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

the whole "gaming experience comes down to load speeds" is merely one, easily quantifiable, factor of the difference between SATA and NVME honestly. I just installed a 2 TB Gen 4 NVME on my b450 mobo (backwards compatible with Gen 3 slots - my mobo can't even use it as full speed), and the difference playing games like RDR2 and Far Cry 5 (big old open worlds) is highly noticeable in terms of smoothness and stutters. unfortunately, gaming experience is harder to quantify than FPS and load times, so I think a lot of content creators skip over that aspect. experientially, NVME is well worth it over SATA.

stay away from those kingston ssds (the ones witg the white and black label) RMA / replaced hundreds of them.

I know you have made videos on NVME M.2 SSD Benchmarks for creators usage. But is it possible to make
a video for Gamers base on game storage drives and also tells us what's important for gamers relative to
purchasing a Top Tier & High Endurance TWB / PWB, M.2 NVME'S Gen 4. Is it possible to use these specific drives listed below with out heatsink:

1 - Seagate FireCuda 530 without heatsink 2TB
2 - WD Black SN850X 2TB
3 - Samsung 990 Pro without heatsink 2TB
4 - TeamGroup T-Force Carder Pro Z440 2TB
5 - Kingston KC3000 2TB
6 - Solidigm P44 Pro 2TB

Very useful, thank you. I expected a much greater difference between the gen 3 and gen 4 NVME drives. I currently run gen 3 and was considering getting a new B550 board to have gen 4, but it just wouldn't be worth it to me.

I went with SATA 3.0 drives... because.. they do have one major benefit over NVMe drives.
If your only motherboard with NVME slots on it dies, well, you're phwcked getting the data off those NVMe drives. If you're on SATA 3.0 drives, it's a simple matter of unplugging them and plugging them into a different computer... going back to the late 90's to be sure. I'm glad to see the load times in real world are not that much slower for random reads. In fact, it looks like in quite a few tests the SATA 3.0 drive is smoking the NVME GEN3 and GEN4 drives in real world use. Which is bizarre. But the reality for the models you have bought.

Needed to update my ssd and was sad to find my motherboard isnt gen4 compatible. Glad to hear gen3 will be just fine for my needs. Thanks for the video.

First time watching you , to say the least you are ver informative and slightly nerdy in great 👍 and I subscribed to your great content man.

what a bad video

I was actually thinking dumping another $50-$100 on top of my already $1,100 upgraded rig for an nvme m.2 but I'm glad that i can confidently save my money for now lol

I love the sound of spinning hard drives!! That tells me whether or not it's actually working correctly. With SSDs, you can't tell. One day, you'll turn on your PC and it will be dead.

I have a Windows 7 pro and I need to put my games on a external dive. I don't know what to get I like using WB drives. I have a 6 TB my book hard drive that I use just for backups. Can I use the rest of the space for my games and run them off too.

Watching this because the BF2042 devs forgot to put a countdown timer before a round. My friend and I both play on harddrives in RAID so the console pea-ople would already be on the first point by the time we got in.

Not really I'm watching this because 4TB SSD's are within my budget now.

Thankyou mate..its a buying decicion

Pcie 4.0 or above have Big advantage in lower latency, provide more Stable Fps, and prevent sudden FPS drop because of higher Bandwidth.

Just like driving a Same Race Car(Game)
in 16 line speedway(PCie 4).
Compare in 8 line speedway(PCie 3).

Why is Gen 4 always slower than Gen 3??? Is the "generation" thing just a scam?

We're all those games tested playing in 4k resolution? Would that make a difference? Otherwise, why does the PS5 require a Gen 4 M.2 Nvme only?

Excellent video bro, I appreciate you doing this!! Haha, anything but a mechanical Hard Drive, which would be good for Archiving, lol.

I really thought Gen 4 is faster but not yet tho, now I know!! Thanks for the video!!

Gen. 3.0 it is then.

ge to the fucking point

I am on gen 4 with a b660 motherboard. To unlock the full potential of the m2 ssd you have to use it on the main m2 pci4 slot and after that to go inside bios and to select to operate the data directly from CPU. And then you will have them crazy fast speeds. A fast m2 ssd doesn't only help you quicker load of your game but also you'd get less latency for competitive gaming when you go for pvp.

This still the case?

Do yourselves a favor and skip to the conclusion. An overall good vid though.

just so you know xpg has one issue if get to cold it will not work you give it few then reboot before it shows in pc system

back here, because those 4tb sata ssds are coming down in price. lol

Gen 4.0 is just a gimmik really.

Hi thank you for the video, I need help pls If I want to install windows 10 on ssd m.2 which one do you recommend and why Kingston NV2 NVMe PCIe 4.0 SSD 500GB with read speed of 3500 mb/s and write speed of 2700 mb/s or should I buy KC3000 1TB with 7000 mb/s read speed ?? just for the windows.

I think it should be SATA SSD vs PCIe/NVMe SSD Gen 3 and Gen 4 to avoid confusion to some. Since SATA and PCIe/NVMe are different interfaces.

To be honest, I'm thinking that the Gen 4 SSD's might suffer from the fact that they try their best to keep backwards compatibility with PCIE 3.0, and so I think that the PCIE 5.0 SSD's are the ones that are going to truly make the difference. If not, then most definitely PCIE 6.0 SSD's when those inevitably become a thing several years from now.

iam buying i5 12400 and gigabyte h610m h , plz recommend is this fine ? or i really gonna need gen4 lanes in the future and go for b660 chipset ? with h610 iam going to save some money

Thanks for the time and effort it took to produce this videos. Simple, yet effective. And humorous. 🙂👍

Wow, you're absolutely hilarious.

Gen 3 is the better value A couple of pound more expensive then SATA SSD
Not enough software capable of taking advantage of the Gen 4 as yet. And this video is a year old and we still at that stage in my opinion.

Conclusion is dont use hdd..any ssd is good

Thank you, this was incredibly helpful. My friend wanted me to get an HDD. I told him that was absolutely crazy. My friend, Arsene, almost got me in a lot of trouble with this one. Thank you for saving me from his dark side ways.

What about for FPS? Will there be a difference besides load time.

Hmm, I have a gen 3 motherboard, I'm looking at a Samsung 970 EVO Plus (top end gen 3) or a WD Black SN770 (mid range gen 4). Which should I get, a top end gen 3 or mid range gen 4?

The main difference for example is that the 500gb drive is a 4k sector structure, and the 512gb drive is an 512b sector structure.. 512b storage devices of any kind will have a storage capacity divisible by 8 and typically increase by a factor of 2xbase, so 8gb, 16gb, 32gb, 64gb, 128gb, 256gb, 512gb, 1024gb, etc.The move to 4K-sectors has been some 10 years in the making, as research in the late 90’s identified that 512B sectors made less and less sense as drives continued to get larger. At a time when hard drives were measured in megabytes, 512B sectors were a good balance between technical factors and a desire to keep wasted space at a minimum (you can’t normally put 2 files in 1 sector), but times have changed and hard drive capacities are several orders of magnitude larger.

BASICALLY WHOLE PCIE4.0 OR EVEN PCIE 5.0 IS JUST A GIMMICK ALL WE NEED IS GOOD OLD PCIE 3.0.
I HAVE OBSERVED SIMILAR PATTERN WITH GRAPHICS CARD ALSO

Ive currently got a samsung 2TB 860 evo sata ssd which is currently about 75% full. will adding a 1 TB samsung 980pro nvme and using that for windows and the one or two main games i play make the difference?

Your time stamps are even more wrong than my ex

Love it. Good job.
I'm planning on running 3 vm running diablo 2 res and background video editing using gpu partition'ng on my old 8gb NVidia. Should I put each vm on its own ssd sata or gen 3 ? D2r seams to have terrible loading right now on hyper-v VM with its own ssd sata 3. But to be fair the host windows 10 is on sam 850 and the vm is using some crap spcc ssd. Booth are on sata 3.

Thanks man, this is the most useful VDO I found in 2022.

I built a new pc. A few months ago in a nr200 case. So I went with a 4tb pny "generic" gen 3 m.2 nvme as my second storage it was on sale for 299. For my os I got 2tb samsung 980 pro gen 4 m.2 nvme.
I was going to buy an 8tb sata but 600 was not worth it. Plus it's a small form factor build so it's nice having no cables and it really did bring my build together with the 3080 12gb and 12700k.
I really don't notice any differences between the gen4 and gen3 ssds while gaming absolutely non. But when it comes to some work I can tell the difference. It's night and day going from a gaming laptop made in 2017 w/gtx1070 gpu and a sata/hdd combo. And it's amazing!!!

so your video coupled with GN video on running RTX 3080 on PCIe3&4 was within 1-2% difference. looks like my gpu uprgrade with come with a feature packed PCIe3 mtb..

Centric videos so good!
My conclusion is for more storage like 1TB and fast load speed I would say SATA SSD are really good for lower price, it gives you fast loading speed and also a bit more storage for the budget:)

Sir please guide me gen 3 m.2 link with gen 4 motherboard or not?