NEW Samsung 950 Pro M.2 NVMe (think SM951 with VNAND & Black PCB) yum!

Rofflay · 7 Nov 2015 at 23:23

shamus21 said:
Yes and hopefully Max out those 4 x pci-e lanes.

Max out 8x maybe they are saying HUGE performance jumps for storage. I duno if all these x4 slots have direct paths to GPU's on all boards. My Z87 i duno so i will use the Gen 3 8x alongside my 980. Hopefully by the time that is saturated we will be moving to Gen 4. I duno if anyone has ever yet maxed out the lanes on a single card and modern boards so i am banking on that despite things like X-Point SSD's and HBM2 GPU's.

Just think no loading at all just a black flash between "worlds" will be great.

delpy8 · 7 Nov 2015 at 23:25

Whats it going to be like in 5 years NO SSD NO M2 what will we be using??

VincentHanna · 8 Nov 2015 at 01:21

Magnetic particle tape and then Genetic storage.

shamus21 · 8 Nov 2015 at 06:45

Rofflay said:
Max out 8x maybe they are saying HUGE performance jumps for storage. I duno if all these x4 slots have direct paths to GPU's on all boards. My Z87 i duno so i will use the Gen 3 8x alongside my 980. Hopefully by the time that is saturated we will be moving to Gen 4. I duno if anyone has ever yet maxed out the lanes on a single card and modern boards so i am banking on that despite things like X-Point SSD's and HBM2 GPU's.

Just think no loading at all just a black flash between "worlds" will be great.

Yes I get that black flash affect when I wake up in the morning

nox_uk · 9 Nov 2015 at 08:16

yay, mine just arrived! really looking forward to getting it installed tonight

Nox

Mr Lazy · 10 Nov 2015 at 11:33

Hi, I'm putting together a Skylake build and am considering a 950 PRO as the OS drive but given the temperatures talked about in some of the reviews I'm concerned about increasing temps inside my case (especially as I have a 390X

). So I was wondering if any of the existing owners could comment on whether it had a significant impact on their case temps as I'd like to keep fan noise/temps as low as possible? I'm currently erring on the side of getting a 850 EVO for now and maybe waiting until 3D Xpoint is here. The main reason for getting a 950 PRO would be for a nice neat build (i.e. less cables etc.).

Just to be clear, I'm not concerned with thermal throttling, only case temps.

Omar · 10 Nov 2015 at 12:00

I would be extremely surprised if it would impact on case temperatures, the drive is tiny and it's not likely to give off massive amounts of heat.

tipes · 10 Nov 2015 at 12:47

Hi all,
Just re built my spare rig with a new Asus Maximus VII Ranger board and a 256Gb 950 Pro M2. Trouble is I am only getting 5Gbps speed. There is a section in the bios labelled Nvme - but unable to enter it or make changes. Have re loaded the latest bios from Asus - still no different, yet this board is supposed to run M2 at 10Gbps.
Anybody else come across this - or know where I am going wrong, or what the problem may be?

Frustrated - pointless having the 950 Pro to run at half speed. Grrrrrrrrrrrr

Mark

mikeo · 10 Nov 2015 at 13:31

Omar said:
I would be extremely surprised if it would impact on case temperatures, the drive is tiny and it's not likely to give off massive amounts of heat.

As above... likely to have next to no impact on case temps. Most of the time my SM951 (obviously similar to the 950) is barely warm to the touch. It only appears to heat up under a"sustained" work load. The sort of thing that is only likely to happen in a synthetic test / benchmark. During normal OS / gaming use, it's only slightly warm to the touch. Biggest heat dump/s will still be your CPU / GPU by a LARGE margin.

Hope that puts your mind at ease.

Mr Lazy · 10 Nov 2015 at 15:04

mikeo said:
As above... likely to have next to no impact on case temps. Most of the time my SM951 (obviously similar to the 950) is barely warm to the touch. It only appears to heat up under a"sustained" work load. The sort of thing that is only likely to happen in a synthetic test / benchmark. During normal OS / gaming use, it's only slightly warm to the touch. Biggest heat dump/s will still be your CPU / GPU by a LARGE margin.

Thanks both for your replies. Yes that puts my mind at ease so I think I will go for it. I got nervous after reading this review which implied that the controller was touching 70 deg C even at idle.

nox_uk · 10 Nov 2015 at 18:10

Not had any issues with mine, but the case is open-top currently

Dave2150 · 10 Nov 2015 at 18:12

tipes said:
Hi all,
Just re built my spare rig with a new Asus Maximus VII Ranger board and a 256Gb 950 Pro M2. Trouble is I am only getting 5Gbps speed. There is a section in the bios labelled Nvme - but unable to enter it or make changes. Have re loaded the latest bios from Asus - still no different, yet this board is supposed to run M2 at 10Gbps.
Anybody else come across this - or know where I am going wrong, or what the problem may be?

Frustrated - pointless having the 950 Pro to run at half speed. Grrrrrrrrrrrr

Mark

You won't get full speed from a Z97 system, you need a Z170 or X99 system to give it the full bandwidth.

tipes · 10 Nov 2015 at 18:31

Dave2150 said:
You won't get full speed from a Z97 system, you need a Z170 or X99 system to give it the full bandwidth.

Thanks for your input - but does not explain why it runs at 5Gbps instead of the 10Gbps in the specs of the board? I have contacted Asus about this also, but wont hold my breath.

Mark
Neither Z170 or X99 will use my current 4770K though - otherwise I would have bought Z170

Update: Solved my problem by using the 950 Pro in my X99 rig instead - at least it runs at full pelt - nice.

Rofflay · 10 Nov 2015 at 21:16

M.2 is slighty confusing there are a few different M.2 ports and are they all Gen3? Surely there must be something obvious you missed tipes. Half speed would indicate Gen 2 which is exactly half bandwidth.

If i am wrong just ignore.

tipes · 11 Nov 2015 at 13:07

Rofflay said:
M.2 is slighty confusing there are a few different M.2 ports and are they all Gen3? Surely there must be something obvious you missed tipes. Half speed would indicate Gen 2 which is exactly half bandwidth.

If i am wrong just ignore.

Only one M2 port on my board - as on most I believe. I have looked at settings in the bios and I am unable to make any changes under the NVMe settings. I have also contacted Asus - waiting to hear back from them, but it seems that Z97 may not indeed support the higher speed.

Mark

Golf1.6 · 11 Nov 2015 at 14:17

thought about getting a m.2 ssd to improve boot. But the bottleneck in the mobo, it spends 15 seconds in post. before the windows screen appears. So annoying, I realised i made a buying mistake as soon as I got it - so stuck with it for 3 years. I'll make sure the noxt mobo can get past post as fast as many laptops do.

Omar · 11 Nov 2015 at 14:55

My board (Gigabyte Z170) also seems to take a few more seconds before the Windows boot screen displays with the 950 Pro than it did with my SATA SSD, I have actually disabled SATA since I have no other devices in my machine so it's not that it's checking for other boot drives.

Cosimo · 17 Nov 2015 at 11:26

Review from Guru:

http://www.guru3d.com/articles-pages/samsung-950-pro-m-2-ssd-review,1.html

moogle · 17 Nov 2015 at 11:51

delpy8 said:
I agree with Dave2150 pointless just for games put them on an ssd and put your money to better use, my two sm951 256gb will be going into a raid 0 setup once the 6700k comes down in price a bit

What is the point of these drives if they don't benefit most consumers with the faster speeds?

Are they better off used for heavy reading/writing workloads like servers and databases?

mikeo · 17 Nov 2015 at 12:53

Still worthwhile as an OS drive in my opinion.
Just don't expect a life changing experience.

Plus as commented on before, some folks (me included) just like to have the latest tech. It as after all an enthusiasts WEB site ocUK.