No love for M.2 SM951nvme?

Soldato
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12 Apr 2007
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Looking to upgrade my core system in the near future and I'm out of touch (still rocking a Q6600).

Looking at mobo/cpu /ram - most people seem to still be speccing up older SSD builds.. any reason for this?
 
Personally I decided to ditch all storage apart from M.2 from my main system when I upgraded to X99 which was for aesthetic and ease of assembly reasons. I do get a big benefit for decompressing large archives which I do regularly and see 900 MB/s to the same drive or copying vbetween my M.2 drives but the majority of the time it's fast but so are the current SSD drives.
 
SATA drives are cheaper and offer pretty much the same real world performance. The silly fast synthetic benchmarks are meaningless. I suppose the form factor may appeal to some but it's not going to be an issue for most people.

Here's a thread in the storage section of the forums: http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=18693392

No. I have both installed, PC is snappier with NVME.

What method of comparison did you use to come to your, "pretty much the same real world performance" statement.
 
Most of us use a range of professional reviews before buying or recommending a product. This gives a better picture than a single user who will inevitably have a large error margin being just one person with their own particular use-cases, helps inform of issues specific to different setups and avoids buyers bias where people wish their new items to be worth the money so they believe they have improved things.

You may be totally scientific in your assessment saying it's snappier but it contradicts what others have found including many who have documented their methods. For example we've no way of telling if you're comparing an old install with lots of stuff slowing it down with a new fresh install or if it was like for like. Most reviews have found the improved sequential write makes little difference, and at consumer levels of use higher iops doesn't make a big difference either. Random read (normally credited with the 'snappy' feeling) is not improved by a significant margin, though it is slightly better.

That's not to say reviews are never wrong - reviewers have bias, make mistakes, don't know how to properly configure hardware, get sent different versions of items to those available at retail etc. In numbers user reviews also cover far more combinations of hardware which can be very valuable, especially if certain less common components turn out to not work well together or something. Hearing different viewpoints is interesting, especially if you're willing to write up your basis for your belief.
 
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I already had a 512GB mSATA SSD so when I got my X99 board that only had M.2 I sourced an M.2 to mSATA connector from the US.

I'd have been looking at adding something like £200 to the second hand value of the mSATA drive to upgrade it to a 950 Pro and that just isn't happening when I probably wouldn't even notice the difference.
 
I have a 512GB 951 nvme, I bought it when it was super cheap last year, is it day to day noticeably faster than a good SATAIII SSD? not really.
 
Thanks for the replies all..
I'll basically be replacing the main part of my pc, mobo, ram, and cpu.. I'm currently running 3 spin drives, one system, and two as a mirrored storage drive.

So I think I may just go straight to a smallish m.2 drive as a system drive with an i5 cpu, I'll start oo with 6gb ram and I can increase that at a later date if needed.

I may throw in a graphics card at a later date but I'm not really doing anything that would warrant one at the moment.

How are the stock coolers on i5? I'm going for a quiet build.. Is it worth getting an OEM i5 and buying a quiet cooler.. Or just getting a retail one with stock cooler.. Don't particularly want to spend big bucks on a fancy quiet one if stock is reasonable.. No current plans to overclock.

Reason for going m.2 straight away is I don't need a large capacity system drive as I have lots of storage on the old spin drives.. And I can upgrade a borderline obsolete Q6600 ddr2 platform to tth above for about £360 which ain't bad for a bang up to date fast system.

Only other considerations are I want the base platform to be good enough to upgrade to a gaming system at some point by simply slinging in a dedicated gpu and maybe another 6gb ram stick to make 12gb.
I have a corsair hx620 psu which is still going strong so no real concerns on the power supply front.

Sound reasonable? My q6600 build was the last build I did so I'm a bit out of touch with modern hardware.
 
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Could be mistaken but I think if you're going skylake k-series i5 they don't come with a stock heatsink at all, you'll need to add your own (no sure which CPU you're thinking so this may be irrelevant)
 
Yeh I think that's the cpu I specced up.. Even the retail chips come without coolers?

What's a good option noise wise.. Is it worth getting a non stock cooler up to about £10?
 
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