Does your motherboard (or laptop) have an M.2 slot?

[Edwin]

This might just be the hard drive of your dreams*!
http://www.forbes.com/sites/antonyl...review-pc-storage-just-got-sexy/#3de2ce609661
http://www.pcgamesn.com/samsung/samsung-960-evo-960-pro-ssd

(*What, you mean you don't dream about hard drives? Hmm...)

Read speeds in excess of 3,000MB/s and write speeds in excess of 1,500MB/s. That's just ludicrously fast, and an order of magnitude better than a SATA SSD. Whether you'd notice in everyday use is another matter, but these drives sound like the supercar of SSDs at merely sportscar prices. In other words, they're expensive vs SATA SSD drives, but not as much more expensive as you would expect given the huge speed improvement.

If I had a motherboard that supported M.2 NVMe, I'd probably run out and buy one tomorrow. Unfortunately, juicy as the idea is, I can't really justify a complete PC rebuild just to put in a super-snazzy SSD!

Cheapest at the moment seems to be eBuyer who are offering the 500GB version for £211.85
http://www.ebuyer.com/766048-samsung-500gb-960-evo-pcie-ssd-mz-v6e500bw

There's also a 1TB version which looks like it will be about £400 if you shop around, but all the retailers seem to be waiting on stock (it should come in in the next few weeks)

 

[bonusmedia]

I have an SSD M2 drive in my main machine for the OS and key apps. It's fast.

I do think there is a point at which you just don't benefit from it getting any faster, but I keep being proven wrong

 

[Edwin]

Until recently, the top SSDs could really only saturate the SATA bus, especially on writes. But the newest generation of drives (like the one mentioned above) take things to a completely different level. But of course it's hard to say what the real-world effects would be without trying them.

 

[martin-s]

What is it with you and hdd performance?!

 

[Edwin]

What is it with you and hdd performance?!

Other people like cars, I...

Speed and silence - my two PC obsessions.

 

[Edwin]

(I realise this won't interest many people, but you never know...)

Here's my current pick of the "ultimate" PC components for a machine intended for business but not gaming. Comes to £1,400 approx (probably closer to £1,500 if you wanted to narrow down the suppliers to just a couple rather than buy everything piecemeal all over the place)
https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/list/4fPfnn

(I would also add some kind of built-in x-in-1 memory card reader - PCPartPicker doesn't support this, but they cost £20 or less. No OS included in the price.)

 

[Skinner]

I were just about to reply on the black friday post that I'm not buying any more standard SSD, I'm moving over to m.2.

I've been using an sm951 in my laptop for about 9 months now. I can go from cold, pressing the power button, to win7ult and photoshop or premier fully loaded in around 20-22 seconds. Prior to the 951, it were about 40-45 seconds depending on ambient temp and speed I can click the buttons.

Speed for me is my time, the unlocked extreme processors, sli graphics, m.2 drives etc is the difference between a job taking 2-6 hours and 2-4 days. Sorry Edwin, my machines sound like harrier jump jets when they are under heavy load

For example, at recent 3 day event I took 1600 photos, resulting in 1600 around 30-40mb each raw image files, about 55gb in total. Editing on my beast, I could load 50 at a time, colour, balance in the raw editor, then crop, rotate, watermark, and save one by one and be done before the days over. When my extremely overclocked gpu melted, a similar job on a normal 700 quid msi took me over a week, at nearly 2-4 minutes per image.

How much is your time worth, play with your kids for 3-4 days, do more work or whatevr or sit watching the hour glass turn at your pc

 

[Edwin]

Sorry Edwin, my machines sound like harrier jump jets when they are under heavy load

No probs. Horses for courses. However, if they really are that noisy (and they sound pretty high-end so I'm guessing you're exaggerating, but not by much) I would be tempted to get some kind of custom larger enclosure for them to all sit inside (noise dampened) and have cables running out of it for mouse/keyboard/monitors etc., perhaps to a KVM. But maybe that level of noise is something you get used to, like people living directly under a flight path hardly notice the planes any more...

 

[bonusmedia]

My main rig has dual 980Tis in SLI.
They have as much space as possible, the machine still sounds like it's going to take off when working hard... But worth it for the performance at 7680 * 1440

 

[bonusmedia]

While I'm showing off - this is the most comfortable and productive workstation I've ever had. You can get the seat and frame kits from Obutto, I highly recommend. They're alright for gaming too

 

[Edwin]

My main rig has dual 980Tis in SLI.
They have as much space as possible, the machine still sounds like it's going to take off when working hard... But worth it for the performance at 7680 * 1440

Ah, that's going to be tricky to quieten down! (Though if you ever wanted to do so as an exercise, you might be able to with a combination of replacement GPU fans and a large, silenced gaming case). Anyway, looks pretty good.

 

[Skinner]

I'm using a laptop so not much I can do to silence it, I could replace the fans again, but I already did that once, didn't make much difference, once temps hit 100 degree's is take off time, I repasted the gpus and cpu to see about avoiding the heat a little but only a degree or so difference. I added some copper shims and custom coolants blades but not much help once the load is heavy enough.

Not much use to me but may help others, I did talk to someone a while ago, about using an aquarium inspired top off reservoir cooling system (water based). Run the water out the case, into the aquarium system, and back. If I ever go back to a desktop, its top of my list

I'm currently eyeballing this http://mysn.co.uk/shop/xmg-u727-gaming-laptop.html.

 

[Edwin]

Some interesting comments here about using laptop cooling pads to bring down the temperature of overclocked laptops...
https://www.techinferno.com/index.p...-pads-really-help-especially-in-overclocking/

 

[Edwin]

Re aquarium-style cooling, this may be of interest... Goes into quite a bit of detail about building a PC submerged in mineral oil.
https://www.pugetsystems.com/submerged.php

Also http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/276288-29-mineral-links

(Google "mineral oil pc cooling" for more similar resources)