Newbie Saying Hi!

R

RetroComputing

Bronze Level Poster
Just joined the forum as I've just become a PC Specialist customer so thought I'd introduce myself and say hi. Hi!

A few years back I used to do a lot of PC Gaming and then the Nintendo Wii came along which became the first console with controllers I could actually get to grips with and use without getting frustrated! Then (after first trying the controller) I got an XBOX 360 as the controller was so much better than the PlayStations offering. Then I moved on to an XBOX One and finally on to an XBOX One X.

As I've not been on my XBOX One X for over 6 months and it's just gathering dust (due to there being no games I fancy playing on it) it was time to sell up and get back in to Desktop Gaming again...

My new setup is as follows:

i5 9400F
16GB RAM
32GB Intel Optane Memory
2TB Seagate HDD
6GB NVIDIA GTX 1660 Ti

Looking forward to having a go with Euro Truck Simulator 2 as it just about works on my laptop in low detail mode but on this beast I should be able to ramp all the settings on to max!

I've also purchased Fallout 4 GOTY and WRC 7 which I shall download when I get home this evening.


Needless to say to celebrate my new purchase I have booked 2 days of work for 'testing purposes' so I have a long weekend to look forward to!
 
Oussebon

Oussebon

Multiverse Poster
Welcome to the forums :)

Out of interest, is the PC shipped to you yet, and what is the full spec? (I think you can copy it from your main PCS account)
 
R

RetroComputing

Bronze Level Poster
Yes it has arrived - I ordered it on Sunday and it arrived on Wednesday!

Here's the full spec:

Case
COOLERMASTER SILENCIO 452 QUIET MID TOWER CASE
Processor (CPU)
Intel® Core™ i5 Six Core Processor i5-9400F (2.9GHz) 9MB Cache
Motherboard
ASUS® TUF B360M-PLUS GAMING: Micro-ATX, LGA1151, USB 3.1, SATA 6GBs - RGB Ready
Memory (RAM)
16GB Corsair VENGEANCE DDR4 2400MHz (2 x 8GB)
Graphics Card
6GB NVIDIA GEFORCE GTX 1660 Ti - DVI, HDMI, 3 x DP - GeForce GTX VR Ready!
1st Storage Drive
2TB SEAGATE BARRACUDA SATA-III 3.5" HDD, 6GB/s, 7200RPM, 64MB CACHE
Intel Optane Memory
32GB INTEL® OPTANE MEMORY - USE WITH MECHANICAL HDD
Power Supply
CORSAIR 550W TXm SERIES™ SEMI-MODULAR 80 PLUS® GOLD, ULTRA QUIET
Power Cable
1 x 1 Metre UK Power Cable (Kettle Lead)
Processor Cooling
STANDARD CPU COOLER
Thermal Paste
COOLER MASTER MASTERGEL MAKER THERMAL COMPOUND
Sound Card
Creative Sound Blaster Zx 5.1 PCI-E Soundcard
Wireless/Wired Networking
10/100/1000 GIGABIT LAN PORT (Wi-Fi NOT INCLUDED)
USB/Thunderbolt Options
2 PORT (2 x TYPE A) USB 3.0 PCI-E CARD + STANDARD USB PORTS

I've also got a LogiTech G920 steering wheel and pedals on a proper stand to use with the above as well! Only ever used this on my laptop with Euro Truck Simulator 2 so looking forward to using it on a more powerful machine.
 
SpyderTracks

SpyderTracks

We love you Ukraine
RetroComputing said:
Needless to say to celebrate my new purchase I have booked 2 days of work for 'testing purposes' so I have a long weekend to look forward to!
Click to expand...

Very welcome to you and also, what a very sensible thing to do! I didn't book any time off when my laptop arrived, but it was delivered to work and I couldn't stop fiddling so the boss told me to go home at lunchtime anyway :)
 
synkrotron

synkrotron

Member
RetroComputing said:
I ordered it on Sunday and it arrived on Wednesday!
Click to expand...

Wow!

I ordered mine on the 18th of February and it didn't arrive until the March 1st. I guess it depends on what parts they have in stock. Their operation is absolutely massive and they shift hundreds of orders each week (I'm guessing) so I totally understand that.
 
R

RetroComputing

Bronze Level Poster
synkrotron said:
Wow!

I ordered mine on the 18th of February and it didn't arrive until the March 1st. I guess it depends on what parts they have in stock. Their operation is absolutely massive and they shift hundreds of orders each week (I'm guessing) so I totally understand that.
Click to expand...

I must admit, I did pay extra for the speed of which it was built, tested and dispatched! I'm used to ordering things in the morning on Amazon and getting them the same day so wanted to get it ASAP - I was constantly refreshing the PC Specialist website on Monday/Tuesday watching who was doing what to it!!!

Needless to say, I shall be going home via Tesco to get some snacks for the weekend...
 
synkrotron

synkrotron

Member
RetroComputing said:
I must admit, I did pay extra for the speed of which it was built, tested and dispatched!
Click to expand...

Ah, right, of course. I'm a bit stingy, sometimes, which on something that cost me nearly 2k was a bit daft.

RetroComputing said:
Needless to say, I shall be going home via Tesco to get some snacks for the weekend...
Click to expand...

Don't forget to clean your teeth and stuff though... We'll be sending the Gaming Addiction peeps round to check up on you :D

And try to remember to blink every now and then. I sometimes get so carried away when playing DOOM and Planetside that my eyes end up like they've had sand chucked in them...
 
ubuysa

ubuysa

The BSOD Doctor
Hello and welcome!

I'd be interested to know how much help that Optane memory is with that drive? If it's at all possible to turn Optane off (in the BIOS perhaps?) some benchmarks with it on and off would be most interesting. :)
 
R

RetroComputing

Bronze Level Poster
ubuysa said:
Hello and welcome!

I'd be interested to know how much help that Optane memory is with that drive? If it's at all possible to turn Optane off (in the BIOS perhaps?) some benchmarks with it on and off would be most interesting. :)
Click to expand...

I've only had it 3 days now so I dont want to go tinkering with any settings just yet. Looking at other peoples benchmarking before I opted for Otane, it's pretty much SSD speeds as it's basically turning your mechanical drive in to a SSHD from what I understand.
 
ubuysa

ubuysa

The BSOD Doctor
RetroComputing said:
I've only had it 3 days now so I dont want to go tinkering with any settings just yet. Looking at other peoples benchmarking before I opted for Otane, it's pretty much SSD speeds as it's basically turning your mechanical drive in to a SSHD from what I understand.
Click to expand...

Not quite, an SSD is still far and away the best option for performance. How good Optane is depends on your data usage patters and how good the Optane algorithms are. Some real world benchmarks would be handy if you find the time and the inclination. :)
 
R

RetroComputing

Bronze Level Poster
ubuysa said:
Not quite, an SSD is still far and away the best option for performance. How good Optane is depends on your data usage patters and how good the Optane algorithms are. Some real world benchmarks would be handy if you find the time and the inclination. :)
Click to expand...

Intel (and a lot of tests on Google) suggest otherwise as you can even use an SSD with Optane for faster performance. Most of the benchmarking tests I've seen suggest a 32GB Optane drive is faster than than a lot of SSDs. Obviously I'm not saying a 32GB Optane drive with a 2TB mechanical drive is faster than a 2TB SSD as the 2TB SSD is 100% SSD, but anything I 'pin' on to the 32GB Optane drive will be as fast (some test suggest faster) as if it was on an SSD drive.
 
ubuysa

ubuysa

The BSOD Doctor
RetroComputing said:
Intel (and a lot of tests on Google) suggest otherwise as you can even use an SSD with Optane for faster performance. Most of the benchmarking tests I've seen suggest a 32GB Optane drive is faster than than a lot of SSDs. Obviously I'm not saying a 32GB Optane drive with a 2TB mechanical drive is faster than a 2TB SSD as the 2TB SSD is 100% SSD, but anything I 'pin' on to the 32GB Optane drive will be as fast (some test suggest faster) as if it was on an SSD drive.
Click to expand...

I'd love to see those SSD/Optane benchmarks, and the configuration on which they were obtained!

I've worked a lot with cached storage in the past and you have to be real careful how you measure it. It's very very easy to create a benchmark with data access patterns that are all resolved from cache and which thus appear to make the cache a 'must have'. It's equally possible to create a benchmark with data access patterns that are never resolved from cache and thus always require a device access, they make the cache appear to be making things worse (because of the wasted time to search the cache). Of course it's equally hard to produce a 'real world' benchmark because the real world is different for everyone, the best you can do is to find a benchmark whose data access patterns most closely match those you expect to be using - that's far from an easy thing to do however.

Cached HDDs do, under most 'real worl'd use, produce faster response times than a similar non-cached HDD, and if you can move the cache further up the data hierarchy (as Optane does) you can take advantage of higher bus speeds further improving the response times. And of course the bigger the cache the more likely to find a cache hit and the better the improvement. These improved access times mostly come from eliminating the 'moving metal' aspects of HDD access, the seek and latency. SSDs have no moving metal which is why caching them generally makes little sense - depending on what interface the SSD is using of course.

I can well understand that Optane with a SATA SSD can produce a response time improvement, because Optane is further up the data hierarchy eliminating the SATA bus, but Optane with an M.2 SSD, and especially an NVMe M.2 SSD is highly unlikely to offer any benefit at all, and certainly none that would justify the cost.

All that said, you have to be very careful that you're not spending money to provide storage response times that you don't need. As an example, video and music files do not benefit at all from the speed of an SSD, nor do they benefit at all from the speed of an Optaned HDD. This is because video and music files are processed in real time (ie. slowly) and loading these files from SSD or Optane simply fills the next buffer faster without offering any improvement to the performance of the application or the end-user experience.

In addition, if you look at the files in a typical user's Documents folder you'll find that about 80% of them are less than 1MB in size, many are just a few kB. Whilst it's true that a 1MB file can be read much faster from an M.2 NVMe SSD than it can from a non-cached HDD the end user isn't going to notice the difference. For example, according to Samsung a PM951 has a response time (single read) of about 0.6ms whilst a 7200rpm HDD has an average response time of about 10ms. A 1MB file can generally be read in a single read operation from both devices meaning that the end user can load a 1MB file in a little over 10ms from HDD and 0.6ms from SSD - so the SSD is faster by 9.4ms. Do you think the end user will notice that 9.4ms difference?

User files that do benefit greatly from being on an SSD are large files (especially those that take more than one read and which might be fragmented) and where the whole file must be loaded before the application can proceed. High-res images are a good example, large databases, spreadsheets are others, but these types of file make up a small (but significant) percentage of most average user's data.

It's thus eminently sensible to ensure that your data is being stored on the most cost effective media, and at the moment for videos, music and most 'documents' data a non-cached (and non-Optaned) 7200rpm HDD is perfectly good enough, provided it's managed properly. It's frankly a waste of your money providing faster response than a (properly managed) non-cached 7200rpm HDD can deliver.

Windows runs the whole system and applications interact with the end user, so their file accesses need to be as fast as possible. Putting these types of file on an SSD makes a massive difference to system and application performance (where that 9.4ms saving really does add up). An Optaned HDD also greatly improves the performance of these files - even an Optaned SATA SSD might produce marginally better performance than the SATA SSD alone (though whether that difference is worth the cost is debatable).

That's why, in my considered opinion at least, Optane is a waste of money and that's why Intel are having to market it so hard. If you need superior storage performance then you need an M.2 NVMe SSD; Windows, applications, and large user data files should go on here. Most other user data can be accessed in perfectly acceptable response times on a decent 7200rpm HDD at the moment (non-cached and non-Optaned).

Of course, as the price of SSDs falls there will come a time (fairly soon I suspect) when it does make more sense to spend a few more pounds on an SSD even for the user data that doesn't benefit from it. There is a power saving and a noise reduction with SSD which in time it might be worth paying for. Optane I'm quite certain is a red herring...

:)

Afterthought. It's important too not to ignore the massive memory management improvements in Windows 10. Many data files are buffered in RAM by Windows so that a real data access (to Optane, SSD or HDD) isn't done at all. In addition, RAM pages that have become unused are only ever paged out if RAM is under pressure, otherwise they're kept in the Standby area of RAM where they can be reused immediately. In the RAM-rich systems we're using these days Windows is doing far fewer wait I/Os (a read or write where the application, and thus the end user, is waiting for it) than ever before. There really is no point in paying for Optane in a RAM-rich system where small user data files are likely to remain in Standby RAM once first read.
 
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R

RetroComputing

Bronze Level Poster
Thank you for the 'warm welcome' I have now unsubscribed from my own thread where I was simply saying Hi. Clearly I have wasted my money so back to my XBox it is.
 
Oussebon

Oussebon

Multiverse Poster
I'd love to see those SSD/Optane benchmarks, and the configuration on which they were obtained!
Click to expand...

I'm not sure which the OP saw, but there's this from PCPer (a pretty well-respected site) https://www.pcper.com/reviews/Stora...Lightning/Installation-Timed-Tests-and-Observ

There are some more in depth benches on the other pages too.

It does show some instances of Optane + HDD (and even Optane + Sata SSD) being faster than a Sata SSD in the real world, e.g. loading Windows or a game (sometimes)

It's worth bearing in mind, however, that one can buy some of the cheaper 256gb PCIe M.2 SSD for less than a 32gb Optane module, and a WD Black SN750 for barely any more, and the Optane module uses up an M.2 slot. If one has an SSD (especially a fast NVMe one), a lot of the things that benefit the most from an Optane module when paired with an HDD or even a Sata SSD wouldn't be applicable as these would now be done by the even faster NVMe SSD (i.e. you'd put the OS and favourite games onto the SSD).

Optane can only accelerate one drive https://www.intel.co.uk/content/www...8/memory-and-storage/intel-optane-memory.html so if one adds an SSD in the future, one would need to choose whether to accelerate the SSD or HDD.

And if one wanted to add NVMe SSDs, it would be worth noting that the motherboard only has 2 M.2 slots, 1 of which is being used by the Optane module.

I'd need to check but I think using both M.2 slots with a PCIe SSD causes the PCIe 3.0 x16 slot with the GPU in it to run at x8 - which is not really a problem but could cost a frame here and there.

If you're getting value out of the system as you seemed to say in other posts that's great and I don't think anyone's saying you've completely wasted your cash. I think the suggestion is more than for anyone else reading this, they might want to consider alternatives to Optane memory to get even better value out of their £. :) It's why I asked whether you'd received the PC yet in my first post in this topic.
 
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