Team Group T-Force Cardea SSD Review

[Guest]

NVMe exposed an existing issue with heat coming from SSD processors. This has long been a minor issue with SATA, but the increase in performance from NVMe and the reduction in drive size from M.2 has compounded the issue. Team Group found a way to fix it.

Team Group T-Force Cardea SSD Review : Read more

 

[damric]

Just put an AIO liquid cooler on it. You know you want it.

Btw typo on last page "The NAND shortage is at it speak" should be" its peak"

 

[bit_user]

I've never seen thermal throttling as a significant issue for most users.

Have you ever tried using a M.2 drive, in a laptop, for software development?

Builds can be fairly I/O intensive. Especially debug builds, where the CPU is doing little optimization and the images are bloated by debug symbols.

And laptops tend to be cramped and lack good cooling for their M.2 drives. Thus, we have a real world case for thermal throttling.

Video editing on laptops is another real world case I'd expect to trigger thermal throttling.

We test with a single thread because that's how most software addresses storage.

In normal software (i.e. not disk benchmarks, databases, or server applications), you actually have two threads. The OS kernel transparently does read prefetching and write buffering. So, even if the application is coded with a single thread that's doing blocking I/O, you should expect to see some amount of QD >= 2, in any mixed-workload scenario. About the only time you really get strictly QD=1 is for sequential reads.

That said, I'd agree that desktop users (with the possible exception of people doing lots of software builds) should care mostly about QD=1 performance and not even look at performance above QD=4. In this sense, perhaps tech journalists delving into corner cases and the I/O stress tests designed to do just that have done us all a bit of a disservice.

 

[bit_user]

my grandmother always said they are not quite as audacious as RGB everything, but heat sinks do provide positive benefits ...

How I first read this.

Me: "Whoa, cool grandma."

Yeah, I read fast, mostly in a hurry to reach the benchmarks.

Seriously, you could spice up your articles with a few such devices. Maybe tech journalists would do well to cast some of their articles as short stories, in the same mold as historical fiction. You don't fictionalize the technical details - only the narrative around them.

Consider that - as odd as it might sound - it still wouldn't be quite as far out there as the Night Before Christmas pieces. The trick would be not to make it seem too forced... again, with my thoughts turning towards The Night Before Christmas pieces (as charming as they were). So, no fan fiction or Fresh Prince, please.

 

[bit_user]

When I started building PCs, it was common to see one fan at the bottom of the case to bring in cool air, and another on the back to exhaust warm air. I haven't seen a case with only two fans in a very long time. That doesn't mean they are not out there; it's just rare.

My workstation has a 2-fan configuration with an air-cooled 130 W CPU, 275 W GPU, quad-channel memory, the enterprise version of the Intel SSD 750, and 2 SATA drives. Front fan is 140 mm and blows cool air over the SATA drives, while rear fan is a 120 mm behind the CPU.

860 W PSU is bottom-mounted, and only spins its fan in high-load, which is rare. The graphics card has 2 axial fans. Everything stays pretty quiet, and I had no throttling issues when running multi-day CPU-intensive jobs or during the Folding @ Home contest.

In addition to that, I have an old i7-2600K that just uses the boxed CPU cooler, integrated graphics, and a single 80 mm Noctua exhaust fan, in a cheap mini-tower case. Never throttles, and I don't even hear it unless something pegs all of the CPU cores (it sits about 4' from my feet, on the other side of my UPS). It does have a top-mounted PSU, which is a Seasonic G-Series semi-modular, that I think is designed to keep its fan running full-time. It started as an experiment, but I never found a reason to increase its airflow. I haven't even dusted it in a couple years.

I'm left to conclude that you only need more than 2 big fans in cases with poor airflow, multi-GPU, or overclocking.

 

[jaber2]

Huh? I hate bots

 

[mapesdhs]

The Comparison Products list includes the 950 Pro, but the graphs don't have results for this. Likewise, the graphs have results for the SM961, but that model is not in the Comparison Products list. A mixup here? To which model is that data actually referring?

Ian.