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Upgrade from Samsung 850 Pro on Rapid Mode to a 950 Pro worth it?

ROGdemigod
Level 7
I installed my old 1TB 850 Pro SSD in my G952VT, as mine did not come with a 128GB SSD, only a 1TB HDD.

After I loaded all drivers, I installed samsung magician and turned on "rapid mode", which gave me these numbers

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But, I have been thinking about getting a 512GB Samsung 950 Pro NVMe, but I really don't need any more storage, and just wondering if I should spend another $350 and just get it. Would it be worth it?

As it is now, my ROG with the 850 Pro boots up in around 8-12 seconds depending. Everything feels snappy as can be, just curious if you guys think it would be worth the upgrade to get the 950.

I do know the 950 is 1.5x more energy efficient, so I would get a little better battery life I suppose if I did.

What do you guys think?
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7 REPLIES 7

JustinThyme
Level 13
Lets put the boot time aside shall we? Not really a good measure of performance differences.

Lets look at Crystal Marks bench results instead (Samsung Magician is about as accurate as common core math, the speeds your screenshot shows are currently not obtainable) that paints a VERY drastic picture.

First lets look at the speeds of the 850, pretty impressive over a 7200 RPM spinner that you are lucky to get 150MB/s sequential read and 50MB/s write.

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now lets look at what happens when you go to PCIe NVMe that removes the SATA barrier.


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So to answer your question if 4x the speed of SATA SSD is worth it to you, then yes its worth it. One other thing to consider is if you dont have the factory image on an SSD you cant just move that and the recovery partitions over. You will have to do a clean install of Windows on the NVMe drive with a UEFI boot disk, load IRST Drivers during the install to get it to work and to boot from it. You will lose some the the OEM software like Sonic Studio.



“Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity, I'm not sure about the former” ~ Albert Einstein

Well, I know the "rapid mode" on the Samsung Magician software uses free RAM as cache, so those read speeds are correct technically speaking.

But I was also thinking instead of just getting the 950 Pro, to just add another 16GB of DDR4 RAM, and create a RAM drive with windows 10 on it, and I have found for about $90. The RAM drive would be superior to the 950, minus the inherent risk of using a RAM drive.

As for the Sonic software, I was able to extract and install it from the latest Maximus VIII Extreme Realtek drivers.

Another option I have been considering is selling the 850, and using the proceeds to get the 950.

One last thing, I use to have an Asus motherboard in a desktop I built 3 years ago, and it had an interactive BIOS, where I could even use the mouse, and a very nice layout, like a micro OS. I could even control the BIOS through their windows desktop app. Does the Asus G752 have this feature, as I assumed it would? Thanks

JustinThyme
Level 13
Those read speeds are not even close to correct in any sense of the word, its an inherent fault in Samsung software. Reading and writing to RAM is not reading and writing to the disk, no matter how you slice it. Run the Crystal Marks for a real disk benchmark. Guarantee 100% you wont get anywhere near that and it will show you just how much of a farce the Samsung Magician software is and show you what your real disk performance is. They are taking a very small slice and exploiting it. When you start a sequential read or write you first have a lag then it spikes to high value until the RAM is saturated then drops like a rock right back to where its really operating. It still has to go to and from disk at some point, that's where your real numbers are.

Ram disk would be fine, after the machine is up and running for whatever you can store on it. Currently my machine and my software exceeds 200GB, I cant load all of that on RAM disk. If I max out my RAM to 64GB and keep back 16GB for actual ram operations I can load a few programs to RAM disk if I want and those apps will load faster a little faster but in the end the app performance other than the initial load time wont be increased. Then as you mentioned are the risks of RAM drive, cant load anything on it that you cant easily reinstall. Best across the board performance would be seen with an SSD.

As for BIOS, these laptops are stripped to the bone in that regard, only very essential things like boot order etc.



“Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity, I'm not sure about the former” ~ Albert Einstein

JustinThyme wrote:
Those read speeds are not even close to correct in any sense of the word, its an inherent fault in Samsung software. Reading and writing to RAM is not reading and writing to the disk, no matter how you slice it. Run the Crystal Marks for a real disk benchmark. Guarantee 100% you wont get anywhere near that and it will show you just how much of a farce the Samsung Magician software is and show you what your real disk performance is. They are taking a very small slice and exploiting it. When you start a sequential read or write you first have a lag then it spikes to high value until the RAM is saturated then drops like a rock right back to where its really operating. It still has to go to and from disk at some point, that's where your real numbers are.

Ram disk would be fine, after the machine is up and running for whatever you can store on it. Currently my machine and my software exceeds 200GB, I cant load all of that on RAM disk. If I max out my RAM to 64GB and keep back 16GB for actual ram operations I can load a few programs to RAM disk if I want and those apps will load faster a little faster but in the end the app performance other than the initial load time wont be increased. Then as you mentioned are the risks of RAM drive, cant load anything on it that you cant easily reinstall. Best across the board performance would be seen with an SSD.

As for BIOS, these laptops are stripped to the bone in that regard, only very essential things like boot order etc.


You're wrong about crystal disk mark, but I'm not sure how this translates into real world use.

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httuner
Level 9
Personally; it ain't worth it.

In real life usage; your not going to notice the tiny difference at all: I don't think an average user or even a power user will write so much data as to need the incredible speeds on these laptops. Sure its nice to have but it only looks good on benchmarks.

If you got money to burn sure why not; but you can play with the BIOS; its easily unlockable to allow you many options like on a desktop motherboard(although you still have some limitations) Anyhow if you end up upgrading; you'll have to get into BIOS and turn your bios to AHCI settings and you'll be able to install windows 10 on those nVme drives easily as then the windows 10 install will see the nVme drive.

httuner wrote:
Personally; it ain't worth it.

In real life usage; your not going to notice the tiny difference at all: I don't think an average user or even a power user will write so much data as to need the incredible speeds on these laptops. Sure its nice to have but it only looks good on benchmarks.

If you got money to burn sure why not; but you can play with the BIOS; its easily unlockable to allow you many options like on a desktop motherboard(although you still have some limitations) Anyhow if you end up upgrading; you'll have to get into BIOS and turn your bios to AHCI settings and you'll be able to install windows 10 on those nVme drives easily as then the windows 10 install will see the nVme drive.


So you are saying in real life you wont notice a difference..... ok let's think about this, when you went from a 100 R/W HDD to a 500 R/W SSD did you notice a difference? I sure as hell did. So now going from a 500 R/W to a 2500/1500 R/W "you wont be able to notice the tiny difference"? Are you serious? dude in that case go back to HDD you wont notice the difference. The 950 Pro is way faster and you can tell the difference in everything.

I would be curious to know how you would go about installing Windows to a RAM disk and stop the RAM disk from being wiped when you shutdown your computer.