Question on upgrades - been out of the loop

overclockedpc

Limp Gawd
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Feb 16, 2006
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So, it’s been a long while since I’ve kept up with hardware and I’m at a loss right now. I have an older system, i7-2600k, 12gb DDR3 , ASUS P8P67 Pro, dual rx580s, 250gb Samsung 850evo, and a few other storage drives.

This all started because I need a bigger drive. I’m looking at upgrading to a 1tb Samsung 970 evo plus, with an NVMe to pcie adapter. The problem is that I don’t even think I have enough pcie lanes for the two cards, let alone an NVMe added to it, but let’s assume I did.

Would it be a good idea to upgrade just the drive for now, or upgrade motherboard/cpu/ram/hdd? I only play COD warzone and the rest of my time on the PC is related to 3D printing and light video editing. I haven’t noticed any major bottlenecks with the system I have now, but I do have COD on a second, slower drives and I get some lag here and there, hence the NVMe upgrade.

I know budget is always a factor in recommending hardware and my budget is ACAP (as cheap as possible), lol.

Thanks is advance for all your thoughts, opinions and recommendations!
 
I upgraded about six months ago. Switched to Team Red. I'm rocking a 3600 and a 1060. Solid setup. It was a great deal then, and I'm sure its an even better deal now.
 
I priced out motherboard, ram, nvme and a Ryzen 5 3600 to about $800 which doesn’t seem bad and I can always reuse the rx580s. I just don’t know if there is something better coming along soon that’s worth waiting for (or that would significantly drop the price of what I’m looking at now).

I think the hardest part of spending the money was that I wasn’t planning on it, and it just grew from a simple SSD upgrade to a “might as well” kinda thing. I guess I’m on the fence and looking for opinions on whether it’s worth the upgrade or not.
 
I priced out motherboard, ram, nvme and a Ryzen 5 3600 to about $800 which doesn’t seem bad and I can always reuse the rx580s. I just don’t know if there is something better coming along soon that’s worth waiting for (or that would significantly drop the price of what I’m looking at now).

I think the hardest part of spending the money was that I wasn’t planning on it, and it just grew from a simple SSD upgrade to a “might as well” kinda thing. I guess I’m on the fence and looking for opinions on whether it’s worth the upgrade or not.
Something better is always "coming along soon". The 3000 series cards are supposedly due the end of the year. After that, perhaps score a 2000 series from someone that is upgrading. That's my plan. The For Sale section here is great. I've bought a few things without issue.

Can't go wrong with the 3600 though. Solid setup. Runs COD:ME just fine on 1080@60hz paired to a 1060 6GB.
 
That's the thing with technology, there is always something right around the corner. Right now it's Nvidia dropping their new line of cards which should, in theory drop the price a bit on the current series. Also you could save some money by buying used. I know some people don't like to do that but I've been buying used parts from these forums and others for 16 years now. The only issue I had is when I first started out and bought a motherboard and PSU from Ebay...rookie mistake.
 
That's the thing with technology, there is always something right around the corner. Right now it's Nvidia dropping their new line of cards which should, in theory drop the price a bit on the current series. Also you could save some money by buying used. I know some people don't like to do that but I've been buying used parts from these forums and others for 16 years now. The only issue I had is when I first started out and bought a motherboard and PSU from Ebay...rookie mistake.
Yawp. My 1060 came from here. Fair price. No issue. Been great.
 
Honestly for $800 you could almost get a complete "15 gaming laptop with a Ryzen 4700u/1660ti. I would almost think you would be correct in your upgrade theory that with 2x 16x pcie gpu's that you would have very few pcie lanes left on you mobo at this point if any for 2x or 4x nvme adapters. Personally if you are just needing storage at this point I would Just get a shuckable WD external 8tb SATA or something and call it a day for $130-150 depending on deal or maybe a inexpensive 1tb sata ssd <$100. That being said the r5 3600/x chips are monsters I have 2 setups at home, one with a rx 570 and games great at 1080p.
 
So, it’s been a long while since I’ve kept up with hardware and I’m at a loss right now. I have an older system, i7-2600k, 12gb DDR3 , ASUS P8P67 Pro, dual rx580s, 250gb Samsung 850evo, and a few other storage drives.

This all started because I need a bigger drive. I’m looking at upgrading to a 1tb Samsung 970 evo plus, with an NVMe to pcie adapter. The problem is that I don’t even think I have enough pcie lanes for the two cards, let alone an NVMe added to it, but let’s assume I did.

Would it be a good idea to upgrade just the drive for now, or upgrade motherboard/cpu/ram/hdd? I only play COD warzone and the rest of my time on the PC is related to 3D printing and light video editing. I haven’t noticed any major bottlenecks with the system I have now, but I do have COD on a second, slower drives and I get some lag here and there, hence the NVMe upgrade.

I know budget is always a factor in recommending hardware and my budget is ACAP (as cheap as possible), lol.

Thanks is advance for all your thoughts, opinions and recommendations!
Not only do you not have enough PCI-E lanes for the extra m.2 adapter, but your two existing GPUs by themselves eat up all 16 of the available PCI-E lanes on the CPU. That forces the m.2 card to use the PCH's PCI-E lanes. And although the P67 PCH itself has eight PCI-E lanes, the total maximum throughput of the P67 PCH itself is the limiting factor. In this case, a total combined throughput of only about 1.2 GB/s. That's far below the capability of most m.2 PCI-E SSDs. And Sandy Bridge CPUs' PCI-E capability is limited to PCI-E 2.0 speeds, as it was implemented before the advent of the PCI-E 3.0 spec. So you will never see much if any performance improvement of the 970 EVO Plus over a typical SATA SSD with that older PC. Moreover, in that platform the SATA controller, including the boot drive, is also run off of that same PCH. With the typical SATA boot drive, that leaves you with less than 700 MB/s in available chipset throughput to the rest of that PC.
 
So, it’s been a long while since I’ve kept up with hardware and I’m at a loss right now. I have an older system, i7-2600k, 12gb DDR3 , ASUS P8P67 Pro, dual rx580s, 250gb Samsung 850evo, and a few other storage drives.

This all started because I need a bigger drive. I’m looking at upgrading to a 1tb Samsung 970 evo plus, with an NVMe to pcie adapter. The problem is that I don’t even think I have enough pcie lanes for the two cards, let alone an NVMe added to it, but let’s assume I did.

Would it be a good idea to upgrade just the drive for now, or upgrade motherboard/cpu/ram/hdd? I only play COD warzone and the rest of my time on the PC is related to 3D printing and light video editing. I haven’t noticed any major bottlenecks with the system I have now, but I do have COD on a second, slower drives and I get some lag here and there, hence the NVMe upgrade.

I know budget is always a factor in recommending hardware and my budget is ACAP (as cheap as possible), lol.

Thanks is advance for all your thoughts, opinions and recommendations!

Are you planning on booting off of the new drive? If so, you either need a motherboard newer than Z77(4th gen and newer I think), or a copy of mmtool, because your system wont be able to detect the drive as bootable otherwise (chainloading through clover on a USB might be an option, but I think its pointless).
 
I wouldn't drop a 1TB 970 Evo into that system period. Either do a full upgrade to a more modern 6C/12T (or better) processor, or just buy a 1TB SATA SSD (which is perfectly fine for games).
 
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I wouldn't drop a 1TB 970 Evo into that system period. Either do a full upgrade to a more modern 6C/12T (or better) processor, or just buy a 1TB SATA SSD (which is perfectly fine for games).
Not only that, but I wouldn't drop any m.2 SSD (even a SATA one) into that system for that matter. Only a 2.5" SATA SSD should be used, if any at all, in that system. And then, of the four remaining SATA ports, the OP will not even see anywhere close to 500 MB/s on any of the remiaining ports if both of that system's SATA 6.0 Gbps ports are filled up. You see, all LGA 1155 chipsets only support two SATA 6.0 Gbps ports (out of a total of six); the rest only operate at SATA 3.0 Gbps speed (real throughput is only 285 MB/s). That will bottleneck even a SATA SSD.
 
Not only that, but I wouldn't drop any m.2 SSD (even a SATA one) into that system for that matter. Only a 2.5" SATA SSD should be used, if any at all, in that system. And then, of the four remaining SATA ports, the OP will not even see anywhere close to 500 MB/s on any of the remiaining ports if both of that system's SATA 6.0 Gbps ports are filled up. You see, all LGA 1155 chipsets only support two SATA 6.0 Gbps ports (out of a total of six); the rest only operate at SATA 3.0 Gbps speed (real throughput is only 285 MB/s). That will bottleneck even a SATA SSD.

That's what I meant. In that case there's really no benefit to m.2 SATA. Might as well just use a SATA port.
 
Maybe I should stop being so worried about advertised speeds? Lol!
bench.jpg
 
Maybe I should stop being so worried about advertised speeds? Lol!
Those speeds look really wonky. It is merely the speed of the cache memory itself. The actual NAND inside that 840 EVO cannot sustain more than about 300-ish MB/s even on a good system. And the CrystalDiskMark test size is too small: You really need a much larger test size in order to get anywhere close to accurate results. That is because 100 MiB is well within the Turbo cache feature on all EVO SSDs.

And do not get any m.2 SSD for the system drive. P67 motherboards cannot boot at all from m.2, while most m.2 adapter cards do not have a bootable BIOS.
 
You're right...I didn't realize what the test size was set to... Write buffer on this drive is 520MB and read buffer is 540MB, so I ran the test again with a larger sample size and got very different results....

bench2.jpg
 
Those speeds look really wonky. It is merely the speed of the cache memory itself. The actual NAND inside that 840 EVO cannot sustain more than about 300-ish MB/s even on a good system. And the CrystalDiskMark test size is too small: You really need a much larger test size in order to get anywhere close to accurate results. That is because 100 MiB is well within the Turbo cache feature on all EVO SSDs.

And do not get any m.2 SSD for the system drive. P67 motherboards cannot boot at all from m.2, while most m.2 adapter cards do not have a bootable BIOS.

You can boot NVMe off of LGA1155 boards (and the samsung 950 pro has an option rom builtin, so it should be usable on any board) if you know where the cow lives......
 

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