Samsung 840 EVO worth upgrading to 970 PRO?

[t_j_stone_1]

I've had a Samsung 840 EVO for a few years now which has been excellent! As I'm about to build a new PC I was wondering if I would notice much difference in general performance upgrading from my 840 EVO to a 970 PRO NVMe?
I understand that the main benefit of NVMe would be faster transfer of large files, but other than that, would I notice much difference?

I'd appreciate it if anyone who has upgraded from an 840 EVO to NVMe could let me know if it was much of a noticable upgrade for general use.
Thanks!

 

[USAFRet]

What will you use this system for?

Currently, I have an 850 EVO and a couple of 840 EVO's.

My next system will be 2x 970 NVMe or similar drives.

 

[t_j_stone_1]

What will you use this system for?

Currently, I have an 850 EVO and a couple of 840 EVO's.

My next system will be 2x 970 NVMe or similar drives.

just for general use, gaming, the occasional photoshop, but if NVMe has it noticeable improvement to game/program loading times compared to my 840 EVO, I might consider NVMe (as I'm just impatient! )

 

[mdd1963]

Boot times are quicker with NVME drives, WIndows full installs in 4 minutes are awesome, but, they were not exactly slow with 840/850-class drives anyway...

Some experiments with game load times, changing levels, etc., have often shown pretty much no advantage to the hypothetically much faster NVME drives...; although as costs come down on NVME drives, there is little reason left to not choose one over a standard SATA drive...

 

[kerberos_20]

theres not much difference tbh in loading apps/games... second here and there..u wont notice much off a diff

 

[t_j_stone_1]

perhaps I'll just use my 840 EVO a little longer, and maybe treat myself at Christmas!
Thanks for your replies!

 

[karenjoly]

I have an 850 PRO, an 860 PRO and a 960 PRO. You would notice a significant difference in some things but nothing earth shattering. However I will soon buy a 970 and retire the 850 just because I love performance.

Since you do not mention it, cost is not likely a large factor but if it will help, consider the EVO rather than the PRO. The ~$ 39 difference will shave some of the guilt off from doing something just because you can.

 

[ElectrO_90]

I have 850 and thought I go the pro route - no difference at all in gaming of basic applications.
Not worth it for the Pro and for people who don't use it for its full potential

 

[Solandri]

The 970 Pro has approximately 60-70 MB/s 4k read speeds, vs about 30-40 MB/s for the 840 EVO (and 30-50 MB/s for the 970 EVO). That is a substantial speedup (nearly 2x as fast) to the slowest operation of the drive, so I would say yes you would notice a speedup. It's not very big, but it should definitely be noticeable.

This benchmark shows it to be about 10% faster than the 850 EVO at loading a game (FFXIV). Small, but noticeable. Whether it's worth it is for you to decide.

http://www.legitreviews.com/samsung-ssd-970-pro-nvme-512gb-ssd-review_204823/6

 

[J_E_D_70]

I went from an 850 Evo 256gb to a 960 Evo nvme and am highly underwhelmed. It is fast but just a couple seconds faster than the 850. If I had it to do over, I would have gotten a 1tb 860 evo (for the price of the 960) in the m.2 form factor to not have to string cables.

 

[kerberos_20]

mine 970 evo (500GB) has ~60MB 4k reads
while 850 evo (250GB) has ~45MB

well there maay be on noticeable thing tbh, waking up my pc is faster on 970evo
since my hiberfile.sys has 14GB

 

[Karadjgne]

For the most part, there's really no significant difference. Big deal about boot times, virgin windows on my 840pro is 8 seconds. After 5 years of crud, it's 23 seconds from off to internet. Coming from old hdds taking 2.5+ minutes, a few seconds is irrelavent. That's also for game loading. Game files are mostly quite small, you'll load 1000+ files a second. Again, no big deal if a game takes 10 seconds to load, or gets a 10% faster load and takes 9 seconds.

The only place NVMe really shine is in large file manipulation, like documents, books, or other files on the 10Gb size. The sheer speed difference means loading/saving in minutes, not a few seconds.

Most ppl have no need for large file manipulation.

 

[t_j_stone_1]

Thanks for all the advice everyone! I'll continue with my 840 EVO for a little while longer since it's still working fine, but who knows... perhaps I'll get tempted to try NVMe if I come across an amazing deal 😀 Thanks again all!

 

[ElectrO_90]

Thanks for all the advice everyone! I'll continue with my 840 EVO for a little while longer since it's still working fine, but who knows... perhaps I'll get tempted to try NVMe if I come across an amazing deal 😀 Thanks again all!

Good, but remember, there is nothing wrong with going the new form factor.
Just don't go the more expensive PRO route, as you won't see any difference.
Also another problem people seem to skip over, is that most of the new slots are right under/near the GPU so heat spreads quicker there and again things will slow down.
Personally, I think they should be vertical or something similar to a RAM setup.