Best Setup for new high end PC.

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RawPower
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Best Setup for new high end PC.

Post by RawPower »

I am getting back into slow loading Microsoft Flight Simulator X Steam Edition and so my Primo Cache again.
I need pro advice on best way to go with Cache creation with the new PC I built. Or whether it would be needed even.
I will list the components:
Win 10 Pro
Intel Core i-9 10900KF 10 core OC to 5300mhz
64 GB Corsair Vengeance LPX 3200
Inland Platinum 4TB SSD M.2 2280 NVme
Cruical 256 GB SSD
Samsung EVO 2TB SSD
Samsung 500 GB SSD
SEAGATE 2TB HDD
ASUS ROG Maximus XII Formula Z490 MB
Radeon RX 6800 XT 16 GB GDDR 6 VRAM

I set Cache with no L2 cache. Created a L1 cache with 30 GB and checked retain cache after reboot and the top box above that checked setting for all only READ cache.

Put these in L1 to be cached:
4TB M.2 "C" drive (filled with Steam Games), 2 TB SSD (filled with less used Steam Games), 500 GB SSD (filled with FSX Scenery bought), 2TB HDD (for My Docs & Data storage, oddly showing as a Sub-Drive under Samsung Evo 2TB SSD..weird)

Checked Prefetch on reboot. 4k blocks as all drives show 4k sizes via Mini Tool Partition Wizard though it defaults to 128k in presets options.

Crystal disk tests show Read on M.2 from 3400 to 16,000
with similar results for rest. I tried making the 256 GB an L2 cache drive for all but thought it maybe best for turning slow HDD data to SSD then Ram cache and may slow down M.2 & SSDs speed to Ram Cache of 30GB.

Question is is this the best set up for these components or is Cache needed at all with an M.2. I have long loading times on many games I wanted to speed to the max.

Best, RAW
Babel17
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Re: Best Setup for new high end PC.

Post by Babel17 »

Hmm, your 4TB NVMe drive is based on QLC which can be a great choice for bang for the buck for bulk storage while still having SSD access speeds, but it can be problematic under some scenarios. Your Samsung drives have excellent latencies, and IIRC their controller chips are designed to hold up and not slow down under prolonged heavy usage. If Microsoft Flight Simulator X Steam Edition is giving the controller chip a heavy workout, then I'd want the Samsungs ones handling that, and not the one of Inland Platinum.

P.S. Before using Flight Simulator go into the Defragment and Optimize Microsoft utility, it's under Administrative Tools, and click on Optimize for your solid state drives. That tells the drives to perform their trim function right away, instead of whenever, and might improve performance.
InquiringMind
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Re: Best Setup for new high end PC.

Post by InquiringMind »

There's no point in using L2 caching unless you want to speed up your HDD - and really it would be better to reserve it for data where access speed is less important (e.g. system backups, downloaded installers, media files) and move your documents/program data onto one of your SSDs (having this on HDD is almost certainly the cause of your performance issues).

Given the size of L1 cache you have set up, you should consider larger blocks (64-128K) since (a) this will mean smaller indexes with a lower overhead and (b) as long as your disk is reasonably defragmented, you can gain a "read ahead" effect with larger block sizes.
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Jaga
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Re: Best Setup for new high end PC.

Post by Jaga »

What InquiringMind said, though I'd keep block size between 32K and 64K. It's difficult to keep a drive defragmented enough for 128K blocks to really matter that much, and when you hit 64K blocks in Primocache the overhead is already minimal.

As a side note: I wouldn't use an Inland SSD for any data I cared about. Their quality is rather sub-par. Samsung on the other hand is top notch, and I install them in every system I build if possible.
RawPower
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Re: Best Setup for new high end PC.

Post by RawPower »

Thank all for all tips to eval & try. Keep um coming. I really need a 4TB m.2 & 2 TB SSD to contain my massive arcade of games I like to tweak, repair, make work with Win10 more than playing really. An Art Collection. The Inland was 1/2 the price of other 4TB M.2s at $479 and made in Taiwan who I trust like Japan, Korea, compared to China who seem to include a the seed of failure in products sold sending to dumps. I always have a back up if it fails. I will try the 64 but program said pop up says set it for the block size on disks which is 4k. Very complex sit. Windows is automatically adding 32 GB Ram to my 16 GB GDDR 6 GPU Vram so I don't know if that is walled off System Ram of of 64GB with 29GB reserved for Primo Cache leaving little left ... all confusing. Hit rate is 16% so not happy so far
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Jaga
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Re: Best Setup for new high end PC.

Post by Jaga »

Hit Rate takes a while to build, and unless you are running a benchmark never gets over 95%. Typically I see between 20% and 80% depending on the application, it's read patterns, and how often I use it.
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