Suggestions - New M.2 SSD as (Win11) Boot drive

[sovitzk154402d7]

My current rig:

PRO Z690-A Wifi DDR5
Intel i9-13900KF (liquid cooled, of course) plenty of case fans
128GB RAM -- Purchased (2) G.Skill RipJaws S5 Series (Intel XMP) 64GB (2 x 32GB) 288-Pin SDRAM DDR5 5600 kits (Windows and BIOS reports System RAM running at 5200 Mhz- I'm fine with this for now...)
Current Boot Drive - 1 TB M.2 Kingston SNV2S1000G NVMe Gen4 SSD (ugh...)
2nd Drive (my own) - 2 TB Samsung 970 EVO Plus (Gen3?)
AUS TUF RTX 4070 Ti 12GB GDDR6X (532.03)

I am looking to replace the lowly Kingston boot drive with a Samsung M.2. Here are my current ideas:

980 PRO with heatsink ($150)
990 PRO ($160)
990 PRO with heatsink ($240)

Looking for ideas...not really wanting to spend the $240 on the 990 w heatsink...but my guess is the 990 by itself might be asking to be thermally performance inhibited.

Thank you for any and all suggestions and tips!

- Michael

 

[Alan J T]

It won't make it any faster in day-to-day activities might as well keep the current Boot drive
What is Highlighted is more important for your OS drive over the speed

 

[citay]

Yes, Kingston NV2 is not the best, as i wrote here, so i wouldn't have chosen it in the first place. Now that you have it, there is the argument that Alan makes, a Samsung 980 PRO / 990 PRO will be better in every regard, but so much that it will make a huge difference that you can feel? That will depend on your usage. Your 128 GB of RAM suggests a power user, maybe lots of VMs, big software projects and the like, so i could see some benefit there.

I would choose the 990 PRO without heatsink, the upcharge for the heatsink version is far too high, and for the first M.2 slot, your board already has a heatsink. If you want an aftermarket heatsink, see here. Whatever Samsung you get, check for firmware updates in Samsung Magician. Afterwards, i tend to uninstall Magician again, and check that my power plan in Windows is still set to "Balanced". Because something has set it to the useless "High Performance" setting (just wastes more power), and i suspect it was Magician. Also, it doesn't need to run in the background all the time.

 

[sovitzk154402d7]

Just to 'close out' this thread, I just cloned the Kingston to a new 990 PRO w Heatsink (good price!). Well worth the money. Fantastic speed and performance.

Thanks again for the help!

- Michael