New SSD or M2 Drive

Lee

Lee

Lee

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Joined
21 Dec 2006
Posts
486
Location
Northampton
I'm looking for some additional SSD storage for some upcoming games I'm looking to get.

I'm on a Z77 (Asus Sabretooth) platform with a i7 3770k, currently with an AMD 7970 (but will be upgrading this at Xmas).

I currently boot (Win 10) from a Samsung 840 256GB drive.

I haven't yet decided on what extra SSD capacity I want, but would you recommend a Samsung 850 or a M2 card ?

If I go with an M2 I would need to install an adapter into a spare PCIe slot. Will I see a degradation in the video card performance by doing this ?
 
Personally I do not see a huge diffrence using my 950 Pro over a 850 Evo as a boot drive. 1-2 sec max, nor for gaming. Really come into thier own when doing high amount of read / write data to the drive. More of a nice to have really.

The GPU would drop down to running at x8, but the real world performance impact is neglible.

One thing I would double check if we are talking about NVME M.2 drives is if your board can actually boot from them. It's only the more recent boards / CPUs that natively support NVME M.2 as boot drives.
 
If you go M.2, the Intel p600 is worth a look as they are ~£150 for 512GB which is much cheaper than other makes. It’s not as fast as the more expensive ones but is faster than a SATA drive.
I have a Samsung SM951 256GB in a 10Gb (2x pci-e 2.0) port on a z97 board and it gets 880MB/s read/write so it’s still faster than SATA.
 
Last edited:
abui1806 said:
I thought the cpu/mobo has enough bandwidth to run a single card at full speed and an extra M.2 drive?
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3770k has 16 Gen 3.0 lanes. Would deliver x8 to GPU when you plug in the M.2 adaptor. So not full speed, but for all intents and purposes a GPU running at x8 vs x16 has a neglible performance hit. The Z77 PCH does have an additional 8 lanes, but those are Gen 2.0. Only the newer skylake stuff has been moved to the new DMI and comes with 3.0 lanes on the chipset on most the motherboards.
 
Radox-0 said:
3770k has 16 Gen 3.0 lanes. Would deliver x8 to GPU when you plug in the M.2 adaptor. So not full speed, but for all intents and purposes a GPU running at x8 vs x16 has a neglible performance hit. The Z77 PCH does have an additional 8 lanes, but those are Gen 2.0. Only the newer skylake stuff has been moved to the new DMI and comes with 3.0 lanes on the chipset on most the motherboards.
Click to expand...

Thank you! I wasn't paying enough attention to OP's platform. :)
 
Thanks for the comments guys, it gives me a good picture of what the options and consequences are. Still not sure which way to go though :)
 
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