Question corsair mp600 under pci-e 3.0?

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May 12, 2019
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I have got a question regarding the PCI-e 4.0 MP600 nvme m.2:
This m.2 uses pci-e 4.0 due to the 3.0 limitations, but what will the speeds of sequencial reads and writes be on a pci-e 3.0 modern motherboard? (Like a z390 aorus extreme e.t.c)
Thanks,
Pablo.
 
May 12, 2019
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Hi,
Some interesting points:

I have been investigating about the MP600 running under PCI-3.0, and found out lots of benchmarks regarding this subject:

It is known that the corsair MP600 or other PCI-e 4.0 NVMe drives have a price premium since they are new and supposedly "faster" than the previous 3.0 PCI-e gen drives. PCI-e 3.0 can manage up to a theoretical 985MB/s per lane, whereas PCI-e 4.0 can handle up to 1970 MB/s per lane. This means that in a 4x PCI-e 3.0 slot no more than 3940 theoretical MB/s (in reality about 3600) can be transferred, on the other hand, a 4x PCI-e 4.0 slot can transfer up to 7880 MB/s (in reality 7600MB/s). This means that NO MORE THAT 3600MB/s are going to be transferred on a PCI-e 3.0 4x slot. So case closed, the MP600 is not going to be able to max its capacity due to bandwidth limitation.

Not too fast: although this is an objective fact, I found some anomalies.

Look at the MP600 test conducted by the "We Do Tech" youtube channel on their review about the corsair MP600:



As you can see, when comparing the drive running under PCI-e 4.0 vs 3.0 (with Crystaldiscmark 6.0.2) we can see a SEQUENTIAL WRITE AND READ MB/s difference, but within the other numbers, there is virtually almost no difference because they are not maxing out PCI-e 4.0 nor 3.0 .


Now take a look at my 970 EVO plus 500GB test on CrystalDiskMark 6.0.2 on a z390 Aorus master with an i9 9900K:



As you can see, read and write numbers are lower compared to an MP600 (to be precise, around 26% lower) but ALL THE OTHER NUMBERS ARE HIGHER (12% +).
So, although the MP600 is 26% faster on sequential speeds, the cheaper 970 EVO plus is 12% faster on all of the other tasks.

So as a conclusion, we can obtain that seq read and writes are much better (26%) on the MP600, but random 4K, deep queue depth e.tc is also much faster on the 970 EVO drive.

So, now it is time to decide if paying the extra premium money is worth it:
The MP600 PCI-e 4.0 wins on ONLY SEQUENTIAL READS AND WRITES, so ARE SEQ SPEEDS IMPORTANT?

Andrew Brownd stated on a Quora forum: "Sequential write and writes speeds only really matters if your recording files which have a large amount of data to be written."
So, in a real-world scenario, we are seldom going to experience real sequential speeds reads nor writes, and as far as my experience goes, sequential speeds are more synthetic than real disc speeds.

Let´s take a look at all the other benchmark sections, on which the 970 EVO plus clearly wins. Those speeds results are more likely to be seen in real life.

So, what is the conclusion?
Please feel free to correct me if I am wrong, but:
From my humble point of view, it is not worth paying for the extra seq speeds of the MP600 unless your work is based on a sequential task workload. But I would prefer to pay for extra non-synthetic performance improvement, and NOT for an extra x570 motherboard that supports PCI-e 4.0 and an expensive 4.0 drive .

I am NOT STATING THAT PCI-E 4.0 IS USELESS, it is a great improvement on the bandwidth that is going to help lots of consumers due to the extra speed. But I do agree with the fact that the MP600 is a bit worse on a real case scenario and therefore, not worth the extra money paid on the majority of situations.

I hope you found the info interesting.
Pablo.
 
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