$1000 USD CAD and Rendering Workhorse. Getting the Balance right?

[Simon]

The AORUS X570 gaming boards are currently advertising capacity to actually run dual nvme SSDs in RAID0. Obviously this is aimed at non-mission-critical gaming builds where reliability comes second to performance; however I rarely run the same boot drive(s) for more than a year or two anyways, so I'm not afraid of RAID0 on my daily driver either. Have done it oodles of times.




"Dual PCIe 4.0 SSD in RAID 0: Extreme Performance with PCIe 4.0 x4 NVMe PCIe SSDs

X570 AORUS motherboards offer the industry's best compatibility in terms of NVMe storage for users who demand high capacity and seek the best performance. AORUS' unique design can be configured in RAID for record speeds of up to 9534 MB/s (Sequential Read), making AORUS the obvious choice for the ultimate PC."

NewEgg Aorus Elite X570 MB Advert: https://www.newegg.com/p/N82E16813145160

Just imagining what these will run like with drives designed from the ground up for pcie4.0 makes me smile. 

mnem
*back into my cave*

I bought a wonderous intel M.2 SSD, the transfere from it to it is 400MB/s, I suppose that is a RAW 800MB/s, that in on PCIe 3.0 that is supposed to do 4GB/s for M.2......

[Mr. Scram]

Yeah,no benefit except booting in 0.7^* seconds. Now multiply that by the number of times you HAVE TO reboot for one reason or another... suddenly very real. And remember, for the purpose these machines are built, you are talking some pretty big executables. _{*random utter BS figure pulled out of my arse for comedic value}
 
It does it automatically if you enable AHCI for the SSD before you install, which DUH.  Also enables and optimizes trim and turns off/hides hibernate. My last 3 builds have been on SSD, did the same every time. 

Nobody runs a machine longer than me. I rarely use the same boot drive longer than 18 months, though my current daily driver build of Windows literally has been upgraded repeatedly wince Win7SP1. IFL FTW, baybee. 

mnem
meh.

It's indeed a complete bullshit number, which is what people have been telling you from the start. It turns out that the benefit of booting from NVMe compared to a SATA SSD is little to none. Real world benchmarks show that boot times on NVMe and SATA tend to be the same. What this means is that we have plenty of bandwidth and are encountering other bottlenecks. Add in RAID and the boot times actually go up as RAID increases system complexity and therefore POST times. The difference between PCIe 3.0 and 4.0 are obviously going to be even smaller than the difference between SATA and NVMe. Benchmarks and the real world are not the same thing. PCIe 4.0 isn't going to be some kind of watershed technology, but an incremental step up instead. It's time to let this one go.

[Mr. Scram]

The last installs I did of 10 I had to turn it off. It's not that anyone is out to get anyone. Microsoft never lift a finger to change anything unless they have to. Windows is full of "legacy" stuff. I am sure that the SSD will last the warranty period (1-2 years) I aim to run a machine for 5-7 years.

Tests show even modestly sized SSDs aren't going to be worn out in 5 or even 10 years. They wear in theory, but in practice they'll wear slower than the rest of your system.

[wraper]

I bought a wonderous intel M.2 SSD, the transfere from it to it is 400MB/s, I suppose that is a RAW 800MB/s, that in on PCIe 3.0 that is supposed to do 4GB/s for M.2......

Is it even NVMe? Sounds like you bought m.2 SATA SSD. One of NVMe SSDs I have does 3500MB/s sequential read, other which is older 2500MB/s. Your result is even worse than 99% of modern SATA SSD do. Or transfer to what?

[wraper]

Yeah,no benefit except booting in 0.7^* seconds.

Except it won't make any significant difference to Windows boot time  . Even fastest NVMe vs SATA makes very little improvement to boot time.

[beanflying]

Interesting read seems 'some' B450 and 470 MB's could be made to run PCIe4 with a Bios update. Way to 'speed up' your virtual memory 

Are you serious? the interface is always faster than the actual storage.

Sorry Sarcasm doesn't always translate well when typed 

On a modern or even relatively modern PC (not laptop) relying on virtual memory is just plain wrong. We are not living in a W95 universe and Memory is 'cheap' in relative terms. That said using M2 NVMe @3-5GB if you have to is so much better than a spinny SATA 

[Mr. Scram]

Sorry Sarcasm doesn't always translate well when typed 

On a modern or even relatively modern PC (not laptop) relying on virtual memory is just plain wrong. We are not living in a W95 universe and Memory is 'cheap' in relative terms. That said using M2 NVMe @3-5GB if you have to is so much better than a spinny SATA 

Relying on it is something you'd like to avoid, but having it as a backup is a good thing.

[beanflying]

Sorry Sarcasm doesn't always translate well when typed 

On a modern or even relatively modern PC (not laptop) relying on virtual memory is just plain wrong. We are not living in a W95 universe and Memory is 'cheap' in relative terms. That said using M2 NVMe @3-5GB if you have to is so much better than a spinny SATA 

Relying on it is something you'd like to avoid, but having it as a backup is a good thing.

For good reason I didn't add turn it off. Using it to avoid raising your memory for your daily workload remains DUMB!

[Mr. Scram]

For good reason I didn't add turn it off. Using it to avoid raising your memory for your daily workload remains DUMB!

Indeed. I was concurring, but I'm not sure how well that translated. 

[Simon]

I bought a wonderous intel M.2 SSD, the transfere from it to it is 400MB/s, I suppose that is a RAW 800MB/s, that in on PCIe 3.0 that is supposed to do 4GB/s for M.2......

Is it even NVMe? Sounds like you bought m.2 SATA SSD. One of NVMe SSDs I have does 3500MB/s sequential read, other which is older 2500MB/s. Your result is even worse than 99% of modern SATA SSD do. Or transfer to what?

I'm not at home to check but it is not SATA if I recall correctly. The socket is not very wide and it sits in between the PCIe slots using some of the lanes, I have 2 slots in fact but these days I am using external storage so just bought a 512GB just in case I used multiple operating systems but am still wating for linux to wake up and smell the 4K coffee.

[Simon]

These days when you turn virtual memoery off it will be turned back on if required or you get warnings in good time. I remember in the dark days of windows millenium, I had a seperate partition for swap at the start of my hard drive because it was faster there and very noticeably. I removed the drive and windows just would not work anymore. They had not even bothered to add the few lines of code required to create and reasign a new default swapfile on the same partition as windows........

[wraper]

I'm not at home to check but it is not SATA if I recall correctly. The socket is not very wide and it sits in between the PCIe slots using some of the lanes, I have 2 slots in fact but these days I am using external storage so just bought a 512GB just in case I used multiple operating systems but am still wating for linux to wake up and smell the 4K coffee.

m.2 slot can accept SATA or NVMe, or both. Generally m.2 slot which accepts NVMe will work with SATA as well.

[nctnico]

The last installs I did of 10 I had to turn it off. It's not that anyone is out to get anyone. Microsoft never lift a finger to change anything unless they have to. Windows is full of "legacy" stuff. I am sure that the SSD will last the warranty period (1-2 years) I aim to run a machine for 5-7 years.

Tests show even modestly sized SSDs aren't going to be worn out in 5 or even 10 years. They wear in theory, but in practice they'll wear slower than the rest of your system.

And how where those tests performed exactly? If you are doing these kind of tests in one go it is very likely you'll get way more write cycles out of an SSD than specified. HOWEVER store that SSD for a couple of months after the test and then try to read the data. Chances are the data cannot be read. Part of the number of write cycles specification is having a meaningfull data retention time.

[nctnico]

I'm not at home to check but it is not SATA if I recall correctly. The socket is not very wide and it sits in between the PCIe slots using some of the lanes, I have 2 slots in fact but these days I am using external storage so just bought a 512GB just in case I used multiple operating systems but am still wating for linux to wake up and smell the 4K coffee.

m.2 slot can accept SATA or NVMe, or both. Generally m.2 slot which accepts NVMe will work with SATA as well.

I wouldn't be so sure about that because the M.2 slot shares lines between the SATA and PCI express lanes. Be sure to check the specifications carefully because you can't determine this just by looking at the connector keying. I have two M.2 modules here which have the same keying but one is SATA only and the other is PCIe only. The same goes for a USB to M.2 converter; I had to buy two different ones  because the ones I have found so far don't seem to support both. I'm working on a design which includes an M.2 PCIe slot; the whole M.2 module slots and interoperability is a mess.

[wraper]

I wouldn't be so sure about that because the M.2 slot shares lines between the SATA and PCI express lanes.

Usually motherboards either have switch to switch between PCI-E/SATA, or CPU/chipset has lanes that can operate both as PCI-E and SATA to begin with.

I have two M.2 modules here which have the same keying but one is SATA only and the other is PCIe only.

Makes no sense. NVMe has PCI-E lane where B key is located. So it cannot have 2 keys unless it's some crippled freak. But SATA with M key only would not be compatible with SATA only m.2 slots. IMHO you confuse something.

[nctnico]

An NVME modules doesn't need to use all the PCIe lanes so an NVME M.2 module can have both B and M keys. NVME doesn't mean a module is limited to M keyed slots.
More information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M.2

[beanflying]

Seriously Samsung Packaging and manual overload for a tiny board needing about zero skills to install It is however 'cute' 

[Mr. Scram]

Seriously Samsung Packaging and manual overload for a tiny board needing about zero skills to install It is however 'cute' 

I beg to differ in regards to the zero skill. You'd be surprised how people manage to mess that up. Of course people want to feel as if they actually bought something worthwhile and a nice box makes it more of an occasion.

[mnementh]

Yeah; I have to admit I'm getting tired of the iPackaging phenomenon. If they spent that money on the bang/buck ratio I'd much prefer it to having 16 kinds of landfill-unfriendly waste to sort & dispose of in each item. 

Welp... Prime day is winding down here... I just screwed Amazon out of 2 kids' Freetime subscriptions and got newer, faster, 4x bigger capacity kids' tablets for them to use in the bargain. I'll use the old ones for a music streamer and my wife's eBook addiction.    Okay, not "Screwing them out of" as I'm paying for them up front, but still I'm saving about $20 and getting a hardware refresh out of the deal.

Found some Ballistix DDR4-3600 CAS16 RAM at a price I can justify, and bought my wife the same Waterpik I got her 2 weeks ago, for $40 less.  I love their liberal return policy. Aside from a ASUS AC1700 router for $59.99, nothing else juicing my 'nads on Prime Day or Anti-Prime Day sales.

LOTS of combos for 450 Chipset boards with 1st/2nd Gen Ryzen; everybody's using "Prime Day" as an excuse to dump their last-gen crap and trying to get as much out of 2xxx processors as the similarly benchmarked 3xx processors, almost to the dollar. 

In the end I bought the MB I wanted at full price; I'll put the Ryzen 3xxx processors I want up on my birthday wish lists and notify those who give a damn about me surviving to see another year. If no "happy surprises", I'll buy whatever Ryzen 3xxx I can afford later. 

Now just casually noodling around for random goodies while my body catches up from staying up til 6am then up again at 11.

Cheers,

mnem
See y'all on the other side...

[beanflying]

Did the rounds of Amazon Primedays BS. Evilbay Bricks and Mortar sellers still come out in front in Oz on this build. - Not so much Prime as a steaming pile of .....

Seems I am building a wee bedroom beast as part of my 'research' but I will save that for another thread 

[tautech]

Bean sales must be good ! 

[olkipukki]

After some more looking at GPU's I reached what I think is the correct thoughts is sit on my hands for 2-3 months until Navi and the Super Nvidea triplets sort themselves out on price and stability. To that end I brought a lightly gamed Gigabyte RX580 to tide me over for $167 USD ($239 pesos). Most likely I will look at Card and Monitor upgrades together and resell the RX 580.

...or waiting until X-mas and post NewYear end-of-madness purchases and you might get something very sweet 

[beanflying]

After some more looking at GPU's I reached what I think is the correct thoughts is sit on my hands for 2-3 months until Navi and the Super Nvidea triplets sort themselves out on price and stability. To that end I brought a lightly gamed Gigabyte RX580 to tide me over for $167 USD ($239 pesos). Most likely I will look at Card and Monitor upgrades together and resell the RX 580.

...or waiting until X-mas and post NewYear end-of-madness purchases and you might get something very sweet 

Seems the AMD Partner cards will be another couple of months then give them another couple to sort out the bugs so October to Christmas might be close. Also going to be interesting to see how the other side responds for $ too The RX 580 should be here tomorrow so I can get on with the rest of the setup time permitting.

[Mr. Scram]

...or waiting until X-mas and post NewYear end-of-madness purchases and you might get something very sweet 

Just make sure you're actually getting a discount. Most of the end of year discounts aren't actually that great or were first inflated to be discounted after.

[mnementh]

https://smile.amazon.com/Ryzen-Gaming-Motherboard-Prime-B450-Plus/dp/B07FKT5CTH


$76 for the next 11 hours... or til sold out. 95% of stock remaining. Seems a good deal since Honey sez it's regularly $138 board, based on prices from Amazon. OTOH, Amazon sez regular price is $89. 

Also ASUS TUF X470-Plus $99 next 6.5 hours: https://smile.amazon.com/TUF-X470-Plus-Gaming-Ryzen-Motherboard/dp/B07C5YR3KS/

mnem