Suspicious SSDs Threadripper Coverage Dead on Arrival

Stingy Storage

SSD prices are stuck at a stubbornly high level, typically four to five times that of a traditional hard drive of the same capacity. Why is it taking so long for prices to come down? And when do you see prices becoming more competitive with HDDs? – Steve Hartjes EXECUTIVE EDITOR ALAN DEXTER RESPONDS: SSDs have actually dropped in price significantly since they first hit our machines, sliding from around $ 3 per GB in 2010 to just less than $ 0.5 per GB today. We are not saying they’re cheap, but they’re much cheaper than they were. Unfortunately, hard drives have also dropped in price, and continue to do so—for comparison, you’re looking at less than $ 0.04 per GB now. Very roughly speaking, $ 50 will get you a 128GB SSD or a 1TB HDD.

Will we ever get to a point where we see parity between HDD and SSD pricing? I doubt it, because you’re not comparing like for like. Sure, they’re both used for storing data, but they work in very different ways, and rely on completely SSDs have dropped in price, but HDDs are still ahead. different technologies. The price hike this year is down to a general demand for flash storage, while hard drive pricing has been stable for a long time now.

There’s a key factor that I haven’t mentioned so far, and that’s performance. If you’re only interested in raw storage, hard drives are still your best option, and they’re not going to go anywhere soon. However, if you care about how quickly you access that data, the value (and price) of SSDs increases significantly. We’ve been banging the performance drum for years, and if you’re not convinced by the benchmarks, it’s worth trying an SSD first- hand. I wouldn’t consider building a machine without an SSD these days. And for serious storage, I’d still have a hard drive spinning alongside it.

Total Coverage

I’m curious why you chose to use an AIO that doesn’t have 100 percent coverage? The Enermax TR240 and TR360 both cover 100 percent. Using the 240 in pull mode, I have yet to see my temps go above 60 C, and that’s the temps AMD is reporting, so depending on which offset you go by, my 1920x stays insanely cool under 100 percent load. I know they are hard to find in stock, but if you want to get the max out of the chip, you shouldn’t skimp on the cooling just because AMD included a free bracket. – Scags DEPUTY EDITOR ZAK STOREY RESPONDS: Threadripper is a big chip, but in reality, the die under the IHS isn’t the entire size of the IHS. 100 percent coverage, in our testing at least, makes little difference with regard to overall temps. We decided to use the Kraken because, at the time of writing, there were very few full- cover coolers out there, and the Kraken was the staple AIO for all our test benches.

Also, Threadripper behaves very much like its top- end mainstream Ryzen counterpart, the 1800X. In short, it’s not temperature that limits overclocks, but silicon stability. If you can get over 4.1GHz on your chip, you’re exceptionally lucky.

All that aside, our Threadripper sample isn't a hot chip. We have a single Noctua tower cooler (the NH- U14S TR4) currently

sitting happily chilling our 4GHz (@ 1.35V) overclocked 1950X, and it’s only hitting 75 C max under load.

Stuttering Ryzen

I’ve seen MaximumPC mention multiple times now how Ryzen can cause stuttering in some games. As a gamer, that sounds like a nightmare scenario, and makes me want to avoid the platform like the plague. I was wondering if you might be able to give this more in- depth coverage. Some examples of games that have this problem, how much measured stutter there is, reach out to AMD for any response, and so on. While it sounds like a great CPU performer overall, the last thing any gamer wants is stuttering performance from new hardware! – Ross Scott DEPUTY EDITOR ZAK STOREY RESPONDS: We have noticed some micro- stuttering in one of our major benchmarks— Total War: Attila. But it’s not a good example of an optimized game (partly why we include it in our benchmarking suite), so don't expect it to be the case for most games. As Ryzen is still a fairly new architecture in terms of resource allocation, there were a few hiccups early on with some games that were no longer being supported, Attila being one of them. In all modern titles, the stuttering is non- existent, although you do lose out on a few fps at 1080p with most games, due to the competition’s superior single- core performance.

I’ve been running a Ryzen 7 1700 at home, and have had little in the way of issues so far. The only game that does come to mind outside of Total War: Attila (all the other Total War games are fine) is the first Dishonored, stuttering with SLI enabled, but running fine with it disabled.

Unfortunately, this is a case by case basis, which ultimately lies on the side of the game developers, rather than that of the chip manufacturer. And as these games inevitably get older, and we advance into newer OSes, it becomes ever more likely that older titles will stop running entirely due to software issues, more so than any particular change to hardware.

Dead on Arrival

In the June 2017 issue of Maximum PC, on page 92, in the last paragraph, you write that one motherboard was dead on arrival (DOA), but you do not specifically state which motherboard it was. Which motherboard was DOA? How come it was not mentioned in any of the reviews? – Scott Finly DEPUTY EDITOR ZAK STOREY RESPONDS: The motherboard in question was the MSI B350M Mortar. It was never mentioned in any of the reviews because it was never actually reviewed. Under closer inspection from MSI, the board had suffered damage to the VRMs during transit, and unfortunately we just didn’t have enough time to get it into the group test or a separate review. To be fair to MSI, we do see plenty of dead gear, and having seen how hardware is handled by couriers, this doesn’t surprise us in the least.

Positive Switch

After reading the console head to head, I now know true review bias. I don’t know where those price figures are coming from, but the Nintendo Switch I got has an MSRP $299, so where did $ 369 come from? And the round- up is very biased already, since the Switch AFAIK isn’t a media playback device. And to call the Joy- Con’s grip “plastic” is ridiculous, as the same can be said of the Xbox and PS4 plastic controllers. I am beginning to see fanboy bias from the start.

Now, if this were a proper review that rated gaming enjoyment, that would be different, but it reads as though it’s a poor review just to satisfy your disdain for the Nintendo Switch and how popular it is. Your article forgets that it’s currently selling better than the Xbox and PS4. Nintendo isn’t there to cater to outdated thinking, but to innovate when others are afraid to take the leap in console portability or next- gen gaming innovations.

For all the nitpicks about Switch hardware, neither the Xbox nor PS4 has come up with anything to rival the Switch in terms of innovation, other than “Hey, look, it’s 4K!” I say meh to that. How much enjoyment are you getting, from just a fun-to- play perspective? That’s something this article omits. And there are third parties making products to make the Switch easier to take on the road as well. That’s what it’s all about for me: the “fun- to- play” factor.

– Robert Schnider EXECUTIVE EDITOR ALAN DEXTER RESPONDS: The pricing was taken at the time of writing, and because of the high demand for the console, it was the best price we could find (even now, many sites are out of stock). As to your other points, Alex Cox, who wrote the piece in question, is a big fan of his Nintendo Switch, and heartily recommends it, but the point of the piece was not to simply sing the praises of any one console because of one single reason, but to give readers an overview of the consoles that are currently available. As for your accusation of bias: We are biased here on MaximumPC, but just toward PCs (naturally). We have no preference when it comes to this latest batch of consoles; they are just playthings, after all.