Slow Intel 750 PCIE 400gb

[AMoff]

I purchased an Intel 750 PCIE NVME in hopes of fast performance. After installation I was entirely underwhelmed. Benchmarks support my lack of enthusiasm. My Benchmarks have something like 60% of the performance shown in reviews and other consumer benchmarks.

Intel 750 PCIe 400gb (4x Gen 3, see attached pic for confirmation)

Asus Rampage Extreme IV (x79 platform)

Not likely relevant:

64gb 2400mhz DDR3

3x GTX 780s SLI

3930K @ 4.75ghz

I have confirmed PCI speeds on my SLI cards using GPU-Z and that Intel SSD toolbox reports Gen 3 with 4x link. Latest drivers (no less than a month old, latest firmware installed). The device is slow. It doesn't even really outperform my Samsung 850 Pro 512gb SATA 3 SSD. What am I doing wrong?

[idata]

Hello InoSiX,

We understant you're experiencing slow performance on your Intel® SSD 750 Series boot drive.It's always important to keep in mind that benchmarking your SSD while being used as your primary drive will never return accurate results. These tests will be affected by your OS running off the drive, Windows* updates being downloaded, your antivirus background activity, among other factors (the fuller the drive is, the slower it will benchmark, for example).With this note aside, we would like to confirm that you're using the latest NVMe* drivers for your SSD:- https://downloadcenter.intel.com/download/26833/Intel-SSD-Data-Center-Family-for-NVMe-Drivers?v=t Intel® NVMe* Drivers Version: 3.0.0.1013.We look forward to hearing back from you.Best regards,Carlos A.

[AMoff]

Unfortunately the drivers you linked to are the drivers I have installed. I understand variance can be expected, but this is egregious. Others are consistently much higher speeds. I didn't pay a premium to go from SATA to PCIe NVME only to barely squeak out a few extra points of sequential read/write. What are the types of things that could be used to diagnose this issue?

I would also like to note that loading Windows is slow compared to videos I have seen from others with the same hardware (motherboard and Intel 750). I have confirmed CSM is disabled, Fast boot enabled, GPT partition and the Win 10 OS was installed using UEFI bootable media. I recently reinstalled to confirm this.

[idata]

Hello InoSiX,

The best way to diagnose performance issues is to install this SSD as a storage drive, format it, and then run benchmarking tests. Although you may skip the formatting part if you wish, as your drive is not full enough to be considered a handicap. You can follow the http://download.intel.com/support/ssdc/hpssd/ssd-750/sb/intel_ssd_750_series_evaluation_guide_332075... evaluation guide for the 750 Series, although CrystalDiskMark* is accurate enough for most ends.

My main concern here is that your write speeds are actually well within spec at 86.7% of the advertised speed. Your reads are definitely slow at 68.5%, but this could be explained by your drive being in use while the tests ran.

1507 * 100 / 2200 = 68.5%

780 * 100 / 900 = 86.67%

As for the numbers you shared from other users, those may be from two 750's being used in a RAID 0, since those results are well above the expected performance numbers of 2200 MB/s sequential reads, and 900 MB/s sequential writes for the 400GB model. Do note that screenshot comes from an empty, secondary drive.

Best regards,

Carlos A.

[AMoff]

Thanks for your help Carlos. For the sake of argument I will attempt to boot off another drive and use the 750 as storage to see how it stacks up. However I should note that in my original post I meant to draw more focus to my 4k random read/write. I sit around 22 while other score upwards of 40, some even 50. This is what I meant by the egregiously slow speeds. As a significant number of (for example) Windows 10 OS loading is done using these smaller files, this would help explain the slow boot performance. While it is faster than a platter hard drive, its not the 400$ experience I was hoping for.

See attached. Another benchmark. This is the 1.2tb drive, but I wouldn't expect half that performance like I am getting now (and since I purchased it).