I finally put all the parts together for my new build. It’s an i7 4790k with an AsRock motherboard. The video and sound cards came along for the ride. I’m waiting for the new NVIDIA cards before I upgrade my old 770, and I still like my SoundBlaster X-Fi Fatality. It works great with my headset. I’m sure on-board sound has improved immensely since the old IBM PC days. However, I’m old school. I like my soundcards.
I did jump in head first into the world of the m.2 SSD drive. I had no idea what these things were when I first saw it on my motherboard. A close friend of mine asked about them, and I was pretty dismissive of the whole thing. They were tiny, but I didn’t see any advantage over a SATA SSD. The read speeds seems about the same. I only saw them in the 500 MBps range. My friend looked deeper into it and found an m.2 drive with a 2200MBps read speed. Read speed has been a bottleneck for as long as I’ve gamed. Cassette tape drive old school. This could be a great thing.
I had to check this out for myself. That kind of speed is amazing, and I’m loving it. I’ve built a awful lot of PCs over the years, and I never was able to have something for myself that I considered to be the best. For once I can say that my machine is a fucking beast now.
It loads faster then it takes my keyboard to power up so I’m having trouble getting into the BIOS. Ha! It’s amazing!
I finally bit the bullet and installed Windows 10 on one of my personal machines, and I’m not hating it. I still haven’t figured out how to search for things as quickly as I could in 8.1, but I’m hesitant about using Cortana. However, A big thank you to the Microsoft Overlords for the entitlement licenses program. I like fresh installs, and my Windows 10 install went absolutely flawlessly with the old 8.1 Key.
It’s kind weird how well it went down. I figure it took me 3 hours from teardown to patching Windows 10 on the new hardware. Hell, it assigned the drive letters to the old HDs exactly how I wanted it to go down. I’ve never had a build go so well.
Benchmarks compared to the old i5 build? Well I figured the m.2 was too radical of a change to the variables. So outside of comparing the CPU usage, I have no hard numbers to give yet. DCS World usage is down 50% and the game loads freakishly fast now. It’s one of the few games I’ll make room for on the m.2 since it doesn’t have a lot of space. Eh, I’m learning how to offload document, music, and movie data to other drives to keep the m.2 clear for now. Although I can install a few more things on the SATA SSD now. 🙂
Now I need to see how much it improves transcoding times. I justified an i7 for moving making, right? I better put something out! It is most certainly a good thing I’ve been practicing a lot in the DCS World Mirage 2000-C. 😉 DCS was the the first game I made sure I had working correctly. HOTAS and FreeTrack (via FaceTrackNoIR) are working well, and I have a working mission with an AI JTAC so I can use GBU-12s to bullseye some T-90s.
As Clint Eastwood said in FireFox, “What a machine.”. I highly recommend the Samsung m.2 Pro.