I’m exciting about the new CPU releases this year from AMD i.e. Ryzen, ThreadRipper. Yes I’m an AMD fan boy as in much as I like to cheer on the under dog. Having a monopoly in any sector is no good for anyone especially the customer. Unfortunately until I get a pay rise or come into some money I going to be stuck on my old AMD AM3+ system for a while. So I decided to see if I can upgrade my current system to get some more performance out of it.
Current System:
- AMD FX-3850 processor
- M5a99FX PRO r2.0 motherboard
- HyperX Savage 16 GB (2 x 8 GB) 1600 MHz DDR3 CL9 DIMM
- OCZ Vertex4 SSD
- Western Digital 1TB drive
- 500W GM Series G550M 80 Plus Bronze Modular PS
- AMD Radeon 7850 HD 860MHz PCI-Express 3.0 HDMI
After the massive performance boost I got when I upgraded my computer’s boot drive from a HDD to a SSD I wonder moving from a SATA SSD drive to a NVMe SSD drive also give my system a boost.
I decided to get the Samsung 960 EVO SSD drive which I got on Amazon for just over a hundred euros. My motherboard lacks a M.2 slot so I got a Startech M.2 adapter
Fitting the drive into the adapter and the adapter into a free PCI-E slot in my computer was straight forward enough.
The Samsung 960 EVO SSD drive has a theoretical read and write speed of 3,200 MB/sec and 1,900 MB/sec respectively. My motherboard has only PCI-E version 2.0 slots which have a max speed of 2000 MB/s for four PCI-E lanes so right way it won’t be reaching speed of 3,200 MB/sec.
Using the benchmarking option of Gnome-disks program I got a read speed of 1,500 MB/s and write speed of 1,400MB/s.
I found running this benchmark a few times gave me a lot of different results. Speed results would drop down to write speeds of 860 MB/s and I know sometimes this was due to thermal throttling.
Did I notice any performance gains?
My system boots in 20 seconds similar to my old SATA SSD drive. I could be losing valuable seconds due to the fact I can’t boot directly from the NVMe drive because my motherboard doesn’t recognise the drive. I having to use GRUB to load the kernel from SATA drive and map the NVMe drive as root.
I’m using my computer to compile my software projects and the compile times are the same. I have noticed Eclispe IDE loads and opens quicker and similar with other apps. I feel my old system can’t utilise the Samsung 960 Evo NVMe to it’s full potential so as an upgrade it’s not worth it. I will be using it in the future in my new system whenever that will happen.
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