To Maxxify and others here - this is an excellent thread for a very similar problem I am having, and I would appreciate your advice. (And maybe the link I am giving below is interesting.)
I have a Dell Optiplex 7010 Mini-Tower with Win 10 Pro 64-bit, an i3 CPU and 16GB RAM. I followed the instructions in the following excellent article to change my hard drive to a Samsung 970 EVO Plus NVMe M.2 and to boot from that M.2, which a 7010 normally cannot do:
https://www.tachytelic.net/2021/12/dell-optiplex-7010-pcie-nvme/
It is working, I am booting from the Samsung NVMe M.2, but I am getting only 1,750 MBps ± in CrystalDiskMark (which is similar to the graphics at the start of this thread), NOT the 3,500 MBps that is shown in the article for a 7010.
Question: if I replace my i3 CPU with an i5 or an i7 that is OK for my motherboard, do you think I will then get the 3,500 MBps throughput that the author of the article gets? Maybe because an i5 or an i7 will provide
some PCI-E Gen 3 and not limit my machine to PCI-E Gen 2 only?
Thanks for your thoughts.