Intel told me OPTANE is memory even though it is slower than Samsung NVME…It has faster IOPS !!!.
ITS MEMORY !!
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Optane seems like another way for Intel to lock you into their ecosystem.
There are other SSD cache solutions. Maybe they are not as cheap or easy for a pro solution, but I just looked into a thread on AnandTech and even Windows ReadyBoost will cache an SSD. When motherboards start coming with Optane DIMM slots as standard equipment and Intel lets other companies make Optane chips I will consider it.
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You could easily create a swap partition on the optane drive for use in linux ( which is pretty equivalent to using it for virtual memory under windows)
but a properly setup machine shouldn’t be using swap though… imo
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But you can do that with any storage medium.
^this
You’re not using up all your RAM now, so why would you need more? People get a couple bucks in their pocket and feel obligated to immediately spend it.
And Optane is storage not memory, Intel’s marketing aside. It’s most appropriately used to cache access to a slow magnetic disk.
+1
amen
Currently I am running an i5 3570k, 16 GB of DDR3, an Ivyu Bridge Z77 board from ASUS, and Gigabyte 1080Ti Extreme edition (got on a wicked deal from microcenter) and multiple SSDs and HDDs.
The upgrade I am intending on would only be the CPU/RAM/MOBO…as of now.
What are you doing with the system?
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I’d take your drives, buy a new board/cpu/memory (16 or 32+ GB depending on what you’re doing) and skip optane personally.
It’s still early.
What workload are you trying to run? Have you measured any performance problems?
Optane is just a fast storage device. If you’re trying to make storage go faster… maybe. But I suspect you’d get better bang for buck (and less complexity) elsewhere.
I do a bit of everything in general. Most of the time it is a mix of gaming at 3440x1440, media consumption, general multitaking (being word/excel/etc) I have also recently began to encode/work with some video files in order to generate a home media server. I can tell that the workflow may be improved based on processing power. I also have been interested in 3d rending/3d printing but have yet to dive deep into it and would rank it lower on my priorities at this point in time.
I understand that my workload would likely suffice with another i5 and 16 GB of ram, but I would like to have this new systems core components last for years into the future before noticing any sort of bottleneck or slow in performance.
GIven the workload you mention above, i’d say your regular SSDs are fast enough and that you’d see more benefit from the 32 GB of RAM than an optane drive.
Optane will be good to accelerate SSD for workloads where you have massive amounts of IO requests, and none of those things you mentioned do that…
And yes, CPU will be the biggest bottleneck you want to improve in my opinion. Even if you can find a secondhand ivy bridge i7 for cheap in the mean-time - the difference is significant. I droped in a xeon e3-1231v3 to replace my old haswell based i5-4430 and it improved things a lot.
Out of curiosity, and for lack of my optane knowledge, what are some big IO requests workloads that typically benefit from one?
It’s not so much big IO requests. Optane’s massive win over regular SSD is in response time. it is very good at handling many small requests, vs. an SSD.
Things like gaming, streaming video, video editing are largely a smaller number of big IO requests. The bigger the IO requests, the less important response time is. e.g., a 4 megabyte read vs. 4,000 1kb reads. the 4 megabyte read has to wait once for the storage to respond to the request. The 4000 1kb reads have to wait for 4000 response times… if you’re doing tens of thousands or millions of IO requests per second that adds up fast. But that’s just not what single user desktops tend to do…
Optane IMHO is a solution looking for a problem as far as desktops go. Would be great in a server environment for heavily loaded database servers, or VM servers serving a lot of users - in a home environment… meh… not so much.
I’m not saying you’d see zero benefit… but the benefits optane bring to a single user desktop just aren’t massive… imho.
And certainly in your case there are other areas you’d get better bang for buck from first.
It definitely sounds like the cost to benefit would not be worth it for an optane. I would rather spend additional money for the increased RAM. My issue is my current build was purchased at a time when 16 GB of DDR3 went for $70 and now that is slightly more than doubled.
Yup, i feel your pain. I just bought 32 GB of DDR4-3000, for 1.5x the price that i paid for 32 GB of DDR3-1600, 3 years ago. And that was “cheap” by today’s pricing.
I’d spend some time trying to measure where your system is holding you up for what you do, and replace those components first. My gut feeling would be your CPU is the limiting factor. However replacing that with something new will mean new board, new CPU, new RAM.
And right now as you know RAM is overpriced.
In the mean-time, you may want to consider waiting that out, and might want to see if you can locate a higher spec CPU that fits the Z77 board you have, and start from there. Something like an i7-3770(k) if you can find one cheap. The extra threads will definitely help if you’re CPU bound.
It won’t be as quick as a new machine, but you can probably get a significant upgrade for cheap to tide you over until RAM prices come down.
I actually didn’t even consider getting a 3770k to hold me over…that isn’t a bad idea. I’ve been trying to research RAM prices, shortages, etc and everything is saying prices are not going to drop that much in the near future. I have noticed prices are SLIGHTLY going down, maybe $5-$10 for 16 GB but nothing that is making me jump and buy it.
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Just had a quick look on ebay. i7-3770k seems to be roughly $100-200.
If you aren’t worried about overclocking, an i7-3770 non-k may be better bet as they’re available cheaper.
I just searched also, the 3770 non-k seems to be going for as low as $105. This now has me thinking though, what would another 16 GB of DDR3 be…insert me searching… which would be another $90. So, for just under $200, I would be getting an i7, albeit older, and have 32 GB of DDR3
If you can get DDR3 that cheap i’d jump on it personally.
The difference between 16 and 32 GB for “general desktop stuff”, gaming, etc. in my experience isn’t huge but it will give you more flexibility for multi-tasking, virtual machines, etc. 32 GB is that tipping point where you can mostly forget about memory being an issue for most stuff.
I do think that the CPU and RAM will probably be your best upgrade path until DDR4 comes down to a reasonable cost. I just upgraded from a haswell 4 core 8 thread box with 32 GB of DDR3 and performance was still pretty damn good considering how old it was. The main reasons I upgraded were to get IOMMU (my H87 board didn’t support it) and more cores for VMs.
One consideration is, will RAM prices ever go down? There is speculation that because a lot more mobile RAM is necessary because of phones and tablet that desktop RAM has began to take a back seat in production priority. What realistic reduction in DDR4 prices can we expect in the next month? year? or longer perhaps. At this rate it could be that prices do not return to “normal” until near time for DDR5.