What's up with NVMe ssd's (PCI-e slot)

[benny van de locht]

Hi,
My pc died last week, and I'm searching Youtube and the www for the best performance possible within my budget.
I came across the subject of non volatile memory and it's advantages. The question is as follows:
Given that I would have a new mid specced I7 or compareable AMD processor, a good workstation grade mainboard and 2 sticks of at least 8GB of RAM.
Would the SSD named in the title give me a spectacular advantage over a new regular SATA SSD ( for example a Samsung EVO)? I know the write and read speeds are spectacularly higher than the SATA, but are the rest of the specs making an important gain of this NVMe SSD, or are those high specced figures bottlenecked anyway?

Thank you!

Benny

[madmaxmiller]

Would the SSD named in the title give me a spectacular advantage over a new regular SATA SSD ( for example a Samsung EVO)? I know the write and read speeds are spectacularly higher than the SATA, but are the rest of the specs making an important gain of this NVMe SSD, or are those high specced figures bottlenecked anyway?

I vote for the regular SATA SSD as it's fast enough. Use two of them (= 2 channels), one for system and software, the other for your sessions.
PCI-Nvme can on some boards cause a lot of interrupts and have the opposite effect of what you try to achieve: while their burst-transfer rates are still impressive, they will interrupt your CPU often enough to struggle with the real-time delivery of audio packets to the sound card.
Here's an explanatory video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUsLLEkswzE

MMM

[benny van de locht]

Hi MMM,
The motherboard not being a good match with a NVMe SSD, does that apply to the new boards equiped with PCI 4.0 in tandem with AMD Ryzen 9 3900X ( for example) ?
Is there a way to find this in the specs of the hardware of a sytem or is this rather unpredictable? I'm just thinking, why buying a high end processor if regular (but really fast nevertheless) SSD's are fast enough? The net is full of recommendations to buy the fastest cpu possible for example. (And the right mainboard, RAM, soundcard, drivers, Windows tweaks, BIOS settings etc... but let's assume those factors considered taken care of)

[madmaxmiller]

Hi MMM,
The motherboard not being a good match with a NVMe SSD, does that apply to the new boards equiped with PCI 4.0 in tandem with AMD Ryzen 9 3900X ( for example) ?
Is there a way to find this in the specs of the hardware of a sytem or is this rather unpredictable? I'm just thinking, why buying a high end processor if regular (but really fast nevertheless) SSD's are fast enough? The net is full of recommendations to buy the fastest cpu possible for example. (And the right mainboard, RAM, soundcard, drivers, Windows tweaks, BIOS settings etc... but let's assume those factors considered taken care of)

It's rather unpredictable. As the guy in the video said: a 1st gen i3 can have better realtime performance than your 10core i9 - in fact it is even very likely. The more features/kernels/etc the more overhead.
If you think about it, SSDs became "standard" only in the last 3-4 years, however we've been running even large projects from standard hard drives before.
I personally don't use the latest brik-a-brak and I'm happy (see signature).
You could make an agreement with your dealer to replace the Nvme with regular SSDs if it doesn't work...

MMM

[benny van de locht]

Hi MMM,
Thank you for putting this into perspective, that is most appreciated.

Benny

[benny van de locht]

MMM,

AMD FX6300, how would that translate spec wise in Intel terms? Which combo mainboard/processor would you recommend me for a new system?

[madmaxmiller]

MMM,

AMD FX6300, how would that translate spec wise in Intel terms? Which combo mainboard/processor would you recommend me for a new system?

No particular models. But an i5 will do it, it doesn't have to be 10th or 11th generation as you don't want hyperthreading. High turbo-frequency is good though and many tasks are still single-threaded and having one core clocked high helps to do these faster. Have a look into the table, everything 4GHz+ is very cool.
https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/...ssors.html

As for the board, there are basically only Intel chipsets out there, make sure it's good quality. I was always happy with Gigabyte boards. Choose one with 4 RAM sockets so you can start with two reasonable sticks and extend later if needed. Always have RAM sticks in pairs, so instead of 1x 16GB rather have 2x 8GB because you then use dual-channel.
Also, the board should have a good number of USB ports, 6+.

Having not the latest fashion can save heaps of money which is better invested in SSDs or studio equipment. I have 3 SSDs, 1 for system/software, 1 for sessions and 1 for sample libraries etc.

HTH
MMM

P.S.: The AMD FX6300 compares roughly to a 7th generation i5.

[benny van de locht]

MMM,

The recommendations you gave in the previous post, do they apply for Mixbus in particulier, or do they apply to REAPER as well? I would live to use mixbus 32C but it requires lots of resources from the system when low laten y settings are desired . Is it true that Harrison and many others don't make efficient usd of multi cores and virtual cores of today's cpu's? And why would that be the case? I read lots of articles on the DAW subject that running many tracks with plugins would benefit from multiple cores, but using only a few tracks with heaps of plugins, one single core at a high clockspeed would do best.

Thank you for your insights!

[madmaxmiller]

MMM,

The recommendations you gave in the previous post, do they apply for Mixbus in particulier, or do they apply to REAPER as well? I would live to use mixbus 32C but it requires lots of resources from the system when low laten y settings are desired . Is it true that Harrison and many others don't make efficient usd of multi cores and virtual cores of today's cpu's? And why would that be the case? I read lots of articles on the DAW subject that running many tracks with plugins would benefit from multiple cores, but using only a few tracks with heaps of plugins, one single core at a high clockspeed would do best.

Thank you for your insights!

That are common recommentdations for all DAWs. Without diving too deeply into system programming, it can be said that there are tasks which can't efficiently be parallelised. All cores using the same cache leads to lots of bad cache lines which slows the CPU down. Multicore scales best with linear data, same instruction multiple data (SIMD) like in video rendering / 3D rendering. It's not how DAWs work...

MMM

P.S.: oh, and then there is Windows... with their own idea of how to (mis)use resources.

[benny van de locht]

Hi MMM,

Now I totally know what you are saying.
I 've found this video!
https://youtu.be/PmCEyLg5bpU