Z97 vs. Z170 - M.2 SSD Performance

Vudaz

Limp Gawd
Joined
Dec 11, 2014
Messages
173
Hi guys,

I've been reading a lot about these news ssd's because I was planning to upgrade my old rig and get one of these guys. But here comes the question.

Since I'm getting an i7 4770k along with z97 chipset, is there any difference as far as speed and performance between these chipsets?

Thanks
 
Z97 doesn't have native PCI-E 3.0 x4 for m.2, so yes there will be. The only Z97 board that does is the ASRock Extreme 6 and it drops your GPU to x8 to do so. Some Z97 have 2.0 x4 m.2 slots but you won't get full speed out of something like a 950 pro.
 
Z97 doesn't have native PCI-E 3.0 x4 for m.2, so yes there will be. The only Z97 board that does is the ASRock Extreme 6 and it drops your GPU to x8 to do so. Some Z97 have 2.0 x4 m.2 slots but you won't get full speed out of something like a 950 pro.

So there's a huge point buying the news z170 boards.

thanks for clarifying
 
So there's a huge point buying the news z170 boards.

thanks for clarifying


Z170 has 20 lanes of PCI-E 3.0 usually available for devices, so you can get x16 on the slots and x4 on the m.2, but it depends on the manufacturer. If you want to get full speed out of an m.2 drive like the 950 Pro then Z170 would be recommended. Plus it supports NVMe natively.
 
Z97 doesn't have native PCI-E 3.0 x4 for m.2, so yes there will be. The only Z97 board that does is the ASRock Extreme 6 and it drops your GPU to x8 to do so. Some Z97 have 2.0 x4 m.2 slots but you won't get full speed out of something like a 950 pro.

huh...you are right. I never knew that. Why don't that state that...fuckers.

When do you need a new rig? At this point you should be waiting for Kaby Lake. It is 6 months out and will allow you to use Optane and some other features.
 
Also, you are unlikely to be able to feel a discernable difference between a sata III Samsung 850 Evo and say an m.2 Samsung 950 Pro. The difference in performance can only really be teased out in specific scenarios. My advice is to just go with the sata III drive and save some coin.

Cheers
 
Also, you are unlikely to be able to feel a discernable difference between a sata III Samsung 850 Evo and say an m.2 Samsung 950 Pro. The difference in performance can only really be teased out in specific scenarios. My advice is to just go with the sata III drive and save some coin.

Cheers
that has been shown false over and over. There are plenty of aspects where there are very tangible differences. If all you do is web browsing maybe it is small enough not to notice it if you don'y use the PC much but if you do any legitimate PC use you will see a difference.
 
As I said, the difference in performance can only really be teased out in specific scenarios. Also, this is my advice, experience, and opinion. What scenarios have you personally experienced tangible differences? How large were the differences? I suppose I must not do any "legitimate PC use." OUCH

My personal experience is that I did not notice an appreciable difference between a SATA III Samsung 850 EVO vs a Samsung 950 Pro in the following illegitimate PC usage scenarios: Windows 10 boot time, web browsing (Chrome), music streaming (Spotify/Pandora/Personal Digital Music Collection on NAS), movie watching (Netflix/Amazon Prime Video/KODI DSPlayer with MadVR/MPC-HC with MadVR), pc gaming (via steam/emulation of classic console games), web development (Adobe products), graphic design for web (Adobe products), Microsoft Office usage (limited to word, excel, powerpoint, one note), Google Office Product Usage, management of digital family photos, editing of digital family movies, and probably some other illegitimate PC usage scenarios I've forgotten about.
 
Also, you are unlikely to be able to feel a discernable difference between a sata III Samsung 850 Evo and say an m.2 Samsung 950 Pro. The difference in performance can only really be teased out in specific scenarios. My advice is to just go with the sata III drive and save some coin.

Cheers

Some people can't tell the difference between an SSD and a HDD either, generally they're just unobservant or simply do not care (which is fine, not everyone has to have the latest and greatest and it saves them money in the long run). Personally, the biggest difference I see with a faster drive is in web browsing. Don't forget if you have power saving features on the m.2 drive has greatly increased response time.
 
Some people can't tell the difference between an SSD and a HDD either, generally they're just unobservant or simply do not care (which is fine, not everyone has to have the latest and greatest and it saves them money in the long run). Personally, the biggest difference I see with a faster drive is in web browsing. Don't forget if you have power saving features on the m.2 drive has greatly increased response time.

I did not feel the difference (or at lest to an extent that warrants the difference in price/gb) between the two drives i mentioned, and I hardly consider myself unobservant and I definitely do care. As far as the difference between a SSD and a HDD, I think we can all agree that it is tangible.

What kind of performance increases are you seeing with web browsing? Decreased page load times?

What kind of things do you do on your PC Vudaz?
 
There are a handful of exceptions to the rule if memory serves, but generally speaking M.2 on Z97 usually only supports 2x or 4x PCIe 2.0 lanes over the DMI 2.0 bus. Thus, Z170 will be faster in all cases. NVMe boot device support is also sketchy on some Z97 motherboards with many of them not having the required BIOS updates necessary to support it.
 
I did not feel the difference (or at lest to an extent that warrants the difference in price/gb) between the two drives i mentioned, and I hardly consider myself unobservant and I definitely do care. As far as the difference between a SSD and a HDD, I think we can all agree that it is tangible.

I'm afraid I disagree with you too, I've noticed significantly lower install times, particularly with huge Windows updates and complex programs like Visual Studio and lower load times for everything. Visual Studio also picks up intellisense hints and compiles faster. I agree that if all you're doing is playing games you might not notice, but for all the IO heavy situations it's noticeably faster. Particularly anything that involves a lot of random access, like deleting thousands of tiny files. I do a lot of software development and that is where I notice it the most, but I still feel like Word and other bloated apps start quicker.

I have a Gigabyte Z170 Gaming 7, Samsung 950 Pro 512GB and Intel Core i7-6700K.
 
I'm afraid I disagree with you too, I've noticed significantly lower install times, particularly with huge Windows updates and complex programs like Visual Studio and lower load times for everything. Visual Studio also picks up intellisense hints and compiles faster. I agree that if all you're doing is playing games you might not notice, but for all the IO heavy situations it's noticeably faster. Particularly anything that involves a lot of random access, like deleting thousands of tiny files. I do a lot of software development and that is where I notice it the most, but I still feel like Word and other bloated apps start quicker.

I have a Gigabyte Z170 Gaming 7, Samsung 950 Pro 512GB and Intel Core i7-6700K.
word is limited by single thread and SSD. Get a 950 PRO and 4.8GHz HW/SKL and you are good to go.
 
Well, since most of the things I do with my rig have already been listed, I wont bore you with the details.

However, I will say that my current rig (in my sig) is by far the fastest one I have owned to date, and I have used/owned/built computers since the early 90's.

My last 2 rigs were z97 & z87, SSD-based machines which were fairly fast already, but this newest generation of chipsets/mobos/m.2 drives EASILY outperforms both of them in EVERY way possible by a large margin, and I CAN tell the difference and I DO care :)

Therefore, I recommend that anyone building a new rig from scratch go with a z170 or at least the X99 platform, and not look backwards by investing in the older systems.

Yes it will cost you some coin upfront, but bounce that against it's expected lifetime and the reduced need to upgrade again anytime soon, and I think it is worth it....YMMV though.
 
You are talking about 1800mb/s v/s the 2200 mb/s speeds? You wont even notice the 500mb/s to the 1800mb/s speed up except in rare cases let alone the 400mb/s incrase there.. Now with a cpu thats different but I noticed that was only in specific cases like 265 encodes whichare now twice as fast but for everything else I dont see any difference. Since I dont play gfx games the double memory speeds and cpu speeds dont show up after a point. I do find the laptop with its 2200mhz cpu with turbo to 2.7ghz rather slow and lame. Although my older core2duo laptop although slower at 2100mhz is much faster. So some things do matter although I dont know what. The new laptop on paper should be 50-100% faster but it is not except it does use 50% less power, built in hardware instructions for such things like 265 decodes etc does not seem to translalate into real world useable difference. Now an even older laptop running at like 200mhz did seem slow.. But a 1000% speed increase showed up as a distinct speedup even on just about anything.
 
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