s drives in my laptop. Quality of life going from a crappy 5200rpm laptop drive to a sata SSD was a notable quality of life improvement, but I have no experience gaming with that.

I will say another steam game benefit of NVME is backing up and moving your library if you have a lot of games downloaded at once. NVME to NVME even just the 1GB/s drives in an USB-C enclosure was WAY faster than my last move from SSD to an internal NVME 1GB/s drive.
 
For games, I noticed only a marginal improvement on average going from fast mechanical drives to 400+ MB/s SATA SSDs. Almost no improvement between those and 1GB/s NVME, and a marginal boost once you head into the 2GB/s range. For things outside of games, there was a bigger difference, but 2GB/s plus nvme makes a real difference in boot times. Going from 2GB/s to 4GB/s drives didn't help boot times much, but damn near everything else outside of game loads feels near instant and is an improvement on the ~2GB/s drives in my laptop. Quality of life going from a crappy 5200rpm laptop drive to a sata SSD was a notable quality of life improvement, but I have no experience gaming with that.

I will say another steam game benefit of NVME is backing up and moving your library if you have a lot of games downloaded at once. NVME to NVME even just the 1GB/s drives in an USB-C enclosure was WAY faster than my last move from SSD to an internal NVME 1GB/s drive.
You're right in the sense that when they first came out, SSDs were not much faster than a WD black mech drive for loading games. I stuck with a mech drive for that reason for quite a while. But the difference as of 5+ years ago or so is pretty dramatic. I'm not just making this up as my own observation btw, I've watched numerous comparison vids.
 
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