On my PC I use the following: AutoCAD, 3dsMax, MATLAB and gaming. I sometimes record with OBS and use Adobe After Effects and Media Encoder.
Is the price difference between the two worth it?
The rest of my specs:
Asus X570-E
R9-3900X
Vega56
32GB (4x8) DDR3200MHz (CL16)
Samsung 850 EVO 500GB SATA (current main drive)
Teamgroup MP33 1TB NVMe
Crucial BX500 240GB Sata SSD
EVGA 850W Bronze PSU
Also, are both of my M.2 slots connected directly to the CPU? Or does one go through the X570 chipset. The motherboard manual is very confusing on this.
Ryzen doesn’t have enough PCIe lanes to have multiple M.2 slots off the CPU. The top one is usually connected to the CPU, the lower ones off the chipset.
That depends. A cursory look on my end shows the A2000 at $119, and the 970 Plus at $170. The read/write between the two are 2200/2200 MB/s versus 3500/3300 MB/s. Looks like the speed premium is close to the price at a glance.
Given your uses, you might see a marginal benefit. Either way, you’re going to beat the pants off that 850.
If you’re going to force a yes/no out of me, then I say yes, go for the 970. I love encouraging reckless choices, and I’ll say it’s in the name of future-proofing 'cause you can’t prove it isn’t.
Since you have a 3900X, and there’s nothing exotic going on with the X570-E in this regard (that I can find), one of those M.2 slots is going through the chipset.
IMO nowadays you pay for the name when it comes to Samsung SSDs. Are they good? Yes. Are there other brands that are just as good for less? Also yes.
Having used a handful of different speed SSDs over the years I find it increasingly hard to notice the difference in speed as speed increases. The jump from spinning rust to a SATA SSD feels huge, the jump from a SATA SSD to a lower end NVMe SSD doesn’t feel as large, and the jump from a lower end NVMe to a higher end one even smaller.
I’m still iffy on Kingston after their bait and switch with the V300, but that was six years ago and I don’t know of it happening since.
Other options may be the WD Blue SN550, WD SN750, or Adata SX8200 Pro. I’m particularly fond of the WD Blue SN550, I think it’s a good price to performance drive.
Your second M.2 slot is most likely through the chipset, but if it still has PCIe 3.0 x4 lanes it should still plenty snappy unless your simultaneously pegging the chipset with other IO at the same time.
I’d like to suggest the PNY XLR8 CS3030 M.2 NVMe SSD 1TB. It has a fairly high TBW, 5 years of warranty and is one of the cheaper SSDs. I have the 2TB version and am quite happy with it.
I really like how the XPG SX8200 Pro looks compared to the rest. For the 970 Evo Plus, I’d had to pay 59 € extra. To me, the 44 € price difference from the Kingston A2000 seems worth it.
The more I look at the specs and the price of the SX8200 the more I like it.
The choice looks pretty clear or am I missing something obvious here?
Pay attention to the 4k random 1Q1T tests for these drives (basically the bottom of the crystaldiskmark screen shots). This is where you’ll spend a good portion of your time. Sequential is often not achievable by most tasks. The one task that will matter is encoding and editing where you need to access a large file sequentially. The rest of your tasks will be multiple small files meaning you will have a hard time achieving higher speeds.
The only other thing to consider is longevity, which is what I think you really pay for with samsung. They are tried and true and they’re aware of that. So you pay for it. Is it overpriced? probably. Is it worth it anyway? thats up to you to decide. The kingston is TLC versus the Samsungs MLC. I believe the adata pro drives also feature MLC.
Both of the WD drives are TLC and not worth their price IMO.
While I agree they are not worth it, since when is TLC a bad thing? 1TB TLC will always be better than 1TB QLC provided the rest of it is similar.
ADATA is OK, when it comes to SSDs, but for me the only decision in your list is price.
Samsung will be more reliable when it comes to speed, life and FW capabilities.
Kingston is a different price category.
You only mentioned one thing that would make me choose Kingston: Encoding videos - if you backup data and perform a lot of writes price becomes a big parameter due to lifespan.
If you do not encode terabytes of videos a week and you want to have a reliable computer go for the pricy samsung. Considering your use case price should not be an issue. Only you have the ability to decide.
EDIT: I talk about reliability as SSDs cannot be measured as block devices. Not even 4K random is a precise test. Degradation and variance in performance is too unpredictable for real life use. Using block tests is now very similar to using GPU benchmarks.
Aren’t they all TLC drives?
The A2000 is a great budget drive with decent performance (you won’t be winning any benchmarks and it will be the slowest from the list) and good warranty from Kingston. The SX8200 Pro is a good middle ground and many people like them. The 970 EVO Plus is the “better” performing drive from the list, but that “better” really depends if you really need that sort of speed for your use case. The SN750 is similar in performance to the EVO PLus, but also tends to be overpriced (not as much as Samsung drives).
I’d personally go with the standard 970 EVO that over the EVO Plus, considering the money saved and performance difference. I recently bought a used laptop that had been upgraded with a 512GB SX8200, and can’t complain about it.
Granted I’m using a 660p in my desktop, but the only time I’ve seen any benefits from using my NVMe drive over SATA is saving larger (4GB+) render outputs from Max. For everything else, CPU and GPU are normally a bottleneck way before storage speed becomes an issue.
At the end of the day, you’re pretty safe going with any TLC-based SSDs, as long as the firmware isn’t complete trash. The Sabrent Rocket is another drive to throw into the mix.
I’ve been happy with my 970 evo. However, I can’t tell the difference in day to day use (outside of benchmarks and BULK file copies) between it and the two 860s and an 850 in my rig. Seriously, I can’t tell the difference day to day.
All of them are fast enough for video editing, game loads are imperceptibly different (I have to look to find out which drive I installed stuff when I’m looking to free space on any given drive), etc.
Buy the one you like that is a good price with a good warranty.
Unless you have special speed requirements, in which case buy Optane.
But based on your stated workloads, I suspect you will see zero noticeable performance difference between the 850 you already have and any M.2 NVME drive. On paper, in benchmarks, sure. But the things you do aren’t SSD bandwidth limited once you’re up at 450-550MB/sec read/write or above.
I’ll add to the above - I also have a Crucial MX300 in an external caddy (480 GB) and that thing - I do notice the performance hit when writing large amounts to it. It starts off fine but drops to 100 MB/sec or even slower beyond some amount when it runs out of cache.
It’s fine, but for write heavy workloads, that’s where you may want to look up some benchmarks. Reads are fine though (and for general gaming, etc. your workload will be almost entirely read except for during game install).
If you do a significant amount of video editing, particularly with larger projects it may be worth looking at a Pro level Samsung Drive (or other higher end drive) with more cache/faster sustained write performance - even if it is SATA rather than m.2. It depends how much you’re writing and what your sustained throughput requirements are. Even a small pro level drive as a scratch/work disk (leave OS on SATA, and fast SSD/optane for scratch disk). That’s probably where optane would be great. But it depends how important video work is to you and how much time you spend doing that, etc.
But video editing with large files is the only workload I see in the OP’s list that might benefit from anything special.
