Question SSD vs NVME for games?

[MustangSVT]

I currently have MSI z490m with i5100600kf which limits me (performance wise) to pcie 3.0 (4.0 requires a 11 series cpu).

Anyway I need to get more storage mostly for games and should I get SSD at half the price or NVME for performance? from the reviews I found, the performance gain seems to be minimal for games for some reason even with pcie 4.0.

Any suggestions? If performance in games are similar, i was just going to get 2t SSD.

 

[Shmee]

Most good NVMe drives will still be much faster than a SATA SSD, but probably not noticeably so in most games. Most load times may be hard to tell apart. It is generally other tasks that you notice the difference.

If you want to save money on a game storage drive, a SATA SSD does make sense.

But, what two drives did you have in mind? Keep in mind there are different tiers of both NVMe and SATA SSDs.

 

[Tech Junky]

After the initial boot or game load everything is about the same between the two. The nvme will load and boot faster but besides that it's about the same.

 

[In2Photos]

Are you sure that a SATA SSD is half the price? Lately the cost of NVME drives seem to be almost equal to that of a SATA SSD.

https://pcpartpicker.com/products/internal-hard-drive/#A=2000000000000,22000000000000&sort=price&t=0

I would go NVME simply for the ease of installation. No wires, no connection to the PSU.

 

[Tech Junky]

I would go NVME simply for the ease of installation. No wires, no connection to the PSU.

Depends on the underlying system. If the MOBO doesn't have dual slots for M2 then you have to use a HBA to add a 2nd drive.

 

[In2Photos]

Depends on the underlying system. If the MOBO doesn't have dual slots for M2 then you have to use a HBA to add a 2nd drive.

The motherboard has 2 M.2 slots and I have a feeling the OP wouldn't have asked about a NVME drive if there wasn't an available slot.

 

[Tech Junky]

MSI z490m

The motherboard has 2 M.2 slots and I have a feeling the OP wouldn't have asked about a NVME drive if there wasn't an available slot.

There is more than one model and some may or may not have dual sockets for M2 drives.

Using a SATA SSD will work just fine but be slightly slower for the load times. If the price difference is negligible then most of us would opt for the nvme over an SSD.

 

[aigomorla]

R-0 SATA SSD's. Raid-0, you can set it up in microsoft storage spaces in windows 10 and 11.

https://www.techradar.com/how-to/how-to-combine-multiple-hard-drives-in-raid-0-using-windows-10s-storage-spaces-feature#:~:text=Windows%2010%20doesn't%20call,'Manage%20Storage%20Spaces'%20label

.

Double the Write Endurance as R-0 writes half to each drive.
Since gaming drives are not data critical with cloud backups, if one fails and you lose all data, it just means you replacing the failed drive, and redownloading the game.
SATA ports are not being used as much lately, so you may as well utilize them.

Also for games, you want Capacity >>> Raw Speed.
Id rather have double the capacity then double the load speed, as in most cases, double the load speed is only a few seconds as best, while double the capacity means more games in your library without deletion required.

As for gaming speed difference, this video should show you more in detail.

As you can see it dependent on how much data the map requires to load.
But also note, if your playing a lot of competitive FPS, it doesn't matter if you load first, as you always have to wait for the last person to load, so load times maybe moot.
But for example in games like battlefront where it say the longest gap, if you loaded the map 5 seconds before everyone, you would still need to wait at the wash paper screen until the last person loaded, or the load timer expired.

 

[EJZ_Nerd]

I guess SSD will be ideal for that.

 

[Harry_Wild]

At the 2023 CES, PCI-5 NvME was released! At 10X faster then PCI-4 ones. Your motherboard & chipset has to have the lanes in it to get maximum throughput!

 

[Tech Junky]

At the 2023 CES, PCI-5 NvME was released! At 10X faster then PCI-4 ones. Your motherboard & chipset has to have the lanes in it to get maximum throughput!

Nope. Your math is bad.

Gen3 - 3500
Gen4 - 7000
Geb5 - 14000