THANK YOU, BUT PCIE 5.0 IS IN ANOTHER CASTLE
NOW WE GET to the pain. The frustration of finding out only after the fact that your motherboard doesn’t actually support M.2 PCIe 5.0 is frustrating. Always read the fine print. It makes it doubly worse, as we’re using two PCIe 5.0 drives, not just a singular drive in this build.
That said, it’s not all doom and gloom, as those sequential numbers are still remarkably high. Additionally, the big advantage we have is that this build is predominantly designed with gaming in mind. The reason we picked those drives was because the Random 4K performance, particularly on singlethread, is considerably higher than that of the competition available for PCIe 4.0, and lo and behold, under scrutiny these things absolutely rip through our random 4K results. Although we can’t include it in the table above, the T705 scored 89 MB/s on random 4K read and 300 MB/s on write, and the T700 netted 73 MB/s on read and 242 MB/s on write. Not by any means slow figures, although certainly not quite as quick as on a true PCIe 5.0 slot.
To that end, then, the only major change we’d make to this build is swapping the motherboard itself out for something of a slightly higher, more modern caliber, that has true M.2 PCIe 5.0 support. Still, we can’t entirely blame NZXT on this one— this journalist should have read the fine print, after all.
Otherwise, overall performance is where we’d expect, the 14900K monsters through Cinebench clocking in a phenomenal 35,600 points in the multithreaded task, and the single core slips in at just over 2,083.
In-game performance is also about where we’d expect to see it, with the RTX 4080 Super falling short of our overclocked RTX 4080 by a few percent here and there. The only major difference between the two again is that our Aero OC is overclocked by 6-7 percent in contrast.
Ultimately, our Geometric build is a build of two halves. On the one hand, it’s been a fantastic all-round systembuilding experience, and we’ve been left with a phenomenal-looking, super-clean gaming PC. On the other, some hardware slip-ups and missteps on components have bitten us in the butt ever so slightly; something we’ll definitely bear in mind moving forward.