I'm putting together a racing-sim PC using a Ryzen 3 3200G and an ASUS B450M-A motherboard. It will run Windows 10 and mostly older racing and driving games, so I don't expect to need more than about 500GB of storage. I found a bundle containing a 2TB WD Black SN850X that would effectively cost around $350 CAD after selling the other items, but that seems excessive for this build. I'm also considering a cheaper 500GB Kingston NV3, though I'm unsure whether its lack of DRAM cache matters. Should I choose a high-end NVMe drive, a less expensive NVMe SSD, or even a SATA SSD for this system?
3 Answers
The 2TB SN850X is far more SSD than this system needs. The B450 platform and Ryzen 3200G won’t make much use of its high-end performance, especially for older games. A reasonably priced 500GB or 1TB SSD would be a better fit, assuming the Canadian pricing is sensible.
You could save money with a basic 500GB SATA SSD and probably wouldn’t notice a meaningful difference in older racing games. The bigger performance limitation is likely to be the Ryzen 3 3200G, not whether the SSD has DRAM. If you might upgrade the CPU or reuse the drive later, an affordable TLC NVMe SSD is still worthwhile.
Try to prioritize a TLC-based SSD rather than the Kingston NV3 if that model uses QLC NAND. DRAM is less important on NVMe drives than it is on SATA SSDs, and Windows plus older games should work fine without it. A budget TLC NVMe drive would be a good middle ground.
Would the other 500GB drive I found be a suitable option, or should I specifically look for a TLC model?