Which Should I Upgrade First?

[jadawgis732]

I am sitting on an x58 system that is getting a bit long in the tooth, but still performs admirably under most situations. Data transfer rate is my main concern right now. I've noticed how Windows capitalizes on my measly 6Gb of RAM and I'd like to speed up random access to storage.

I've added in a good SATA III solution via a PCI-e card, which saturates the drive's throughput, but the OS drive is only 120Gb, and after moving my page file to that drive I only have about 20Gb of buffer.

I am wondering whether I should first upgrade to 12Gb of RAM or upgrade my SSD to a 500Gb drive. If the latter route, based on responsible price to performance ratio, which would be the best route: Samsung 840 EVO, 840 Pro, 850 Pro, or Sandisk Extreme Pro? Any opinions appreciated!

 

[drescherjm]

I've added in a good SATA III solution via a PCI-e card

Unless it is a LSI Mega RAID with fast path most likely you will have lower performance (higher sequential benchmarks but lower real world performance) to no better with the PCIe card over your Intel SATA II ports. The reason is latency. Its hard to beat the latency of Intel native ports. That is unless your workload is copying GB sized files from SSD to SSD you probably do not use SATA III that often.

I am wondering whether I should first upgrade to 12Gb of RAM or upgrade my SSD to a 500Gb drive. If the latter route, based on responsible price to performance ratio, which would be the best route: Samsung 840 EVO, 840 Pro, 850 Pro, or Sandisk Extreme Pro?

Its a tough call. I mean I just added 16 GB (2 X 8GB dimms) to my x58 system to get it up to 30 GB (2 x8 + 3 x4 + 1x 2). Although I use it mainly for programming. But then your 120 GB SSD is small. Random performance will be better for an 850 pro but then it will not be night and day.

 

[jadawgis732]

Unless it is a LSI Mega RAID with fast path most likely you will have lower performance (higher sequential benchmarks but lower real world performance) to no better with the PCIe card over your Intel SATA II ports. The reason is latency. Its hard to beat the latency of Intel native ports. That is unless your workload is copying GB sized files from SSD to SSD you probably do not use SATA III that often.

I think the PCI-e solution is pretty good. Granted, only sequential reads benefit greatly, but the bandwidth is there if the Northbridge can dish out data fast enough.

On Intel SATA II:

PCI-e based SATA III:

Its a tough call. I mean I just added 16 GB (2 X 8GB dimms) to my x58 system to get it up to 30 GB (2 x8 + 3 x4 + 1x 2). Although I use it mainly for programming. But then your 120 GB SSD is small. Random performance will be better for an 850 pro but then it will not be night and day.

I mainly use my PC for development too. Having Eclipse open with 500Gb of RAM consumed, and opening Android Studio is a tough proposition. BTW, aren't you supposed to match stick size with RAM? How's that mash-up working out?

 

[Yakk]

I'm still running a couple x58 systems and upgraded both SSD and RAM to 12GB, I liked the SSD upgrade. The sequential read speed is maybe not the highest, but you still get the main benefit which is the random read/write speedup.

Next step is going for a 6 core for me. (mostly out of curiosity)

 

[drescherjm]

BTW, aren't you supposed to match stick size with RAM? How's that mash-up working out?

Intel allows this. I originally had 3 x 2 GB dimms + 3 x 4GB dimms. I took out the 3 x 2GB dimms and added the 2 x 8GB but then it totalled 24GB in that config (memtest86+ and windows). It seems the 3rd 4GB dimm was not being used. After playing with combinations I added one of the 2GB dimms back and got 30GB. I have ran memtest86+ multithreaded mode for 50+ hours in this config to test the stability. No errors detected in that.

 

[jadawgis732]

So I hedged my bets, and got both. Thanks guys!

 

[jadawgis732]

Seems you were right about the Intel SATA II.