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SOLVED - NOOB: Graphics Card & mSata advice

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Re: NOOB: Graphics Card & mSata advice

YK97 said:
:crazy: :banghead: wow, that comment really made me think, hmm so what your saying is that the mSATA connector itself not faster it's just that mSATA's are SSD's which are faster than the normal HDD so basically if i get a 6 gb/s SSD say.. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6820148441 with higher preformance (Sustained Sequential Read/write....etc.) than the m SATA 3gb/s http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6820211581 it would be much faster

Some SSDs are faster than others, obviously a 6Gb sata hooked up to a 6Gb sata controler is going to be faster than a 3Gb sata. Most of the drives out there are sandforce based, those use data compression to improve their performance, which means they are wicked fast at tasks that involve compressible data (which is a lot of the stuff you'll use), but suffer when dealing with incompressible data (compressed video for example). Samsung's 830 series is considered tops overall for this reason and the Crucial M series are also considered to be over all superior to the sandforce drives.

Different types of flash memory also offer different peformance levels and advantages/disadvantages. Single Level Cell flash is much faster and more durable than multi-level-cell flash (2 bits per cell), but MUCH more expensive and typically only found in Enterprise market drives.

YK97 said:
and not to be rude but on what basis are you saying all these things because in another thread a man with an mSATA and a normal SSD said the mSATA was way faster (although he had not activated TRIM)

Without knowing what exactly this guy was comparing I can't really give you a full explanation. It could be he had a slow regular SSD and a fast mSATA drive, perhaps he was using highly compressed files wt a Sandforce SSD and a non-sandforce mSATA ssd. Larger SSDs also tend to have better performance due to more flash memory channels. Perhaps it was a specialized MB/mSATA, but AFAIK there is nothing inherently special about an mSATA connection.

Tops in speed in any case are the PCIe based drives like OWC's Accelsior
http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/SSD/PCIe ... lsior/RAID

They aren't limited by having to go through an interface that was designed with conventional HDDs in mind and PCIe is essentially a direct connection to the processor, while SATA goes through an external controller chip. The higher end ones ($$$$$) can have throughput in the thousands of gigabytes per second and can be raided together to hit mindboggling amounts of throughput (at an equally astronomical price).

TRIM doesn't make a drive faster, it just prevents it from loosing performance over time which happens for a number of complicated reasons.
 
Re: NOOB: Graphics Card & mSata advice

ggeorge said:
Tops in speed in any case are the PCIe based drives like OWC's Accelsior
http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/SSD/PCIe ... lsior/RAID

They aren't limited by having to go through an interface that was designed with conventional HDDs in mind. The higher end ones ($$$$$) can have throughput in the thousands of gigabytes per second.

Yes, but i'm getting the UP4 TH mobo and as far as i have read i don't think it has the PCIe slot or does it? because i'm new and i dn't understand the difference in PCI express x16 / x1 /x4 and all that... so does the UP4 have the PCIe slot or not? and the capacities are different it's only 50gb ( http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... pcie%20ssd ) and 100gb the 100 is too expensive and the 50GB is faster but not that much than say http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6820148441 so i don't think it's worth the hassle
...and what's this controller card is it needed so the PCIe SSD can work??
(THIS IS A WHOLE NEW HASSLE :crazy: )
 
Re: NOOB: Graphics Card & mSata advice

YK97 said:
Yes, but i'm getting the UP4 TH mobo and as far as i have read i don't think it has the PCIe port or does it? because i'm new and i dn't understand the difference in PCI express x16 / x1 /x4 and all that... so does the UP4 have the PCIe slot or not?

FWI, it's unclear if the Thunderbolt ports on that MB (or any of the PC motherboards) are going to be usable under OSX (AFAIK).

There is no such thing as a PCIe "port" per say, though this is kind of what thunderbolt is. Since that is essentially an external connection/cable to PCIe lanes. Which is why it's so fast and has very low latency.

All current motherboards essentially have PCIe Slots. The x16/x8/x4/x1 slots refer to two things.

1) The physical connector
2) The number of PCIe "lanes". IE. how much bandwidth the slot has.

Each PCIe lane has a throughput of about 500Mb/s for PCIe 2.0 (Sandy Bridge) or 1,000Mb/s for PCIe 3.0 (Ivy Bridge). So a x16 slot has twice as much bandwidth as an x8 slot and four times that of a x4 slot, etc... It also means that an x8 PCIe 3.0 slot has an equal bandwidth to a x16 PCIe 2.0 slot.

A x16 slot has both 16 lanes of PCIe and a connector that supports the 16 lanes. You can and often do have fewer lanes hooked up to a slot that has the physically larger slot. Most typically you'll see a physical x16 slot with say 8 or 4 lanes, but you might well see anything down to 1 lane, because you can stick any PCIe card into a larger slot, but not one that's smaller. Also the number of lanes going to a particular connector can sometimes even be configured in software or automatically allocated depending on what's in the slot or how many cards are in slots.

The PCIe controller is actually built into the CPU, which is why Socket 1155 (sandy bridge/ivy bridge) have 16 PCIe lanes and the socket 2011 CPUs have 40. It also determines the PCIe 2.0/3.0, etc...

A PCIe SSD, doesn't need any special controller, it IS it's own controller. You just need a PCIe Slot, which is generally at least a x4 slot. The OWC PCIe SSD is currently the only OSX compatible PCIe SSD that I know of.
 
Re: NOOB: Graphics Card & mSata advice

ggeorge said:
YK97 said:
Yes, but i'm getting the UP4 TH mobo and as far as i have read i don't think it has the PCIe port or does it? because i'm new and i dn't understand the difference in PCI express x16 / x1 /x4 and all that... so does the UP4 have the PCIe slot or not?

FWI, it's unclear if the Thunderbolt ports on that MB (or any of the PC motherboards) are going to be usable under OSX (AFAIK).

There is no such thing as a PCIe "port" per say, though this is kind of what thunderbolt is. Since that is essentially an external connection/cable to PCIe lanes. Which is why it's so fast and has very low latency.

All current motherboards essentially have PCIe Slots. The x16/x8/x4/x1 slots refer to two things.

1) The physical connector
2) The number of PCIe "lanes". IE. how much bandwidth the slot has.

Each PCIe lane has a throughput of about 500Mb/s for PCIe 2.0 (Sandy Bridge) or 1,000Mb/s for PCIe 3.0 (Ivy Bridge). So a x16 slot has twice as much bandwidth as an x8 slot and four times that of a x4 slot, etc... It also means that an x8 PCIe 3.0 slot has an equal bandwidth to a x16 PCIe 2.0 slot.

A x16 slot has both 16 lanes of PCIe and a connector that supports the 16 lanes. You can and often do have fewer lanes hooked up to a slot that has the physically larger slot. Most typically you'll see a physical x16 slot with say 8 or 4 lanes, but you might well see anything down to 1 lane, because you can stick any PCIe card into a larger slot, but not one that's smaller. Also the number of lanes going to a particular connector can sometimes even be configured in software or automatically allocated depending on what's in the slot or how many cards are in slots.

The PCIe controller is actually built into the CPU, which is why Socket 1155 (sandy bridge/ivy bridge) have 16 PCIe lanes and the socket 2011 CPUs have 40.

A PCIe SSD, doesn't need any special controller, it IS it's own controller. You just need a PCIe Slot, which is generally at least a x4 slot. The OWC PCIe SSD is currently the only OSX compatible PCIe SSD that I know of.

ok,i think i'm starting to get it but he PCIe SSD is way over my current budget but seriously thanks for the advice! hopefully, i will be more PCIe SSD-oriented when renewing my computer ;) :thumbup:

EDIT: I think i got it!! so in a nutshell x16 is the throughput and the 2.0/3.0 depends on the CPU

But wait does that mean that getting a GPU with a PCI express of 2.0 and an Ivy Bridge CPU mean that i'm not taking full advantage of my graphics capabilities and getting a PCI Express 3.0 is better???? :crazy:
 
Re: NOOB: Graphics Card & mSata advice

I doubt any modern day PCI GPUs will fully utilize a PCIX16 slot. X8, doesn't hurt GPU performance to a point you need to worry about. I have tested this several times on a GTX285 and lost .5 fps.

mSata does have the advantage that it does power the drive as well. Thus, eliminating routing of cables inside your case :banghead: Which is great! :headbang:
 
Re: NOOB: Graphics Card & mSata advice

Solidww said:
I doubt any modern day PCI GPUs will fully utilize a PCIX16 slot. X8, doesn't hurt GPU performance to a point you need to worry about. I have tested this several times on a GTX285 and lost .5 fps.

mSata does have the advantage that it does power the drive as well. Thus, eliminating routing of cables inside your case :banghead: Which is great! :headbang:

COME ON!!! :banghead: i had just eliminated mSATA's are they better or NOT??

Here's my Conclusion: Pro's and Cons
Pros:
- It's directly into MB eliminates need for SATA cable
- powers the GPU, eliminates more cables
- Caching (if OSX supports it, don't remember)
Cons:
- It's slower (3gb/s) than a decent 6gb/s SSD
- It's 60 GB while i'm planning to get a 64 GB (if you can call that a con i'm just trying to convince myself ;) )

But for me the 1st Con is a deal-breaker sooo yea thanks anyway
 
Re: NOOB: Graphics Card & mSata advice

YK97 said:
EDIT: I think i got it!! so in a nutshell x16 is the throughput and the 2.0/3.0 depends on the CPU

To use a clearer analogy, think of each PCIe lane as a lane of traffic, obviously you can fit more traffic down 16 lanes than you can in just 8. The throughput of an individual lane is essentially the "speed limit".

YK97 said:
But wait does that mean that getting a GPU with a PCI express of 2.0 and an Ivy Bridge CPU mean that i'm not taking full advantage of my graphics capabilities and getting a PCI Express 3.0 is better???? :crazy:

The ONLY cards that even use PCIe 3.0 currently are the nVidia 6XX cards (and not all of them) and the AMD 7XXX cards. Even there as Solidww said, there aren't really any cards that can saturate an x16 PCIe 2.0 slot never mind a 3.0.

The main advantage to 3.0 is if you wanted to run dual graphics cards or a graphics card and say a PCIe ssd, since the 16 lanes on a socket 1155 chip means each one can get at most x8 lanes, but with 3.0 that's the same as a x16 2.0 slot. However again as Solidww said, even an x8 PCIe 2.0 slot only slightly hurts the performance of a graphics card.

YK97 said:
Here's my Conclusion: Pro's and Cons
Pros:
- It's directly into MB eliminates need for SATA cable
- powers the GPU, eliminates more cables

The GPU doesn't have anything to do with the mSATA (or the CPU for that matter).
 
Re: NOOB: Graphics Card & mSata advice

ggeorge said:
YK97 said:
EDIT: I think i got it!! so in a nutshell x16 is the throughput and the 2.0/3.0 depends on the CPU

To use a clearer analogy, think of each PCIe lane as a lane of traffic, obviously you can fit more traffic down 16 lanes than you can in just 8. The throughput of an individual lane is essentially the "speed limit".

YK97 said:
But wait does that mean that getting a GPU with a PCI express of 2.0 and an Ivy Bridge CPU mean that i'm not taking full advantage of my graphics capabilities and getting a PCI Express 3.0 is better???? :crazy:

The ONLY cards that even use PCIe 3.0 currently are the nVidia 6XX cards (and not all of them) and the AMD 7XXX cards. Even there as Solidww said, there aren't really any cards that can saturate an x16 PCIe 2.0 slot never mind a 3.0.

The main advantage to 3.0 is if you wanted to run dual graphics cards or a graphics card and say a PCIe ssd, since the 16 lanes on a socket 1155 chip means each one can get at most x8 lanes, but with 3.0 that's the same as a x16 2.0 slot. However again as Solidww said, even an x8 PCIe 2.0 slot only slightly hurts the performance of a graphics card.

YK97 said:
Here's my Conclusion: Pro's and Cons
Pros:
- It's directly into MB eliminates need for SATA cable
- powers the GPU, eliminates more cables

The GPU doesn't have anything to do with the mSATA (or the CPU for that matter).

Ok, thank you Solidww and Ggeorge i just realized how much of a noob i am..
I'll just get the GTX 560 Ti since it's good and cheap and i think i don't need more than it :thumbup:
Thanks for the Advice, Sorry for the trouble!
 
Re: NOOB: Graphics Card & mSata advice

YK97 said:
Ok, thank you Solidww and Ggeorge i just realized how much of a noob i am..
I'll just get the GTX 560 Ti since it's good and cheap and i think i don't need more than it :thumbup:
Thanks for the Advice, Sorry for the trouble!

YW, it's what we're here for.

The 560 ti is a very good card. It should serve you well.
 
Re: NOOB: Graphics Card & mSata advice

No prob! Let's mark this one solved unless you need some more info.

I will be using mSata when I do finally upgrade. It will save having to run cabling for another drive. Speed isn't totally a disadvantage. Just use a 3Gb drive as scratch, or whatever floats your boat. Use whatever tools you have at your disposal. I.E. mSatat, PCIE drives, etc....
 
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