Skylake --- we have lift off................

[Abarbarian]

Decided to make a small upgrade to me good old Skylake build. Main reason is that I have a small NVME drive 256 MB which is big enough for me Arch os but I can only fit a few games on it. An at the moment for some strange reason my Steam account spread across three drives which has been working perfectly well keeps on telling me that my games on my secondary drives are not installed. This means I have to go into settings and fart around making the drives accessible again which is a real pain in the ba......

So have bought this,

Adata XPG SX8200 Pro review: A perfect ratio of power to price

I bought the 1 TB version for £ 116 inc postage of Amazon. I would have preferd to buy from E-Buyer but they seem to have stopped free postage on orders over £50 and wanted to charge me £3.49 for postage. I could have got a WD Blue for £90 which would probably have been good enough for my needs but what the heck it is almost Christmas an I have not spent any loot on computing for ages apart from me new mouse.

When I bought the original SP951 it cost quite a bit more than this new drive which is four times bigger and faster just shows how fast tech is marching forward at the moment.

 

[Ian]

Very nice! Funnily enough, I've been looking at NVME drives this past week for my games drive too (although I chickened out and re-used an old SATA mechanical drive for now, as spent too much this month!).

That 1TB Adata drive looks like quite the sweet spot. Are you going to stick with the 256GB drive for the OS and then the 1TB for games alone?

 

[Abarbarian]

Very nice! Funnily enough, I've been looking at NVME drives this past week for my games drive too (although I chickened out and re-used an old SATA mechanical drive for now, as spent too much this month!).

That 1TB Adata drive looks like quite the sweet spot. Are you going to stick with the 256GB drive for the OS and then the 1TB for games alone?

I am running the NVME of a add in PCI card so that I get max speed/cooling and leave all the SATA slots free for other drives. That was the best way to set up with the kit I had back then.

The PCIe and SATA set up needs careful thought with this motherboard, originally it took me a lot f head scratching to get sorted.

https://techreport.com/review/29072...motherboard-reviewed/-7-motherboard-reviewed/

I will probably use the 1 TB for Arch and games though as there is enough space for my needs.

 

[V_R]

Adata Switches to Slower Controller, NAND on SX8200 Pro

A change in components could mean slower performance.

www.tomshardware.com

 

[Abarbarian]

Adata Switches to Slower Controller, NAND on SX8200 Pro

A change in components could mean slower performance.

www.tomshardware.com

Even the slower version should be a tad speedier than me present SP591. I bought it for the size and cos it were pretty cheap. Could have afforded the 970 Evo Plus but reconed it was notworth the extra £50, loot saved bought me new mouse.

 

[Abarbarian]

SK hynix Platinum P41 SSD Review: The Best Around (Updated)

Original Review published 4th June 2022:


We can say, without hyperbole, that SK hynix’s Platinum P41 is one of the most anticipated consumer SSDs in recent memory due to the pairing of its new Aries SSD controller with 176-Layer TLC flash, thus delivering headline specs of up to 1.4 million IOPS that will pose a challenge to the leaders on our list of best SSDs. Storage enthusiasts have looked askance at drives like the Samsung 980 Pro, instead holding out for the P41’s inevitable arrival. There was every reason to believe that the day would soon come as SK hynix had announced the drive earlier this year with a general date in mind.

Back in 2022 I added a 1TB of the above to the Skylake. I also got a PCIe4 addon card for it even though the Skylake can only handle PCIe3. In use it was slightly faster than the Adata it replaced. Naturally I got it in a sale.

That was my last upgrade to the Skylake which even though it was built NINE years ago is still a very good pc even today in 2024. Starting to show its age a bit and although it will handle modern games they are not playable at ultra or very high settings. I could have upgraded the GTX1070 but that would not have given enough of a boost as the cpu would then still be a bottleneck. I felt that it would also be a waste of money too.
So after I had finished playing through every nook and crany of the entire Witcher 1/2/3 plus add-ons and DLC boosted with as many mods as I could find, I decided to retire the venerable Skylake.

After a great deal of research and thinking I took the plunge and donated an arm and a leg to buying and building a new pc. Hope it does as well as the Skylake. Farewell dear friend I hope someone on E-Bay will give you a decent retirement home, you deserve it.