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*** AMD "Zen" thread (inc AM4/APU discussion) ***

DragonQ said:
Is there any actual way to use an M.2 SSD without it throttling? Seems the only options are to spend quite a bit on a PCIe adapter/enclosure with a heatsink, or to void the warranty by replacing the sticker with some smaller heatsinks.

Having M.2 slots under a GPU seems really dumb...Maybe they are cooled sufficiently if the M.2 port is elsewhere and case airflow is good?
Click to expand...

Point fan at it?
 
DragonQ said:
Is there any actual way to use an M.2 SSD without it throttling? Seems the only options are to spend quite a bit on a PCIe adapter/enclosure with a heatsink, or to void the warranty by replacing the sticker with some smaller heatsinks.

Having M.2 slots under a GPU seems really dumb...Maybe they are cooled sufficiently if the M.2 port is elsewhere and case airflow is good?
Click to expand...

I have mine in the top PCIE Slot.
 
DragonQ said:
Is there any actual way to use an M.2 SSD without it throttling? Seems the only options are to spend quite a bit on a PCIe adapter/enclosure with a heatsink, or to void the warranty by replacing the sticker with some smaller heatsinks.

Having M.2 slots under a GPU seems really dumb...Maybe they are cooled sufficiently if the M.2 port is elsewhere and case airflow is good?
Click to expand...

if im not mistaken the Crosshair VI have 3D mounting slot for fans facing the M.2 slot, but you have to print it yourself, model on their site.
 
DragonQ said:
Is there any actual way to use an M.2 SSD without it throttling? Seems the only options are to spend quite a bit on a PCIe adapter/enclosure with a heatsink, or to void the warranty by replacing the sticker with some smaller heatsinks.
Click to expand...

That's where U.2 comes in.
 
DragonQ said:
Is there any actual way to use an M.2 SSD without it throttling? Seems the only options are to spend quite a bit on a PCIe adapter/enclosure with a heatsink, or to void the warranty by replacing the sticker with some smaller heatsinks.

Having M.2 slots under a GPU seems really dumb...Maybe they are cooled sufficiently if the M.2 port is elsewhere and case airflow is good?
Click to expand...


Honestly m.2 makes little to no difference over a normal SSD, it's mostly placebo effect for most people. Fresh install of windows, newer drivers, maybe new mobo/cpu. m.2 is hugely faster.... it's speed most users can't use. If you're like recording and editing 8k footage, or running a server with dozens/hundreds/thousands of users I'm sure m.2 is the ****, but for a home user... meh.

If my m.2 throttles or not, who knows, it's likely you'd never know unless you were actually running specific storage tests over and over, with numbers coming down to likely still several times higher than actually required.


http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/samsung-950-pro-ssd,4313-5.html

maybe not the best review but shows a bit of time difference of various things, raid 950 pro or single 950 pro, basically imperceptible difference in 9/10 applications. In the one big gap it's 11 seconds in a heavy adobe workload that took 350 seconds on the pro anyway so still a pretty damn small difference.

Unless you're working with huge files constantly... which incidentally will struggle to fit on reasonably priced m.2's anyway, there is so little value in buying them. BUt even if you do buy the cheaper smaller ones, they won't throttle anywhere near a standard SSD speed and yet don't give any benefit at full speed anyway. Games won't load faster, windows probably won't, almost nothing will be faster if you are a pretty normal home user.

Since really the 3rd or so gen SSDs when the stutter of 4kb reads was completely gone, we've mostly not been storage speed limited. It's been processing the data coming from the storage limited, as such more and more storage speed is making little to no difference in most workloads.


http://techreport.com/review/29221/samsung-950-pro-512gb-ssd-reviewed/4

another one showing little to no real world difference, with a 850 evo and a mx200 crucial both winning a game load time vs the 950 pro.
 
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there isn't much hype really, IPC performance is as they said a year ago (~+40%), trading blows with broadwell, the surprise is hyper threading, where it seem to be a bit more efficient than expected.
the real hype is from the price, ppl are excited to have more affordable cores/threads.
question will be how good are they at overclock, and how performance scale.
 
DragonQ said:
Is there any actual way to use an M.2 SSD without it throttling? Seems the only options are to spend quite a bit on a PCIe adapter/enclosure with a heatsink, or to void the warranty by replacing the sticker with some smaller heatsinks.

Having M.2 slots under a GPU seems really dumb...Maybe they are cooled sufficiently if the M.2 port is elsewhere and case airflow is good?
Click to expand...
Get out of the way, GPU! Thermally endowed M.2 coming through!

tvWh8Pr.jpg

(not mine, but I'm considering doing this to my SM961 for fun/placebo)
 
Great, so U.2 is so new there doesn't seem to be many SSDs in that format anyway. Using a PCIe adapter makes the native M.2 ports pointless (and probably means those PCIe lanes are wasted), putting on heatsinks voids warranty, and adding a special fan requires a 3D printer.

I guess a U.2 to M.2 adapter would work but I have no idea if they exist and haven't seen many AM4 motherboards with U.2 sockets anyway.

I know that right now M.2 is just placebo but it has way higher maximum throughout compared to SATA, plus NVMe is better than AHCI, so it's better for future proofing.
 
DragonQ said:
Great, so U.2 is so new there doesn't seem to be many SSDs in that format anyway. Using a PCIe adapter makes the native M.2 ports pointless (and probably means those PCIe lanes are wasted), putting on heatsinks voids warranty, and adding a special fan requires a 3D printer.

I guess a U.2 to M.2 adapter would work but I have no idea if they exist and haven't seen many AM4 motherboards with U.2 sockets anyway.

I know that right now M.2 is just placebo but it has way higher maximum throughout compared to SATA, plus NVMe is better than AHCI, so it's better for future proofing.
Click to expand...

Such is life at the cutting edge ;)
 
DragonQ said:
Great, so U.2 is so new there doesn't seem to be many SSDs in that format anyway. Using a PCIe adapter makes the native M.2 ports pointless (and probably means those PCIe lanes are wasted), putting on heatsinks voids warranty, and adding a special fan requires a 3D printer.

I guess a U.2 to M.2 adapter would work but I have no idea if they exist and haven't seen many AM4 motherboards with U.2 sockets anyway.

I know that right now M.2 is just placebo but it has way higher maximum throughout compared to SATA, plus NVMe is better than AHCI, so it's better for future proofing.
Click to expand...

I don't understand the idea of future proofing in this case, NVMe is better, but it provides a minimal boost unfortunately and not one you can feel. There is no time in the next probably 10 years that we will jump from 500MB/s SSD's to requiring 2500MB/s M.2 drives. We just don't use that level of data. We're still limited by processing the data and processing speed and GPU speed won't go up enough within lets say 5 years at least to warrant such a jump in storage speed.

If there were even minor gains I'd say sure, go ahead, but there is literally no even slightly tangible difference in usage. Save the cash and buy something better when you need it. My guess would be for m.2 or more speeds to be required, you're talking about a whole new tech, a whole new interface, a new CPU and mobo that supports said connection and if data usage goes up that much.... the amount of data stored will increase with it. So where you might get a 50GB game today, if you have something that requires upwards of 2GB/s of read speed, it's likely the game size will be upwards of 100+GB, for like 8-16k textures for some awesome VR setup 3-4 gpu generations away. In which case that small NVMe drive you buy today will be near worthless anyway. Rather than spend £120 on a 256GB M.2 today that you can't use, just save the cash and when the new tech or software comes along that can utilise it, either buy a 1TB M.2 for the same cash or buy the 'next' type of tech.


ULtra speed storage has uses, but as yet it's about iops and improving user experience when it comes to dozens, hundreds of users on the same system.
 
As much as I love trinkets it's hard to disagree. Generally speaking consumers aren't going to be running tasks that perform multiple I/O requests or make use of the speed. I made do for a couple of months recently on a Toshiba Q300 SSD as an OS drive, and really didn't notice any difference between it and my Samsung 961.
 
Loving the look of the 1600X. It's rated for 95W and is apparently in the top-end cooling class ("HS81" -presumably XFR related) along with the 1700X and 1800X (conspicuously the 1700 isn't).

My Xeon is effectively a 1st generation i7, hex-core, 3.4-3.7 GHz. Now all these years later I'm looking at a hex-core, 3.3-3.7 GHz that will slap the daylights out of it.
 
Panos said:
I never thought to buy any of the lower ones tbh regardless the price. 1800X is the most sensible option if you plan to watercool and push it to it's limits
Click to expand...

I'm already running a custom loop, so i'll just need a AM4 WB and its full speed ahead. :D

Will EK CPU coolers available from day 1?
 
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