May I suggest a happy medium? https://www.amazon.co.uk/Intel-M-2-...ntel+1tb+nvme&qid=1552740338&s=gateway&sr=8-1 I have one, and I can tell the difference at boot. It's £60 cheaper though and is a proper NVME. https://www.intel.com/content/www/u...60p-series/660p-series-1-tb-m-2-80mm-3d2.html The speeds on Amazon are a typo I know, but unfortunately there are only about three review sites on the net where PSUs are actually tested properly. Thus, many don't know that because they don't understand how they work.
FTFY Every non titanium spec meanwhile is just "do whatever you want" below 20%. But either way, the price premium isn't really worth it (well, except that sweet deal in the marketplace, even if it is total overkill as I have a T2 1KW powering a 2950x and 2080TI without breaking a sweat)
Agree on the titanium PSU's not being worth it, i bought a platinum and regret spending so much on it as to recuperate the £80-90 increase in price over a gold or silver would take me 10-20 years based on this calculator.
Just to add to the "why do you need all the cores" explanation: I've been waiting for this thing to finish on my poor ol' A10-5800K for about fifteen minutes now, and I've got a fair while longer to wait yet. If I had eight processor cores, instead of somewhere between two and four depending on whether you buy AMD's Bulldozer-era definition of a 'core' or not, I'd be done in a quarter of the time - less when you figure that said cores will also be faster, as well as more numerous. For now, though, I'mma switch to doing something else while this gets on with things in the background.
Sorry, missed this earlier: that's certainly cheaper, but it's also a lot slower because it's QLC NAND. Check out the figures here - it benchmarks (which, yes, is not fully indicative of real-world performance) at nearly a third the data rate of the Samsung.
Aye, so instead of buying a £117 1TB QLC which drops to sub-SATA speeds when you use more than 500GB, I could buy a 500GB 970 Evo for the same price and get full performance from 0-100% usage. Or just pay the extra for the 1TB version, which I reckon is worth it.
Just to revisit this quickly: I have a 500GB Samsung 960 EVO (NVMe) and a 500GB 850 EVO (SATA, 2.5") in this PC and although benchmarks show that the former has read and write speeds of about five and four times the latter respectively, when I've switched applications and games between the two drives I have noticed absolutely no perceptible difference between the two drives. The desktop is just as snappy with the OS installed on either drive, too. Now not all SSDs are created equal, be they NVMe or SATA, and some drives definitely have poorer performance than others (and particularly under certain conditions), but for general use I don't think you'd see any real-world benefit to using a 970 EVO over a good SATA SSD. Your money, your choice, of course, but this is definitely an area where you could shave a chunk off the cost without compromising on actual noticeable performance. Then again, if you've not upgraded your PC for a long time then I can definitely see the attraction of splashing out a bit on all the shiny stuff... That's what I did when I retired my previous PC two years back (ATX s775 E8500 with 4GB of DDR2 and a 256GB 830 SSD plus a 1TB rust spinner, in a Fractal R2, replaced by an mITX Z170 board and i7 6700K, 16GB of DDR4, the two SSDs mentioned above, all in a lovely NCase M1). Could I have saved a lot of cash by dialling down a couple of those items? Sure, but where's the fun in that?
The key real-world scenario I've seen is loading the game Exapunks, which I was playing on both the laptop and desktop. On the desktop, it took a good minute or so to load; on the laptop, about ten seconds. Now, there are other differences between the two - the laptop has a Core i7-7560U, the desktop the aforementioned A10-5800K - so I can't be sure that it's all down to the difference in transfer rate, but it certainly won't be hurtin'. Yeah, what I don't want to do is cut a corner now and then not have the money to correct it in the future - this needs to last me a good five or six years, just like the old one did. Added bonus: if I do get a new drive - whether it's SATA or NVMe - I can buy a £30 case-and-PSU bundle and have my old system ready to run as a backup if something dies on the new build.
Aye, if I had to guess then I'd say the CPU is playing a greater part in the difference than the storage drive. Not to say that the latter isn't making any difference, just that it's not going to be the major factor. Games don't tend to benefit too much from really fast SSDs as typically you're loading a lot of relatively small files so you'll struggle to hit full throughput - but then again, this is exactly the sort of situation where SSDs thrive relative to rust spinners As an example from my experience, loading a game like GTAV or Skyrim from my NVMe drive isn't noticeably faster than from my SATA SSD. The difference is maybe a single-figure percentage, whereas on paper the NVMe is capable of more than five times the read speed. On the other hand, loading either of these games from the 850 EVO is massively, massively quicker on my current PC than it ever was from the exact same drive on my C2D machine! It's funny, though, because when you're speccing yourself a new PC it's incredibly easy to justify spending x because of feature a. Once you've done that, it's easy to justify spending x+y because of feature b, and so on I also think that us PC nerds love to focus on features rather than benefits: it's great having all of these on-paper features but spending money to have something that's good on paper but doesn't actually benefit you in reality is just throwing money away, really.
Once I'm into Windows I can't tell the difference between any of my ssds for which there are many of all brands and types (OCZ, SanDisk, Samsung and Intel) Hence happy medium. It's faster SATA but £60 cheaper.
My desktop: Code: blacklaw@trioptimum:~$ sysbench --num-threads=4 --test=cpu run sysbench 0.4.12: multi-threaded system evaluation benchmark Running the test with following options: Number of threads: 4 Doing CPU performance benchmark Threads started! Done. Maximum prime number checked in CPU test: 10000 Test execution summary: total time: 1.5819s total number of events: 10000 total time taken by event execution: 6.3233 per-request statistics: min: 0.60ms avg: 0.63ms max: 15.53ms approx. 95 percentile: 0.70ms Threads fairness: events (avg/stddev): 2500.0000/24.77 execution time (avg/stddev): 1.5808/0.00 A teeny-tiny ickle Nvidia Jetson AGX Xavier: Code: nvidia@jetson-0423718017663:~$ sysbench --num-threads=4 --test=cpu run sysbench 0.4.12: multi-threaded system evaluation benchmark Running the test with following options: Number of threads: 4 Doing CPU performance benchmark Threads started! Done. Maximum prime number checked in CPU test: 10000 Test execution summary: total time: 1.4269s total number of events: 10000 total time taken by event execution: 5.6954 per-request statistics: min: 0.56ms avg: 0.57ms max: 1.57ms approx. 95 percentile: 0.58ms Threads fairness: events (avg/stddev): 2500.0000/1.58 execution time (avg/stddev): 1.4238/0.00 BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE: The Jetson actually has eight cores, not four... Code: nvidia@jetson-0423718017663:~$ sysbench --num-threads=8 --test=cpu run sysbench 0.4.12: multi-threaded system evaluation benchmark Running the test with following options: Number of threads: 8 Doing CPU performance benchmark Threads started! Done. Maximum prime number checked in CPU test: 10000 Test execution summary: total time: 0.7585s total number of events: 10000 total time taken by event execution: 6.0432 per-request statistics: min: 0.55ms avg: 0.60ms max: 7.13ms approx. 95 percentile: 0.64ms Threads fairness: events (avg/stddev): 1250.0000/5.98 execution time (avg/stddev): 0.7554/0.00 Yeah, I'm definitely overdue an upgrade... (Though, in fairness, the Jetson is, like, three times the price of my PC, so there's that to take into account.
Well, the money I would need to do this has done arriven - the only question is, pull the trigger or wait for Zen 2? Advantages of waiting: Zen 2 will probably be better. Zen 1.5 will definitely be cheaper, at least for a bit. I don't have to find time to actually build the bugger. Advantages of doing it now: Zen 1.5 has had all the Linux-related bugs ironed out, which won't be the case for Zen 2 at launch. I won't fritter the money away on something else. It'll help bring down my next payment on account to HMRC. Decisions, decisions...
Do it now, you have an A10 absolute power has not been a concern for you, Ryzen is more than twice the single core performance of a high clocked A10 and of course the multicore is leaps ahead as it has proper multithreading and more cores which your use model can take advantage of. Makes sense to go with a known quantity rather than the new stuff if you want it to just work. FYI I submitted some A10 numbers on a Cinebench R20 thread, because I'm fun like that Here so you can see how it looks up against modern stuff. My A10 is a 5xxx series but to my knowledge AMD did not move the CPU cores on much for the APU.
How important is having Samsung B-die DRAM? I ask, 'cos finding 'em is proving an absolute pain. There's this handy tool, but the bulk of what it recommends ain't in stock in the UK - and what is in stock is around twice the price of the 3,000MHz C16 stuff I threw into my basket earlier in the thread, which is... y'know, not great.
People are running all sorts of RAM, 2xxx is less picky than 1xxx as a lot of AGESA/BIOS work has gone on to iron out Ryzen issues, but it is always prudent to see if you can find those sticks on a QVL of any board you are looking at, B Die is good for high clocks and low latency but Ryzen will run most memory.
Good to know, ta - I can live with losing a few percent absolute performance and saving ~£150, given that I'm going to be gaining a bajillion percent compared to my current system!
Boards have been known to be picky (Ryzen 1 moreso than 2 as @sandys says) so checking your RAM is on the compatible list is top of the 'things to do'. Is it worth the price premium? It wouldn't be for me. So long as it's 3000 or 3200 mhz.
I was concerned about RAM and Ryzen with talk of B-die, dual/single rank and whatnot but in the end I found a good (read cheap) deal on some 3200 RAM and decided to just go with it. It's running perfectly stable at 2933 (I can't be arsed to spend time tweaking and pushing it to its fastest overclock) and it's not like I'm sat around thinking my PC is slow. FWIW it's G.Skill Ripjaws, no idea about the die, *think* it's dual rank (which my mobo technically only officially supoprts upto 2400), possibly not on the QVL list and it's paired with a Ryzen 2600 and B450 ITX board.
From what I've read elsewhere, BIOS updates for B450/X470 boards have started landing in preparation for Ryzen 2. (Also, I'm seeing reports that the Threadripper 1900X is down below £280 now)
