Is NVMe worth giving up graphics bandwidth for?

[edwjohn3]

I have an Asrock Z77 Extreme4 motherboard that I am thinking of getting an m.2 NVMe drive for to use as the boot drive. My current boot drive is a 256 gig Crucial M4 SATA SSD. I know the Z77 chipset does not natively support booting from an NVMe drive, but Asrock has released a beta BIOS for this board which supposedly adds the capability. I have been reading on forums mixed reports of others’ experience with this. There are reports of it messing up the UEFI interface of the BIOS and some people are mentioning having to mod the BIOS, but I can’t tell if these reports are from before the official Asrock beta BIOS was released.

Do you think it’s worth trying to add an NVMe boot drive to this aging motherboard? The other thing to consider is that I would have to buy an m.2 to PCIe adapter to plug the drive into the secondary PCIe slot on the board, meaning my Vega 56 would drop from 16 lanes to 8 lanes of PCIe, though from what I have read the performance difference between x16 and x8 is negligible. Any thoughts?

 

[ShadyHamster]

It is true that the performance difference between x16 and x8 is negligible, however the performance difference between a Sata and PCI-e SSD drives is also negligible, when it comes to booting windows and the likes (yes i know the sequential speeds are much better on most PCI-e drives).
You'll be saving an extra 2 seconds or so from the boot times, is that really worth the trouble you may have to go through?
IMO it's not worth it, even if you don't encounter any issues.

 

[InvalidError]

An M-key M.2 SSD can use up to PCIe x4. In a PCIe 2.0 x4 chipset slot, that's already 2GB/s. I'd just get a PCIe x4 riser and put it in an x4 slot instead of a GPU slot.

Personally, I wouldn't recommend messing with beta BIOS or BIOS modding on a PC that doesn't have the "disposable" status. The biggest single benefit from having an SSD is sub-1ms random access time to load things quickly and you already get most of that from SATA3/6G.

While going from HDD to SATA3 SSD is almost universally considered a huge improvement, opinion on the next step from SATA3 to NVMe is more divided - you shave a few seconds here and there, but nothing anywhere near as dramatic as HDD->SSD for everyday use.

 

[Scottray]

What do you hope to gain by going from a SATA SSD to the NVMe drive? In other words, do you regularly work with very large files that the extra NVMe speed would make an actual difference in your workflow?

 

[edwjohn3]

I don’t use my PC as a workstation, so I suppose a SATA SSD is good enough. I guess I’m mostly just thinking that NVMe is the future of storage tech and I don’t want to buy something that is already obsolete

 

[USAFRet]

I don’t use my PC as a workstation, so I suppose a SATA SSD is good enough. I guess I’m mostly just thinking that NVMe is the future of storage tech and I don’t want to buy something that is already obsolete

Go with an NVMe drive with your next system.
Trying to force a Z77 system into using an NVMe (beta BIOS?) and giving up some GPU perf is a non-starter.

I have a Z97 system + 5x SATA SSD, and am not worrying about NVMe for this box.
Next time, yes.

 

[edwjohn3]

Thanks for all the replies. I think I’ll probably hold off on NVMe for now.

 

[failboat]

The GPU doesn't need very many lanes. You won't notice any difference. In the article even 4 lanes of PCIE 1.0 isn't running too bad. The NVME drive on the other hand could be a substantial upgrade. If you can't boot from it, I don't think it's worth it.

https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/AMD/R9_Fury_X_PCI-Express_Scaling/18.html