Upgrading soon: looking for a reason to get M2 PCIe 4.0 NVMe...

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echn111

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It's been a while, but going to upgrade my PC soon. I usually go for fairly high end kit but it has to give me "some" benefit.

Anyway, looking to get one of those new 3rd gen Ryzen's with an X570 board that runs PCI 4.0. As for SSD's, was thinking I should get a new 2TB M2 PCIe 4.0 NVMe because it's faster... Did some research and was a bit disappointed to see claims that there is no real world benefit and it's largely a waste of money. Which impacts my plans to get the X570 board as PCIe 4.0 was my main reason to spend the extra cash to get that...

I've not kept up with technology for the last few years so not quite sure. Open to views from this forum. Can someone give me a good reason to get a PCIe 4.0 NVMe?
 
echn111 said:
It's been a while, but going to upgrade my PC soon. I usually go for fairly high end kit but it has to give me "some" benefit.

Anyway, looking to get one of those new 3rd gen Ryzen's with an X570 board that runs PCI 4.0. As for SSD's, was thinking I should get a new 2TB M2 PCIe 4.0 NVMe because it's faster... Did some research and was a bit disappointed to see claims that there is no real world benefit and it's largely a waste of money. Which impacts my plans to get the X570 board as PCIe 4.0 was my main reason to spend the extra cash to get that...

I've not kept up with technology for the last few years so not quite sure. Open to views from this forum. Can someone give me a good reason to get a PCIe 4.0 NVMe?
Click to expand...

AMD is soonish going to launch their B550 boards which should also support PCIe 4.0 and should be more affordable still, depending on what you do it might not be worth it to you.
 
Random read and writes aren't affected by link speed as no controller/NAND combination has been able to even saturate a SATA interface yet as far as I know. OS drive performance is primarily dictated by random performance. Even in games where there is loading of large maps, the sequential reads don't last long enough to significantly matter in most cases. If your load time was 3 seconds before, it might drop to 2. While that represents a 33% improvement in performance, 1 second simply does not feel like a long period of time, especially if you're spending significantly more to get that 1 second.
 
Thanks. If i get a 33% increase in load speeds with PCIe 4.0 NVMe over the last gen PCI, that seems a good enough reason. And if those B550 boards are out soon, might grab one of those, especially if they support PCIe 4.0 while being cheaper.
 
Theoretically, PCI-E 4.0 has double the maximum throughput of PCI-E 3.0. However, the NAND and controller has to be that fast to take advantage of it. Loading a game will be a mix between sequential and random reads, hence the average improvement being significantly less than the change in maximum throughput.

Basically, there's little point in spending extra for PCI-E 4.0, but there's no reason to avoid it either if it's at the same/less cost.
 
if you want those sweet benchmark numbers, get one. but that and large file transfers is the only place youll see/feel the speed.
 
Since the difference between boot times / game loading times between SATA and NVME are close to nil...

I doubt you'd notice the difference between PCIE 4.0 and 3.0 for NVME, unless you do massive file transfers as part of your everyday workloads.

After using midgrade consumer NVMEs (960 Evo, 970 Evo, SN 500s/550s) and SATA SSDs, at this point I currently wish for an inexpensive 4TB SATA drive for my needs.
 
to notice the diferance between gen 3 and 4 you need 2 Gen 4 NVME SSDs and copy large files between them often (they are just not worth it, a samsung SSD is overall faster than a Gen 4 NVME ssds)
 
Don't get ANY of the current Gen 4 drives. Wait for a native design.
 
I have one those new 3rd gen Ryzen's with an X570 board that runs PCI 4.0 in a system I recently built to upgrade my home workstation. Pretty much the only reason I did it is to try one, and it really cleans up the inside of the system. I don't even have a window in my case. o_O

If you're buying one because you have a need (i.e. larger SSD), I don't see why not, but I wouldn't do it as an upgrade. I didn't even need x570 for this machine at all, but wanted features on the board, the better VRM, and an expectation that I would upgrade the CPU on this machine down the road and didn't want to worry about it.
 
If you don't have an Nvme now Get a Pci-e 4.0 one and you can use in a PCI-E 3.0 BOARD until you upgrade. Let me make life easier by giving you numbers I personally just got an Nvme as a boot drive and I wanted to compare it to my other single drives in my system.

edit: In the picture Micro should be Micron.
 

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quite sure the samsung evo plus 3.0 Nvme is overall faster than a currant gen of 4.0 NVME ssds (there is more to it then just raw Seq speed)
 
If your workload doesn't have a specific need for abnormally high drive performance, then there will be no difference between a competent SATA drive, PCIe 3.0 NVMe drive, and PCIe 4.0 NVMe drive. They will all perform the same. Loading levels for games does not qualify as a specific need; level load times are typically gated by asset decompression, shader compilation, and other factors.

To quote one of my favorite Dilbert comics, "you can't pour a gallon into a thimble no matter how fast you pour". You've got a gallon of data to load, but your system can only process a thimbleful at a time. Additional pouring speed won't help.

*edit* Found the comic:
1590282258784.png
 
likeman said:
quite sure the samsung evo plus 3.0 Nvme is overall faster than a currant gen of 4.0 NVME ssds (there is more to it then just raw Seq speed)
Click to expand...

The SLC cache design and TLC used on the Gen4 drives mean they'll be slower than the 970 EVO Plus in many workloads, not to mention Samsung's controller is more powerful. The Gen4 drives are the fastest for sequentials for obvious reasons but, yes, if you're looking at overall performance and consistency the 970 EVO Plus is second-to-none.
 
really your limitation is the USB speed and the system not the NVME or SATA SSD disk (RAID and SSD no point unless it's for redundancy, or your task requires high I/O, if your unsure why you need high i/o then you shouldn't be considering raid, just buy a bigger SSD)

if i install windows 10 of my "Patriot Supersonic Rage " USB3 stick under 4 minutes is easy (if i install windows 10 on a Lenovo its even faster, so fast networking hasn't started yet when it hits the desktop and have to set a windows password to slow down the load to desktop)
 
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