From the perspective of the customer
belgolas has it right.
As a many-year fan of Hardware Canucks, I hope what follows will be taken as constructive criticism.
I’m a fairly affluent gamer; and I too have read perhaps 8 reviews of Intel’s new Optane 900P.
As noted, Linus’ “The fastest SSD for gaming, and one big problem” is indeed an attempt to meet my needs. (The 30 seconds of video; two game review starting
here)
The key problem is that any reviewer looking at a “new piece of hardware” spends an inordinate amount of time looking at ways to
• comment on architecture/design;
• benchmark it against others;
• stress test it; and
• provide “real world performance” comments.
Let’s call this the “hardware” focus.
Problem is, I’m a customer … one with cash … and want to know what value I’ll get from spending that cash. A review that explains this concisely and clearly would be “customer” focused.
There may be more, but from my personal experiences there are three types of customers for hardware like the Optane 900P:
- Gamers: people who want seamless gaming performance; people (high end) who would pay through the nose for an advantage.
- Video Production /Streamers: a likely smaller group, who have a specific need for fast and cost efficient video production. An even smaller subset who Game & Stream at the same time.
- Data Hogs: the “big data” folks. Database manipulation. Copying impressively large amounts of data from one place to another. Perhaps the “encrypters”; perhaps the “data compression” folks.
Obviously I’m outside my comfort level with the 2nd and 3rd of these … so let’s just re-focus on gaming.
What value can an SSD provide to a gamer?
No compromise gaming performance (with multiple internet web-pages open; probably a spreadsheet or two as well). What does THAT look like?
- Faster “start-up”. I want to press “go” on my computer and get into my game in the minimum time possible. Load windows; load my game; download updates to my game.
- Reduced load screen times. This is HUGE for me. I may, in reality, spend only a small fraction of my gaming experience in loading screens, but it SEEMS like 25% or more because staring at the equivalent of a spinning hourglass adds zero value to the gaming experience! I need to change from one character to another, then zone from one location to another. A minute or more staring at load screens (with 2 older SSD’s in raid 0). THAT’s what makes my gaming experience suck. THAT’s what I would pay money to fix.
- Capacity: The page 3 notion that I’d lose nearly 20GB of a 280GB drive is indeed relevant to assessing whether the drive would meet my needs (although I didn’t quite follow; nor did I see reference to the larger 480GB drive’s stats).
- Consistency: I expect to know before I buy “hardware x” whether it will throttle or not.
- Reliability: The page 2 “durability” comments are valid and meaningful. Appreciated. My current raid 0 SSD configuration scares me … a lot!
- A “dollar value proposition” to go along with those metrics. Would I spend $300 more for a 0.5% improvement? Maybe; maybe not.
There’s not much more I want (SSD wise). Expand the list a bit to “value propositions” presumably “not applicable” to SSD’s:
- The pipeline “from game server to PC”: IPS/Modem/Router/(Wifi?): The best possible internet experience with Low latency/ping; low dropped packets. How many router reviews quote comparisons of ping?
- Butter smooth video (call it FPS+; as it would include latency and anything to improve the visual experience such as accurate colour reproduction) How many screen reviewers rank displays by latency?
... all with "test scenarios" that include a few open web-pages; a separate communication system (like Teamspeak or Discord) and a couple fairly large spreadsheets would be helpful as well, since just testing a single game in Windows isn’t reflective of my real-world workload.
So back to the review in question for the Optane 900p:
First, the
competition. The Samsung 960 Pro is reputedly one of, if not the fastest SSD’s available … and price-wise the most viable “competition of note” for the 900p … yet despite references to it on page 2 of the review (and verbiage on page 3 directly comparing sequential write performance), it’s not in the comparison tables. Does that help me with my purchase decision? Same for the Samsung 850 mentioned on page 1. Does not help one bit. My money would NEVER go to any of the competition in the tables … making them largely or wholly irrelevant. Worse still, most are SATA drives; a fundamentally different technology from a generation ago that influences the result of the table comparisons MORE THAN the hardware themselves).
Second, the
Consistency argument (3 above). Reviewer was “shocked” at the “significant misstep” of potentially inadequate cooling. Perfect valid concern. Any empirical assessment of throttling? Nope. Do I leave the review with an understanding of short or long term performance sustainability in a gaming environment? Nope. Any point to citing cooling concerns if they have no real-world applicability? None that I can see. At the very least it would have been of value to me to know that for certain though.
Third, the
value proposition relative to gaming needs. This is the one that truly irritates. I don’t run ATTO; CrystalMark; PCMark8; etc etc. and I most certainly don’t WANT to run them. They add zero value to my life.
I can understand the notion that “if it’s the best there is, use it”. It takes time and money to conduct these tests, yet in NO WAY do I understand at the end whether I should be buying this piece of hardware or not. 120 web-pages open in Firefox? Let’s see … the last time I tried that was … omigod … never!! (has anyone, ever?) If you instead told me it would reduce windows load times from 20sec to 15sec? I’d “get” that. If you told me it would reduce my game’s initial load and/or zone change screen loads from 40sec to 30sec? I’d “buy” that (literally; and today!!).
I’d also never miss a review by that reviewer!
So I also get that this would be hard to do as a reviewer. Which games to choose? Games change each year, making benchmarking difficult. Other hardware and other factors can influence results … making true comparisons to “my system” challenging. Yet I still don’t care. ANYTHING that gave me answers to the “value proposition” of spending my cash on a piece of hardware is preferable to looking at stats that don’t tell me if my life would be better or not.
I AM the esport gamer at the top of page 2’s pyramid! I certainly can afford to buy one … but won’t waste money on something that adds virtually no value.
As an aside, I’ve also spent a fair amount of time trying to figure out what bottleneck(s) are causing excessive screen load times … without much success. THIS (and ways to mitigate it) would be of enormous interest.
I also know all too well that like my moniker, I’m old and senile. I could be dead wrong on specific points; or wildly missing other valid ones. Yet I still believe the premise is valid:
Please review hardware from the perspective of the customer, not the hardware.
