Socket 1150 motherboard that takes NVMe SSD?

[SimonP2]

I currently have an LGA1150 / DDR3 based system that works well but I need more disk speed. I bought a Samsung 970 NVMe card and an adaptor board that works, but sadly doesn't boot up much faster than a standard 850 SSD. I therefore would like to find a motherboard that will take my i5-4670K, 4x4GB of memory, and the 970 natively. I also need 8 or more SATA3 disk ports onboard.

The ASRock Z97 Extreme6 looks perfect, but it is 5 years old and unobtainable now, unless I can find a working second-hand one.

Do you know of any other motherboard that would fit the bill and is still available? I'd rather not have to upgrade the whole system but I can't find one so I thought I'd check with you experts before abandoning the idea and saving up for a major upgrade.

 

[bremen1874]

What are you going to do with the couple of seconds you might save (and I'm not convinced you'd actually save anything)?

Save your money for a proper upgrade.

 

[SimonP2]

Thanks for the reply. I set up a system for my nephew not long ago and it booted up amazingly quickly, MUCH faster than mine. Not only that but I run Oracle VirtualBox from my C: drive and that gets a bit sluggish so a faster drive would help. I'm happy with the rest of the system so there doesn't seem much point in a major upgrade if I can get away with a minor one.

 

[bremen1874]

Have you benchmarked the drive?

There's more to boot times than the raw performance of the boot drive so it's not the best indicator.

If the adapter you've used is providing the necessary PCIe lanes there's no obvious reason why a dedicated NVMe slot would be any faster.

Where does the PCIe slot you've used get its PCIe lanes from? Some slots are usually connected to the chipset rather than the CPU and have lower performance.

 

[SimonP2]

Sorry for the late reply.

I used HD Tune Pro and got avg. 1847MB/s for the 970 compared to 323MB/s for an 860 so in testing it's quicker but I mirrored the 970 to an 850 and compared boot-up speeds and they were within a second or two of each-other.

I don't know what is feeding each slot but when I get a moment I'll try moving the adaptor card to another slot and see if that makes a difference.

 

[ninezerofive]

I think you are creating way to much fuss for few saved seconds.

 

[bremen1874]

And quite possibly overly high expectations.

No actual times mentioned so there's no way to tell if the OP's PC is booting as fast as you'd expect it to.

An average speed benchmark from software like HD Tune Pro isn't going to tell you much. Windows boot is going to be mainly 4K reads.

For 4K reads and writes the advantage of an NVMe drive over a good SATA drive is only going to be 40-50%, not the 300-400% you can see for sequential transfers.

You've then got to take into account that some of what the PC is doing as it boots will take the same amount of time whatever type of drive is installed.

 

[SimonP2]

I can't argue with either of you although 1) that's why I'm only thinking about replacing the motherboard, 2) while I'm talking about boot speed as it is fairly constant, everything else will speed up as well, 3) it should measure nearer 3000MB/s when working natively (rather than in my adaptor board) so the speed increase should be greater, and 4) Samsung have told me that it will run slower in an adaptor board than natively.

My boot speed is slow as I am still running Windows 7 and have 10 big drives in my system so a faster boot disk should improve the time it takes for the OS to read them all a bit more than in a 'normal' system, especially if I downgrade to Windows 10.

I am clear that benchmarks aren't reflected in real life use, I'd just like to speed up my system and it feels as if it's disk-bound, even with SSDs. However I think you're right, I just hoped that someone might know of a motherboard that would be a half-way house and help a bit without going to a lot of expense.

Thanks for your replies.

 

[pandem0nium]

I can't argue with either of you although 1) that's why I'm only thinking about replacing the motherboard, 2) while I'm talking about boot speed as it is fairly constant, everything else will speed up as well, 3) it should measure nearer 3000MB/s when working natively (rather than in my adaptor board) so the speed increase should be greater, and 4) Samsung have told me that it will run slower in an adaptor board than natively.

My boot speed is slow as I am still running Windows 7 and have 10 big drives in my system so a faster boot disk should improve the time it takes for the OS to read them all a bit more than in a 'normal' system, especially if I downgrade to Windows 10.

I am clear that benchmarks aren't reflected in real life use, I'd just like to speed up my system and it feels as if it's disk-bound, even with SSDs. However I think you're right, I just hoped that someone might know of a motherboard that would be a half-way house and help a bit without going to a lot of expense.

Thanks for your replies.

Most Z97 and H97 boards have an m.2 slot to install the ssd but they won't allow you to run the drive at full speed.
The reason is that they use two gen 2 lanes rather that 4 gen 3 lanes that became the standard after these boards were released.

You'll need to use the adapter installed in one of the PCIe gen 3 slots that use lanes from the cpu to get the most out of the new ssd.

 

[Darujhistan]

What are you going to do with the couple of seconds you might save (and I'm not convinced you'd actually save anything)?

Save your money for a proper upgrade.

What he said.

 

[MassiveJim]

yeh save your money. you won't get any noticeable performance increase on that old platform.
and also W10 boots quicker