panosru Posted September 21, 2020 Share Posted September 21, 2020 (edited) Hello! I want to get a new NVMe for my system, my mobo is a Gigabyte Z390 Aorus Pro and I'm looking to buy either Gigabyte Aorus NVMe Gen4 1TB or Samsung 970 Evo Plus 1TB, the price difference of the two in my country is 17 euros more for Gigabyte, so it is ignorable. My main questions are, a) will it work on my motherboard? In the specs of my motherboard say "All of the PCI Express slots conform to PCI Express 3.0 standard.", and b) if my motherboard doesn't have gen4 PCIe, then should I buy the Samsung 970 Evo Plus instead? Based on the manufacturer specs for each disk these are the indicated speeds of the drives: 5000 MB/s Read | 4400 MB/s Write for Gigabyte 3500 MB/s Read | 3300 MB/s Write for Samsung Also, I can get the Samsung today, but Gigabyte will get to me in about 3 - 4 working days if I order it today. What are you suggesting to me? Thanks a lot! My main questions are, a) will it work on my motherboard? In the specs of my motherboard say "All of the PCI Express slots conform to PCI Express 3.0 standard.", and b) if my motherboard doesn't have gen4 PCIe, then should I buy the Samsung 970 Evo Plus instead? Based on the manufacturer specs for each disk these are the indicated speeds of the drives: 5000 MB/s Read | 4400 MB/s Write for Gigabyte 3500 MB/s Read | 3300 MB/s Write for Samsung Also, I can get the Samsung today, but Gigabyte will get to me in about 3 - 4 working days if I order it today. What are you suggesting to me? Thanks a lot! Update: Based on Quote If you have a PCIe 4.0 graphics card you can use it with a motherboard designed for PCIe 3.0; however, the card's available bandwidth would be limited to the capabilities of PCIe 3.0. I suppose the same applies to all cards, so in other words, if I buy the Gigabyte NVMe, I won't get the speed it indicates, therefore maybe I should just buy the Samsung? Thanks! PS: From a logical perspective, I know that since the price is more or less the same, it will be wise to buy Gen4 since it is backwards compatible and you can use it with a new motherboard, but tbh I have no plans to change my motherboard for at least the next couple of years, maybe more, I want to see what will happen with Hackintosh now that Apple moved to ARM, so in that case, the fact that is backwards compatible is not a major factor for me. My main factor is speed (of course) and the availability of the product. Not that I can't wait for 3 - 4 days, but I will wait only if it worth the wait, if I end up with same speeds like Evo Plus, then maybe I should just go and drive now to a store near me and buy it Update 2: It is kind of embarrassing answering your own question, but what the heck, we all do that! I still value your input to the matter though and I would like to see your perspective on it and what would be your choice. So I ended up to these pros and cons: Gigabyte Pros: - Sequential Speed is faster - It uses newer architecture (Gen4 - which actually, to my understanding, is just a modified Gen3 component) Cons: - Not natively supported by my motherboard (results in Gen3 speed range) - Negligible price disadvantage - Availability delay around 3 - 4 business days - Speed of real-world use cases are very close to the speed of a good Gen3 NVMe Samsung Pros: - Prooven to be a reliable and fast drive - Available for pick up today - Negligible price advantage - Natively supported by my motherboard - Speed of real-world use cases are very close to the speed Gigabyte Gen4 NVMe provides Cons: - Uses older Gen3 technology - Sequential speed is slower So as a proper geek and OCD freak I created a spreadsheet in Excel to help me decide the choice of my dilemma, and the result was Samsung. dilemma.xlsx Update2: I'm attaching here the results from Blackmagic Disk Speed Test. During the test, I had two instances of Microsoft Edge with 178 tabs open (combined), Rider from JetBrains, Navicat, AirMail, Outlook, Mail, Opera with 6 tabs, Messenger, Telegram, Grids, WhatsApp, Viber, Transmission (idle), Spotify (playing), KaDesk (kafka GUI), iTerm (4 tabs), two instances of Tower (Git GUI), and a few services running (postgres sql, mysql, mongodb, kafka, eventsource, nginx and others). Edited September 22, 2020 by panosru Info update Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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