Hey everyone! I just got done with my recent upgrade which consisted of a new Z590 FTW mobo, 11900k, RTX3080ti FTW, 32Gigs of DDR4, and my first ever purchase of an NVME SSD, a Samsung 980 Pro, 1TB. Samsung Magician shows proper speeds of 7000 read and 5000 write, but when loading some games it seems to lag sometimes which it never did with my old Samsung 860 Evo SSD with much slower speeds. Honestly it even boots up about the same time as the old SSD which only got around 500MB/sec speeds. I have the drive in the upper slot, per the EVGA manual but it just doesn’t seem that impressive at all for some reason. Even loading up the Shadow of the Tomb Raider benchmark, the games lags every once in a while, like it was running a mechanical HDD, or very low on RAM. Anyone else have this SSD and experience this?
I almost got the WD Black NVME drive but I thought since I already had a Samsung SSD, that’s one more piece of software I would not have to install. I’m thinking I should have got the WD drive now. Your thoughts would be very much appreciated!!

the_Scarlet_one
It would be very beneficial to look up the game loading speed differences and tests between a good SSD and a NVME. The difference is truly negligible most of the time. This is due to the programming of the game and the process of loading, the SSD is relatively close to the same loading time as the NVME.

Did you do a clean install of all of the games when you loaded them?

Also, have you loaded the Samsung drivers instead of letting Windows load a driver.

Yes, it was a fresh install of Windows, and a fresh install of everything. I did not however load a Samsung Diver for the NVME (a newbie on NVME still). Thanks for the tip, going to try that and see what happens! Makes a lot of sense now having a generic windows driver vs a driver from Samsung. I haven’t ran actually load time tests, but I still can. I still have windows loaded on my old SSD and can simply boot to that one via the bios. Will get back with the results soon!! Thank u again for the info!!

the_Scarlet_one
Hopefully it makes a difference.

Well, I took a look on the Samsung site, and they do not officially list a NVME driver for the 980. Confirmed that by reading many other posts asking for a driver. Seems we are stuck with using the built in Microsoft NVME driver.

I did however put a fresh copy of Windows (from the Microsoft site) on a brand new flash drive, and re-installed windows with a fresh install and that seemed to fix the lagging. I guess I’m still not impressed with the boot up time with this NVME. I have a Dell Rugged Laptop with a 9th Gen Core i5 and a NVME drive that fully boots up in about 4-5 seconds. This drive/motherboard combo takes much, much longer. It’s could be the Corsair Commander Pro, and Corsair AIO with all the USB connections that’s slowing down the boot process. Or the mobo may just need a few more refinements since this board was just released not long ago.

Do keep in mind that Samsung has not release drivers for the 980 series (both PRO and non-Pro) - I know because I had the same SSD and consulted Samsung support about it. And they say they don't have no such drivers for the  980 series, only for the 970, 960, and 950 series.

new W10 install ... indexing can take a toll on performance, till it has done its thing

980 pro controller has hot character and can throttle. If you use 980 pro without heatsink then buy it.