Hardware & Technical PCIe SSD
- Thread starter lysan
- Start date
Depends on the game, but with todays massive memories, cache and videocards, the advantage is only in the initial loading time.
The short answer is no. You won't feel a difference compared to an SATA SSD; there may be the odd fraction of a second advantage for a PCIe part, but by and large nothing to write home about.
Pretty much just a for rapid read\writes over a multitude of files see a benefit.
And that's pretty much just under OS boot, and the whole prefetching thing windows does now that makes older disk spinners seem inordinately slow.
That said I have an M.2 for my OS drive and if you have serious rig it's no reason not to get one.
But it's also not cost effective, I have a regular SSD as well and a regular disk, but as for games I can't really tell the three apart, and I have tested with ED installed on all of them.
Any half decent game engine wouldn't load data in this manner anyway, and if it does it would probably be terribly regardless of storage method.
It would be probably more noticeable when dealing with video or photoediting where you load large files and randomly jump around in them like when scratching 4k video.
Doing that in say an uncompressed format would almost require a RAID of SSD's just for bearable use, but this is far beyond anything you would need to do privately.
And that's pretty much just under OS boot, and the whole prefetching thing windows does now that makes older disk spinners seem inordinately slow.
That said I have an M.2 for my OS drive and if you have serious rig it's no reason not to get one.
But it's also not cost effective, I have a regular SSD as well and a regular disk, but as for games I can't really tell the three apart, and I have tested with ED installed on all of them.
Any half decent game engine wouldn't load data in this manner anyway, and if it does it would probably be terribly regardless of storage method.
It would be probably more noticeable when dealing with video or photoediting where you load large files and randomly jump around in them like when scratching 4k video.
Doing that in say an uncompressed format would almost require a RAID of SSD's just for bearable use, but this is far beyond anything you would need to do privately.
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Already got 5 SSD and 2 HDD, the HDD I use for mass data storage, the SSD's are for my games and apps.
We are dealing with a game that doesn't cache the background video of its main menu and reads it a frame at a time…
For you screen peasants perhaps. I get the VR hangarWe are dealing with a game that doesn't cache the background video of its main menu and reads it a frame at a time…
PCIe SSDs are great, but Games are not I/O heavy applications. I have experienced that most of the "loading times" are application related and cannot be improved by providing more IOPS.
If it's just for gaming, a HDD array with a bit of SSD cache and proper RAM Cache (via 3rd party product) will be quite fast enough.
Further, as M.2 (which is also PCIe) cards developed and higher capacities are available, it might be a cheaper alternative and you don't need to consume a precious slot.
I have an Intel 750 1.2TB SSD pcie-attached and I'm quite happy with it. But it came with a price.
Enjoy!
Lestat
Banned
I was in an odd spot. Pay $50 more for a single 512 GB vs 256 GB with a 1 tb 7200rpm hard drive. I looking at it. Going I have a 256 GB SSD from my last laptop. That 768 GB Just shy of a TB I looking to buy a 2 TB hard drive for my laptop for Go pro video. Maybe Do some Elite Dangerous videos.
My New Setup.
Alienware M17 R5
8th Generation Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-8750H (6-Core, 9MB Cache, up to 4.1GHz w/ Turbo Boost)
16 GB Ram Might be upgraded to 32 gb later
Nivida 1070 8gb
512 SSD
17.3 inch QHD (2560 x 1440) 120Hz
For gaming, as others have said, no. There will be no noticeable difference going to a PCIe SSD in 99% of cases. However, if you are working with massive files for productivity, it could be worth the cost. I would personally stick to SATA or M.2, but if your workload outside of gaming would benefit from a PCIe SSD, go for it.
I switched to an M.2 Nvme Samsung Evo 256GB as my C: drive an Elite game folder and I certainly noticed a difference in VR. The stuttering when arriving at star port was far less prounced; it still happened but easily noticeably shorter.
My new MB has PCIe 3.0 support.... gonna be good I reckon [smile]
I bought a decent 490 GB SSD, installed the OS on it and a couple of games, most of the rest of my apps (except Office) are installed on plain-old spinny-disks. I get good performance.
Could have a point, I have my main ED install on my m.2, cause why not.
But in my experience, ED has been just as much vulnerable to networking issues than with anything storaged based.