Search the Community

Samsung T7 Shield 4TB portable SSD selling at its lowest price on Amazon and Newegg by Fiza Ali Today, you can get your hands on the 4TB Samsung T7 Shield portable SSD for only $219.99 on Amazon and Newegg. Samsung's rugged PSSD has been built to be tough, fast, and compact, making it durable and suitable for challenging conditions. It has an IP65 rating, providing resistance against dust and water. It utilizes USB 3.2 Gen 2 and PCIe NVMe technology, resulting in impressive sequential read speeds of 1,050 MB/s and sequential write speeds of up to 1,000 MB/s. This allows you to edit files directly from the drive. The high-tech rubber exterior, along with the Dynamic Thermal Guard, ensures that heat is effectively managed, maintaining consistent performance even during intensive projects. The T7 Shield is designed to withstand rough handling. Additionally, the rugged design and advanced outer elastomer provide extra durability, enabling it to withstand drops of up to 9.8 feet. It is compatible with various devices including PCs, Macs, Android devices, gaming consoles, and more. The package includes USB Type C-to-C and Type C-to-A cables for added convenience. 4TB Samsung T7 Shield Portable SSD 9up-to 1050MB/s, USB 3.2 Gen2, Rugged, IP65 Water & Dust Resistant, for Photographers, Content Creators and Gaming, External Solid State Drive): $219.99 (Amazon US) - $219.99 (Newegg US) Furthermore, you can check out other SSD deals from SanDisk and Western Digital. For hard disk drives, you can head over to our HDD deals section to see if anything from there matches your requirements. If this is not what you want, you can also browse through Amazon US, Newegg US, or Amazon UK, or visit our Deals section to see if you find some other great deals. As an Amazon and Newegg Associate, when you purchase through links on our site, we earn from qualifying purchases. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.

Amazon is offering up to 58% discount on 1TB, 2TB Western Digital Blue SSDs today by Fiza Ali If you are looking for some fast, snappy storage options on great deals, you might want to check out the 2TB Western Digital Blue NVMe internal solid-state drive. It is currently selling for only $99.99 after a huge 58% discount on its original MSRP of $239.99. With this deal, you get to save $140 so, get your hands on it today. The WD Blue SSD features read speeds of up to 3,500 MB/s in an M.2 2280 form factor and is compatible with PCIe for enhanced performance. The downloadable Western Digital SSD Dashboard aids you in monitoring your drive's health. Furthermore, it comes with a one-month Adobe Creative Cloud trial to help you make the most of the collection of desktop and mobile tools for your creative projects including photography, graphic design, video editing, UX design, and social media. 2TB Western Digital Blue SN570 NVMe Internal Solid State Drive (Gen3 x4 PCIe 8Gb/s, M.2 2280, Up to 3,500 MB/s): $99.99 (Amazon US) You can also get its 1TB variant which is available at 47% off: 1TB Western Digital Blue SA510 SATA Internal Solid State Drive (SATA III 6 Gb/s, 2.5"/7mm, Up to 560 MB/s): $52.99 (Amazon US) Alternatively, you can also check out other SSD deals from SanDisk, Samsung, and Crucial. For hard disk drives, you can head over to our HDD deals section to see if anything from there matches your requirements. If this is not what you want, you can also browse through Amazon US, Newegg US, or Amazon UK, or visit our Deals section to see if you find some other great deals. As an Amazon Associate when you purchase through links on our site, we earn from qualifying purchases. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.

Amazon Deal: Crucial X6 and WD_Black NVMe 1TB SSDs selling for up to 54% discount by Fiza Ali If you are looking for some good SSD deals to choose from, the ones from WD_BLACK or Crucial might be your option. Amazon is offering 54% and 41% discounts on the 1TB WD_BLACK SN770 and SN850X NVMe internal SSDs, respectively. Furthermore, the 1TB Crucial X6 portable external SSD is also available at a 45% discount. The original MSRP of the WD_BLACK SN770 is $129.99, the WD_BLACK SN850X is $159.99, and the Crucial X6 is $109.99. However, with these deals, you get to save $70, $65, and $50, respectively. So, get your hands on the deal that best matches your needs today! The 1TB Crucial X6 Portable SSD (Up to 800MB/s - PC and Mac - USB 3.2 USB-C): $59.99 (Amazon US) The 1TB WD_BLACK SN770 NVMe Internal Gaming SSD (Gen4 PCIe, M.2 2280, Up to 5,150 MB/s): $59.99 (Amazon US) The 1TB WD_BLACK SN850X NVMe Internal Gaming SSD (Gen4 PCIe, M.2 2280, Up to 7,300 MB/s): $94.99 (Amazon US) - $94.99 (Newegg US) Alternatively, you can also check out other SSD deals from Samsung, and SanDisk. For hard disk drives, you can head over to our HDD deals section to see if anything from there matches your requirements. If this is not what you want, you can also browse through Amazon US, Newegg US, or Amazon UK, or visit the Deals section of our articles to see if you find some other great deals. As an Amazon Associate when you purchase through links on our site, we earn from qualifying purchases. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.

AMD launches a 2GB RX 6300 card in 2023 with limited PCIe but an excellent ~$60 price by Sayan Sen Back in April 2022, rumors of a 2GB AMD RX 6300 began surfacing on the interwebs. We said at the time that this could be one of the worst GPUs of all time ever. This was followed by more leaks online and now the card seems finally ready for prime time as it has been spotted in China. While a graphics card with less VRAM isn't inherently bad, what makes the RX 6300 and the other Navi 24-based RDNA 2 GPUs like the RX 6500 XT and the RX 6400 so unappealing is the extremely limited PCIe bus bandwidth as the Navi 24 only has four PCIe (or x4) lanes. This means whenever the available memory buffer is saturated, the card loses performance on any system which is PCIe Gen3 or older. Fortunately for the 6500 XT and the 6400, the SKUs packed 4GB of VRAM which is mostly enough for 720p or 900p gaming these days. However, the new RX 6300 comes with just half of that which means the GPU will almost always be limited by its VRAM as most AAA titles these days gobble up the available memory buffer. This means users will only be able to play older titles. The leaked specs of the card show 2GB of VRAM across a 32-bit wide bus though at least the power consumption of the card is a major redeeming factor. The price of the card appears to be around ~$60, at least when converting Chinese prices. Another big problem for the RX 6300 is the lack of encoding and AV1 decoding support on Navi 24, which means it won't be a good card for HTPCs either. However, if someone didn't have a ton of AV1 content to play back or no transcoding work, then the RX 6300 could certainly be a decent option as it will be the fastest GPU available at this price in a long time. Perhaps the terrible Nvidia GT 710 can finally die. Source: @KOMACHI_ENSAKA (Twitter) via HXL (Twitter)

Gigabyte launches the AORUS Gen5 10000, its first high-end PCIe Gen 5 SSD by Robbie Khan Gigabyte has launched its latest PCIe Gen 5 SSD, the AORUS Gen5 10000, and Newegg is listing it for pre-order at a whopping $339. The new model boasts some impressive sequential transfer numbers, coming in at 9500MB/s read, and 8500MB/s write. The new drive uses Phison's E26 controller to manage that bandwidth, and comes with the optional heatsink, which I'll admit, does look pretty cool, and since it's passive, is a quieter solution than CFD Gaming's s active cooling for their Gen 5 SSD. The AORUS line of products is squarely aimed at enthusiasts and gamers, but even Gigabyte isn't promoting the new SSD as a gamer's drive, instead opting to word the descriptions very carefully. Gigabyte highlight the transfer speeds especially such as shown on its website. So, whilst the new drive, on paper, could load games much faster, the reality is that the loading time difference even in games that support Microsoft's DirectStorage is minimal at best, and only measurable with a benchmark rather than something any gamer will actually notice. A prime example of this is when we reviewed Sabrent's latest Gen 4 SSD which ships with a DirectStorage-optimised firmware. The Rocket 4-Plus-G was on average only 0.1s faster than a Gen 3 Samsung 970 Evo Plus. How much of a difference adding a Gen 5 drive into the mix makes remains to be seen, but the practical numbers speak for themselves. A note to our readers before anyone rushes out to order one: Outside of DirectStorage, I have yet to see a game using more than 1500MB/s read speed from any SSD, meaning even a Gen 3 SSD loading a game that has only NVMe SSD optimizations and no DirectStorage, will not even saturate the 3500MB/s read bandwidth that a PCIe Gen 3 SSD has to offer. For now, then, it does seem these new Gen 5 SSDs are mostly for bragging rights, unless you routinely need up to 8500/9500MB/s transfer speed. Though on a more positive note, these drives need to come to market so that competition results in lower prices down the line. Our stories may contain affiliate links for products/apps where Neowin is paid an affiliate fee if you complete a purchase via those links.

Does a PCIe Gen 4 SSD exist that doesn't need a heatsink or comes with a heatsink at reasonable price but doesn't heavily throttle, and is able to sustain performance? Which are the best ones? I am leaning towards Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus which runs relatively cool even though not the very fastest.

USB Announces USB4 Version 2.0 with up to 80Gbps transfer rate by Karthik Mudaliar USB Promoter Group has finally announced (pdf) USB4 Version 2.0. Although the naming hints that it is just a second-gen update to USB4, it supports double the transfer speeds of its predecessor, with up to 80Gbps. The new standard will be backwards compatible with USB4 version 1.0, USB 3.2, USB 2.0, and Thunderbolt 3, but not with USB 1.0 and Thunderbolt 4. The USB4 2.0 specifications will be updated for USB Type-C and USB Power Delivery (USB PD) as well. Due to licensing issues, USB and Thunderbolt have been updating parallely. Intel laptops have a Thunderbolt port, while AMD Ryzen ones have the USB4 branding. However, even after Intel updated to Thunderbolt 4, the transfer speeds were roughly equivalent to that of Thunderbolt 3 and USB4 1.0. With the second version, Ryzen-based laptops might have an edge, at least until Intel announces Thunderbolt 5. Brad Saunders, USB Promoter Group Chairman, said: “Once again following USB tradition, this updated USB4 specification doubles data performance to deliver higher levels of functionality to the USB Type-C ecosystem. Solutions seeing the most benefit from this speed enhancement include higher-performance displays, storage, and USB-based hubs and docks.” Key characteristics of the updated USB4 solution include: Up to 80 Gbps operation, based on a new physical layer architecture, using existing 40 Gbps USB Type-C passive cables and newly-defined 80 Gbps USB Type-C active cables. Updates to data and display protocols to better use the increase in available bandwidth. USB data architecture updates now enable USB 3.2 data tunneling to exceed 20 Gbps. Updated to align with the latest versions of the DisplayPort and PCIe specifications. Backward compatibility with USB4 Version 1.0, USB 3.2, USB 2.0 and Thunderbolt 3. USB4 version 2.0 will debut in devices later this year.

PCIe 7.0 to bring insane speeds of 128GT/s for even faster SSDs, 800 Gig ethernet, and more by Sayan Sen Today, Peripheral Component Interconnect Special Interest Group or PCI-SIG, the consortium which publishes and maintains PCIe standards announced the latest generation of PCIe (peripheral component interconnect express) with PCIe 7.0 or PCIe Gen7. The announcement was part of its PCI-SIG Developers Conference 2022 where the organization is celebrating its 30 year anniversary. As has been the tradition, with the latest generation of PCIe too, the bandwidth has doubled netting a total throughput of 128GT/s or 128Gbps uni-directionally on one lane (x1). Summing up, on PCIe x16 slot, like those for discrete graphics cards, the total theoretical throughput is 512GB/s bi-directionally. Meanwhile, an NVMe SSD, which typically pair with x4 PCIe slots, can provide up to 64GB/s uni-directionally. The final specifications will be released in 2025. Here are the highlights of the new PCIe 7.0 standard: Delivering 128 GT/s raw bit rate and up to 512 GB/s bi-directionally via x16 configuration Utilizing PAM4 (Pulse Amplitude Modulation with 4 levels) signaling Focusing on the channel parameters and reach Continuing to deliver the low-latency and high-reliability targets Improving power efficiency Maintaining backwards compatibility with all previous generations of PCIe technology With the new PCIe Gen7, PCI-SIG says that the 800 Gig Ethernet (800 GbE), and other similar data intensive markets can be addressed far more effectively. You can find more details on the official press release here.

Intel's Arc Alchemist and DG1 discrete GPUs are buggy with problems in DDT and PCIe 4.0 by Sayan Sen Intel DG1 dev kit Intel is almost ready to take a swing at AMD and Nvidia with its first-gen Arc Alchemist GPUs and the entire lineup recently leaked out courtesy of Intel's own driver. However, tests have suggest there are many teething issues and bugs that must be ironed out before Intel's discrete GPUs are ready to join the arena. The latest bug was discovered by Twitter user Löschzwerg who has been testing the Intel Xe LP-based DG1 graphics card for a while. The bug pertains to PCIe 4.0 throughput wherein the Gunnir Index V2 DG1 is unable saturate the PCIe 4.0 lanes using 3DMark's PCI Express feature test. The Index V2 seems to work well on all the previous PCIe interfaces up to the 3.0 standard. But on PCIe 4.0, the card is performing the same as PCIe 3.0 even though it should get around double that score. This indicates either some form of bottleneck or a bug on DG1. PCIe 4.0 PCIe 3.0 PCIe 2.0 PCIe 1.1 Moving on to Arc Alchemist, which is based on Xe HPG architecture, the successor to Xe LP, the first review for Arc A350M have also shown that Intel's Dynamic Tuning Technology (DTT), a feature similar to AMD's SmartShift technology, is hurting the performance of the Arc GPU. When DTT is turned off there is nearly a doubling of the framerates as can be seen in the images below: The DTT should be fairly easy for Intel to fix if it hasn't already been as it likely only needs some optimization to the power states (P-states). Meanwhile, fixing the PCIe bug might be a bit more difficult as the issue isn't generally such a common one among AMD Radeon or Nvidia GeForce GPUs. However, the bug so far has only been noticed on the older DG1 cards which is rarely on anyone's purchase radar as it was never officially released for the DIY market. Sources and images: Löschzwerg (Twitter) and BullsLab Benchmarks (YouTube)

Nvidia Ada Lovelace to reportedly feature just PCIe 4.0 bus despite needing PCIe 5.0 power by Sayan Sen Nvidia RTX 30-series Nvidia has already introduced PCIe 5.0 power connectors in its recently launched $1,999 GeForce RTX 3090 Ti graphics card. The various partner models of the card are coming with one or even two 16-pin PCIe power cables where each of these are capable of an insane 600W of output. It is even rumored that the RTX 3090 Ti PCB, among others, is itself a test drive for its next-gen RTX 4000 Ada Lovelace cards. And while Nvidia is making great strides to add the new power standard for its next-gen cards for additional power headroom, the company is purportedly only adding PCIe 4.0 bus capabilities on Ada Lovelace RTX 40-series GPUs, according to reliable leakster kopite7kimi. If true, the upcoming Nvidia RTX cards will be limited to just 2GB/s per lane uni-directionally. PCIe 5.0 is something which Nvidia already announced with its Hopper architecture that's meant for data center and high-performance computing (HPC) markets. Hence, it is slightly surprising to see that Nvidia may not offer the same feature parity for its consumer gaming lineup. In terms of support, Intel has already introduced PCIe 5.0 on its 12th Alder Lake platform while AMD will also be bringing it with Zen 4 and Socket AM5 soon by the end of the year. However, it's not confirmed so far whether either Intel or AMD is bringing PCIe 5.0 support in their respective Arc Alchemist or RDNA 3 GPUs. Source: kopite7kimi (Twitter)

AMD RX 6400 is a $159.99 low-profile graphics card with a GPU that was meant for laptops by Alap Naik Desai AMD has quietly launched a new graphics card. The AMD RX 6400 has a GPU that’s weaker than the $199 AMD Radeon RX 6500 XT. Despite its limited performance, the new AMD graphics card could benefit those who are designing an ultra-compact mini-PC for multimedia streaming, light gaming, and office work. AMD’s partners, including ASRock, Biostar, Gigabyte, MSI, PowerColor, Sapphire, and XFX now have a graphics card with the AMD RX 6400 GPU. The majority of the cards launched with a list price of $159.99, and, most of them are actually selling at a retail price that matches the MSRP. The AMD RX 6400 is rated at just 53W of power. In other words, this graphics card will not need an additional power input, and it will run reliably on the power that the PCI-Express slot supplies. An average PCIe slot can reliably supply up to 75W of power. In terms of performance, the AMD RX 6400 does pack an RDNA 2 GPU. However, it offers only 12 compute units. As mentioned above, it is slower than the $199.99 AMD Radeon RX 6500 XT in all aspects. The RX 6400 packs 4GB GDDR6 VRAM clocked at 16 Gbps, and only 128 GB per second of bandwidth. All the variants of the graphics cards from AMD’s partners feature just two display outputs. The card does offer HDMI 4K support, and most of the variants have an HDMI 2.1 out as well as 1.4a DisplayPort. The AMD RX 6400 does benefit from 16 MB AMD Infinity Cache but lacks H265/HEVC as well as AV1 decoding abilities. Perhaps the biggest appeal of the AMD RX 6400, besides the fact that it does not need an extra power connector, is that it can easily fit inside an SFF (Small Form Factor) PC. Most of the RX 6400 models take up a single slot and they ship with a low-profile PCIe bracket (except the one from Gigabyte). This means the AMD RX 6400 can easily fit inside a PC meant for multimedia consumption and light computing. Incidentally, the majority of AMD’s partners who are offering the RX 6400 variants, seem to be including both the standard as well as the low-profile PCIe brackets.

GIGABYTE launches G262-ZL0 and G492-ZL2, new liquid-cooled HPC and AI training servers by Fiza Ali GIGABYTE has launched two new liquid-cooled HPC and AI training servers, G262-ZLO and G492-ZL2, that can push the NVIDIA HGX A100 accelerators and AMD EPYC 7003 processors to limit with enterprise-grade liquid cooling. The G262-ZL0 is a 2U GPU-centric server that comes with support for the NVIDIA HGX A100 4-GPU baseboard while the G492-ZL2 is a 4U GPU-centric server with the NVIDIA HGX A100 8-GPU baseboard. The company joined hands with CoolIt Systems to produce a thermal solution that employs direct-liquid cooling to balance optimal performance, high availability, and efficient cooling, to avoid overheating and server downtime in a compute-dense data center. Commenting on the topic, a spokesperson from GIGABYTE stated: The inclusion and choices of the NVIDIA HGX A100 platform in the new GIGABYTE servers is important, in that new NVIDIA Magnum IO™ GPUDirect technologies favor faster throughput while offloading workloads from the CPU to achieve notable performance boosts. The HGX platform supports NVIDIA GPUDirect RDMA for direct data exchange between GPUs and third-party devices such as NICs or storage adapters. And there is support for GPUDirect Storage for a direct data path to move data from storage to GPU memory while offloading the CPU, thus resulting in higher bandwidth and lower latency. For high-speed interconnects the four NVIDIA A100 server incorporates NVIDIA NVLink®, while the eight NVIDIA A100 server uses NVSwitch™ and NVLink to enable 600GB/s GPU peer-to-peer communication. The latest servers isolate the GPU baseboard from the other components to allow the accelerators to be cooled by a liquid coolant to maintain peak performance. In these servers, the dual CPU sockets are also liquid-cooled. The servers feature 2.5" U.2 bays that come with support for PCIe 4.0 x4 lanes and multiple PCIe slots for faster networking employing a SmartNIC like the NVIDIA ConnectX -7 for four ports of connectivity and over 400 Gb/s of throughput. To buy either of the two servers, customers can contact GIGABYTE, and for information on the integration of the cooling structure into the data center and what additional cooling components are required, you can contact CoolIt Systems.

Next-gen 12-pin PCIe power output likely overstated as ASUS confirms it's 450W, not 600W by Sayan Sen 12-pin PCIe power cnnector There has been a lot of speculation regarding the next-gen PCIe 5.0 12-pin power connectors due to a wide variety of reports regarding how much power they will be able to output. The typical speculated output value is generally around 600W. It looks like Asus has finally answered this question as its recently released ROG Thor series of power supplies has been rated to be able to deliver up to 450W of power via a 12-pin connector. The information comes from the Asus ROG Thor 1000W Platinum II PUS's "PCIe Gen 5.0 Ready section". However, the firm had apparently altered this key piece of detail very recently as VideoCardz says it had noted Asus previously stating on the page that the 12-pin PCIe 5.0 power connector "can pipe up to 600W of power to PCIe Gen 5.0 graphics card". Hence, it looks like Asus too was probably overestimating the amount of power such a 12-pin connector could actually provide. While a 25% reduction from 600W down to 450W is significant, we must remember that going from (6+2) pins or 8-pin power connectors up to a 12-pin model is still a massive upgrade as the 8-pins can only provide 150W while 12-pin cable is set to deliver thrice as much power. PCIe 5.0 will also bring 600W of output but with the 16-pin (12+4) pin connectors instead. This is also why there is conflicting information regarding the power headroom of the purported EVGA RTX 3090 Ti Kingpin model as it reportedly comes with either dual 12-pin connectors or dual 16-pin connectors. If the Kingpin packs dual 12-pin, then the card will have a 975W of power headroom, while for the dual 16-pin model, expect 1275W of power headroom. via VideoCardz

GPU-Z wrongly thinks RX 6500 XT is a PCIe x16 card despite really being x4, fix coming soon by Sayan Sen AMD's newly launched Radeon RX 6500 XT is unlikely to have a great reception in the market due to several limitations it comes with. The card lacks a lot of modern media decoding (AV1) and encoding (like HEVC) support that you'd expect. And in terms of PCIe throughput, it is limited to just four channels (x4). Read all the details here. Fellow outlet, TechPowerUp, which develops GPU-Z, the popular graphics specification-checking utility, has put out a report cautioning users that the currently available GPU-Z versions are misreporting the number of PCIe lanes on the GPU as x16 instead of the actual x4. The site explains that the reason for the misidentification is that GPU-Z is yet unaware of the way Navi 24, the GPU inside the Radeon RX 6500 XT, operates. While the graphics core itself can support x16 width as correctly reported by the downstream switch port, the PCIe upstream switch port only accepts x4 lanes from a Navi 24 card, like that of the RX 6500 XT and its smaller sibling, the RX 6400. TechPowerUp says that a future GPU-Z update will fix the issue. The website also is currently listing the card as a PCIe x8 card but that should change too as specifications listed on the website before launch are sometimes placeholder data. In terms of the consequences of such a narrow PCIe width, TechSpot data using a similarly performing 5500 XT suggests that the new RX 6500 XT could suffer heavily in games that are VRAM-heavy, both in terms of averages as well as minimum fps, on PCIe 3.0 and older boards. Source and images: TechPowerUp

AMD's new RX 6500 XT and RX 6400 limited to just PCIe x4, lacks AV1 decode and HEVC encode by Sayan Sen AMD launched several products during its CES 2022 keynote presentation. And while the company went into great detail describing its upcoming Ryzen 6000 RDNA 2-based Rembrandt mobile APUs, it was rather tight-lipped about the new Radeon RX 6500 XT budget card. For example, the Red team completely skipped the fact that the card comes with only 4 Gigs of video memory. Also, the official specifications of the 6500 XT on AMD's site reveal the new budget graphics card lacks AV1 decoding and H.265/ HEVC encoding, something that other larger Navi GPUs all feature. The lack of AV1 support on the new Navi 24 RX 6500 XT and the RX 6400 essentially makes these GPUs quite ordinary as a modern Home Theatre PC (HTPC) driver as AV1 content is pretty widespread nowadays. And even as a gaming solution, these new AMD Radeon cards seem pretty gimped. German outlet 3DCenter noticed on ASRock's site that the Radeon RX 6500 XT is limited to just four channels (x4) of PCIe bandwidth. While the card does support PCIe 4.0 and that should be plenty for a GPU of this caliber, anyone running this card on a PCIe 3.0 motherboard will essentially be limited to just half the throughput, ie, 32GT/s or around 4GB/s. And in a VRAM intensive game like DOOM Eternal, the low PCIe bandwidth could lead to a very large performance loss. Source: ASRock via 3DCenter Update: The RX 6500 XT and RX 6400 lack H.264/AVC encoding as well.

PCIe 3.0 could be crippling AMD's RX 5500 XT performance by Sayan Sen AMD introduced PCIe 4.0 with the Ryzen 3000 series CPUs and Navi-based RX 5700 series GPUs. The new standard doubles the throughput over last gen. Testing, however, showed that there was very little difference between PCIe 3.0 and 4.0 graphics performance on the x16-capable RX 5700 XT. The recently launched budget-oriented RX 5500 XT, though, is limited to 8 lanes only, and as PCGH has found, it may be crippling the performance of the card on a PCIe 3.0 platform possibly due to saturation of the available bandwidth. Currently, only AMD's flagship X570 chipset supports PCIe 4.0 in the mainstream segment, and it was pitted against Intel's Core i9-9900K platform, which is still on older PCIe 3.0. An AIDA64 GPGPU graphics benchmark test using the RX 5500 XT showed the Ryzen system outperforming the Intel one by about two times in the GPU memory reads and writes. Ryzen 5 3600 / X570 chipset (PCIe 4.0) Intel Core i9-9900K (PCIe 3.0) Memory Read 13331 MB/s 6755 MB/s Memory Write 13211 MB/s 6586 MB/s A few VRAM-heavy games were also tested to measure the effect of the fewer PCIe lanes on both 4GB and 8GB flavors using AMD's Adrenalin 2020 edition driver. From the tests, it appears that the 4GB variant, especially on the PCIe 3.0 platform, has struggled the most. The slower memory read and write speeds - as seen from the AIDA64 numbers - seem to be further hindering the performance of the 4 gig card. If the finding here is accurate, then the 4GB RX 5500 XT will consequently become very difficult to recommend as the majority of the people shopping with this budget will likely not opt for expensive PCIe 4.0-capable X570 motherboard offerings. There's also a possibility of some other issue being at play here, which will require further investigation to confirm. Source: PCGH

As our CPUs enter a new era of speed even in a laptop, and the mighty NVIDIA TITAN RTX gives former big science GPU power to the consumer, will we starve all our new computing power by short-changing the availability of high speed interconnecting PCs with each other and with peripherals that currently seems to lag in comparison. I was fascinated by the generally muddy thinking about these issues illustrated in the discussion in this forum involving fantasy thinking to impossibly drive high speed peripherals off a USB 3.0 port. The obvious assumption was that the designers of PC hardware are smart enough to understand and balance these issues so that consumers can just "plug in stuff" without needing an engineering degree... Sadly, the people who design our PCs and Laptops are just as stupid as anyone. But it got me thinking... What is available? What is out there in the vast marketplace of tech gadgets? So far, here is what I have for high speed ( greater than 20 gbits) connections: (NOTE: I am focusing on greater than 20 gbits since 20 gbits is "just" the current base rate for a 4K monitor signal) 1. Thunderbolt 3 40 gbits https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thunderbolt_(interface) 2. NVMe There is some sort of spec for a NVMe interconnect cable... TBD 3. PCIe There are existing products to extend the PCIe bus via external cables... TBD https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCI_Express#External_GPUs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCI_Express#PCI_Express_External_Cabling 4. InfiniBand (Mellanox, Intel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InfiniBand A company from Israel that specializes in high speed interconnects for Super Computers but they have varous plug in cards anyone can use. "SLOW" Ethernet stuff at 25 gbits: InfiniBand at 200 gbits: http://www.mellanox.com/page/products_dyn?product_family=265&mtag=connectx_6_vpi_card https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mellanox_Technologies 5. NVIDIA They have something in this area I think... TBD https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NVLink Edit: update title to follow format of other reference threads intended to be continuously updated over time...

The next few years will speed ahead on Flash! NVMe will be everywhere, QLC will kill the consumer HD market and Thunderbolt 3 will host external NVMe with new lower prices that will make very powerful workstations on the go. Discuss, add tips, tweaks, advice etc to possibly build a useful reference. I'll add any good stuff you come up with to this post and please feel free to point out mistakes and suggest improvements! Reference Links & Info Flash Types: SLC - 1 memory bit per cell - highest speed, highest writes before destruction MLC - 2 memory bits per cell TLC - 3 memory bits per cell TLC 3D - 3 memory bits per cell - In 2018, the world supply of 3D NAND Flash ramped up tremendously - brings back some speed and a huge increase on #writes before cell death over TLC QLC - 4 memory bits per cell - The newest attempt at higher density to perhaps replace the HD for consumer usage. Horrible 1st gen write endurance similar to early TLC so far... SSD Performance Top end NVMe drives are on a path to actually max out the 4 PCIe lanes they are using. At that point we might see a return to RAID and see below for a RAID card using the GPU PCIe x 16 slot to pack in 4 NVMe drives! SSD Reliability Manufacturers are now publishing Write Endurance in their specs. It is the number of terabytes you can write to a drive before you kill it. The number is very dependent on the size of the drive and on your decision to Over Provision or not. NVMe performance level drives lifetime are typically 300 TB for 500 G and 600 TB for 1 TB drives. That's 600 full re-writes of the entire drive in both cases. Nobody is going to overwrite their data that many times for a plain old storage drive, but the problem is that these high performance drives are being used as real world work horses where video editing, graphics creation and development can generate massive write loads. SSD Over Provision Before you format your new drive for the first time, you can choose to create a partition that is smaller than the drive. If there is a partition on the drive that has never been allocated most firmwares will use that for spare write cells, producing a large boost in drive longevity. Did You Know? 1. Did you know that those amazing NVMe write speed specs are mostly false? The top end NVMe drives have a 1 gig RAM cache and a 30 - 100 gig SLC cache. After you blow past the cache the drive writes at its native TLC NAND Flash specs which are 1/2 speed at best and as low as 1/4 the rated speed. 2. Samsung made my life easier for a while with one of the longest runs of dominance well ahead of the pack in tech history! The performance and reliability of Samsung NVMe became so far ahead of everyone else that without any thought, I could tell everyone to buy Samsung, anything else would be crazy. In 2018, 3D NAND Flash production came online everywhere and off-the-shelf NVMe controller chips improved to the point that almost any drive manufacturer can build a generic device that gets them to 80% of Samsung with zero effort. 2019 will be the year of competition again! 3. Did you know that the performance of a NVMe drive model depends on it's size? The standard sizes are 250, 500, 1 TB and 2 TB. Each size variation within the same model will have different DRAM cache, different SLC cache and often different layouts of the 3D NAND Flash chips, all of which combine to affect performance. Typically the performance increases with the size of the drive and the longevity of the drive will increase as well in most cases. 4. Did you know that current Thunderbolt 3 drives and USB 3.1 Gen 2 (10 mbits) both use a USB-C connector but they are not compatible? You need to find out which protocol your USB-C connector supports, but in most cases Thunderbolt 3 was a well advertised feature of whatever computer, motherboard or laptop you purchased. 5. Did you know that some motherboards can be sneaky and due to a shortage of PCIe lanes will feed the primary or secondary M.2 socket with 2 lanes instead of 4? Not a problem for a low end NVMe drive, but a huge issue for the top performing drives. Tips - insert Tips here HowTo & Tweaks - insert tutorial info here Leading NVMe drive models 2019 - tbd (incomplete) - Corsair M510, Adata S11, upcoming 980 Pro, Crucial, Muskin, Intel, Kingston, etc need to be evaluated and ranked - Intel Optane needs to be included for completeness - Planning to include various Enterprise drives and devices - Hoping to locate a SLC drive for reference How to spot 2019: For WD Black, SN750 denotes the 2019 update and for the SX8200, 2019 is "Pro" and for HP the jump from 920 to 950 is the 2019 model and for Samsung it is "Plus" - The Samsung 970 Pro had not yet had a hardware refresh for 2019. Note: The following are all great drives. The order is based on DevTech's balanced criteria, which weights Sequential Write and 4K Write far more than most. But if read performance is the only criteria, chances are that a NVMe drive not really needed anyways and getting a 4 TB SATA would be far better value than a super-fast 500 GB NVMe. For Random 4K/IOPS which is of interest for Dev work and other professional content editing (except Video Editing) the WD Black SN750 (2019), Adata SX8200 Pro (2019) and HP EX950 (2019) are all about at parity with the Samsung drives. Leaders, 500 GB 1. Samsung 970 Pro 2. Samsung 970 EVO Plus (estimated: Only 250 and 1 TB currently available) 3. WD Black SN750 4. Adata SX8200 Pro 5. HP EX950 Leaders 1 TB 1. Samsung 970 EVO Plus 2. Samsung 970 Pro 3. Adata SX8200 Pro 4. WD Black SN750 5. HP EX950 Plugging in your NVMe drive Motherboard - tbd PCIe single or dual or quad card. - tbd - ASUS Hyper M.2 X4 - ASUS Hyper X16 PCIe RAID card - tbd - Highpoint X16 Quad M.2 RAID External NVMe drives Thunderbolt 3 at 40 mbits and USB 3.1 Gen 2 at 10 mbits - tbd Other things you can do with NVMe - tbd ------- I know that it is usually hit and miss, with a larger spoonful of miss on these sorts of "lets build something useful" so my expectations are super low and anything at all is appreciated for our community... Edit: update title to follow format of other reference threads intended to be continuously updated over time...

Source

So a month or so ago I got a Sapphire R9 270X Toxic, great card and had no problems with it. A couple of days ago I went to strip my PC and clean it, however when I got to the graphics card I noticed that I couldn't push down the lock on the slot. I could pull the front half (well more like a quarter because the card is so big) out of the slot but could not push the lock down at the back no matter how hard I tried, I tried to push it down with a screwdriver and got it about half way open before it just pinged back up. I didn't want to try any harder and have the screwdriver split it and crack the mobo. I have it in the PCIe 3.0 slot, the one with the lock that's kinda more like a DIMM slot's as opposed to the tab. I'm not sure if it's the size of the graphics card/shroud that's causing it, to stick, I tried to get my camera down to have a look but it's too low for me to be able to see. This is the opposite side though, as you can see the head of the lock is pretty marked with the force I was putting on the screwdriver. So does anyone have any advice? I know with the tab type locks you can just snap them but I can't really do that with this and would rather not break the slot as the PCIe 2.0 slot would cause the card to cover 4 of my SATA sockets :( Ohh also the reason I want to take it out and not just leave it be is that after getting it half out and putting it back in I've been experiencing quite a few graphical glitches such as flickering while playing games and occasionally random squares that look like QR codes will appear, especially when using Chrome, so I wanted to take it out so that I could make sure I've not bent anything and re-seat it. I did upgrade to Catalyst 14.4 straight after putting it back in though so not sure if it's maybe being caused by it.

a few weeks ago i began to experience problems with my on board sound, later discovered (after a lot of messages to the customer support for my mobo) that a capacitor that i had discovered at the bottom of my case was the cause of all my issues, i must have knocked it off during one of my through cleans of the case. but anyway, i'm in the market for a new sound card and i'm lost with all the choices. it will be used with 5.1 speakers, PCI-E connection is proffered because the only PCI slot i have is covered up by my graphics card, and finally, has to be under ?45. so anyone got any recommendations?