Vertex 3 on a 3GB mobo? How much would it under perform?

Gazanimal · 13 May 2011 at 17:02

I've got currently a 120GB Vertex which performs great & OCZ have given me great support when I've had issues.

But I'm think if throwing the Vertex into my Dell laptop to increase performance and buy a nice shiny Vertex 3 120gb to replace it.

Currently I have an ASUS P6T motherboard which obviously isn't a 6 GB/s so what kind of performance deficit could I expect if I threw in a Vertex 3?

Note: I will be upgrading later in the year to a 6 GB/s motherboard as well as CPU, Ram & GFX card.

LiamJ · 13 May 2011 at 17:15

Worth it if your upgrading.

Speeds will be similar to the Vertex 2E, about 280MB/s on both read and write.

Sin_Chase · 14 May 2011 at 17:10

I got 275 R/W out of mine on an IP35PRO on the onboard SATA II ports.

IF your P6T has PCI-E 2.0 you could get up to 5Mbit/second bandwidth from the SSD using a SATA III controller card. If it's PCI-E 1.0 like my IP35Pro was however you are limited to 2.5GBit/sec which is less than onboard (Much much less)

I ended up just buying barebones Sandybridge kit and putting it into my current rig

Ch3m1c4L · 15 May 2011 at 01:01

Sin_Chase said:
I got 275 R/W out of mine on an IP35PRO on the onboard SATA II ports.

IF your P6T has PCI-E 2.0 you could get up to 5Mbit/second bandwidth from the SSD using a SATA III controller card. If it's PCI-E 1.0 like my IP35Pro was however you are limited to 2.5GBit/sec which is less than onboard (Much much less)

I ended up just buying barebones Sandybridge kit and putting it into my current rig

You know those speeds are for pci-e 1x, not 4x etc. And the ad in cards are most likely only pci-e 1.0, but thyey tend to be at 4x not 1x. They all use the marvell controller though so they suck, unless you get the expensive ones but then you may as well just get a new mobo.

Sin_Chase · 15 May 2011 at 02:29

Mine was in a 16x slot (Which is electrically 4x) and speeds were sub 2.5GBit/sec. Take from that what you will.

Ch3m1c4L · 15 May 2011 at 09:09

PCI Express 1.0a

In 2003, PCI-SIG introduced PCIe 1.0a, with a data rate of 250 MB/s and a transfer rate of 2.5 GT/s.
[edit] PCI Express 1.1

In 2005, PCI-SIG introduced PCIe 1.1. This updated specification includes clarifications and several improvements, but is fully compatible with PCI Express 1.0a. No changes were made to the data rate.
[edit] PCI Express 2.0

PCI-SIG announced the availability of the PCI Express Base 2.0 specification on 15 January 2007.[10] The PCIe 2.0 standard doubles the per-lane throughput from the PCIe 1.0 standard's 250 MB/s to 500 MB/s. This means a 32-lane PCI connector (x32) can support throughput up to 16 GB/s aggregate. The PCIe 2.0 standard uses a base clock speed of 5 GHz, while the first version operates at 2.5 GHz.

I expect it was the controller on the card, not the bus speed. The asus u3b6 thing uses the marvell controller and gets poor speeds (350MB/s) in best case.

Sin_Chase · 15 May 2011 at 13:34

In 2003, PCI-SIG introduced PCIe 1.0a, with a data rate of 250 MB/s

The bus speed is still crippling. Even if it worked at the advertised speed it would still be less than using an onboard SATA II port when you only have 1.0a available.

Darkman · 15 May 2011 at 13:48

Might also be worth considering stumping up the extra for the 240Gb version (now or later), or getting 2x120Gb ones and putting in RAID 0 to give the same overhead and double the speed. Check out the review on anandtech for the rationale.

Other option is the Agility 3. Almost as fast for nearly as much

Ch3m1c4L · 15 May 2011 at 15:01

Sin_Chase said:
The bus speed is still crippling. Even if it worked at the advertised speed it would still be less than using an onboard SATA II port when you only have 1.0a available.

note the capitals, that 250 mega bytes per second, so only 50MB/s less than sata 3Gbps. not sure o overhead differences though. a 1X card isnt good enough for sata 6Gbps though, which is why thay are 4X which on pci-e 1.0 is 1GBps, which is 3 times sata 3Gbps speed, or a bit under double sata 6Gbps speeds. if its pci-e 2 so double again.

Gazanimal · 15 May 2011 at 21:56

I've been looking at getting a 6GB/s controller card, but likes been mentioned with use the Marvell chipset which seems to suck balls.

I'm also tempted by the Agility as it's only 10,000 IOP/s down on the Vertex 3 & 25mb/s slower on max read speed.

Choices choices!

Asus do a 6gb/s controller card, with USB3 ports. Does anyone know what chipset that uses?

Ch3m1c4L · 15 May 2011 at 22:32

its marvel, benchmarks show it fails. u need and intel one really.

Sin_Chase · 15 May 2011 at 23:04

Ch3m1c4L said:
note the capitals, that 250 mega bytes per second, so only 50MB/s less than sata 3Gbps. not sure o overhead differences though. a 1X card isnt good enough for sata 6Gbps though, which is why thay are 4X which on pci-e 1.0 is 1GBps, which is 3 times sata 3Gbps speed, or a bit under double sata 6Gbps speeds. if its pci-e 2 so double again.

Theory theory theory.

And I am well aware of capitalisation and it's meaning. 250MB/sec RATED or not - It sucks, you get nowhere near even 250MB/Sec. Got it?

Krony · 16 May 2011 at 01:44

My experience of Marvell 6Gb/s controllers (specifically the one on my Asus Sabertooth X58) suck, using my Vertex 3 on the native intel 3Gb/s atm and it runs a lot better even tho i know it's not running at it's full potential.

Ch3m1c4L · 16 May 2011 at 09:35

Sin_Chase said:
Theory theory theory.

And I am well aware of capitalisation and it's meaning. 250MB/sec RATED or not - It sucks, you get nowhere near even 250MB/Sec. Got it?

you do realise that the onbard sata ports are using pci-e lanes to talk to the cpu dont you? same with usb ports, hence sandy bridge usb 3 ports not being perfect due to limited lanes.

i know all i posted was theory, and stated i didnt know the overheads on pci-e.

i know that my old 1x pci -e card could deliver over around 240 MB/s sustained read from a raid 0 array on it, which was about 30 less than onboard (only using spinpoints, not ssd's.

my 4x card gives better results using 5 drives than onard, but neither are limited bt bandwidth since its still on hdd's so meh.

the asus sata 6gbps 4x card performs the same if not a little better than the X58 onboard one, according to benches iirc. could look up some intel benchmarks to really find out, but im on my phone so will do it later.

i do agree that pci-e 1x is crippling, unless it has enough lanes on it for the number of ports, u always want it to have more available maximum bandwidth than u will need, so yea a 1x pci-e 1.0 port will cripple the speed of a good ssd.

but look at revo drives, which use pci-e to overcome sata speed limits, or the ocz drives than use a proprietry connector to a pci-e card and performed better on them.