What are the pros and cons of using or skipping out on optane? Ive heard a lot of good things about it
The 16 and 32GB Optane modules are simply a cache for a spinning HDD.
Very very fast, but still only a small cache.
It does not speed up the whole drive, only that which happens to live in the cache at that moment. Whatever is not in that space is still read at normal HDD speed.
In the context of a game, if you go to a new level, that does not live in the cache. It has no way of knowing that the next thing you want is the particular data for a new level. Load that same level again, and it will probably be in that cache space and read very fast. But only on subsequent reads.
Writes still happen at HDD speed.
Given the rapidly dropping prices of regular SSD's, Optane is a solution looking for a problem in the consumer space.
If you were running a database server, and needed both the space and the speed, Optane would probably be a good solution. The stored procedures would end up in that cache space, and be read over and over and over, very fast.
For thee and me? Just get a regular SSD. Either SATA or NVMe. That is fast across its whole space.
1TB SSD's are around $100 and dropping.