pci-e 3 to 4 any diff

[xu^]

realised that after upgrading my platform, that both my nvme drives are both gen 3, would i actually notice any difference upgrading them to gen 4 or 5? day to day use, loading games and things.

 

[Macro Device]

If your sense of speed isn't excessive then no, you won't notice any real improvement. Might get better linear speeds which are mostly relevant for those who move huge chunks of data (doesn't help with massive amounts of tiny files) on a daily basis. Buying gen 3 today is cost inefficient anyway so if you wanna increase your overall drive capacity then go ahead and buy a gen 4 drive. For a speed upgrade, you're better off looking for a drive with the best random reads and writes. This is thousands of times slower than the PCI-e interface can provide so gen 3/4 is irrelevant here.

I'm also on gen 3 now. There's no reason for me to upgrade it as well.

 

[68Olds]

No. While you will see higher numbers in a benchmark, you won't really 'feel' it in the seat of your pants.

 

[BlaezaLite]

Probably not. I had only gen 3 drives in my old build and notice no loading speed differences, although benchmarks may say different. Just make sure to only get gen 4 and above from now on as they are cheaper now.

 

[AleXXX666]

Probably not. I had only gen 3 drives in my old build and notice no loading speed differences, although benchmarks may say different. Just make sure to only get gen 4 and above from now on as they are cheaper now.

i'd better "buy" what's RELIABLE not that's "cheaper"

 

[xtreemchaos]

Apart from the speed which in normal use we don't really see unless we are looking for it, anything over a 1000mb trans is fast, gen4 tend to run hotter which could lead to shorted lifespan.

 

[BlaezaLite]

i'd better "buy" what's RELIABLE not that's "cheaper"

I said cheaper as "SOME" people look at price as the main reason not to buy something. Reliability should be a no brainer given how good SSD's are now.

 

[AleXXX666]

I said cheaper as "SOME" people look at price as the main reason not to buy something. Reliability should be a no brainer given how good SSD's are now.

well, 1% of wear every month isn't "reliable" for me, 1% for few years - "okayish"...

AND REMEMBER, I'M NOT SERVER GUY, IT'S JUST 0DAY HOME USAGE

 

[Chrispy_]

realised that after upgrading my platform, that both my nvme drives are both gen 3, would i actually notice any difference upgrading them to gen 4 or 5? day to day use, loading games and things.

As others have said, no - you won't notice a difference.

Games will load a few percent faster, which translates into savings of maybe 5 seconds per hour of gaming.
Applications will install and run at the same speed, within margin of error.

Buy a faster SSD only if you are hitting bandwidth issues (4K/8K RAW video editing that involves a lot of moving/copying very large files and then seeking through them a lot), or if you are hitting IOPS issues (hosting multiple busty VMs or working with database-heavy simulations).

For casual consumer use, SSD progress is basically irrelevant now since we hit CPU and software bottlenecks long ago that have even the very fastest Gen5 SSDs still serving data at only 100MB/s instead of the 10GB/s they're capable of. It's because the data stream is poorly-queued, single-threaded, and bumping up against NAND read write latencies or it's just wating on a processor for encode/decode, encrypt/decrypt, compress/decompress overhead.

Tiered storage using RAM cache is the answer but it needs mainstream support and tight OS integration before anything really changes so we're stuck with NAND for the forseeable future. No matter how good your SSD is on paper, Windows and consumer workloads will probably never push it beyond 5000 IOPS, a queue depth of 5, and more than about 8 threads. You'll only see the speed increase of newer SSDs for those rare occasions when you copy from one fast SSD to another fast SSD, which most people do almost never unless they're transferring data from an old SSD to a new SSD.

 

[Hardcore Games]

I have a PCIe 4.0 SSD stuffed in my laptop and it does boot slight faster but the difference is negligible. PCIe 4.0 can handle 8000 MB/s before it saturates.

 

[Ruru]

When I saw the thread title, I was thinking about GPU bottlenecking. Anyway, I'll post this, shouldn't hurt anyone.

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 PCI-Express Scaling

The new NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 is a graphics card powerhouse, but what happens when you run it on a PCI-Express 4.0 x8 bus? In our mini-review we've also tested various PCI-Express 3.0, 2.0 and 1.1 configs to get a feel for how FPS scales with bandwidth.

www.techpowerup.com

 

[GerKNG]

a 990 Pro (the fastest gen 4 ssd available) is barely even reaching Gen 3 speeds in real life tasks.
except when you copy a video from one 990 pro to another (which does so at ~15% above the Gen 3 Speed) you will literally be unable to see any difference.

 

[Ruru]

a 990 Pro (the fastest gen 4 ssd available) is barely even reaching Gen 3 speeds in real life tasks.
except when you copy a video from one 990 pro to another (which does so at ~15% above the Gen 3 Speed) you will literally be unable to see any difference.

The "slowness" of PCIe3 is hella overadvertised.

 

[A Computer Guy]

realised that after upgrading my platform, that both my nvme drives are both gen 3, would i actually notice any difference upgrading them to gen 4 or 5? day to day use, loading games and things.

Not really outside of specific tasks.

 

[ShrimpBrime]

I mean, how can we tell without really seeing what's going on.

Does it post like mine and pretty much usable the second windows is up??

https://imgur.com/a/LkBYOvc

 

[A Computer Guy]

I mean, how can we tell without really seeing what's going on.

Does it post like mine and pretty much usable the second windows is up??

https://imgur.com/a/LkBYOvc

LOL how did your UEFI post that fast? (edit) Oh wait I see Intel inside.

 

[Chrispy_]

I have a PCIe 4.0 SSD stuffed in my laptop and it does boot slight faster but the difference is negligible. PCIe 4.0 can handle 8000 MB/s before it saturates.

That's down to your laptop's windows install, hardware configuration, and BIOS

This chart has Gen3, Gen4, and Gen5 drives all mixed up in the results because Windows bootup never gets remotely close to to the bandwidth limits of even a Gen3 x2 drive. You're loading about 5-6GB of data off a disk in around 12 seconds, which even a 550MB/s SATA drive like 860 EVO can handle.

 

[ShrimpBrime]

LOL how did your UEFI post that fast? (edit) Oh wait I see Intel inside.

I did shorten the video.
Power button to opening TPU forum was 27 seconds. So add 10 seconds. Memory training was involved but that has nothing to do with what the drive is doing....

But yeah, Intel on the inside next to 1tb 980 pro .

It is that fast yes.

 

[Dr. Dro]

I have intentionally used Gen 3 NVMe drives because they tend to be cheaper, heat less and transfer speeds are perfectly acceptable for use on a desktop today. I also happen to own both the Gen 3 and Gen 4 versions of the WD Black SN750 at the same 500 GB capacity, the original Gen 3 version has 64-layer BiCS3 flash + DRAM and the Gen 4 (SE) version is 96-layer BiCS4 DRAMless, the real world performance between them is generally indistinguishable. This is my bootup time on the Gen 4 SN750 SE with a fresh installation of Windows 10 22H2

 

[ir_cow]

When a drive bottoms out at 1,000MB/s write, it really doesn't matter if you have anything faster than Gen 3.

 

[nomdeplume]

realised that after upgrading my platform, that both my nvme drives are both gen 3, would i actually notice any difference upgrading them to gen 4 or 5? day to day use, loading games and things.

I'd put any discovered shortcoming in cooling far above. With both having a tendency to be replaced when they badly lack speed or outright die. Keep what you have.

Gen 5 NVMe offer next to nothing in daily use over Gen 4 other than higher heat.

 

[A Computer Guy]

Gen 5 NVMe offer next to nothing in daily use over Gen 4 other than higher heat.

It would have been interesting if the industry would have planned NVMe slots to have a variation that oriented horizontally like PCIe slots. Much less space on the board with the more compact connector and they could also address the expandability issue with the orientation being able to support add in cards so AIC vs. NVMe tradeoff would be a non-issue given the limited lanes available.

 

[nomdeplume]

It would have been interesting if the industry would have planned NVMe slots to have a variation that oriented horizontally like PCIe slots. Much less space on the board with the more compact connector and they could also address the expandability issue with the orientation being able to support add in cards so AIC vs. NVMe tradeoff would be a non-issue given the limited lanes available.

Asus and maybe industrial/commercial explored this. Between add in PCIe card orientation and one parallel and directly in front of RAM it was pretty clear PCIe worked better.

 

[Shuttlepro83]

Not really, maybe alittle more when combined in multiple situations.

 

[Ruru]

Not really, maybe alittle more when combined in multiple situations.

And most likely that's just in synthetic benchmarks.

Hell, I'm still running Win11 from an old 840Pro 256GB and nothing to complain