Expensive Build - Gen 4 / Gen 3?

[saarxee]

I will buy some premium build with 5900X and X570 mobo..
Gen 4 is worth it? for 2TB capacity the difference from gen 3 to the fastest gen 4 (Rocket 4 plus) is 200$.
I think the main use is gaming and general use and maybe video editing in the future..
Or it is better to save money?

 

[dgianstefani]

Gen 4 is useful for the high end but not the low end.

Elaborated, 3060/70 are both gen 4, but are the same performance as 2080ti in 3070. 2080ti was fine on gen3x16 and gen 3x8 was a couple %slower. Gen 4 makes sense for 3080/90 etc and with resizable BAR.

As for storage gen 4 only offers higher sequential. Underlying nand technology isn't changed much so effective speed is similar. Gen 4 however is useful since you can do more with fewer lanes or with splitting. Ie raid arrays or maxing out slots on mobo.

 

[saarxee]

Gen 4 is useful for the high end but not the low end.

Elaborated, 3060/70 are both gen 4, but are the same performance as 2080ti in 3070. 2080ti was fine on gen3x16 and gen 3x8 was a couple %slower. Gen 4 makes sense for 3080/90 etc and with resizable BAR.

As for storage gen 4 only offers higher sequential. Underlying nand technology isn't changed much so effective speed is similar. Gen 4 however is useful since you can do more with fewer lanes or with splitting. Ie raid arrays or maxing out slots on mobo.

Oh man.. I mean on storage.. not on the graphics cards..

 

[TheLostSwede]

Where the new gen PCIe 4.0 drives see an improvement in general is the response time, which can be important.
The new Phison controller also seems to quite good at RND4K, which might also matter.
It kind of comes down to what you use your system for, but apart from the additional cost, there are no downsides.
You wouldn't really notice it in most instances. It's not like moving from spinning rust to an SSD, that's for sure.
The price difference seem to be more like $150, which is a lot of money for the same amount of storage (PCIe 3.0 vs the latest 4.0 one).
I wouldn't get the first gen Phison based PCIe 4.0 drives, as those controllers run really hot.

 

[saarxee]

Where the new gen PCIe 4.0 drives see an improvement in general is the response time, which can be important.
The new Phison controller also seems to quite good at RND4K, which might also matter.
It kind of comes down to what you use your system for, but apart from the additional cost, there are no downsides.
You wouldn't really notice it in most instances. It's not like moving from spinning rust to an SSD, that's for sure.
The price difference seem to be more like $150, which is a lot of money for the same amount of storage (PCIe 3.0 vs the latest 4.0 one).
I wouldn't get the first gen Phison based PCIe 4.0 drives, as those controllers run really hot.

So... drives like MP600 / Aorus Gen 4 and SN750 are first gen 4?

 

[milewski1015]

So... drives like MP600 / Aorus Gen 4 and SN750 are first gen 4?

The first two are 1st Gen gen 4 Phison-based drives, yes. The SN750 uses a proprietary WD controller

 

[saarxee]

The first two are 1st Gen gen 4 Phison-based drives, yes. The SN750 uses a proprietary WD controller

So it is worth it to buy the sabrent 2tb rocket 4 plus?

 

[kapone32]

So it is worth it to buy the sabrent 2tb rocket 4 plus?

Read as many well worded reviews as you can and do Google searches for issues and you should have a good idea

 

[saarxee]

Read as many well worded reviews as you can and do Google searches for issues and you should have a good idea

What? I read a lot in google but why you told that...
I ask if the difference is worth it

 

[milewski1015]

So it is worth it to buy the sabrent 2tb rocket 4 plus?

As @TheLostSwede mentioned, it's really dependent on your use-case for the system.

I ask if the difference is worth it

The difference between PCIe 3.0 and PCIe 4.0? See the second line in my quote from Swede's post below:

It kind of comes down to what you use your system for, but apart from the additional cost, there are no downsides.
You wouldn't really notice it in most instances. It's not like moving from spinning rust to an SSD, that's for sure.
The price difference seem to be more like $150, which is a lot of money for the same amount of storage (PCIe 3.0 vs the latest 4.0 one).

Given that your main use is gaming and you might do some video editing in the future, personally I'd be hesitant to shell out for a PCIe 4.0 drive right out of the gate. At this time, NVMe SSDs (let alone PCIe 4.0 NVMe drives) don't really offer a significant performance improvement over SATA SSDs when it comes to game load times. Microsoft's Direct Storage implementation on Windows may change that, but until then, we don't really know if it will or by how much. It also has to be specifically supported by the games themselves.

If you're dead set on video editing that'll make use of the high sequential read and write speeds NVMe has to offer, then sure, opting for an NVMe drive isn't a terrible idea. But to me, if you're unsure that you're going to be doing a lot of video editing like your initial post makes it seem, I would opt for a cheaper (maybe even SATA) SSD now and then spring for a better one if you find you really need it. Personally, I'm still rocking SATA SSDs only. All I do is game and occasionally trim down a recorded clip. I have no need for NVMe speeds at this point in time. Maybe that will change come Direct Storage's arrival on PC, but I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.

TL;DR: If you're set on NVMe, I would go for a Gen 3 drive now and add a Gen 4 one later if you find you're doing a lot of video editing. At this point though, with gaming being your main focus, you likely don't even need a Gen 3 NVMe drive and could make so just fine with SATA. It really depends how much money you want to throw around.

 

[GorbazTheDragon]

Gen 4 is not particularly useful in most practical uses for daily users, you will usually not care about having the crazy sequential performance as there are other bottlenecks elsewhere in the system that will be more limiting. The drives themselves are also more bottlenecked on the flash and controller than they are on the data bus, so basically it's just not worth spending more on. If you can get an equal quality gen4 drive over a gen3 drive that's fine I guess but there's no reason to go out of your way to get gen 4.

As mentioned above, even SATA to gen 3 is only a small jump in practice, if any (particularly in game loading times for example), just being on a SSD gives you a massive improvement in IOPS over hard disks, there simply isn't such an order of magnitude improvement going between different SSDs.

That said, the SATA to NVMe jump is next to nothing price wise nowadays (compare MX500/WD Blue 3D/Sandisk Ultra 3D to e.g 970 Evo or SN750 for example), and the jump from SATA to a upper-midrange NVMe drive like those mentioned before is generally way bigger than between gen 3 and gen 4 drives.

 

[freeagent]

Gen 3 for a Joe Blow like me is insanely fast.

Complete overkill. Sure is nice though

 

[GorbazTheDragon]

I will also add, with respect to the SATA Vs NVMe thing, SATA ports are still much more available than m.2 slots in most builds/boards. So, if you are like me and keep drives in use for the better part of a decade (and then demote them to NAS usage), you might want to consider that SATA drives are generally easy to keep around, whereas keeping m.2 drives means keeping precious m.2 slots occupied... But it really depends how you treat your hardware.