I'm planning a gaming PC with a Ryzen 7 9800X3D, an RTX 5070 Ti, and a B650M AORUS ELITE AX AM5 motherboard. The board has one PCIe 5.0 M.2 slot and one PCIe 4.0 slot, so I'm trying to decide whether to buy two PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSDs or pair a PCIe 4.0 drive with a PCIe 5.0 model. I'd use one SSD as the boot drive and the other for games and general storage. Is a PCIe 5.0 SSD worth the extra cost, or would two PCIe 4.0 drives make more sense?
2 Answers
For a typical gaming system, the difference between PCIe 3.0, 4.0, and 5.0 SSDs is usually small in real-world use, and features like a DRAM cache aren’t necessarily decisive for this workload. One good 2TB NVMe drive would probably be the simplest choice, with another drive added later only if you need more space. If you already expect to use several M.2 drives, consider a motherboard with three M.2 slots instead, such as the ASUS TUF Gaming B850M-E WiFi.
Using separate drives can be convenient for organization, with one dedicated to the operating system and another for games or work. Keeping the boot drive from getting nearly full can also help avoid performance issues. That said, you don’t strictly need separate drives if one large NVMe SSD has enough capacity.
Would it make sense to buy two PCIe 4.0 NVMe drives and install one in the motherboard’s PCIe 5.0 slot? I’ve heard PCIe 5.0 SSDs aren’t really worth it yet.
Two M.2 slots does feel a bit limiting, so I may compare other motherboards. Would the B850M-E be a good match for the Ryzen 7 9800X3D?