I'm planning to build a new PC with the AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D and I'm looking for recommendations on the best SSD to pair with it. I do a mix of gaming and productivity tasks, so I want something that offers excellent performance and reliability. Should I go for PCIe 4.0 or PCIe 5.0?
I’ve been testing different drives on my 7950X3D rig and honestly i’m super satisfied with sticking to Gen 4 for now. I spent a week benchmarking a newer Gen 5 drive and while the sequential speeds looked huge on paper, like over 10,000MB/s, it didnt actually feel any faster when loading games or heavy apps. The random IOPS were nearly the same as the one I got in my current setup. One thing i learned is that the Gen 5 stuff gets way too hot and starts throttling hard unless you have a dedicated fan on the heatsink. My current drive works well and stays under 50C even when i'm hammering it with large file transfers. I compared a few different brands and noticed the one I kept has a much more stable controller that doesnt drop off a cliff after the SLC cache fills up. Some of the others I tried would tank in performance after about 100GB of writes. Gen 4 is just more mature and reliable imo.
Samsung 990 Pro SSD or 990 EVO SSD.
Consider the SK Hynix Platinum P41. It's often overlooked but performs amazingly well - great thermals, lower power draw than 990 Pro, and usually cheaper. Been rock solid in my 7950X3D build for months.