heyitsheather Posted August 19, 2017 Share Posted August 19, 2017 I am speccing out a new budget machine for gaming... Nothing intense, but finally time to upgrade from the old Core 2 Quad. One question I have is in regards to interfaces for the SSD. I am looking at a 500GBish SSD for the main system drive, for the OS and app installs. I will be basing the system off of the Asrock A320M Pro4 MB coupled with a Ryzen 1200. The board has an M.2 slot, but the drives appear on average $50 or so more than their SATA counterparts. Will I see a noticeable performance difference? The machine will have 8GB DDR4-2800 to start, and the secondary storage for data will be a 1TB Seagate Constellation ES migrated from the old machine. Thanks! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
The Evil Overlord Posted August 19, 2017 Share Posted August 19, 2017 Regardless of you preferred vendor choice of processor/board/ram etc... Why limit yourself to 1 500gb drive? (You'll fill that up before you realise it) As a suggestion I'd go for a 120gb ssd for your os, and any combination of 1 or 2tb hdds of your choice for storage and installs/games. On the boot/loadup front, to desktop, it makes a huge difference regardless of whether the rig is modern or ancient, I've tried an ssd on both an old and athlon x64, and on my current rig and fx 6350, with an ssd the boot time is more than halved, and the PC is ready for your input a second or 2 later. (Cold boot) +Raze 1 Share Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
adrynalyne Posted August 19, 2017 Share Posted August 19, 2017 (edited) M.2 doesn’t determine your performance difference. The bus the ssd and m.2 slot uses does. So if the drive is pcie then yes it will be faster. If the m.2 and drive only support sata then it’s going to be no faster. Will you notice the difference? It depends on your use cases. Nogib 1 Share Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mockingbird Posted August 19, 2017 Share Posted August 19, 2017 M.2 is form factor. There are plenty of M.2 SATA SSDs. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+Warwagon MVC Posted August 19, 2017 MVC Share Posted August 19, 2017 2 hours ago, The Evil Overlord said: Regardless of you preferred vendor choice of processor/board/ram etc... Why limit yourself to 1 500gb drive? (You'll fill that up before you realise it) As a suggestion I'd go for a 120gb ssd for your os, and any combination of 1 or 2tb hdds of your choice for storage and installs/games. On the boot/loadup front, to desktop, it makes a huge difference regardless of whether the rig is modern or ancient, I've tried an ssd on both an old and athlon x64, and on my current rig and fx 6350, with an ssd the boot time is more than halved, and the PC is ready for your input a second or 2 later. (Cold boot) Maybe he wants his games to load fast too. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
xendrome Posted August 19, 2017 Share Posted August 19, 2017 Yeah lets be clear M.2 is just a form factor of SATA. But M.2 is also a form factor of NVME. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
The Evil Overlord Posted August 19, 2017 Share Posted August 19, 2017 13 minutes ago, warwagon said: Maybe he wants his games to load fast too. Then he'll need something bigger than a 500gb drive regardless, as it'll be full before you know it +Raze 1 Share Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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