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Do I need PCIe 4x for NVME?

Spork829
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My motherboard (ASRock Z97 Extreme4) has an M.2 socket that says it supports up to PCIe Gen 2 x2 (10Gb/s). Will the new top-of-the-line NVME drives (960 pro, RD400, MP500, etc.) work in this socket, or do they require a 4x connection?

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It should work (as long as the m.2 slot is keyed the same)

You may see slightly lower speeds than if it were in a 4x slot, but it should still be blisteringly fast compared to sata.

When in doubt, re-format.

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2 minutes ago, pwn_intended said:

It should work (as long as the m.2 slot is keyed the same)

You may see slightly lower speeds than if it were in a 4x slot, but it should still be blisteringly fast compared to sata.

Disagreed, except in professional workloads. NVMe does nothing for boot up and application launch times compared to decent SATA drives.

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2 minutes ago, DocSwag said:

Disagreed, except in professional workloads. NVMe does nothing for boot up and application launch times compared to decent SATA drives.

Oh really? Perhaps I'm better off saving some money and going with SATA. 

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1 minute ago, Spork829 said:

Oh really? Perhaps I'm better off saving some money and going with SATA. 

Yeah, unless you do stuff like video editing or stuff where you constantly do large file transfers and stuff NVMe actually doesn't make much of a difference. For pure boot up times and launching games SATA drives perform basically identically to even the highest end of NVMe drives. As you can see by this review of the 2tb 960 pro, in boot up and game launch times NVMe drives really aren't much faster than SATA drives at all. The difference is 5% at most. It's only in large file transfers and stuff where it actually matters. Something like an 850 evo or Sandisk SSD Plus will be fine for you.

Make sure to quote me or tag me when responding to me, or I might not know you replied! Examples:

 

Do this:

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And make sure you do it by hitting the quote button at the bottom left of my post, and not the one inside the editor!

Or this:

@DocSwag

 

Buy whatever product is best for you, not what product is "best" for the market.

 

Interested in computer architecture? Still in middle or high school? P.M. me!

 

I love computer hardware and feel free to ask me anything about that (or phones). I especially like SSDs. But please do not ask me anything about Networking, programming, command line stuff, or any relatively hard software stuff. I know next to nothing about that.

 

Compooters:

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Laptop (I use it for school):

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And if you're curious (or a stalker) I have a Just Black Pixel 2 XL 64gb

 

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3 minutes ago, DocSwag said:

Disagreed, except in professional workloads. NVMe does nothing for boot up and application launch times compared to decent SATA drives.

I'm talking about RAW transfer speed. Not necessarily the overall feel of the computer.

 

Totally agree on the SATA SSD recommendation. I would also definitely recommend on going with a "standard" SATA drive, not an m.2 one. Might as well keep the slot open for an NVMe for down the road.

When in doubt, re-format.

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3 minutes ago, DocSwag said:

Yeah, unless you do stuff like video editing or stuff where you constantly do large file transfers and stuff NVMe actually doesn't make much of a difference. For pure boot up times and launching games SATA drives perform basically identically to even the highest end of NVMe drives. As you can see by this review of the 2tb 960 pro, in boot up and game launch times NVMe drives really aren't much faster than SATA drives at all. The difference is 5% at most. It's only in large file transfers and stuff where it actually matters. Something like an 850 evo or Sandisk SSD Plus will be fine for you.

 

2 minutes ago, pwn_intended said:

I'm talking about RAW transfer speed. Not necessarily the overall feel of the computer.

 

Totally agree on the SATA SSD recommendation. I would also definitely recommend on going with a "standard" SATA drive, not an m.2 one. Might as well keep the slot open for an NVMe for down the road.

Alright thank you. I'm using a Sandisk SSD Plus in my laptop right now and it's great (though it's being bottlenecked by SATA 2). Figured that M.2 would be nice but if the day-to-day performance won't change over SATA much, better I save the money.

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Yeah stick to sata, don't waste money :)

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