Gadgetory

hey everyone this is steve from gamers nexus donna and once again at PAX Prime 2013 this is day two yesterday actually last night we published a pax cast that talked briefly about SSD overclocked in which we did right here in this lab area of the Intel booth and I'm joined by Justin Whitney today from Intel's SSD marketing division we're going to be talking more about the SSD overclocking feature why it's relevant what you can do with it and maybe even if you can expect it anytime soon it is currently in a prototype phase justin can you give me like a quick top-level overview of SSD overclocking yeah what we're really what we're really doing at PAX this year is we were really excited to come for the first time ever and talk about an SSD overclocking technology we're not necessarily saying we've got a product coming anything like that more important to us was the gauge both tech press like yourself so as as well as the attendees reaction to that kind of technology we're not even sure that the market wants something like that but we've been playing around with a prototype and wanted to get that that kind of reaction from our target audience and so far how has the reaction been from your end users I'm actually shocked at how positive it's been we sat down with some IT pros from data centers yesterday and they were like why wouldn't we want to do this and we've thought well I mean if there was any any chance or possibility at all to corrupt data by pushing a frequency too high or something like that wouldn't you be really risk adverse to that type of situation they were like you know well we would go through do a lot of validation on our end you know tune performance to get higher AI ups lock it down and when it's stable I think we pushed it too hard we'd back it off and do it again so that was a you know the biggest surprise or shock for me at the at the show so far end users and we're surrounded by overclockers that take like a case cube processor like the new 4770k they're pushing it they're like give me another knob that's awesome let me go till it breaks I don't care six months I'm gonna replace it anyway you know so so far everything's been really positive as far as actual functionality what can we overclock what utility are we using to overclock it a really good question a part of this technology demonstration is we're looking at a beta version of Intel's extreme tuning utility so you know any any system with that with an Intel chipset has the ability to overclock memory and graphics processor settings that sort of thing they put a beta feature in just press these they're gonna show it at Intel's its Developer Forum next week as well through through that beta feature next to you we're looking at two settings on the drive the the ASIC or the controller itself we've got a pretty write wide range of frequency settings for for that part of the drive and then we look at the NAND channel bus so you have all these flash parts soldered down and what frequency are they talking to the controller as well so the controller and then the NAND the nand channel frequency as well so two knobs and they both have a little bit different impact on performance as far as actual performance gains percentages stuff like that what can we expect with overclocking SSDs well one no no promises on anything here okay true prototype status no commitment to product or anything else so numbers or you know just show and tell purpose right now depending on which setting which benchmark you're running and even which system you're sitting on with these prototypes right now we've seen some increases in the 20% range specifically in IEEE ops IAP reads we've been seeing go up quite a bit in the end the writes as well so about about 20 10 to 20 so far it sounds pretty good so far so for one of the biggest questions will be getting is about endurance can you talk to us about endurance what your if you have any predictions or if you have any and anything you're specifically looking at reinforcing there we have no formal validation runs that anything that I would put any numbers associated to short answer I would say any time you start overclocking the performance of a drive you're probably gonna have a trade-off with endurance or the life of the product how much probably is going to be dependent on how far we allow you to push it are we gonna allow you to you know if it went to market would we let you go so far that you're going to cut the drives life in half I doubt we'd want to be there and we'd have a lot of upset end users unless we disclaim the heck out of it okay you go to this you know this setting and you know you're you've cut it in half I don't know where we're gonna be argue our guess is there's gonna be some trade-off and that's actually one of the questions we've got for everyone at PAX is what would you do you know if you could get 20% in performance would you give up 20% life or you know is that not something you want to mess with so it's totally variable depending on how much you push the drive have there been any any discussions at Intel about ksq SSDs or anything like that with unlocked overclocking features a discussion sure we're gonna call it a case queue I don't know if that was part of your question discussions yeah we haven't decided any of that if we don't even up we'll go to market right but I think in terms of the case queue Association there's some really strong affinity there even in terms of you know do you do you unlock it overclock it and then do you void your warranty if you had a product I think this is going to be very similar to that I would I would imagine so so you'd likely validate at a known good frequency and that's what you warranty and if you want to push it further you may be on your own and some pretty strong disclaimers would be back up your data first you know don't put anything important on here while you're setting you know going through and testing your settings and then once you have it locked down you know then get your your favorite games and your files and that sort of thing very cool so I think we've talked about it quite a bit now can you show us what's going on here oh it love - let's do it all right all right guys so after you know tuning some of the performance settings while we take a look at the results we have three different comparisons that were up that we have up on the screen right now this this bottom score 806 was from our intel SSD 520 series there's one you can talk about specs for sequential reads and writes and then give me some you know some real incompressible data test it out what is reality in this case I think we're you know we're seeing some some bus saturation in some regards we're you know about 500 megabytes per second on reads we're not impacting that a whole lot the writes we got to go up from like 286 megabytes a second on our 520 series up to 415 on our prototype and then once we started overclocking that we got another you know another 10% or so on those rights maybe a little under that but if we look at the random scores that's where it gets really interesting so I'm gonna switch to AI ops instead of megabytes a second so from that perspective we had about 60,000 AI ops for random reads and writes on that 520 series and then when we looked at the prototype default settings on that we jumped up to 75,000 or so overclocked it took it up to 88 almost 89 thousand really big IAP scores you know really nice to jump from our 520 series you know high-end client drive up to just stock settings now there was 10 percent or more on that and then another 10 percent or higher on after we started overclocking it really depends on the settings I think what did we calculate we were 18 to 22 percent on random scores and increasing for those reads and writes so kind of a fun little experiment at this time what do you guys think I'd really like to know what your viewers think - yeah I think personally I think it's pretty cool it's pretty exciting if you have any thoughts or comments leave them in the in the comment section below and of course tweet at Intel gaming or at gamers Nexus and thanks for the overview Justin we will see you guys next time peace