Speed up your PC - Add an nVME add in card for you system

hello this is my crochet today I want to talk about an inexpensive add-on card that when used with the right type of SSD will make a huge difference in your performance hello and thanks for taking the opportunity to watch this video today I want to walk through an inexpensive way to add on speed and storage to your system what you see here is a couple different cards which I'm going to walk through and show you how they work and then at the end of the video we'll run some benchmark tests to see if you know they perform as advertised we're only going to test one of the cards because they're effectively the same type of card and I expect the performance to be exactly the same before we start putting things together I want to briefly talk about the different types of SSDs so I'm sure you've seen these types before which is basically your standard two and a half inch Samsung or any brand for that matter typically used as a hard drive replacement they're reliable fast and they're they're great upgrade to your system however what we're here to talk about today is really a couple of other types of drives you have another type of drive called an m2 and here's a couple examples of the m-dot - if we look at this one here we're looking at a at a 970 Pro which you know has a approximately 3.4 3.5 gigabytes per second transfer rate versus the 550 range that you're going to see from this drive although these looks similar to this there's there are two different types and I want to talk briefly about those two different types this is actually a standard SATA Drive so even though it's in this form factor you know obviously can be mounted on motherboards that have this type of adapter the performance basically between this and this is roughly the same there you don't don't really see any difference at all the nvme however is completely different and I want to draw your attention and I hopefully you can see this through the video but there is roughly there's a key here and I'll try and zoom in on this here in just a second and let's see if we can't put these together so if you look closely at these notches here you'll see that the Samsung Pro only has one notch on the right-hand side while the standard SATA drives actually has two notches and if you look at the pictures I'll try and supply some links so you can look at you know a little bit closer shots but basically that's what distinguishes these two drives is actually the knotch and this is critical because when you buy at one of these empty drives you want to make sure that as we use them in these cards that you actually buy the nvme type because that's the only one that's going to work with these adapters and let me let's take one apart so you can kind of see what it looks like okay so let's go ahead and I'll pop open a couple of these boxes here so we can get an idea of what these look like and I'm gonna spare you the screwdriver and the screws but basically they kind of can these come kind of fully equipped so you can put it together pretty easily yourself and the card itself is really really simple and so what you see here is basically just a single card that has the slot and you'll notice here on this slot that it has the same notch that's on this samsung pro and the process for putting things together is very simple and I'm going to show you on this other card because I'm not going to put this one together but in essence you're going to put a standoff next to the appropriate size and these kind of just slip in at a slight angle here and then just push down and basically screw down so that's what holds these in place but again we're going to use this card because this one actually comes with a heat sink the one thing I want to mention about these particular types of drives is they get extremely hot and when they get hot they throttle and therefore you lose some of the effectivity of the performance what I typically do is put a heatsink on these I buy these kits with it comes with a heatsink in the clips and it's less and it snaps together with some thermal compound which you probably can't see very well in the video but there's a thermal pad underneath the heatsink and the top of this SSD mm-hmm and this is critical so if you're going to mount an SSD like this on a card like this that's open you're going to want to use a heatsink now I've deliberately move the remove the heatsink off of this this 970 so we can put together on this type of card because I'm going to show you another kind of card here let's go ahead and set this one aside here for a moment and let's go ahead and open this one up and this one here is basically identical with a couple of notable exceptions the first thing you're going to notice when you take this apart is it's a lot better built so when you go ahead and take this apart set this aside for a moment and as you can see here this card let me just go ahead and zoom in a little bit so as you can see that there's a there's some visual differences with these cards number one this card actually is designed to fit and any size slot so you can go with the buy four by eight or by 16 slot you know notice this card here only has 2 by 4 slot now even though this is a x 16 slot it will not run at time 16 if you look closely in UNEP you're probably going to not be able to see it very well but there are traces that go to these boards that make the connection between the m dot 2 connector and the circuitry that plugs into your motherboard there's only circuitry on the first part of this the only reason that this is actually a multi slot car is for mechanical strength only so as I put this in a larger slot that's going to hold a little bit tighter you'll notice this car has no mounting at all whereas this card actually mounts into your standard expansion slot on your computer so we're gonna use this one the the other main difference is obviously this one comes with a nice big heatsink and that's something that we're going to want to use so let's go ahead and put this thing together and then we can run some tests on it so the first thing we're gonna do is take actually take out these pads since this comes with actually a whole bunch of pads here they give you some extras depending on how your particular board is configured head and now take this apart this has basically four screws in the back you can see one two three four so let's go ahead and take that apart you okay so basically we've got this board apart and as you can see let me turn it around here there isn't much on this thing but basically traces because your your connection or the the the interface type between what plugs into your board and this particular type of drive is exactly the same these are designed to run on a times four PCI Express so all you're really doing is making connections do it to your motherboard so let's go ahead and put this thing together so we're going to use this little stand off here okay so the first thing we're going to do is take the larger pad as you can see here these plastic peels off and we're gonna place this larger pad right on this SSD here so we're gonna put it as far back as we can so it doesn't interfere with the the connector at all okay and that's pretty good and don't forget to take the top layer up because there's also a piece of clear plastic on top of the thermal pads so what you should end up with is very soft thermal pad on the top of the SSD so the next thing we're going to do now is basically slide it into this board so we're going to take and take the SSD which you can notice the slots match up nicely there we go and that fits in like this and then we're gonna head and put that screw back in here like that so what you have here is that little tiny round post that's got the kind of a groove in it that holds the SSD down while this screw actually just holds that post down so now as you can see this Drive is mounted nice and flush with an air gap underneath so from that point on what we're going to do here is actually put the heat sink back on and we're gonna do that by lining up this front groove here on this heat sink as you can see there's a cutaway there and we're gonna go ahead and put that in here that actually faces the front and then the the drive should fit nicely into this eight sink which it does it's nice and flat from there we're gonna put this back plate on and that back plate has three holes in it to match up one of the three screws here so we're going to line that up with the screw and basically slide this right in it should just fit right in like that so at that point we're gonna put the four screws back in that we took out originally you I wouldn't tighten these all the way until I get all four in there just to keep it from popping up on the side so if all went well what we should see here is a nice even gap all the way this should be nice and flat now let's make sure these are all tight so that we don't have anything coming loose and there we have it so now you can see I've got my SSD drive mounted with a nice heatsink on top in this only piece I have is this to clip into either x 4 x 8 or x 16 slot so I'm going to show you how that's mounted it's pretty straightforward and then we're gonna run some tests on it and see how it works ok as you can see from the video it's a little bit difficult but you can see that the inside of my test board there my test system has an empty PCI Express slot and that's the one we're going to use for testing so I'm going to go ahead and insert that [Music] okay that should do it right there so as you can see the units been inserted into a by 16 slot and we're going to go ahead and use that for testing and again remember these units only run at times four even though it's plugged into a time sixteen slot he just holds it the board a little tighter let's see how this thing runs okay let's get into some testing as you can see on the display I actually have three samsung drives in the system the first one being 850 which is the two and a half inch drive that we saw earlier in a video and then I also have the 960 which is actually mounted directly to the motherboard and lastly we have the 970 Pro which is the one that we just put into the add-in cart so we're going to run a benchmark called a tto on each one of those so you can see the difference and ultimately so you can see that the plug-in card is every bit as fast as a board mounted directly to a Rebs SSD mounted directly to the board and that's really the the big thrust here is to compare that putting an SSD and nvme SSD into an add-in board does not impact performance whatsoever and that's what we're going to demonstrate here today so let's start with the testing okay we're going to start with the D Drive which is actually the eight as I mentioned the 850 so I'm going to go ahead and run this test you okay so there you have the first test and again this was the 850 standard two-and-a-half inch SSD that we'll use as our baseline comparison when we're comparing the other two as you can also see that it's it's tapping out about 550 which is kind of what we estimated in the very beginning so let's go on to the next one okay so the next one we're going to do is the 960 Pro which is actually mounted to the motherboard directly so let's compare that and this is it actually an nvme drive as well so we'll get to compare the difference between nvme in a standard SSD in this particular test and ultimately as I mentioned we'll test the plug-in card against this particular drive so let's go ahead and start you okay so there you have the next results as can see we're up into the 3.1 gigabytes per second sin read speed which is significantly faster than a standard SSD so here we're comparing the difference between an nvme drive in a standard SSD so now the next part let's compare the adding card to this drive bear in mind there's slight differences the 970 is marginally faster than than the 960 but at least we get to see if that plug-in that in to a simple you know under $20 extension card will actually make a difference ok let's go on to the last test now we're going to now test the samsung 970 on the extender card what I'd like to do is also show you what happens to the temperature now bear in mind this is the card that has the heat sink so it should stay reasonably cool without a card you can expect these nvme drives to approach a hundred degrees C and then start throttling now they're designed to run at that temperature because that's why they've enabled throttling however when you throw out all you do give up some performance so keeping it cool it's kind of important in my opinion again these are designed to run and can be run without any kind of heat sinking but when you put it on a card that actually has heat sink you'll see it's it stays considerably cooler than if this card was running exposed which I typically don't do because I don't like throttling if you're spending an extra 20% to get an nvme drive then you're going to make sure that you get the maximum performance out of it so let's go ahead and run that last drive on the adapter card and let's see what we get you okay there you have it you can see that putting an nvme drive in an extender card has very little to no impact in performance of the drive and as you can see there's no temperature problems either due to that nice heatsink that they bundle on there so you've got kind of a win-win situation it's a great way to to upgrade your system now there's a couple of caveats I want to mention obviously any PCI Express that is a times 4 or 8 or 16 will work with with these adding cards the the one thing I did want to mention is that if you choose to try and make this a bootable Drive that is system dependent that means you'll have to make sure you have the most current bios and you have to do a little bit of research on your motherboard they will basically always work as a secondary drive like if you wanted to use it for games scratch drive whatever it is that you're using it for data it'll be fine however if you're trying to use it as a boot drive which many people do you'll need to do a little bit of homework in terms of checking out to make sure that your motherboard can boot from a PCI Express card and it's really has really nothing to do with the type of card you plug in there it only has to do with can I boot from the card or can't I so check your motherboard do a little homework maybe check forums support sites anything you might find on your motherboard if you decide to use it as a boot drive before you go through all this trouble make sure it's gonna work ok I hope you enjoyed the video thank you very much for watching if you haven't done so already please subscribe and set the notification so you'll be notified on future videos hope you enjoyed it thank you very much we'll see on the next one [Music]

Channel: Mike Faucher

Views: 360,645

Keywords: nvme, pci-e, nvme ssd, nvme pci-e, speed up your pc, nvme pcie adapter, nvme adapter, speed up your pc with an ssd drive, m.2 pcie adapter, m.2 adapter, pcie ssd, m.2 nvme, nvme install, pcie nvme adapter, nvme adapter install, 970 evo plus, nvme pcie adapter review, nvme pcie adapter card, m.2 ssd, pcie ssd install, pcie ssd card

Id: iSEkTGzzzk0

Length: 22min 27sec (1347 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 15 2019