Intel SSD Overclocking Hands-On & Prototype SSD Sneak Peek - PAX Prime 2013
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2014-05-07
·
1,305 words · ~6 min read
0:00
lineus Tech tips coverage of pxs 2013 is brought to you by Western Digital Intel
0:04
and steel series we're here at the
0:08
byoc sort of joined Intel booth at PA
0:12
Prime with Justin Whitney who's one of their team members when it comes to SSD
0:17
marketing and you guys are talking about something that actually for my regular
0:22
viewers I said was crazy like 24 hours
0:25
ago justify this to me explain what this is come on man um to to be really honest
0:32
I thought it was a little crazy too um so what we're talking about is a we've
0:37
got a prototype drive here first time shown ever we wanted to we wanted to
0:42
come to PS talk to the press and more importantly get enduser reaction to this
0:47
technology we had a couple of customers that approached us and said you know
0:51
SATA bus is starting to get saturated the technology is it stagnating a little
0:56
bit we're looking ahead to PCI Express before you even get there
1:00
can you do any overclocking of your drives how can you tune the performance
1:05
and you my initial reaction was you guys
1:08
are insane why why would you adjust the
1:11
performance settings and maybe risk people's data they're like why does it
1:15
have to be risky so I mean we we took that customer
1:19
feedback started making this kind of Skunk Works project um in our Labs like
1:24
wow it it can be stable let's go show it
1:28
off and see what end users re reactions are so show me the Tool uh right here
1:32
this is a beta beta feature within the Intel extreme tuning utility called SSD
1:38
what can you do to the drive to tweak performance there's there's really two
1:42
settings in here we're looking at the the the controller itself or the the the
1:46
Asic it's essentially the CPU of the of the drive and we're also looking at the
1:51
Nan um bus itself and the frequency on
1:54
that bus so we've got those two knobs in
1:58
in the first instance we can from 400 MZ
2:01
to about 6 600 625 I'm sorry did you
2:04
just said that like that's a 50% plus overclock yeah that's a exactly on the
2:11
on the controller for that drive okay and then so for the the nanb
2:17
frequency what what are we looking at here 80 the the stock on it is 83 MHz
2:22
and that goes up to 100 okay so you guys
2:25
are taking a lot of user feedback you're segmenting people out into kind of like
2:29
Pro Gamers versus modders versus you
2:33
know even Data Center and it guys who are here at the show what surprised you
2:37
most about the feedback you're getting I
2:41
well I had to pick myself up off of the
2:44
floor here in our booth when I found out
2:47
that we had three data center guys that had just gone through this this little
2:51
clinic we were doing and I asked them would you
2:56
overclock the drive after what you saw would you do it they're like oh yeah we
2:59
would do it right now and I was like why would you possibly put your data at risk
3:03
or other people's data at risk and they're like there is no risk for us
3:07
we're going to validate the technology we're going to stress test it we're
3:10
going to look at the the life of the drive and then we're going to put it in
3:13
a cach array all the data safe behind
3:16
that here's our cach we'll overclock
3:20
that get our our Performance Tuned jack up the the iops you know the random iops
3:25
on those drives and you know just roll with it okay so then the less surprising
3:30
one I guess is the the Enthusiast Gamers and I mean what have they been saying so
3:34
far so far they're like if there's a knob we want to turn it please don't
3:38
limit it let us push it till it breaks and I was whoa wait that's your that's
3:43
your storage Drive why would do you want OS on there and and brick it they're
3:48
like well I can always you know I would I would test it out and if it you know
3:52
if the drive froze I would unlock it and
3:55
if you give me a utility oh so you want a utility to
3:59
unlock yeah yeah so okay if we give you an unlock utility then you're okay with
4:03
it yeah I'll just reinstall the OS or
4:07
another and user jumped to the same conclusion as a data center they would
4:11
put it into a Cash Drive configuration and leave their their bulk storage alone
4:16
so what kind of a performance Improvement are we potentially looking at here you've got assd running um on a
4:22
regular 520 and then on this prototype
4:25
uh you know prototype flash prototype controller prototype firmware prototype
4:30
utility what are we looking at here um did you mention this was a prototype
4:34
Drive I I think I missed that part you better clarify it for the audience yeah
4:37
this is not a production part no announcement this is a
4:41
prototype uh what we're really seeing we
4:45
the the top score was a from our 520 series Drive the bottom was just the
4:49
Baseline settings on this prototype and
4:52
we're seeing over a a 10% performance gain but more importantly if you take a
4:58
look at the quential rights um there was a big jump and
5:03
that's this this prototypes drives ability to handle incompressible data is
5:09
really solid um depending on which controller you're based on you may not
5:14
handle incompressible data you know High bit rate um high definition audio video
5:20
those kinds of things this drive handles all data equally equally well so we saw
5:25
that bump immediately then we started overclocking it random myops we saw
5:31
scores go up um at least in this little clinic here
5:35
22% so some of the sequential rights we
5:39
saw go up 18% overall scores you know 15
5:43
18 depends so we're you know we didn't we didn't push it too far we wanted it
5:48
to be stable here and get that you know that feedback rather than well I did it
5:51
and it bricked I'm out of here but yeah so far so good so I want some comments
5:56
under this video because I think Justin's covered the the pros and cons
6:00
pretty well at this point um two things
6:03
number one is guys viewers out there would you sacrifice the longevity of
6:09
your SSD to have more performance let's say you could get a 20% bump let's just
6:14
throw that random number out there would you be willing to sacrifice that and
6:18
number two is I guess just a a more a
6:21
more General um how would you utilize
6:26
this would you be comfortable running your entire system off an overclock SSD
6:30
would you run your OS off an SSD and have all of your save games and
6:34
everything on a secondary hard drive or would you go with something like a cash
6:37
solution like the data center guys were saying so thank you very much Justin this has been awesome appreciate it
6:42
thanks for uh coming and checking it out at PA first cool man guys don't forget
6:47
we're powered here at the show by Western Digital Intel thanks for to
6:51
Intel collectively and steel series we couldn't have done it without you