Do nvme drives actually make a difference for games?

[outwar6010]

I am getting a new ryzen system soon which will have two m.2 slots and am wondering if its worth getting a fast secondary m.2 for games. What are peoples experiences with this? Online, people are generally saying it doesn't offer much but I would interested in what people here think.

[Biscuit]

Wont have any effect on FPS what so ever. Might load maps/levels a bit faster. Perhaps open world type games will be a little bit smoother when transitioning between "areas".

[virtuo]

Load times might be marginally (and probably not noticably) faster since I think you are already coming from SSD.

Does your new mobo support RAID across the 2 M2 slots? That might be fun.

[Spreadie]

I am getting a new ryzen system soon which will have two m.2 slots and am wondering if its worth getting a fast secondary m.2 for games.

No. I've been running NVMe drives for the last two years and there is no noticeable performance difference between them and SATA3 SSDs; despite my drive boasting around 1200MB/s write and 2100MB/s read speeds.

It's nice to have two fewer cables inside the PC but, other during than some very specific tasks i.e. SSD benchmarks or shuffling around some very large files, you will not notice any difference.

I have a 500GB SATA3 SSD as my Steam/Games drive, and I did once try running the OS from an SSD and using the m.2 for Steam - no difference as far as I could tell.

[edit] Which motherboard are you looking at? Some twin m.2 boards only have one m.2 NVMe slot, with the other being m.2 SSD (which is rated at the same speed most SATA3 SSDs are capable of). My current Ryzen board has that very configuration - Asrock AB350M Pro4.

Load times might be marginally (and probably not noticably) faster since I think you are already coming from SSD.

Does your new mobo support RAID across the 2 M2 slots? That might be fun.

My Skylake board supported m.2 NVMe RAID - tried that too. Once again, no difference.

[outwar6010]

Thanks for the comments. For the record I was never ever expecting extra fps at any point lol. I am stuck between several mobos. Online people are saying that the asrock taichi is the one to go for but I hate the look of it; so I'm still looking.

I found this video last night which corroborated with spreadie and said that there was no difference in gaming between a normal sata 3 ssd and an nvme one. So I think i will stick to the current ssd for gaming but will still get an nvme for the os.

[outwar6010]

Load times might be marginally (and probably not noticably) faster since I think you are already coming from SSD.

Does your new mobo support RAID across the 2 M2 slots? That might be fun.

I'm not too sure about that.

[Hoonigan]

That's a blatant photoshop opportunity.

Get at least 1x NVME for now mate, then grab another when they're cheaper