I'm putting together a midrange PC and trying to decide whether paying extra for an SSD with onboard DRAM is worthwhile. My typical use is gaming, watching videos, and having several browser tabs open. I won't be editing video or constantly moving huge files around.
The price difference is noticeable, but I also don't want to repeat past mistakes by buying a cheap drive that performs poorly. Do DRAMless SSD slowdowns actually show up during normal gaming and desktop use, or are they mostly visible in benchmarks and large file transfers? I'd especially appreciate experiences from people using one as a boot and game drive.
4 Answers
For that workload, a modern DRAMless NVMe drive with Host Memory Buffer should be perfectly fine. Games and normal desktop tasks are mostly read-heavy, so the difference from a drive with onboard DRAM is usually hard to notice. The main situation where you may see a slowdown is sustained writing, such as copying hundreds of gigabytes or doing repeated large installs.
I’ve used both DRAM and DRAMless SSDs, and everyday performance has been practically indistinguishable. Gaming, browsing, and normal application use won’t usually expose the difference. I’d pay more attention to the drive’s overall controller, NAND type, reviews, warranty, and endurance rather than treating DRAM as the only deciding factor.
One caveat is that the rest of the system can affect how a DRAMless drive feels. If your RAM is nearly full, the browser is consuming a lot of memory, and an update is writing in the background, the PC may feel less responsive. With a sensible amount of system memory and some free space left on the SSD, it should be fine.
DRAMless is a reasonable choice for a budget gaming build, especially if it uses TLC NAND and supports HMB. QLC models can be less attractive because their sustained write performance and endurance may be weaker. A DRAM-equipped drive still has advantages for heavy transfers, but those benefits probably won’t matter for your normal routine.
That’s also why keeping the drive from being almost completely full matters. Even a faster SSD can slow down when it has very little free space for housekeeping and cache behavior.