Mr. Fox

Quote

Our friends at Crucial were kind enough to bless us with not just one, but two, of their latest and greatest creations for review. So, without further ado, and with great pleasure, we introduce you to the Crucial® T700 PCIe® 5.0 NVMe™ SSD. Buckle up for safety.

Read the full review HERE,

5 hours ago, iamjanco said:

More cowbell...

Very awesome. All of it. Love. It.

And, who doesn't dig gigantic moths and spiders? The dead ones are my favorite.

4 hours ago, bonami2 said:

Am i the only one that the 3 picture in the post don't show up?

There was a problem with that yesterday that I believe is resolved now. Nobody else has said anything but I was having the same issue. You might try dumping your browser cache and see if that helps. It's displaying correctly for me now. Hopefully if anyone else sees the same issue they will say something. Thank you for saying something.

2 hours ago, pioneerisloud said:

This was a review worth waiting for.  Absolutely fantastic work @Mr. Fox!  Definitely agree with the sentiments of everyone else here.  I'm using some of those "dumb" adapters myself right now in my rack server.  Something like this would be infinitely more useful had it been available at the time of my build.  Might consider actually buying one or two of these in the future as my server expands now though.

Thank you for the kind words brother.

2 hours ago, Barefooter said:

Nice review!

 

Being Gen 3 shouldn't really make any difference as most people will use this to add massive amounts of M.2 storage.

 

I would love to put four 4 TB SSDs on that bad boy!

Thank you. Yes I agree with you that it won't matter to most people. And I would  also love to have four of those to put in it.

6 hours ago, Fluxmaven said:

Great review! 

 

4x NVMe plug and play with backwards compatibility without needing bifurcation is huge. 

 

The existing solutions in this space are either just a "dumb" card that is cheaper but just splits up an x16 slot. In addition to it using up said x16 slot, that also requires a motherboard that can do x4x4x4x4 which is mostly only in HEDT platforms.

 

Or they are fancy hardware NVMe RAID cards that cost several times more than this Sabrent.

 

This was a product I really could have used a couple years ago. At the time I settled for SATA drives, then ended up shelling out more for motherboards with multiple onboard M.2 and buying larger capacity drives once that was available.  

Thank you. You're spot on in your assessment, too.

21 hours ago, Sir Beregond said:

Great write up! I will definitely be looking into this when my daily rig needs more storage. Gen 3 speeds are fine for me for that.

 

I was really disappointed that the Asus Dark Hero board only came with 2 nvme slots. I'll have to double check my radiator clearance for the x4 slot though. 

Thank you. Yes, I agree about that 2-NVMe limitation. Such a costly motherboard should have offered more... at least 4 (2 on the PCB plus DIMM.2 would have been nice).  I really like how M.2 (both SATA and NVMe) drives take up so little space and have no cables or wiring clutter to have to fuss with. Makes for a much nicer, cleaner build if you have enough slots. The added speed of NVMe is appreciated, but I think I appreciate the compact wire-free aspects of them even more than the speed.

1 hour ago, keeph8n said:

was not expecting gains from gen4 in gen3 carrier, but moreso how much speed would be lost.

 

Seems nice for those who need extra storage on mainstream boards or older boards. Unfortunately not a product I could use. 

 

Awesome review though. Thoroughly enjoyed it

Thank you for the compliment. I'm glad you enjoyed it.

For anyone that wants to replace SATA with NVMe I think it's a truly killer option. I had a couple of people remark to me that it's too slow but if your extended storage options without it are limited to SATA then there's really no downside. Massive upgrade from SATA. I'm now running eight NVMe and just one spinner HDD for file storage. I eliminated four SATA SSD by using this add-in card.

13 minutes ago, keeph8n said:

So Gen3 only? No gen4? Tried gen4 drives in this? How are speeds affected? 
 

Does giving the card more lanes offer any tangible benefits? 

It is a Gen 3 card so I doubt installing Gen 4 drives would yield any gains. The PCI edge connector is X4. If you put it in an X8 slot I doubt it would run any faster but it would cut your graphics card bandwidth from x16 to X8 on most motherboards. It probably would not affect the GPU slot bandwidth on x299 because there are plenty of pcie lanes to go around.

2 hours ago, iamjanco said:

@Mr. FoxGreat writeup, bud!

Thank you. It is a really excellent product. Probably among the most useful system add-ons that I have ever seen. I love it.

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The Sabrent 4-Drive NVMe SSD to PCIe 3.0 X4 card (EC-P3X4) is designed to add up to four NVMe SSDs to your computer with minimal fuss. Connect 4x SSDs into the PC-P3X4 and start using it.

The adapter fits M-Key 2280 SSDs and can be placed in x4/x8/x16 PCIe slots with forward and backward compatibility. This makes it ideal for adding storage to legacy machines. Your drives will stay cool, reliable, and safe thanks to the aluminum housing with built-in thermal padding. Enjoy NVMe levels of performance with support for a PCIe payload size of up to 512 bytes. Running software RAID/JBOD has never been easier.

Read the full review HERE

Maybe this will inspire some craziness...

Thank you for this. The form works well. If you object to the type of submissions that I sent let me know. I did not want to limit my availability to help to a specific brand or product.

10 hours ago, iamjanco said:

Not my game (yet), but imho the question may change from the proverbial but can it run Crysis, to but can it beat Crysis?

 

System Shock on Steam

STORE.STEAMPOWERED.COM

---

A first-person fight to the death in the depths of space!

 

Pepperidge Farm will let you know once he's finished with his current tasking.

It would be really hard to beat anything from the Crysis game franchise. It's literally my all-time favorite in one of very few games that I have played over and over again from start to finish. But this title looks like it can give it a serious run for its money. Hopefully it's not prophetic in terms of where things are headed with AI.

MSI Afterburner no longer supports AMD graphics cards, even if you do the tweaks that used to work. It is totally worthless with my 6900XT. No point in bothering to install it.

The sheer complexity of your build makes it an amazing work of art. And, it makes my head hurt at the same time, LOL.

I also have tremendous respect for your patience. Looking back to my younger days as a third-generation auto repair technician, I always hated doing collision repairs because I didn't want to have to look at the same car for more than one day. Always preferred doing the mechanical work and knocking out more than one job in a day. I haven't changed with age and that same kind of impatience found its way into my PC building adventures. I want it done yesterday, with an order of fries, to go.

Thankfully, I haven't been a car guy for about 35 years. I don't miss being dirty and having busted knuckles. Now I won't even do my own oil changes, LOL. Better to pay Walmart or Jiffy Lube.

10 minutes ago, Sir Beregond said:

Yeah that's really unfortunate. It's just supposed to be for the fun of it really. Elite overclockers should be happy more amateurs are getting into the space.

Totally. If nothing else, it ensures the sport we all enjoy will survive and their elitism will have a reason to exist.

6 hours ago, Avacado said:

Thank you for making this thread Fox! I will try to get some subs in here too. ECC does really bring down the points....

Certainly. I really wish NVIDIA had not exposed the option in NVIDIA Control Panel. 

5 hours ago, Sir Beregond said:

Huh. Wonder why they changed that rule. Also I didn't realize 40-series vram was ECC.

Brother @J7SC_Orionnailed it. There was one elite overclocker in particular that was pushing it really hard.

2 hours ago, J7SC_Orion said:

Anyways, 'the cure' is worse than 'the disease', IMO.

I agree. Had NVIDIA not exposed the option in the Control Panel, this never would have had an opportunity to be a point of contention. It would have remained a non-issue as it always had been, and as it continues to be for those that do not own a 40-series GPU.

2 hours ago, J7SC_Orion said:

this rule change only applying to one model range is ludicrous and a failure of HWBot management.

Absolutely. While I still enjoy overclocked benching, even more than PC gaming that was my gateway into being a performance PC enthusiast, I am really not OK with the favoritism and politics and the unfair advantage given to the elite group. They already get access to non-standard and special binned hardware and unlocked firmware and tuning software that everyone else is denied access to, which is really lame. Having rules changed to make it more challenging for those without access to compete is just as lame. All of this is beginning to diminish my interest in participation.  It is not as much fun when the winners are predestined and receive special treatment to help facilitate that. It is essentially a rigged outcome.

Anecdotally, the non-ECC scores submitted by the Chosen Ones were not removed when the scores of the peons were being deleted, and it wasn't until some of the peons began chirping about those scores remaining on the leaderboard that they got taken down. What is interesting is the fact that some of the Chosen Ones haven't submitted new scores with ECC enabled.  It seems the only people freaking out about the possibility a few people might win by cheating are those chosen to live in the Ivory Tower. It is sad that some are so afraid of losing to someone that wasn't granted special favor through a benefactor.

Post your Speed Way results here. HWBOT rules require 3DMark have ECC enabled on 40-series GPUs. If you post results using a 40-series GeForce GPU with ECC disabled, please indicate that if you do not post a link to the result and screenshots showing GPU-Z with the diminished memory capacity when ECC is enabled. Otherwise, results will be misleading apples vs oranges comparisons.

Preferred post format below:

https://www.3dmark.com/3dm/94304600 | https://hwbot.org/submission/5276042_mr._fox_3dmark___speed_way_geforce_rtx_4090_10760_marks

This run is with ECC enabled for HWBOT compliance. It sucks that those are the new rules.

https://www.3dmark.com/3dm/94305191 | https://hwbot.org/submission/5276059_mr._fox_3dmark___time_spy_geforce_rtx_4090_38660_marks

This is with ECC enabled for HWBOT compliance. I really hate having to enable ECC. The score takes a pretty hard hit.

https://www.3dmark.com/3dm/94304340 | https://hwbot.org/submission/5276039_mr._fox_3dmark___port_royal_geforce_rtx_4090_28654_marks

Making dark mode free for those that can't, or are not ready, to help support the community financially is a good move.

I think I spend more time manually blocking advertisement elements on pages at overclock.net than I do looking at content.

On 02/04/2023 at 21:54, Fluxmaven said:

Thanks for taking the time to look at the review! 

 

I will probably end up putting a 1080mm rad on a rack shelf behind the case on QD fittings since I wasn't able to achieve the results I'm used to with just a slim 360 and 160mm rads. 

 

As for the 12VHPWR connections, I wish they hadn't bothered. I already have plenty of custom cable sets and I think triple 8 pin PCIe power cables looks nice. If it weren't for the abysmal Folding@Home performance, I'd just go all AMD GPU's and not have to bother with the new connector. 

Did Zotac have a change of heart about you keeping the 4070 Ti or allowing you to buy it at an irresistible price?

The 6900 XT is the first red card I have owned since the HD 7970 days (2011). I hated them back then and wrote them off as garbage because I had too many GPU failures (HD 6900 and 6950 and 7970) and Catalyst drivers were absolute trash. I moved to the green side and never looked back. It's easy to hate NVIDIA as a company. I think they are probably the most crooked PC component manufacturer, but their graphics cards are better in every way in my opinion. So, getting the 6900 XT was kind of a "wish me luck" leap of faith with hope that it would turn out OK.

As far as the 6900 XT goes, it's certainly not horrible, but it doesn't really do much to impress me. It will allow me the opportunity to rack up some hardware points on the bot, but I wouldn't recommend it to anyone looking to buy a GPU. Overall, it is a bit lackluster. I like it enough to keep it, but probably would not buy another one. I will say that it is kind of fun tinkering with the More Power Tool, but apart from that I am not finding much to write home about. 

Even on water, the reported 6900 XT hotspot temps are ludicrous... to the point that I am almost inclined to think the insane hotspot temps are a product bug that is erroneous and totally inaccurate. It doesn't make any sense that there can be a 30°C or higher delta between core and hotspot temps at any given point in time under a high stress overclocked load.

Excellent review. Looks like a good rack-mount option.  Something like that would work well for me because I use external radiators and pumps.

You could probably use a Cablemod 90° 12VHPWR adapter to get the lid on it, but I do not blame you for avoiding problems with sharp cable bends. I really do not like the new 12VHPWR GPU power cables because of the sensitivity to bending. I can't really see the logic behind deploying it. I guess NVIDIA needed to disrupt status quo by changing something that didn't need to be changed. I prefer the "ain't broke, don't fix it" approach. 8-pin PCIe cables were an example of that. There was no problem that needed fixing. 

Great review, bro. I really think Zotac GPUs are under-rated. Pretty much everyone I have known that had one liked it and had good results with it. I really like the aesthetics of their new GPUs. The curvy lines are a nice contrast to the boxey-looking trend that the technology cartel hive mind has chosen to stick to. That GPU performs very similar to an RTX 3090, so it is a good option for gaming that isn't north of $1500.

Yeah, good review. Sorry I am late to the show. Crucial generally doesn't make "enthusiast" parts, but they do produce reliable memory and SSDs. This low cost kit is a great option for an AMD system that isn't going above 6200 or an Intel system that memory overclocking isn't high on the list of priorities. Very affordable option for the right application.