What CPU? Single vs Multi core in real life (no games)? Future?

[Kilrah]

I've seen a drastic improvement going from SATA to NVMe. I had frequent slowdowns with 2 different SATA drives (everything is blazing fast then when doing too many things at a time grinds to a halt) which never happen with NVMe. Nothing to do with peak throughput, just the interface and queuing management of things is way better suited to today's heavy multitasking loads.

[Ice-Tea]

Sure you're not just seeing the improvement between SSD generations?

[Kilrah]

I would not expect a single gen to bring THAT much difference...
I've tried 2 successve SATA gens with the same meh performance, and next one in NVMe solved it.

But maybe, can't really say since I never bought 2 of the same in SATA and NVMe for a comparison.

[NiHaoMike]

Can we please stop to put RGB Led everywhere? Or Audio grade capacitor with some 120dB SNR DAC spec? Everytime I hunt an high end MOBO for my new workstation I want to cry, I don't want those feature but I have to pay them anyway.

I have a DX79SI, a high end motherboard from about 7 years ago (still in daily use), that has been criticized for the audio part being basically the same as what's used on cheap motherboards. Customers who pay more generally expect more in every category.

[Zucca]

I have a DX79SI, a high end motherboard from about 7 years ago (still in daily use), that has been criticized for the audio part being basically the same as what's used on cheap motherboards. Customers who pay more generally expect more in every category.

Don't you think because the customers are now gamers, they need to put implement fancy and not useful feature in order to sell?

[Berni]

Yep when people buy a motherboard that's in the ballpark of half a grand, then expect it to have all the bells and whistles. Its not like the fancy audio actually cost them much on the BOM with such an expensive board.

Oh and with SSDs there was a bit of a bumpy ride in the old days. Motherboards would love using them in IDE emulation mode, or an OS wouldn't automatically run trimm on it and such. All of that could show significant performance degradation.

But yeah in terms of boot times even old SATA SSDs are fast enough to make other parts of the machine be the bottleneck. Its more about the quick access time to the many many tiny files the OS tries to load on boot. The reason i moved to NVME is that my stoneage 160GB SSD (That was a pretty big SSD back in the day) is becoming a bit small for a system drive. And if i buy a new drive i might as well go for NVME due to its extra performance.

[KaneTW]

I tried overclocking my 128GB of ECC UDIMM RAM, but that didn't lead anywhere. Not sure what was causing issues, and I don't have the equipment to even attempt to look at the signals. I'm thinking either low headroom on the RAM, or the memory subsystem just not being able to handle full banks + ECC + fast clocks.

Not too interested in trying out other RAM considering the price, but maybe once there's a new TR socket.

[Berni]

I tried overclocking my 128GB of ECC UDIMM RAM, but that didn't lead anywhere. Not sure what was causing issues, and I don't have the equipment to even attempt to look at the signals. I'm thinking either low headroom on the RAM, or the memory subsystem just not being able to handle full banks + ECC + fast clocks.

Not too interested in trying out other RAM considering the price, but maybe once there's a new TR socket.

RAM overclocking can be tricky sometimes. You might just need to give it more voltage, or you might actually have to adjust the timings for it. In general RAM requires longer CAS/RAS latency timings when run at higher clock speeds. This means that the access time tends to not improve at all, just the raw transfer rate improves.

But yeah in most workloads the RAM speed is not all that important. Its only the slowest grades of RAM that are slow enough to actually really affect performance. Most of the time the CPU does a very good job of caching data to reduce RAM traffic. There certainly are some workloads that benefit from blazing fast RAM but most don't. Easy way to check is to simply down clock your RAM to half its speed in BIOS and see if your workload slows down any.

[KaneTW]

I was trying different timings at the time, but at some point it just felt like poking in the dark and I grew tired of it.

[Mr. Scram]

Sure you're not just seeing the improvement between SSD generations?

It is pretty much exactly what NVMe is supposed to bring. SATA was never intended for torrents of data being thrown around.

[wraper]

thanks Lukas,Red Squirrel and rhb. Very interesting.

Now I9 9900K does not support ECC RAM, this is irritating. Intel is selling his ass to teenager gamers  , and they are right 'cause there are tons of money there.

Yep, They disable ECC in desktop CPUs. Purely for marketing reasons, so they don't compete with Xeon. But they have ECC in Atoms and Pentiums as those may go into NAS. AMD don't officially support ECC in Desktop CPUs but don't disable it either.

[wraper]

I tried overclocking my 128GB of ECC UDIMM RAM, but that didn't lead anywhere. Not sure what was causing issues, and I don't have the equipment to even attempt to look at the signals. I'm thinking either low headroom on the RAM, or the memory subsystem just not being able to handle full banks + ECC + fast clocks.

Not too interested in trying out other RAM considering the price, but maybe once there's a new TR socket.

On my motherboard my Hynix MFR based RAM won't overclock unless I change drive strength to 68 or 80 OHm. The fun fact is, it overclocked just fine with one older bios version, which is not even supposed to be used normally. It's a bridge version which you need to update old bios to before updating to newer versions. On another motherboard I had it would overclock just fine with the same CPU without any tinkering.

[vtwin@cox.net]

I've been trumpeting the benefits of SSD for years to my friends and coworkers, ever since buying my first 60 GB SSD several years ago.  Each and every time one of them has finally upgraded to an SSD, they remark that its "like a brand new computer".  I'd say that SSD is mandatory, and NVMe is a "would be nice".

SSDs are the single best improvement you can invest in. I've taken 5 year old systems at work, put in an SSD, and it is like a brand new computer to the end user.

Buy a new 'decent' system for the office staff: $1000
Buy a new SSD and upgrade their existing system: $100

Really, it's a no-brainer.

I have a Dell Precision laptop with both an NVMe (2TB) and SATA-600 (4TB) SSD. The NVMe drive is 4x faster than the SATA-600 drive.