PCIe Express 4.0 released earlier this year with the AMD X570 chipset and the Ryzen 3000 processors and offers twice the performance from 8GT/s to 16 GT/s over the previous generation. PCGamesN did extensive benchmarking to test its effects on gaming performance.
The test-bench contained an MSI MEG X570 ACE motherboard, a Ryzen 7 3700X, the NVIDIA RTX 2080Ti, 16GB of G-Skill Trident Z Royal RAM and the Corsair H100i V2. The comparison was done between the Corsair Force MP600 4.0 M.2 NVMe SSD and the Samsung 970 Evo M.2 NVMe SSD; with the MP 600 using the Phsion PS5016-E16 controller.
Corsair MP600 Gen4 PCIe 4.0 Specs:
- Controller: Phsion PS5016
- NAND Flash: TLC 3D NAND
- Capacity: 2TB
- Sequential Read: 4,950 MB/s
- Sequential Write: 4,250 MB/s
- Price: $450
Samsung 970 Evo Specs:
- Controller: Samsung Phoenix
- NAND Flash: Samsung V-NAND 3-bit MLC
- Capacity: 2TB
- Sequential Read: 3,500 MB/s
- Sequential Write: 2,500 MB/s
- Price: $479
Three games, AC: Odyssey, Destiny 2 and Anthem were benchmarked. In all of them, the Corsair MP600 offered marginally better performance, with results being close to a single second, and only performing visibly better in one instance.
You can find the detailed benchmarks on PCGamesN.
Even though the Corsair MP600 doesn’t outright beat the Samsung EVO 970 when it comes to game load times, it offers significantly better synthetic performance than the latter, with read speeds of 4,000 MB/s and write speeds of up to 3,900 MB/s!
Of course, the little improvement in performance could be attributed to the fact that these games aren’t exactly optimized to take benefit of the PCIe 4.0 speeds. But, with the next generation of consoles by Sony and Microsoft launching with SSDs as a primary storage option, upcoming games will benefit from PCIe 4.0 we should expect a significant improvement in load times (and hopefully no more minute-long loading screens) over the next few years.
Moreover, the Phison PS5016-E16 is the only PCIe 4.0 controller available for purchase currently, and with more manufacturers like Samsung getting into the game, the improvements in performance will only keep on increasing.
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