With the Intel/Raven bundle out now, I thought it worthwhile to have a thread as basically a clearing house of info on the 900P and a technical discussion of why someone would want one (besides the shiny virtual ship of course). If really want the Sabre that badly, just sell the card later. It will probably cost less in the end than on the grey market that way.
A few random articles on the subject:
pcper.com/reviews/Storage/I … Internals-
tomshardware.com/reviews/int … ,5292.html
anandtech.com/show/11953/th … 00p-review
First, Benchmarks. I hear many off-the-hip statements like 7 time faster than “insert SSD” without a lot of context to how that is known. The speed you get is greatly dependent on how the data is read and what that data is. An averaged benchmark doesn’t tell you everything, and neither does a single one at which a particular drive excels (such as 4K random reads). I’ll admit that in benchmarks, the 900P is definitely in the lead. Is it worth twice the money though? It kind of depends on what your needs are. The one place it absolutely stomps all the others is 4K random reads. The question for me what what proportion of disk access does that account for on the average gaming system. Lastly here is a 3 year old article I found that seems related, and may shed light on the subject.
gamersnexus.net/guides/1577 … ?showall=1
Second, just how much speed do you need, really? When the NVMe drives first hit the market, the argument was made that the average user with average use wouldn’t notice the difference, that conventional SSDs were already fast enough in most cases. I think the argument was fair, and should probably be asked today. Would you even notice the difference between a 900P and a Samsung 960 Pro? If you are rendering large amounts of data or something equally demanding, then any speed boost can be important. But gaming, I have serious doubts.
