[SOLVED] Is Nvme Worth It

quarkrad

Commendable
Jul 5, 2020
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1,515
I'm thinking of upgrading my 5 year old pc - although it is running fine and I am perfectly happy with it. (i5 4460, 8gb ram). I'm looking at i5 8600, nvme m.2 and 16gb and will need to replace my current cpu and motherboard. The cost is reasonable but I'm now wondering whether it is actually worth it. Most/all of the benefits of m.2 nvme documented are related to Gamers - I have seen nothing relating to non gamers (e.g. the great benefit in loading games speed). I do some occasional very basic video editing and do not really need any more performance. I need to somehow, as a non-gamer moderate/light user, have a realist expectation of what difference I'm going to experience. I'm thinking I would see no actual difference in usage/performance. I would have the satisfaction of having a modern ultra fast platform but maybe would see no difference in terms of actually using the pc. (My main day-to-day OS is linux).
 
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I'm thinking of upgrading my 5 year old pc - although it is running fine and I am perfectly happy with it. (i5 4460, 8gb ram). I'm looking at i5 8600, nvme m.2 and 16gb and will need to replace my current cpu and motherboard. The cost is reasonable but I'm now wondering whether it is actually worth it. Most/all of the benefits of m.2 nvme documented are related to Gamers - I have seen nothing relating to non gamers (e.g. the great benefit in loading games speed). I do some occasional very basic video editing and do not really need any more performance. I need to somehow, as a non-gamer moderate/light user, have a realist expectation of what difference I'm going to experience. I'm thinking I would see no actual difference in...
Jul 4, 2020
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10
I'll be very general with my response because there's not really a good way to answer this specific to only one person, everyone needs something different. However, in most cases, no NVME isn't worth it. NVME, while it has much higher sequential speeds, isn't actually that much faster than a good SATA drive; this is because the majority of applications an NVME would be used for are random tasks (i.e. loading a game, booting windows, etc).

If you go and look at some speed comparison graphs featuring the best SATA drives and the best NVME drives, random speeds don't actually differ by a significant margin - maybe 200MB/s at best. The main benefit of an NVME drive would be in applications where large, sequential file reads/writes are performed such as video editing, 3D modelling, and other specialised workstation tasks. And with that, I'll let you decide whether YOU need NVME, because in the end, it depends on what YOU want to do.
 
I'm thinking of upgrading my 5 year old pc - although it is running fine and I am perfectly happy with it. (i5 4460, 8gb ram). I'm looking at i5 8600, nvme m.2 and 16gb and will need to replace my current cpu and motherboard. The cost is reasonable but I'm now wondering whether it is actually worth it. Most/all of the benefits of m.2 nvme documented are related to Gamers - I have seen nothing relating to non gamers (e.g. the great benefit in loading games speed). I do some occasional very basic video editing and do not really need any more performance. I need to somehow, as a non-gamer moderate/light user, have a realist expectation of what difference I'm going to experience. I'm thinking I would see no actual difference in usage/performance. I would have the satisfaction of having a modern ultra fast platform but maybe would see no difference in terms of actually using the pc. (My main day-to-day OS is linux).
With Linux you'd see even less of a difference but NVME drives are getting very close in price to fast SATA SSDs and have other advantages beside faster loading times. Faster a disk is, less load on other parts of system during read and write and also need no cables and don't take any space.
 
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jonfitch

Reputable
Jul 5, 2020
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4,510
It's a pretty big deal for ITX SFF cases since it allows you to increase your storage with use of minimal internal volume (they are usually installed on the back of the mobo). Outside of that it's not particularly useful. They are marginally faster than SATA SSDs, and perhaps future games will be designed to leverage the faster transfer speeds more.
 

quarkrad

Commendable
Jul 5, 2020
2
1
1,515
Thank you all for your replies - as I suspected, I'm not going to see/experience any significant difference. The few times I have looked at my system monitor I'm hardly using my existing resources - increasing their capacity does seem a waste. This is like going from a sports car to a super car to travel down to the shops at 30mph!
 
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kanewolf

Titan
Moderator
Thank you all for your replies - as I suspected, I'm not going to see/experience any significant difference. The few times I have looked at my system monitor I'm hardly using my existing resources - increasing their capacity does seem a waste. This is like going from a sports car to a super car to travel down to the shops at 30mph!
The M.2 standard is a form-factor. You can get SATA or PCIe (NVMe) devices. An M.2 form factor disk has advantages that no cabling is required. You plug it into the motherboard, tighten a screw and you are done.