Without a benchmark or stopwatch, you'll never notice the difference. When folks create a 'test" to compare two thijngs, you'll notice that they choose 'tests' with no bearing on reality. I once saw one on you tube where the guy, in earnest trying to show how great his new SSD was, used "opening 100 windows in chrome" as his "test". Since I have never done such a thing, this test showed me nothing. Why are any of these significant ?
MS office Installation - OK you did that once in the life of your PC and you did something else in the minute it took to install. Y 5 year old Samsung 850 Pro did it in 55 seconds.
AV Run - takes from 50 to 54 seconds best to worst in TPUs test, it gets done in the background, who cares ?
iTunes Installation - 13 to 15 seconds best to worst, who cares.
Chrome Installation - 7 to 9 seconds, who cares.
Adobe Reader - 16 to 19 seconds, who cares
Photoshop startup - 4.1 to 4.7 seconds, who cares
Photoshop Editing - here we finally get to something where speed matters, well maybe. The range here was 46 to 89 seconds ... but the test is a script of a series if actions on very large files ... do you use such a script on an every day basis ? or do you press a ket=y between opening a file and doing each of the actions ..
."open ten 50 megapixel images at the same time and, once done, process each image, one by one. The operations performed on each image were crop, move, auto levels, resize to 1024x768, and save for the web. " For most folks, the answer is yes thereby making the test non applicable to every day usage.
Watchdog 2 level loading - 45.7 to 46.3 seconds ... woot I'll save 0.6 seconds ! .... just think how much more progress I can make !
BF1 level loading - 16.8 to 19.7seconds ... Im upgrading, 2.9 seconds ! .... That's $18.97 per second gained between your 2 choices. That makes your time worth $62,275 an hour
... But hey it's only $55 ... if budget not an issue, then it's not an issue to get the 960.
I was so curious about this subject that we ran side by side tests with 5 users for 6 weeks.
Desktop Test - One desktop equipped with twin SSds , twin SSHDs and 1 HD .... in the morning I'd go into BIOS change which device the box booted from.... users were asked to document "any slowness due to the new AV software" ... got one report (HD boot) "I can't be sure but boot up time seemed slow today". BTW Boot times were 21.2 seconds on the HD, SSHD was 16.5 and SSD was 15.6 secs.
Laptop Test used two otherwise identical lappies, one with 120 GB SSD (OS Only) + 1 TB, 7200 rpm HD an the other with 1 TB , 7200 rpm SSHD. Same conditions, same users but went 6 months ... no one reported any differences tho i did have to clean the 120 GB SSD of excess file storage where folks would drop stuff info "my Folders" on C or just forget"clean C".
In the "real world", assuming folks boot the boxes in the morning, after pushing the button, most do other stuff. In one instance an employee who had one of our older boxes, asked me to get him an SSD to make it more productive. As his job title included 'engineering economics for construction projects", I asked him to "make his case" and if it had a positive ROI, I'd order it.
He estimated 30 seconds saved per day (his actual boot time was 24.5 seconds) for the slow boot time. At 330 work days per year, that was 2.75 hours or $247.50 which was what they were going for in those days. But installing it, and reloading OS and all the software would eat all that. However, I noted the time / actions next day (he sat right outside my office).
-Arrived at work took off jacket and started PC - 08:26
-Walked around said good morning to a few folks, made fresh coffee, asked what I had on agenda for him today, sat at desk, listened to phone messages, checked his imbox, garbbed some coffee, asked what I had on agenda for him that day, sat at desk, shook his mouse to wake up PC - 8:42 ... if his box took 16 minutes to boot it would be ready for him before he was ready for it.
This happens with most of what we do, scripts of 100 MS Word operation times don't matter as in real life, a kry needs to be pressed in between each one. back in the day, we used $1000 SCSI drives for AutoCAD but today, AutoCAD has completes it's "thing" before I get my next key press or mouse action in. In gaming, when i launch or game or move to a new level, I don't sit there staring at screen w/ stop watch running ... I'm grabbing a snack, taking a bio, reading my notes as to what I need, realoading web maps on my browser, chatting on discord ... again, game is ready for me well before I'm ready for it.
In short, on the desktop or lappie, I wouldn't stress about it. Will you "see a drastic performance change" ? Outside workstation apps in a "production environment" doing animation, video editing or rendering, the answer is Yes, the performance will pay for itself over time, not as quickly as you might think tho. Doing everyday stuff, even AutoCAD, the answer is no, you will never recover the investment in "saved time". No legal secretary ever prepared an extra Legal brief before 5:00 because he / she had an SSD. For the most part, doing every day stuff, the machine will spend more time waiting for you than you for it. That being said
... the cost difference is small enough that we are putting 250 / 500 GB 960 Evo NVMe's in just about every build not because we will see any perceptable increase in performance in every day tasks but cause the price difference is insignificant.
In your case, if you are using scripts with numerous large files to do your PhotoShop and other workstation type work, you will likely see a percetable but not really significant productivity improvement unless it's an every day / much of day activity. I'd suggest a pair in this instance (OS Programs for one and scratch for the other) making sure that MoBo / CPU will support the necessary PCI lines w/o impacting performance.
