Ryzen CPUs just got a decent discount (on pending Alder Lake from Intel).
I have 3 builds based on the Asus Rog Strix B550F. They have been solid and stable boards for the price, but I will say they do occasionally have phantom USB devices connect/discconnect, and one of them has some Ethernet flakiness. Not bad, they run well, but in the spirit of full disclosure.
I don't know that it's worth paying anything extra for the X570.
For "Fair Amount of USB devices" - You shouldn't be paying anything extra for USB slots on a motherboard, as they can easily and inexpensively be extended via powered hubs or added via drop-in cards if you absolutely need full bandwidth.
*edit* I'll also add I feel the same way about WiFi - never pay extra for it on a motherboard, it's too easy and inexpensive to add on after the fact.
The 3 I linked have similar prices with the MSI board being the more expensive one.
ASUS: 195 euro (And I think it gets further discounted with the discount) Gigabyte X570: 205.49 euro MSI: 220.94 euro
Yeah, I understand about getting a USB-Hub. I'll need one anyway with a m-ATX board. The WIFI is honestly useless for me. My router has wireless capabilities in itself. Sure, it might not have the same speeds, but I couldn't care less when I sometimes use it for my phone.
Ryzen CPUs just got a decent discount (on pending Alder Lake from Intel).
I have 3 builds based on the Asus Rog Strix B550F. They have been solid and stable boards for the price, but I will say they do occasionally have phantom USB devices connect/discconnect, and one of them has some Ethernet flakiness. Not bad, they run well, but in the spirit of full disclosure.
I don't know that it's worth paying anything extra for the X570.
For "Fair Amount of USB devices" - You shouldn't be paying anything extra for USB slots on a motherboard, as they can easily and inexpensively be extended via powered hubs or added via drop-in cards if you absolutely need full bandwidth.
*edit* I'll also add I feel the same way about WiFi - never pay extra for it on a motherboard, it's too easy and inexpensive to add on after the fact.
The 3 I linked have similar prices with the MSI board being the more expensive one.
ASUS: 195 euro (And I think it gets further discounted with the discount) Gigabyte X570: 205.49 euro MSI: 220.94 euro
Yeah, I understand about getting a USB-Hub. I'll need one anyway with a m-ATX board. The WIFI is honestly useless for me. My router has wireless capabilities in itself. Sure, it might not have the same speeds, but I couldn't care less when I sometimes use it for my phone.
Ryzen CPUs just got a decent discount (on pending Alder Lake from Intel).
I have 3 builds based on the Asus Rog Strix B550F. They have been solid and stable boards for the price, but I will say they do occasionally have phantom USB devices connect/discconnect, and one of them has some Ethernet flakiness. Not bad, they run well, but in the spirit of full disclosure.
I don't know that it's worth paying anything extra for the X570.
For "Fair Amount of USB devices" - You shouldn't be paying anything extra for USB slots on a motherboard, as they can easily and inexpensively be extended via powered hubs or added via drop-in cards if you absolutely need full bandwidth.
*edit* I'll also add I feel the same way about WiFi - never pay extra for it on a motherboard, it's too easy and inexpensive to add on after the fact.
The 3 I linked have similar prices with the MSI board being the more expensive one.
ASUS: 195 euro (And I think it gets further discounted with the discount) Gigabyte X570: 205.49 euro MSI: 220.94 euro
Yeah, I understand about getting a USB-Hub. I'll need one anyway with a m-ATX board. The WIFI is honestly useless for me. My router has wireless capabilities in itself. Sure, it might not have the same speeds, but I couldn't care less when I sometimes use it for my phone.
If it were me, unless there were some other compelling reason, I’d just go with the Asus and save what I could where I could without making any significant sacrifices.
For "Fair Amount of USB devices" - You shouldn't be paying anything extra for USB slots on a motherboard, as they can easily and inexpensively be extended via powered hubs or added via drop-in cards if you absolutely need full bandwidth.
ITX motherboards often have only one PCI-E slot. If you use a discrete GPU there's no free slot for PCI-E USB card.
I think with ITX computer it'd be better to assume that the only practical way to add more USB ports is by splitting the ones you already have with USB hubs.
If it were me, unless there were some other compelling reason, I’d just go with the Asus and save what I could where I could without making any significant sacrifices.
Ordered these so far. Still require the CPU (hoping for a discount on it) and 1 or 2 NVMe storage drives (but man are they expensive).
[Edit]
Got the CPU as well. Right after buying the rest, it gets a discount lol. Doubt it will go any lower than that so I'll take what little discounts I can get.
(These are from amazon.de for anyone interested)
All I have left are 1 or 2 NVMes. Was considering a gen 4 and gen 3 while keeping my 256GB ssd. Not sure on what drive I'll have the operating system. I'll surely get a 1 TB version for games, and maybe a 500gb one for OS and other random crap.
If your getting a new nVME get the PCI-e 4 version. A 1 TB nVME will set you back enough to only use one. I find multiple drives to be a pain with Windows, and I don't think Windows 11 solved that. For your mobo it has a PCI-e 4.0 and 3.0 port. Both look like they don't have good cooling options. It may also be best to use a non-performance version. Performance versions can get pretty toasty compared to other versions they typically don't require a heatsink.
If you're getting a new nVME you should check the transfer speeds and try to get a decent one. Nowadays the price difference between 520 MBps transfer speed and 2500 MBps transfer speed might be just 20% extra price, and that 20% extra is worth paying.
But you don't need to go overboard with speed and try to buy the best one on market. I'd recommend staying away from the most expensive ones, and rather trying to find a deal that gives you decent speed without adding too much extra price. You should look at both PCI-e version 4 and 3 NVMes to find a good offer.
EDIT: Also if you think you're going to need 1 TB + 500 GB NVMe drive, I'd recommend just going for a 2 TB one. That way you'll only need 1 NVMe slot so that if you ever want to add more hard disk space you'd still have the other slot free. It's not important now, but if you think for example 5 years in the future, or 10 years in the future, a large NVMe is something you could likely keep in your computer as you upgrade. Whereas having multiple small NVMes means you might end up just abandoning the smallest one due to not having extra slots.
If you're getting a new nVME you should check the transfer speeds and try to get a decent one. Nowadays the price difference between 520 MBps transfer speed and 2500 MBps transfer speed might be just 20% extra price, and that 20% extra is worth paying.
But you don't need to go overboard with speed and try to buy the best one on market. I'd recommend staying away from the most expensive ones, and rather trying to find a deal that gives you decent speed without adding too much extra price. You should look at both PCI-e version 4 and 3 NVMes to find a good offer.
EDIT: Also if you think you're going to need 1 TB + 500 GB NVMe price, I'd recommend just going for a 2 TB one. That way you'll only need 1 NVMe slot so that if you ever want to add more hard disk space you'd still have the other slot free. It's not important now, but if you think for example 5 years in the future, or 10 years in the future, a large NVMe is something you could likely keep in your computer as you upgrade. Whereas having multiple small NVMes means you might end up just abandoning the smallest one due to not having extra slots.
It is a good point to consider going for a single one than two. I mainly wanted two to separate the OS from the games. With a large NVMe I wouldn't need to separate anything tough.
I'll see what I can get, and try going for a 2 TB one then. Thanks for the advice ppl.
They're more expensive, and it didn't seem like its worth the price jump. The one I listed is no longer available (there's used but no thanks). I was considering going x570 as its the latest, but from research and suggestions from people on this forum I went with the b550 instead.
The advantage of X570 is more connectivity off of the chipset, so you could have more PCI Express devices, SATA devices, and so forth. But those extra devices don't really fit on a Mini ITX motherboard, so you don't end up with much of an advantage over B550.
Hi people, tomorrow (hopefully) I get my next paycheck and I'm browsing on available NVMes to get for the best deal. I just have some questions if you don't mind:
Do I get one with or without a heatsink?
Are speeds higher than 3500 overkill for gaming?
PCIe 4 vs PCIe 3, is the price jump justified?
When I'm currently browsing amazon.de, the main 2 brands showing up are Samsung, and WD_Black then there's a few of the rest. Price per speed wise, nothing seems to beat WD_Black. I'm not sure about reliability tough. When I look at top x reviews, they have a negative of heating up quite a bit.
Since this is an Itx build, there's already going to be heat. The motherboard I ordered ( ASUS ROG Strix B550-I) already has a heatsink, but its probably not the best. Is there a preferred brand and speed you guys go for? Thanks!
1) That depends some on your motherboard. It's preferable to have a heatsink on high-performance PCI-E SSDs, as otherwise, they'll tend to overheat and throttle back performance. But some motherboards include a heatsink for the M.2 slot, so you don't need a separate one attached to the SSD itself. Meanwhile, some heatsinks are big enough that if you try to place them in the M.2 slot, they'll block something else, such as your video card. That depends not just on the size of the heatsink, but also where the M.2 slot is placed on the motherboard.
2) Basically all SSDs are fast enough these days that extra performance won't make much difference for consumer use. Something else will be the bottleneck first.
3) If you're on a money is no object budget, then you might as well. If you're considering what to cut back on, then getting a relatively slower SSD rather than going for the top end is an easy place to cut back that won't make much of a real-world performance difference.
"WD_Black" is Western Digital. They've been one of the major hard drive brands for decades, and now make SSDs, too. They're also one half of one of the world's four major NAND flash vendors, as they bought SanDisk, which jointly owns some NAND foundries in Japan together with Kioxia (formerly Toshiba).
High end M.2 SSD controllers can burn several watts under heavy, sustained loads. A modest heatsink can dissipate that pretty easily, but that's really too much for a simple heatspreader on such a small chip. Realistically, they'll throttle back performance to keep temperatures at safe levels even if you do push them hard.
For consumer use, you may or may not even notice a difference from throttling. Some controllers are clever enough to throttle back performance to 20% or 40% or some such of max, which is still pretty fast. Others say "oh no, I'm overheating" and almost stop entirely until they cool down.
If you're getting a new nVME you should check the transfer speeds and try to get a decent one. Nowadays the price difference between 520 MBps transfer speed and 2500 MBps transfer speed might be just 20% extra price, and that 20% extra is worth paying.
But you don't need to go overboard with speed and try to buy the best one on market. I'd recommend staying away from the most expensive ones, and rather trying to find a deal that gives you decent speed without adding too much extra price. You should look at both PCI-e version 4 and 3 NVMes to find a good offer.
EDIT: Also if you think you're going to need 1 TB + 500 GB NVMe price, I'd recommend just going for a 2 TB one. That way you'll only need 1 NVMe slot so that if you ever want to add more hard disk space you'd still have the other slot free. It's not important now, but if you think for example 5 years in the future, or 10 years in the future, a large NVMe is something you could likely keep in your computer as you upgrade. Whereas having multiple small NVMes means you might end up just abandoning the smallest one due to not having extra slots.
It is a good point to consider going for a single one than two. I mainly wanted two to separate the OS from the games. With a large NVMe I wouldn't need to separate anything tough.
I'll see what I can get, and try going for a 2 TB one then. Thanks for the advice ppl.
I've used multiple conventional hard drives for years (since my XP days), to specifically keep the OS and my personal data (including games) separate. It almost works well, except for Windows trying to shovel all manner of temp files onto C:. What's worse is that many games like to put saved game files under the User directory. All that activity on the C: drive means that it is impractical to consider any RAID for the C: drive without slowing the system down. (RAIDs speed up read speeds, but slow down write speeds. Windows makes it a pain to manually control where all these temp files and internet work files are stored).
All that aside, I've got no direct experience with how Windows handles SSD drives, much less multiple SSD devices. Since it looks like I'm in the 'must-upgrade-for-WIn11' camp, I'd like any opinions on what kind of clever (or infernal) traps that Win 11 might have in store for me and multiple HDs and multiple SSDs.
Thanks.
Logic, my dear, merely enables one to be wrong with great authority.
I've used multiple conventional hard drives for years (since my XP days), to specifically keep the OS and my personal data (including games) separate. It almost works well, except for Windows trying to shovel all manner of temp files onto C:. What's worse is that many games like to put saved game files under the User directory. All that activity on the C: drive means that it is impractical to consider any RAID for the C: drive without slowing the system down. (RAIDs speed up read speeds, but slow down write speeds. Windows makes it a pain to manually control where all these temp files and internet work files are stored).
All that aside, I've got no direct experience with how Windows handles SSD drives, much less multiple SSD devices. Since it looks like I'm in the 'must-upgrade-for-WIn11' camp, I'd like any opinions on what kind of clever (or infernal) traps that Win 11 might have in store for me and multiple HDs and multiple SSDs.
Thanks.
A RAID with SSDs is usually not very useful for speed increase, since if you're buying new SSD (and have a M.2 slot so that you can buy NVMe SSD), you'll be able to buy one that's fast enough without RAID.
For HDDs a raid was good idea for faster speeds, but for SSDs I recommend first looking at whether you could just get a single SSD fast enough that you don't really want faster.
That's not to say you couldn't get some speed advantage with multiple SSDs running on RAID. But for normal users there's usually no real need.
I've used multiple conventional hard drives for years (since my XP days), to specifically keep the OS and my personal data (including games) separate. It almost works well, except for Windows trying to shovel all manner of temp files onto C:. What's worse is that many games like to put saved game files under the User directory. All that activity on the C: drive means that it is impractical to consider any RAID for the C: drive without slowing the system down. (RAIDs speed up read speeds, but slow down write speeds. Windows makes it a pain to manually control where all these temp files and internet work files are stored).
All that aside, I've got no direct experience with how Windows handles SSD drives, much less multiple SSD devices. Since it looks like I'm in the 'must-upgrade-for-WIn11' camp, I'd like any opinions on what kind of clever (or infernal) traps that Win 11 might have in store for me and multiple HDs and multiple SSDs.
Thanks.
A RAID with SSDs is usually not very useful for speed increase, since if you're buying new SSD (and have a M.2 slot so that you can buy NVMe SSD), you'll be able to buy one that's fast enough without RAID.
For HDDs a raid was good idea for faster speeds, but for SSDs I recommend first looking at whether you could just get a single SSD fast enough that you don't really want faster.
That's not to say you couldn't get some speed advantage with multiple SSDs running on RAID. But for normal users there's usually no real need.
The RAID would mostly be for data security, for my brother's machine -- he does (or did) some rodeo photography. I never considered putting an SSD on a RAID. And we probably don't want data storage on the SSD, anyway. Only the slow photography software. When my brother was busy, he would easily fill up 10-12 TBs of external drive space every season (bad format required by his sales site).
I will be looking for a RAID setup for his internal HDs. Can't afford (or tolerate) more late night calls when a picture (or 17) goes fizzle.
For myself, I'll probably stick with my basic 2 internal HDs + a large SSD, in a similar range to the Samsung 980 above. (about 3000 MB/s)
Now, to magically fit my wish list into my fiscal reality. But MS isn't dumping Win 10 immediately, so I have some time.
Logic, my dear, merely enables one to be wrong with great authority.
I saw a 970Evo Pro 2TB for $199 for black Friday at Best Buy, I think. It's a pretty decent discount($50ish) on what used to be one of the best m2 drives on the market.
Just having a solid backup solution is better for data security and much easier to manage. PC Raid is a hassle in my opinion.
I agree with Ridelynn that if you want to do that then setup a NAS using raid with redundancy. That can still be a pain to manage, but a much smaller one with built in tools to do so. A good NAS isn't cheap though. You can homebrew one cheaper (with a Pi or NUC) but then you're taking on a lot more of the management and maintenance that is built into commercial products and it still isn't "cheap".
My friends who run a large home NAS still use hdd (mostly WD reds because they're cheaper and available). 30T - 40T of nand is going to be expensive. It depends on how much space you need and what you're using your NAS for too. Is it just a plex server to serve some music or media and maybe a little file storage? Then you might not need much. If you're planning on running a seed box and acquiring a lot of media files then you will need a lot more space.
Thanks, guys. The operative word to describe by brother is 'cheap'. His photo sales are pretty much a hobby, but really needs a powerful workstation or a server class machine; he'd rather put his money into camera gear. He's had difficulties with drive failure that scrapped some of his pictures in the past, and he gets a bit paranoid about it. RAID is definitely a pain, I've worked with it before. His external storage solution is essentially being used as a NAS. I'll just suggest that he either keep that, or pony up a lot of bucks. That should cut down the desire for data security.
Logic, my dear, merely enables one to be wrong with great authority.
Ended up getting the gen 3 version of WD_Black SN750 NVMe 2TB. The gen 4 is out of stock until another week and I purposely booked leave from work for next monday and tuesday to build it up. Besides, there was a 70 euro difference between the two and from research I did, for gaming it won't be noticeable.
In the future, I'll get a gen 4 if the 2TB i'm getting starts filling up.
Ended up getting the gen 3 version of WD_Black SN750 NVMe 2TB. The gen 4 is out of stock until another week and I purposely booked leave from work for next monday and tuesday to build it up. Besides, there was a 70 euro difference between the two and from research I did, for gaming it won't be noticeable.
In the future, I'll get a gen 4 if the 2TB i'm getting starts filling up.
I would say, watch which slot you install them in. Some motherboards, B550's in particular, only have 1 Gen 4 NVMe slot. It would be a pain in the rear to have your system all up and running, then need to swap your drives around, as I don't think the Windows bootloader handles that very gracefully.
You can run a Gen 4 in a Gen 3 slot, but you won't get the Gen 4 speed increase.
Ended up getting the gen 3 version of WD_Black SN750 NVMe 2TB. The gen 4 is out of stock until another week and I purposely booked leave from work for next monday and tuesday to build it up. Besides, there was a 70 euro difference between the two and from research I did, for gaming it won't be noticeable.
In the future, I'll get a gen 4 if the 2TB i'm getting starts filling up.
I would say, watch which slot you install them in. Some motherboards, B550's in particular, only have 1 Gen 4 NVMe slot. It would be a pain in the rear to have your system all up and running, then need to swap your drives around, as I don't think the Windows bootloader handles that very gracefully.
You can run a Gen 4 in a Gen 3 slot, but you won't get the Gen 4 speed increase.
Yes, will totally check to ensure I put the Gen 3 NVMe in the Gen 3 slot.
Ended up getting the gen 3 version of WD_Black SN750 NVMe 2TB. The gen 4 is out of stock until another week and I purposely booked leave from work for next monday and tuesday to build it up. Besides, there was a 70 euro difference between the two and from research I did, for gaming it won't be noticeable.
In the future, I'll get a gen 4 if the 2TB i'm getting starts filling up.
I would say, watch which slot you install them in. Some motherboards, B550's in particular, only have 1 Gen 4 NVMe slot. It would be a pain in the rear to have your system all up and running, then need to swap your drives around, as I don't think the Windows bootloader handles that very gracefully.
You can run a Gen 4 in a Gen 3 slot, but you won't get the Gen 4 speed increase.
Yes, will totally check to ensure I put the Gen 3 NVMe in the Gen 3 slot.
Depending on your motherboard, it might well be better to put the SSD into the Gen 4 slot. In some cases, it's PCI-E 4.0 x4 and PCI-E 3.0 x2 or something like that. The former can run at 3.0 x4 speeds, but the latter cannot. In some cases, a slower SSD slot will even be NVMe over SATA, not even PCI-E, and that's much slower.
Comments
ASUS: 195 euro (And I think it gets further discounted with the discount)
Gigabyte X570: 205.49 euro
MSI: 220.94 euro
Yeah, I understand about getting a USB-Hub. I'll need one anyway with a m-ATX board. The WIFI is honestly useless for me. My router has wireless capabilities in itself. Sure, it might not have the same speeds, but I couldn't care less when I sometimes use it for my phone.
I think with ITX computer it'd be better to assume that the only practical way to add more USB ports is by splitting the ones you already have with USB hubs.
Ordered these so far. Still require the CPU (hoping for a discount on it) and 1 or 2 NVMe storage drives (but man are they expensive).
[Edit]
Got the CPU as well. Right after buying the rest, it gets a discount lol. Doubt it will go any lower than that so I'll take what little discounts I can get.
(These are from amazon.de for anyone interested)
All I have left are 1 or 2 NVMes. Was considering a gen 4 and gen 3 while keeping my 256GB ssd. Not sure on what drive I'll have the operating system. I'll surely get a 1 TB version for games, and maybe a 500gb one for OS and other random crap.
Hope they get some discounts haha.
But you don't need to go overboard with speed and try to buy the best one on market. I'd recommend staying away from the most expensive ones, and rather trying to find a deal that gives you decent speed without adding too much extra price. You should look at both PCI-e version 4 and 3 NVMes to find a good offer.
EDIT: Also if you think you're going to need 1 TB + 500 GB NVMe drive, I'd recommend just going for a 2 TB one. That way you'll only need 1 NVMe slot so that if you ever want to add more hard disk space you'd still have the other slot free. It's not important now, but if you think for example 5 years in the future, or 10 years in the future, a large NVMe is something you could likely keep in your computer as you upgrade. Whereas having multiple small NVMes means you might end up just abandoning the smallest one due to not having extra slots.
EDIT 2: I know you can't likely buy this because of import fees and such, but newegg has a good offer right now:
https://www.newegg.com/team-group-2tb-t-force-cardea-z44q/p/N82E16820331736
I'll see what I can get, and try going for a 2 TB one then. Thanks for the advice ppl.
- Do I get one with or without a heatsink?
- Are speeds higher than 3500 overkill for gaming?
- PCIe 4 vs PCIe 3, is the price jump justified?
When I'm currently browsing amazon.de, the main 2 brands showing up are Samsung, and WD_Black then there's a few of the rest. Price per speed wise, nothing seems to beat WD_Black. I'm not sure about reliability tough. When I look at top x reviews, they have a negative of heating up quite a bit.Since this is an Itx build, there's already going to be heat. The motherboard I ordered ( ASUS ROG Strix B550-I) already has a heatsink, but its probably not the best. Is there a preferred brand and speed you guys go for? Thanks!
2) Basically all SSDs are fast enough these days that extra performance won't make much difference for consumer use. Something else will be the bottleneck first.
3) If you're on a money is no object budget, then you might as well. If you're considering what to cut back on, then getting a relatively slower SSD rather than going for the top end is an easy place to cut back that won't make much of a real-world performance difference.
"WD_Black" is Western Digital. They've been one of the major hard drive brands for decades, and now make SSDs, too. They're also one half of one of the world's four major NAND flash vendors, as they bought SanDisk, which jointly owns some NAND foundries in Japan together with Kioxia (formerly Toshiba).
High end M.2 SSD controllers can burn several watts under heavy, sustained loads. A modest heatsink can dissipate that pretty easily, but that's really too much for a simple heatspreader on such a small chip. Realistically, they'll throttle back performance to keep temperatures at safe levels even if you do push them hard.
For consumer use, you may or may not even notice a difference from throttling. Some controllers are clever enough to throttle back performance to 20% or 40% or some such of max, which is still pretty fast. Others say "oh no, I'm overheating" and almost stop entirely until they cool down.
Logic, my dear, merely enables one to be wrong with great authority.
For example WD Black 2 TB Performance Desktop HDD is relatively fast HDD and rated for up to 164 MB/s transfer:
https://www.newegg.com/black-wd2003fzex-2tb/p/N82E16822236624
But if you compare it to NVMe you could easily get something like Samsung 980 M.2 drive that's rated for up to 3 500 MB/s transfer:
https://www.newegg.com/samsung-1tb-980/p/N82E16820147804
Or assuming you've got PCIe 4.0 on your computer you could go even faster, for example XPG Gammix S70 NVMe is rated for up to 7 400 MB/s transfer speeds
https://www.newegg.com/xpg-2tb/p/0D9-00DF-000T1
For HDDs a raid was good idea for faster speeds, but for SSDs I recommend first looking at whether you could just get a single SSD fast enough that you don't really want faster.
That's not to say you couldn't get some speed advantage with multiple SSDs running on RAID. But for normal users there's usually no real need.
Logic, my dear, merely enables one to be wrong with great authority.
Unless your building something workstation or server class, RAID in a PC is not going to really give you what you are looking for.
Logic, my dear, merely enables one to be wrong with great authority.
Just don’t leave it plugged in all the time - back up to it, disconnect and put it in a drawer. Do that once a week or so.
In the future, I'll get a gen 4 if the 2TB i'm getting starts filling up.
You can run a Gen 4 in a Gen 3 slot, but you won't get the Gen 4 speed increase.