Almost Retro :)

[Camden_Guitarist]

Hey there community,

I've been a big fan of Linus for a  couple of years but this is my first post.

 

I am trying to wring out the last ounce of of performance out of my aging hardware by upgrading from time to time. At the moment I just can't afford to change out the core components: Gigabyte GA-Z97X-UD3H with an Intel i7-4790K and 32 Gb of DDR3 ram. I'm running currently an RTX 2080 Super and my operating system is on a M.2 drive on the board. I've come into some NVMe drives that I'd like to use in tandem so I was thinking of getting a PCIe 4x converter for the NVMe drives.

 

My question is, will this give me the boost in performance over the M.2 on the board withough negatively impacting the graphics card? I do understand that the GPU is probably already bottlenecked a bit by the MOBO and CPU (yet it was indicated by https://pc-builds.com/bottleneck-calculator/ to have the least negative impact).

 

Any insights would be greatly appreciated. I know I run old hardware but from what I gather from forums on games I play, I get a lot less glitches and crashes than people with shiny new builds so that'll do me.

 

Have an awesome weekend everyone!

[Needfuldoer]

Welcome!

 

1 hour ago, Camden_Guitarist said:

My question is, will this give me the boost in performance over the M.2 on the board withough negatively impacting the graphics card?

 

Here's what your motherboard's manual says about PCIe expansion:

 

 

If you're not using any of your PCIe x1 slots, installing an NVMe SSD in a PCIe x4 riser in the PCIEx4 slot won't impact your GPU.

 

If you install anything in your PCIEX8 slot, you'll take half your GPU's lanes away. (Unfortunately that's just the nature of regular desktop platforms; they've only got so many PCIe lanes to go around. Either they share lanes, or they have to hit a switch chip. Either way you're losing bandwidth.)

 

More fast storage won't give you more frames per second, though. If you want a better gameplay experience, I'm afraid a platform upgrade is unavoidable.

 

What kind of budget are you working with? Ryzen 3000 series is a great value on the used market now, and even that will feel like a rocket ship compared to your Haswell machine.

 

1 hour ago, Camden_Guitarist said:

yet it was indicated by https://pc-builds.com/bottleneck-calculator/ to have the least negative impact

"Bottleneck calculators" might as well be random number generators, because of how varied and situational computer workloads are. Don't take what they say as gospel.

[Mark Kaine]

That hw is still ok for majority of titles - im pretty sure it should even run crazy stuff like cyberpunk at ~30fps.

 

 

And no a NVME drive isn't going to give you more performance  - in fact LTT did a blind test some years ago and nobody could actually tell the difference (with few exceptions like computational expensive tasks like doing video editing / previews) 

 

better save the money towards a new platform (motherboard cpu ram) cause your hw is still ok but who knows for how long... 

 

[Camden_Guitarist]

Thank you very much guys for your input. I know that for a better peformance I should upgrade, I'm not a big fan of AMD though, never have been, I know they've made loads of progress, probably even more than Intel, but I'm just a team blue member, it is what it is.

 

I'll keep on looking for second hand higher gen Intel stuff, I've always been into retro hardware, fixing up what other people toss away. This machine was built from parts I bought back in 2014 to build my second Hackintosh project.

 

Eventually I wanted to go back into PC gaming and so I upgraded RAM and processor to what I currently have (the best of that generation)

 

My GT740 was switched for a GTX1050ti, a GTX1080 and now I have an RTX2080 Super. Allt the GTX cards are/were second hand and have done a tremendous job. I'll keep the NVMe's for another project or at least swap my current Sytemdrive (M.2) for one of them, they're bigger anyway.

 

Cheers!

[Mark Kaine]

4 hours ago, Camden_Guitarist said:

probably even more than Intel, but I'm just a team blue member, it is what it is.

there's no probably about that ... lol.

 

not that i personally care but if you ever get another intel get 11th or 12th gen, 13th/14th gen have massive issues and unclear if ever get fixed.

 

and no problem... but the answer is still nah a nvme will not make your gaming experience better it's just literally wasted money for your use case and hardware,  as said, better save up for a platform change imo... gpu is still ok, cpu is borderline not (anymore) 

 

even a 9th gen or something would be a huge upgrade and probably not that expensive.