M.2 for Civ VI?

[SirWill90]

Hi. I have a WD Blue 1 TB SSD right now. If I'm interpreting the specs correctly, (good chance I'm not lol) the read/write speeds of a Samsung EVO 960 or 970 M.2 SSD are somewhere around 6 or more times that speed.

Considering making the purchase and moving my OS (Win 10) and all games over to that. Now the WD seems pretty quick to me as it is my first SSD. Loading times are still kind of long but my main question is whether the Evo M.2 would speed turn times at all, or is this entirely on the processor?

Specs: i7-8700K @ 4.7 GHz, 16GB DDR4 RAM, RTX2080

 

[Laurana Kanan]

The M.2 would likely improve your load times some. Turn times will depend mainly on your processor.

 

[Janskey]

You might get some marginal benefit, but the bottleneck is usually somewhere else. E.g.

Spoiler :

Like Laurana Kanan said, CPU is much more important, more specifically the clock speed. I did some testing a while ago and having more than two cores doesn't improve performance nearly as much as higher clock speed. Overclocking or buying an already overclocked i9 processor is the way to go, but seeing that you're already at 4.7 GHz, there's not much to be done.

 

[SirWill90]

Thanks to both of you, you just saved me about $180.

To follow one question up with another, does anyone know how to compare how my rig is doing as far as turn times? I have run "AI Benchmark" but the results mean nothing to me, unless that percentile is actually a comparison to all the other rigs out there which seems unlikely.

 

[Janskey]

You're probably doing as good as it gets - you might get a few % off the turn times with higher clock speeds, but nothing spectacular. E.g.

Spoiler :

https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/intel-core-i9-9900k-9th-gen-cpu,5847-4.html

 

[SirWill90]

You're probably doing as good as it gets - you might get a few % off the turn times with higher clock speeds, but nothing spectacular. E.g.

Spoiler :

https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/intel-core-i9-9900k-9th-gen-cpu,5847-4.html

Thanks! Guess I need to expand my horizons a little to find this kind of info. A great site.

 

[Janskey]

No problem. I recommend checking multiple sites for benchmarks (if you can find the time). Other noteworthy sites are https://www.gamersnexus.net/ and https://www.anandtech.com/
If you're really into technical details, buildzoid is your man: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCrwObTfqv8u1KO7Fgk-FXHQ

The Finnish https://www.io-tech.fi/ has occasionally very detailed articles as well, but those are in Finnish. I don't remember reading anywhere else that many motherboard manufacturers use ~0.20€ cheaper parts in some critical applications, resulting in total savings of maybe 2-3€ per board, reducing lifespan even though we're talking about motherboards in the 300€ price range.