Will Upgrading from a 970 Pro NVME to a Gen 5 be Noticeable?

SquirrelMadness

SquirrelMadness

SquirrelMadness

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I have a Samsung 970 Pro as my OS drive which gets 3478 MB/s read and 2561 MB/s write speeds.

Not entirely happy with the speed at which my apps are launching (long story short just upgraded a 10 year old Intel Haswell-E to a 7950X and seeing no noticeable difference).

Will replacing this with a 2tb Gen 5 drive give a big enough improvement to be happy? Yes have a Gen 5 slot.

I want apps like Photoshop to load almost instantly. If it'3 3x faster to load Photoshop then I'm happy.

Thanks.
 
You won't see a massive difference, read/write speeds directly are rarely the bottleneck with applications starting up - I upgraded from a Xeon 1650 V2 w/ SSD OS drive and 970 Pro application drive to a 14700K w/ PCI-e 4.0 990 Pros and though quicker loading stuff it isn't dramatically so - probably not even 1/3rd less time.
 
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Just out of interest, when you upgraded did you also start with a fresh install of Windows too? Seems odd that you're seeing no noticeable difference between a brand new system v's a 10 year old unit.
 
coupe69 said:
Just out of interest, when you upgraded did you also start with a fresh install of Windows too? Seems odd that you're seeing no noticeable difference between a brand new system v's a 10 year old unit.
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No I'm on the same Win 10 as I had before... surely that can't be the reason for it?

I tested Win 11 on a separate SSD after the build to make sure all is good before popping the Win 10 970 Pro back in.

Some things I didn't like about Win 11 was the task bar can't be moved to the top (why are these even on the bottom?) and it required a Hotmail acc to even use the system (I prefer keeping my personal stuff away from any cloud servers).
 
SquirrelMadness said:
I have a Samsung 970 Pro as my OS drive which gets 3478 MB/s read and 2561 MB/s write speeds.

Not entirely happy with the speed at which my apps are launching (long story short just upgraded a 10 year old Intel Haswell-E to a 7950X and seeing no noticeable difference).

Will replacing this with a 2tb Gen 5 drive give a big enough improvement to be happy? Yes have a Gen 5 slot.

I want apps like Photoshop to load almost instantly. If it'3 3x faster to load Photoshop then I'm happy.

Thanks.
Click to expand...
Apologies for the stupid question, but it needs to be asked: is Photoshop (or your other apps) on the same drive? If they're on a hard drive, then having a fast drive for your OS won't help.

In terms of loading speeds: the bottleneck is quite hard to determine because it really depends on the app, how it is programmed and what is being loaded. If the bottleneck is primarily loading from the SSD, then so long as your CPU is fast enough to handle any storage tasks, there's no benefit from a faster CPU. You need to be careful with these kind of large suites too, because they can sometimes be heavily bogged down by things you weren't expecting (e.g. having a large photo cache on an HDD, lots of existing projects open, third party plugins).

I'd have a look in task manager and check if your SSD is really hitting 100% usage.
 
SquirrelMadness said:
Not entirely happy with the speed at which my apps are launching
Click to expand...
if it's just specifically apps launching/loading, then no, not really
the bottleneck is the controller, not the pcie bandwidth in random access - which is essentially what loading programmes are
you'll notice the difference in sequential performance though, eg: reading/writing/copying one large file

a bit crude but does demonstrate the difference, or in this case...the lack thereof
 
You could use the Windows Performance Toolkit
learn.microsoft.com

Windows Performance Toolkit

Included in the Windows Assessment and Deployment Kit, the Windows Performance Toolkit consists of performance monitoring tools that produce in-depth performance profiles of Windows operating systems and applications. (index)
learn.microsoft.com
If you wanted to know what's causing the bottleneck.
 
coupe69 said:
Just out of interest, when you upgraded did you also start with a fresh install of Windows too? Seems odd that you're seeing no noticeable difference between a brand new system v's a 10 year old unit.
Click to expand...

OP mentioned Haswell-E - I think people vastly underestimate how well 10 year old high end desktop/Xeon CPUs hold up - the time many filters take for example in image editing on my 1650 V2 Vs my 14700K is perceptually not much different and often only around 20% less time on the newer CPU for general filters.

Obviously there are some things much faster on the newer CPU.
 
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SquirrelMadness said:
I want apps like Photoshop to load almost instantly. If it'3 3x faster to load Photoshop then I'm happy.
Click to expand...
Going to gen 5 from gen 3 will not make a difference here. Photoshop/Lightroom etc simply are not coded to load instantly this way so this goal is impossible until Adobe redeign the foundation of these apps, along with other devs etc.

For reference my Photoshop loads an image from the right click menu in 7-8 seconds on a gen 4 990 Pro, the same time it took on a Gen 3 970 Evo Plus.

Once in these applications though, everything is GPU accelerated, so the CPU has less of a bearing on how fast the app does stuff. At least for Adobe and Davinci etc. Other apps may not have this level of GPU acceleration.

SquirrelMadness said:
(long story short just upgraded a 10 year old Intel Haswell-E to a 7950X and seeing no noticeable difference)
Click to expand...
The problem is configuration related, not SSD, as long as your current SSD shows accurate read and write speeds in CrystalDiskMark (make sure CDM is set to NVMe SSD mode), then your system config needs to be looked at. You went from Haswell to current gen Ryzen, I went from Skylake to 12th Gen and the difference was massive. Apps did load faster purely because the CPU is orders of magnitude more powerful. You should be seeing equally faster load times, and if you are not then the issue lies in the build itself, maybe BIOS settings, maybe drivers, maybe mix of both.
 
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Yes apps are on the same drive... but I have 5 other drives connected (app shouldn't be accessing these though).

I haven't played with the BIOS yet... I did set the RAM to 6000 and it made the boot time take long (like a minute), so I went back to auto which is around 4800 and the boot times are now 14sec again.

So RAM is the only componment not running at rated speeds.

I do notice games running smoother and Photoshop is now able to deal with Panasonic 24mp RAW files better than before (no more lag when adjusting exposure in CameraRAW).

3DMark score around 18,500, about 15,000 for the CPU alone @ default settings 1440p.
 
You'd probably have a better chance of seeing a tangible difference (in general use) with an optane drive, though still unlikely I think.

I went from a SATA SSD to a gen 4 SN850, Windows feels basically the same.
 
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Windows isn't optimised for SSD leverage though, it's still using ancient architecture deep down at its core. The only change in recent years id DirectStorage, and that's solely been aimed at the gaming market so far. There were talks of MS maybe implemented similar tech for the OS itself on Windows 12 perhaps so that remains to be seen. There is zero reason why Windows cannot be updated to leverage SSD's super fast latency and access times to boot up the entire OS in a couple of seconds once the UEFI has completed POST given that games loading multi-GB textures and other assets can load in under 3 seconds if not instantly using DirectStorage with any setting at any resolution.

MS just want to save such features for a future version of Windows, if Windows 10/11 had all these things patched into it then nobody would care about buying into the new OSes down the line etc.

Business has to stay a business.
 
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