Are PCIe 4.0 SSDs Worth It For GAMING? - Gen 4 vs Gen 3 vs SATA vs HDD Gaming PC Load Speed Test!

three two one go ten seconds for cyberpunk that is not bad is it gonna get close to the gen four will we find out in just a second yes today we're here to answer one question and one question only and there's a big one when you're buying your gaming rig should you buy a hard drive a sata ssd a gen 3 or gen 4 pcie ssd does it make any difference to game load speeds and ultimately are the better ones actually worth the money that's right serious video today no time for mucking about at all the gaming laptop you've been waiting for has arrived the latest omen 15 not only looks incredible but comes packing some serious gaming performance the new smarter chassis is remarkably thin and light yet it uses the latest intel and amd processors for all you can eat portable power play games at sky high frame rates with the optional 144hz display and then bask in the glory of super smooth gameplay thanks to the mighty nvidia geforce rtx graphics cards learn a little bit more about this incredible gaming machine today with that link down below so yes this is an absolutely huge question and if you are building a gaming pc or a pc really of any description it's probably a question that you have asked yourself if you look at the raw performance of these new drives then they are so much better than the ones that came before it i mean look at the difference between my old hard drive and then this brand new samsung 980 pro pcie generation 4 drive it is incredible the difference but is that actually going to translate into a better gaming experience because in terms of fps it's not really going to make any difference there are some games where there are some weird bottlenecks but generally speaking no so it's all going to come down to load speeds so let me introduce you to our contenders we have a western digital black drive not this one it's actually inside the pc it is one terabyte in size and this is actually i think the first good hard drive i bought the manufacturer date was 2013 so this is very much representing your old hard drive that you have lying around next up we then have the samsung 870 evo and this one is brand spanking new but the problem is that this is a sata drive and it's going to be priced fairly similarly to some other nvme drives that you can get which means that for a lot of people this isn't really going to make sense unless you actively need a two and a half inch drive but i suppose that the price will come down a little bit as this gets a little bit less new moving on to the real deal we now have the nvme drives right off the bat you can see that these are a completely different form factor to all of the others they're nothing new now they've actually been out for quite a few years they've become i guess mainstream they're getting very affordable as well but if you're wanting a gen 4 drive and these get ridiculously fast the main caveat is that you are going to need a b550 and x570 or the upcoming z590 motherboards or at least a 11th generation chip and a z490 motherboard this drive is the 980 pro and it's the fastest gen 4 drive i have on hand sadly it is only a 500 gigabyte version so it is going to muck up our test ever so slightly but the question is not whether these drives are fast the question is whether this will actually translate into any better gaming performance and if you're looking at price to performance is it actually going to be worth going for a faster drive or is even the hard drive perfectly fine for what you're going to want to use it for let's find out the way that this test is going to work should be pretty straightforward really we have our complete setup ready to go we've got four drives installed i've tested all of the speeds they're all working properly we have four games we've got the witcher 3 we've got cyberpunk we've got civilization 6 and what's the other one again far cry 5 that's it we've got far cry 5 installed so a variety of games and i'd say that the newer the game the faster the difference should be but let's put it to the test we're going very high tech today we have a notepad we have a pen we have a stopwatch and we're just going to note down how long it takes to actually load the games aren't you glad it's me doing this not you okay first test then cyberpunk in theory this should be the most optimized because it's the newest definitely no bugs in this game at all go gonna have to be quick on the draw here the second it says it's done i'm expecting this to be quick oh there you go 10 seconds for cyberpunk that is not bad all amd system this as well running cyberpunk if you do want to see the full video about this pc by the way and what it can do in cyberpunk with frame rate and everything hit the i in the top right corner of your screen nothing like a bit of self-promo now isn't there is there now is there [ __ ] are you ready for the witcher 3 3 2 1 go 12 seconds collect all the missing cards in the skellige deck 13 and 19. i friggin loved gwent gwent was awesome far cry 5 3 2 1 go there you go boom 11 seconds the irony with our final game civilization six is that this is probably the smallest game i have installed on any of my pcs right now but this is always the one that takes the longest to load i think it's because there's a lot of very small files it's got a pump in there it's very complex so it should be a very good test once more into the breach resume game go oh there we go boom 16 seconds 72 i told you is the slowest at night i told you marcus is always right drum roll please the hard drive from 2013 should be absolutely awful versus the best of the best when it comes to gen 4 ssds is there going to be a big difference far cry 5 go what did we have before we had 11 seconds and 21. so immediately this is going to be the test to know how bad or close things are going to be i'm just filling for time here 28 seconds versus what did we have 11 so what's that about 140 more time if you're playing a heavier game or you're playing a game i guess like far cry when you're doing a lot of fast traveling then that time is all going to add up think about it over the years the amount of time you could save that is quite a few cups of tea that you have in your book or hopefully not in your book in your belly get in my belly get your bids in boys what do you reckon sata ssd is this going to be the right price to performance is there going to be much no improvement versus the hard drive is it going to get close to the gen 4 will we find out in just a second yes 11 seconds and 92 maybe caught that a little bit late but not much in it 11 seconds the gin 4 ssd did it in 10 seconds and 41 this did it in 1192 so really not much difference there at all now is there witcher 3 witcher 3 which results are we gonna get that's a that's a loose joke that one imagine actually spending time with me it must be horrible there we go 11 seconds 93 versus 12 seconds o 8 over on the gen 4 so basically exactly the same circumstantial no difference i really did think you know that there would be a difference between the gen 4 drive and the others just because it is so much faster but clearly at the moment the bottleneck does seem to be somewhere else do you hear that noise no you don't because there's no horrible spinning hard drive going hate hard drives which brings us on to our final drive drumroll 4 the gen 3 ssd [Music] [Music] here so [Music] [Music] that's it i'm free i don't need to do any more tests now and you don't need to see them or i spared you that the gen 3 was actually pretty similar to what i expected but there were a couple of results where it did come out on top of the gen 4 drive this could just be circumstantial it could be because this is a one terabyte drive whereas the gen 4 was 500 gig we're not sure but ultimately what does all of this tell us well it is pretty straightforward really if you're looking at buying a gaming pc and all you're going to be using it for is gaming then clearly the ssd that you go for doesn't make a huge amount of difference in the grand scheme of things i think in the future this will change because of things like microsoft's direct storage api and the ability to actually change the way games work to make them not only more optimized but to have new settings that can load more things directly from the ssd into the graphics memory that's when something like a gen 4 ssd is really going to start to make a whole lot of sense and i stand by the fact that i think that in the future there will be different game settings that will need fast drives to properly work but ultimately today is not that day so if you're watching this video and you want to buy some more storage or you're buying a whole new gaming computer and you're wondering what sort of budget you should allocate to the storage then as long as you're not buying one of these i don't think it's going to make a huge amount of difference but i would probably go for one of these a gen 3 ssd because they're not really much more expensive than sata drives to be honest with you and they do give you a whole bunch of benefits across your system and in certain games it will make a difference but ultimately as we saw not all of them as for gen 4 pcie ssds something like the 980 pro is a fantastic ssd but it's not properly utilized in games at the moment so i'd only go for something like this if you're going to use it in a whole bunch of other applications that you know you'll be able to properly utilize this speed let me know your thoughts on this video though were these the results that you expected to see did you think that the gen 4 ssd would pull out ahead did you think that the hard drive would be slower i'd absolutely love to hear from you let me know what you've bought recently or are going to buy down in that comment section below don't forget to smash that like button this video took a long time to make so i'd really appreciate some love on this one do get subscribed as well for more videos just like this including those epic pc builds that you can find in the end screen and of course all of the products that have been featured here today will list it down in the description below with my amazon affiliate links and of course while you're down there don't forget to check out the brand new omen 15. equipped with nvidia rdx graphics you not only get super smooth sky-high frame rates but the next generation of gameplay thanks to real-time rtx ray tracing and ai enhanced dlss 2.0 combine that with nvidia's reflex tech and the mighty omen tempest cooling system and you'll be able to play and win for hours on end turn up the volume with bang olufsen audio and customize it your way with the omen gaming hub check out the omen 15 today with that link down below but thank you so much for checking out this video i really appreciate it i'll see you in the next one you

Channel: PC Centric

Views: 216,327

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Id: 2NKnPTkRY2w

Length: 12min 13sec (733 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 27 2021