Hey Guys! Hope you are doing great today! I just got a new SSD for the OS and Apps, replacing a Samsung EVO 850 of 250gb. My question is the following: this drive was tested here and it's rated for 3200mb/s read and 1800mb/s write speeds. At first, I was getting 1500/1500 R/W speeds. I found out I was doing PCIex x2 instead of x4 speed on the BIOS. Tweaked everything over there and got WAY better speeds. Still, they are not exactly as I expected. Here is the result of the Guru3D review with crystal disk mark next to my results: Is this normal? Anything else I can tweak in the OS to make it run as fast? I switched the drive form m.2 port 1 to the second one so I could put it under the heat spreader that comes with the asus z370 gaming f motherboard. Speeds went up just a tad. My config is the following: i7 8700k asus z370 gaming f XPG 16gb ddr4 3600mhz Zotac GTX 1080 amp! Creative ZX sound card Currently running this SSD plus 2 HDDs Any insights will be appreciated!
I have the 500gb version try playing with windows Write caching [restart after each change] it has serious effect on speeds, in my case on 4K speeds. This is second drive after Optane that doesn't like this option enabled, previous NVMe drives all LOVED this option and with it disabled would perform 30-40% worse [my MP500 960gb for example] Looking at your benchmark 4K scores it looks exactly like my bad benchmark with Cache enabled Write Caching Disabled [Turn Off Windows Write Cache Buffer option Check-mark OFF] Write Caching Enabled [Turn Off Windows Write Cache Buffer option Check-mark ON]
Thanks for your reply! I tried what you mentioned and got mixed results, some went up and some went down.. Still quite far from your results:
You cant get exact results across the board, motherboard quality, CPU, RAM all that has effect, windows freshness [these tests were made on fresh W10 install, on my current old install i have tad worse score] Gigabyte AORUS Gaming 7 z370 9900K 32gb RAM Im sure it had some positive effect. OH< when you test, for proper results you need to have everything turned off and not running, even opening some file can affect the score and change power mode to Ultra/High, i mean its not obvious for everyone [including me] but with High/Ultra power mode when CPU is at 100% all the time I got higher scores I tested every possibility to find best setup for best results I also have Intel SRT installed
P.S. Lets not forget that Intels/MS Spectre fix has HORRIBLE slowdown effect on PCIe subsystem, if you want to see higher results, download inSpectre from Guru3d and it allows you to disable both [at least for benchmarks] and see how much you lose. On my 9900 the program says its disabled, it doesn't work for me at all [maybe because the 9 series has some fixes build in]
You were correct. Using inSpectre v8 made my speeds waaaay better, especially the 4kb ones. tops speeds didn't improve though, but it may be related to something else maybe. Damn spectre/meltdown!
Have you tried the High power preset too? Intel SRT drivers? Or maybe its enough, now with inspectre disabled you have perfectly good scores 2800>3200 is NOT that big of a difference, you wont feel it. Hey, people dont feel the difference between good SATA SSD and NVMe, the load times are usually identical or like 1-2 seconds difference. I also have Intel Optane 480gb and right now my Windows 10 is on old Samsung 850 EVO 250 GB SATA, when I was sure that im staying with my z370 board, i installed fresh windows 10 to my Optane, the boot times and usage felt identical to me. Now when I got new z390 mobo, ill have to re-install windows 10 again, this time on HP 920, Optane will be cache drive for my HDDs
You are probably right. I don't feel any difference. I just wanted to know I wasn't hindering performance with any settings. FYI, I did have Intel RST, though I just updated those drivers, and I always use High Performance power plan. Couldn't live without it. Difference in performance without spectre and meltdown fixes is abysmal.
