Question Upgrade 3D graphics PC CPU RAM or disk

[davide445]

Currently using this PC (noticed the signature it's not shown on mobile)

AMD Ryzen 5 2600X, ASUS PRIME B450-PLUS, 2x16GB GSkill Ripjaws V DDR4-3200, Sapphire Radeon HD7950 Dual-X w Boost 3GB, Kfa2 GTX 1070 EX 8GB, Crucial MX300 275GB (Windows 10 Pro), Crucial MX500 500GB (KDE Neon), TOSHIBA DT01ACA300 3TB, Fractal Design Meshify C (fan: 2x Fractal Dynamic X2 GP-12 front, 1x back), Corsair TXM 750W 80+ Gold, LG 29" 29wk500-p ultrawide 2560x1080

I was thinking how to improve considering this bottlenecks

- Opening File Explorer or opening a new directory need always 3-4 seconds on the single HDD where I maintain most of the working files. This is less true but still slow in Linux that's accessing the same drive for data (also having his own boot drive)
- Many of the 3D programs I'm using (CAD but also realtime engines or Digital Content Creation) rely on single thread performance for at least some of the most used tasks, so even with my CPU boosting at 4.1 Ghz I'm waiting in some cases 10-20 sec or more for a click to complete any operation
- Loading the digital assets in the 3D programs need often my HDD to work 100% for minutes
- The Windows 10 boot SSD drive is the smaller one and it's mostly filled with just 10% of free space remaining
- Even having 32GB ram using a 3D program with cartographic data this is in some cases 100% filled for optimization operations, in a couple of cases causing a freeze and crash after allocating 110GB virtual memory (after that I avoided to try the operation again)
- Working with then of thousand of images at time the HDD this have accumated millions of files, also working 100% busy while batch working on them

Monitoring the behavior seems HDD is most of the times the bottleneck, but also in previous cases CPU single thread performance and RAM play a role.

The options are many, not sure what can be the most effective and with hightestt priority
- Change HDD filesystem from NTFS to a more performing one such as ReFS, eventually purchasing another HDD for RAID config. Cheapest option about €67
- Purchase another two RAM stick so to max mobo to 64GB, can be used also as cache when needed. Second cheapest €125
- Purchase a new NVMe 1TB drive such as 970 Evo Plus, to be used both as cache (using what software?) or just new fast storage. €192
- Upgrade the CPU to Ryzen 5 3600X gaining at least +25% single thread performance. Being the same socket (thanks AMD to up poor Intel game) I didn't need to change anything else. €232

 

[Flayed]

Sounds like replacing the HDD with an SSD would speed things up

 

[davide445]

Yes I think the true two options are add a new fast ssd to the other one (3tb ssd to fully substitute the hdd cost way too much) or change the cpu.
Any reliable way to use ssd also as cache? As AMD use I was reading about StoreMI but experiences are not so good.

 

[Flayed]

Yes I think the true two options are add a new fast ssd to the other one (3tb ssd to fully substitute the hdd cost way too much) or change the cpu.
Any reliable way to use ssd also as cache? As AMD use I was reading about StoreMI but experiences are not so good.

I read a thread a while ago about Primocache. I think it is quite good but I have no experience with it.

PrimoCache - Excellent Software Caching Solution to Accelerate Storage

Home page of PrimoCache product which is a supplementary software caching scheme to improve the system performance.

www.romexsoftware.com

 

[Insert_Nickname]

- Change HDD filesystem from NTFS to a more performing one such as ReFS, eventually purchasing another HDD for RAID config. Cheapest option about €67

Changing filesystem won't do anything as the HDD can only work so fast. RAID-0 is an option, but don't expect miracles. HDD's are very slow by today's standards however you set them up, and RAID just adds additional complexity. Which affects reliability.

F.x. a two drive RAID0 array might do 300-400IOPS on a good day. Even an A1-rated SD card can do ~1000, a high performance PCIe SSD can do 300-500.000. Just to put things in perspective.

- Purchase another two RAM stick so to max mobo to 64GB, can be used also as cache when needed. Second cheapest €125

That will not help with disk I/O. Your performance issue seems to be getting data into memory, which adding more memory will not help.

Also, make sure there is enough room for the page file, if Windows allocates 110GB's worth of virtual memory, that has to go -somewhere-. Adding more memory will help here, but I'd go straight to 128GB, or the maximum your mainboard supports. If you really need that kind of memory, I'd start looking seriously at a new 3rd gen Threadripper system. That platform is rumoured to launch in November.

- Purchase a new NVMe 1TB drive such as 970 Evo Plus, to be used both as cache (using what software?) or just new fast storage. €192

Adding a high performance NVMe drive is the best option if you're disk I/O limited. Use it as the work drive. Leave the HDD for archiving.

- Upgrade the CPU to Ryzen 5 3600X gaining at least +25% single thread performance. Being the same socket (thanks AMD to up poor Intel game) I didn't need to change anything else. €232

Can be worthwhile, but I'd start with the NVMe drive, see how that performs. You can always change the CPU later, perhaps wait for Zen3?

 

[davide445]

My concern with just adding another SSD is the need to manually allocate data and programs among 3 storage, eventually needing to reinstall some sw on the new faster drive.
Was looking at a cache as an interim easy solution, swap a new smaller SSD and let the sw choose where optimize. This will use the last SATA slot of the mobo, leaving the NVMe slot as new adding in the future.

As for the RAM the mobo did support max 64GB, also AM4 slot did not support the new (or old) Threadripper, so a Zen 2 desktop CPU will be the only choice. With the possibility to go up to 12 core is more than enough, and I will probably do it as third step after ssd cache and new NVMe drive.

Looking better at my usage pattern RAM seems to be a lower priority right now, being fully used only some times.

 

[Markfw]

My concern with just adding another SSD is the need to manually allocate data and programs among 3 storage, eventually needing to reinstall some sw on the new faster drive.
Was looking at a cache as an interim easy solution, swap a new smaller SSD and let the sw choose where optimize. This will use the last SATA slot of the mobo, leaving the NVMe slot as new adding in the future.

As for the RAM the mobo did support max 64GB, also AM4 slot did not support the new (or old) Threadripper, so a Zen 2 desktop CPU will be the only choice. With the possibility to go up to 12 core is more than enough, and I will probably do it as third step after ssd cache and new NVMe drive.

Looking better at my usage pattern RAM seems to be a lower priority right now, being fully used only some times.

Get a new fast NVME SSD, and then use software to migrate the entire disk to the new drive. Not that I am pushing this, but eas US or something like that has software to clone, then extend the drive to the larger size. I did that on the PC I am trying on now. Sent from 512 gig to 1 tb, and its way faster now. $50 for the software. Worth every dime.

 

[davide445]

Can't migrate a whole 3TB hdd drive into an NVMe SSD with a budget...

 

[Markfw]

Can't migrate a whole 3TB hdd drive into an NVMe SSD with a budget...

Is the drive full ? can you shrink it to 2 tb ? those exist cheaply in nvme world. And you should be able to move data off that drive. I can't imagine 3 tb of programs only.

 

[davide445]

Is the drive full ? can you shrink it to 2 tb ? those exist cheaply in nvme world. And you should be able to move data off that drive. I can't imagine 3 tb of programs only.

It's about 1.9Tb full, unfortunately a mix of programs and data since the primary SSD where are OS and other programs it's fairly small.
So trying to avoid reinstalling and reconfiguring programs.
Discovered I have an old SATA2 SLC 80GB Intel SSD lying around unused, testing with PrimoCache (demo) just for checking the benefits and stability.
Main concern is having a dual boot Windows/Linux how to make it work so that I can use caching in both of them.
My current plan is to split the SSD in two partitions, one for Windows and one for Linux, using only read cache. Hope will not create instabilities.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Discovered I have an old SATA2 SLC 80GB Intel SSD lying around unused, testing with PrimoCache (demo) just for checking the benefits and stability.
Main concern is having a dual boot Windows/Linux how to make it work so that I can use caching in both of them.
My current plan is to split the SSD in two partitions, one for Windows and one for Linux, using only read cache. Hope will not create instabilities.

Calling @BonzaiDuck for some help, he has direct experience with this sort of thing.

 

[davide445]

I decided to uninstall PrimoCache since will result in corrupted files sharing them between Windows and Linux. Probably the same will result in any other caching not able to work both on Windows and Linux (I wasn't able to find any able to).

So back to the choice new NVMe drive or CPU upgrade, I think will first add an NVMe drive, problem will be shift the OS installation with grub also.