SAMSUNG 850 evo SSD or 32GB memory

Community Community & Industry Discussion
1

im doing a few small upgrades for my PC so i can install and run UE4. To that end im getting windows 8.1. but that doesnt really do anything for performance.

im not replacing my CPU atm or my GPU, though i may add a 2nd GPU later or replace it based on cost(my pc has room for a 2nd).

but for a little bit of money i was thinking of either adding 16GB more memory for a total of 32GB(though this wouldnt really benefit me outside of UE4) or getting a SSD.

the SAMSUNG 850 evo seems to still be popular and allot of people still recommend it, the price is also good from what i can tell. at 100$ 250GB seems like a good size and is right where im comfortable spending atm. the 500GB version at 200$ is outside my comfort zone and seems to be bigger then what i need. the 1TB version just seems insane. At most id be sticking windows 8.1, unreal engine and microsoft visual studio on it(unless anyone has advice or recommendations otherwise). The SSD would also speed up my PC in general where as the 32GB of memory wont be otherwise noticed outside of UE4.

i could potentially get the memory and the 100$ SSD, or maybe just the larger SSD for 200$ but no memory… but thats stretching it atm.

I prefer to buy for what i need and not replace components if possible. if the 250GB SSD isnt going to cut it and im going to need a bigger one then ill just have to get a bigger one.

for a rough idea of what ill be doing in UE4, ill be trying to make a large scale game, though it will use allot of repeat content, same meshes etc just different textures to make things not all be the same.

Any advice or recommendations ares appreciated.

(btw, is there any way to delete threads? or do you guys just archive them?)

2

Good SSD is a deal breaker IMHO. After I’ve received my first SSD I was really shocked by all this speed. Before I could not even imagined that reboot could be finished in a matter of seconds. And everything will startup and work extremely fast!
Additional memory depends on your needs, I use Chrome(usually 10-20 tabs), ZBrush, MODO, Substance Designer and Unreal Engine at the same time and 16gb is enough for me. However when I start video editing I have to shutdown everything and 32gb definitely won’t hurt :smiley:

3

For general use, the SSD is a game-changer. It is very hard to go back to an HDD! :slight_smile:

Get at least 256GB, and look at either Samsung Evo or Corsair MX100. You can keep your current HDD for your unused assets and games.

If you are building a big game, you need to build the assets and gameplay first, the actual large levels come later. This will give you time to hopefully have some more money saved up to get the RAM then.

Bear in mind that a second GPU will not be recognised by Unreal at the moment. Just get a good single GPU when you upgrade it.

4

Get an M.2 if you can, the one in my laptop is an XP941 and capable of 1.2GB/s transfer speed.

5

Since you already have 16gb RAM I’d say go with an SSD. 250gb is perfect and I would definitely go with a Samsung EVO. I have one Samsung 830, two 840 and one 850 spread out over 4 machines and they have all ran fantastically since I got them.
Going lower than 250 would be a waste if you plan on using it as a primary drive. Windows take lots of space (around 30gb for 64bit Win7 and about 20gb for Win8) and after that you’ll drown in appdata and temp files.
I don’t think 32gb RAM will benefit you much if you’re not using tons of heavy softwares at once. I upgraded a while back from 12gb to 32gb but I use Photoshop, substance designer/painter and 3d modelling softwares and engine all at once since I’m too lazy to turn them off when I know I’ll need to start them to check something, but I just barely scrape close to 30gb when I use these plus browsers will millions of tabs (**** chrome and chropera waste soo much ram).
Although, lots of ram would let you use a RAM disk, which can be amazing at times. :slight_smile:

6

Easy now, the XP941 doesn’t come even close to 1.2tb/s write or read speed. It maxes out about twice the speed of common regular SSDs at 1170 MB/s read and 930 MB/s write speed, so nothing that fantastic. Not even the fastest commercial RAM disk can do that, even though they’ll beat an M.2 and run leaps around it any day of the week, even with really slow RAM.

7

Looks like I wasn’t paying attention, I meant 1.2GB/S :D…

That’s still pretty impressive though :). *Only if you get the 512GB+ module.

Were all allowed a typo every now and again.

8

I posted this into another thread recently, but I think it’s worth adding this in here too:

All of the drives last longer than you will likely need them to, but there was a difference between the different brands and/or models. At the same time it could be argued another identical SSD could last longer (or fail quicker) due to a defect in the tested drive, but still an interesting read. :wink:

9

I just put an 850 evo in my Macbook Pro (16GB ram) and its like I went and bought a new machine, EVERYTHING is faster - do the drive!

10

Thanks everyone for your replies, maybe you could tell but i was already leaning towards the SSD. This confirms my feeling that it was the right choice.

@Jez, i didnt realise unreal didnt support 2 GPU’s, to be honest thats fairly surprising. thats just the Engine though and not games made with it right? seems like something they need to fix asap. while i didnt build my PC for UE4 use, my current graphics card should be sufficient, my original plan was to just buy a second in the future if i ever needed it. Kinda a let down with UE4. ill have to look into this more, thanks for the heads up.

@Shadow Thanks for the info, its sequential speed is definitely noteworthy(double!). but its cost is more then 100$ higher and only has a 3 year warranty, i dont think its worth it for me at this point.

@Sit, ive always wanted to set one up but im not sure what id use it for though! lol its in my wishlist of things id like to try.

@, Thanks for the link, i noticed they tested the samsung pro 256GB… and wow… its on page 2 with the kingston but if you check out the numbers, they both blew the others out of the water. though the kingston hardly reallocated anything before it failed. seems strange.

Looking at how the samsung pro vs the samsung evo faired, it seems like the pro might be the better of the two.

The samsung pro has a 10 year warranty vs kingstons 3,
samsung is only about 22-30$ more then the kingston
samsung does 4K random write at 90,000 vs kingstons 60,000

the only questionable data was on page 3 for the endurance test, samsung didnt do well at all. even so, that 10 year warranty looks mighty appealing.

I think im going to go with the samsung pro. if anyone has anything else to add or comment on please do, gotta look into that 4k random write more though…

11

How much faster will a github build of the engine be with a SSD? Im thinking about one just for that. My build script builds several things, and a clean build takes around two hours here now.

12

I dont think an SSD would show any improvement at all, the bottleneck would be the CPU. unless you have a really beasty CPU and a really slow HDD(even so…). Check your CPU usage next time your building the engine, it should show allot of use/max use.

13

Yea well it certainly does use alot of the cpu, but there must be a connection to the IO system as otherwise we wouldnt need Unity builds to improve performance.

14

Thanks for sharing such a great information with us its really impressive and interesting. looking forward to see more update like that