***The Official MSI GT80 Titan Owner's Lounge***

RAID 0 is out of the question for me. It's completely irrelevant. It introduces a vulnerability at a questionable increase in performance. Just one of the modules failing will bring down the entire cluster. Which is not all that uncommon I hear. I mirror the drives I have using Reflect and that works for me very well in terms of reliability, which to me is by far more important than performance. It's almost like RAID 1 except

The same results as in 2017 or 2016. I ran CrystalDiskMark against PM951 and got numbers slightly below specs. Maybe it was a one-time result, not sure. It was roughly 1600 Mbs/second in the first row (about 3 times faster than the X400 module it replaced). It's noticeable but very slightly. All in all, it feels like 10% faster, not 300%.

 

The problem is there is no air flow in that area...MSI tried a makeshift tin / foil connection to the Optical drive / bay to route heat through it, but IDK if it helps much.

The worst part is the GT80 CPU is right between the 3 M.2's and 1 M.2, and I noticed that benchmarking the CPU - 100% load for long periods of time, conducted heat from the CPU through to the M.2's, and vis versa...

At that point I decided to get a 2TB HDD, and scale back the M.2 SSD's splitting 2 of them across the physical space, one in the 3x side and 1 in the 1x side, so that they wouldn't radiate heat into each other.

It's all cutting edge tech, and it took 2 years before companies recognized the need for active cooling of NVME (SATA too) M.2's to keep them from throttling.

Something to think about, maybe get 1 2TB NVME / SATA drive to keep from adding too much heat to the space...

 

That's only relevant to GT80, not GT80 SLI as the latter lost 1 2280 slot.

I have 3x2280 slots and 1 2.5" slot. Of the 3 slots for 2280, 2 are PCIe and 1 is SATA3.

I wonder why they did that with the SLI edition. I would have preferred to have 4x2280 and 1x2.5".

 

@etcetera

I was hoping by now there would be super thin fan's - edge exhaust - that would fit on top of M.2 SSD's so they could be retro-fitted to the GT80 and other laptops, something to vent heat out and away from the M.2 controller chip - that's what gets hot, but so far this is the best I can find on a short search:

67mmX20mmX4mm Pure Copper Heatsink for M.2 NGFF 2280 PCI-E NVME SSD with fan 4.0mm for Laird Adhesive Heat sink cooling vest
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/67m...80-PCI-E-NVME-SSD-with-fan-4/32834985127.html

Maybe you can do some searching and find something better...

 

Actually the change in 4x M.2 in the GT80 came with the GT80S 2x NVME + 1 M.2, and my GT80 was SLI 980m's, with the first GT80S's also SLI 980m's + eventually an SLI 980 (full desktop GPU's).

MSI said there weren't enough PCIE lanes to continue to support that 4th M.2 SATA along with the new 2x PCIE... and there also weren't enough PCIE lanes to do 3x M.2 NVME.

The new GT83 still has the 2x NVME + 1x M.2 SATA

 

Hm, I was wondering what the tinfoil was for.. I thought it was just to cover things up. One of my 2280s is completely missing the thermal paste tab, I will buy some.

Ultimately it seems the GTI80 SLI does not place the 2280 modules in the best possible location in terms of cooling - they are however very easy to access.

This just highlights the need for backup the data on a regular basis. If the primary boot SSD fails, I have a backup and only lose a few days of data. which is acceptable. So you have a 1TB SSD doing nothing but being on standby in case of a recovery. It's a very cheap solution considering the alternatives. I experienced complete data loss this past summer and spent many a night recovering it. Ultimately successful but it was the most complicated IT thing I've ever done. A damn 300GB HDD failed and took out a lot of critical data. I thought I had things mirrored but the mirror had issues. Best HDD you can get with 15.5K R/s speed and only $30. That was the thing that made me completely abandon the HDD.
Extra 300 bucks for a PM961 or such is a bargain.

I mirror the boot drive and the data drive also but since the slot is not PCIe, no sense to get a PCIe module, but X400 in the 1TB capacity will do.

Stuffing a Titan full of 1TB SSDs is expensive and then using only half of them for actual data and the other half for a RAID 1 type configuration is even more expensive but what the hey. In for a penny, in for a pound.

 

The GT80 with 4x SATA didn't have the foil, it was all open to the air. I was considering buying a 2nd top plate and drilling an array of ventilation holes over the M.2 slots and figuring out a heatsink / fan to vent hot air up through them, but then I found out about the conduction of heat from the M.2's through to the other side with the CPU, and decided to dump M.2's to keep the heat load down.

I wonder if you could RAID 0 the 2 NVME drives, and bind that volume into a RAID1 with the 1TB M400

Probably would get weird with writes... super fast, then long delay on write confirmation? Depends on how you had the RAID caches set up, it might write through and the M.2 SATA could "catch up" without delaying writes to the 2x NVME RAID.

IDK if the BIOS RAID will allow that kind of nesting of RAID's...maybe a hardware RAID0 with the 2x NVME and a Windows "RAID1" between the RAID0 volume and the 1TB SATA might work.

 

well, I would need to know where the things plugs in.

 

You'd probably have to DIY a tap on power from the 2.5" bay...I dimly remember someone finding a power point not soldered but on the board for fan power. It would take some googling to find someone that's tapped into power for extra fans, I think I recall seeing some.

M.2 Cooling products on Ali Express
https://www.aliexpress.com/wholesale?catId=0&initiative_id=&SearchText=m.2+cooling

 

I don't want to RAID 0 anything...

Actually this machine is fast enough, I don't ever have any issues with speed. I don't copy Terabytes of data back and forth.. I do have issues with peripheral USB devices that aggravate me, like external drives and such, that are of course slow. No reason to gain a few milliseconds in the internal configuration.

I removed the OEM Toshiba SSDs, broke the RAID 0.. replaced the OEM HDD with Samsung Evo 850 1TB - and it wasn't even that expensive. I will probably get another Samsung PM951 or PM961 as their prices are steadily coming down. If I score one for $200-220, that's a win. And that's as good as it gets.

What's the point of getting an expensive machine with PCIe interface and then running SATA3 in it.

 

Well, if you post pics and detailed "Heatsinks for Dummies install" manual.
Every time I make mods to anything, I usually break something.
Especially something that delicate.

 

Saving money, getting optimized value per doller per GB storage.

It's a tough think, but if you consider that the actual benefit of the extra $'s placing M.2 NVME drives for the same total storage size, wouldn't you rather have the $ applied to another project?

It's going to be hundred's of $, maybe more, price difference to fill out with all SATA M.2's vs NVME + SATA.

It's only lost performance if your use gets benefit from it, otherwise it's wasted $ and effort.

Also the M.2 SATA Controllers put out less heat than the NVME Controllers on the M.2 board.

So going with M.2 SATA will reduce the thermal load...

For me the thermal load of 4x M.2 SATA's from back then was more than I wanted to keep running, NVME would be that much more, even with only 2x NVME + 1 M.2.

 

The tough part back then when NVME M.2's came out is that the mfgr's left off thermal probes... so you couldn't accurately measure thermal load without external meters.

The M.2 SATA's I used had built in thermal probes, IDK which models do today, but I'd research it before buying.

Leading up to: test M.2 temps and/or thermal load with / without tinfoil shroud, and then add some kind of easy to apply passive radiator to stick on the M.2's.

As I mentioned earlier, maybe reduce down to 1 2TB device, I think even today there are only 2TB NVME M.2's, I just searched and couldn't find a 2TB SATA M.2 being sold - although I found some announced about 1.5 years ago, they don't seem to have made it to market.

If you don't feel comfortable doing DIY hacking on your laptop, then don't do it, I actually discourage people that don't do this all the time from pulling apart their $XXXX's laptops to re-paste, so hacking in to power is a whole new level of craft.

That's one of the things I like about the GT80 series, with the easy access removeable top panel for RAM / Storage expansion.

 

No. If I wanted to save money, I would have stayed with my previous machine, a 10 year old workstation loaded with 4 HDDs. I got a relatively good deal on a GT80 SLI (new old stock - the technology was already 2 years old when I got it, so I saved plenty of coin and now want to invest it where it matters the most). Getting the (almost) latest-greatest storage device is really the only meaningful upgrade you can make, everything else is just fine. I don't have any issues with the CPU/GPU, etc. Will probably keep 980m forever. It runs my Dell 4K beautifully.

My only slight complaint about the Titan, I kind of expect a 4K 18" display but it's an Unobtanium apparently. Plenty of 17" 4K screens but not 18". If they do eventually come up with an 18" or even 19" laptop that's 4K that will be a very strong incentive to upgrade.

For that matter, my 2006 workstation was a beast. Dual CPUs, 16GB of RAM, up to 8 HDD drives. I only upgraded it for one reason, the video card could not handle 4K and I wanted to get into the 4K game.. plus the SSD option looked attractive. It still could chew anything you threw at it with its dual 3Ghz processors and never felt "slow".

I keep my hardware on the average for 7 years, way past obsolescence. Even the most expensive SSD solution becomes cheap when spread out over that time period.

I am completely paranoid about data loss and will go to the extreme to prevent it. My solution may not work for everyone. Even if there is no data loss, downtime is another thing I do not want to endure, rebuilding the OS.. I did that this summer, and what a complete nightmare to the Nth degree it was.

 

Yeah, the GT80 SLI seems to be a piece of cake to work on.. Thus far anyway. I definitely appreciate the ability to swap the SSDs in a nanosecond.

Took me a while to get the hang of bcdedit, and the good old Macrium Reflect is your friend. I alternate boot drives, run one 1TB as primary or another 1TB and check the hours on them with CrystalDisk. If I drive fails, I am 20 seconds away from a working operating system that is a few days out of date.

The data drive, Samsung 850 Evo looks impressive enough and pretty fast for being only SATAIII. I forgot the specs but it looked faster than the SanDisk X400 2280 SATA.

https://www.amazon.com/Samsung-850-PRO-2-5-Inch-MZ-7KE1T0BW/dp/B00LF10KTE

Take the number of copies of data you have and subtract one and that's how many you have. Data loss is a more serious problem than performance issues IMO.

Come to think of it, I think I will pick my next Samsung 1TB SSD (PCIe) based on the write endurance. Supposedly PM961 comes in at the top and higher than 960 Pro, amazingly.

 

Spending extra money without extra benefit is still wasting money, even amortized over 7 years

NVME PCIe SSD vs. SATA SSD for Gaming, Tested!
Testing results start about 4:00


There are other test comparison videos for SATA vs NVME SSD's, I'll see if I can find them and edit / add them below...

Here's a new review of Intel Optane SSD, showing again that for normal usage you won't notice the difference in user perceptible performance.

The fastest SSD for gaming, and one big problem..
Results start around 3:50


Only specialized long running jobs will show benefit's that a user can benefit from.

 

I've got 10 year old SSD's that are still in service since 2010, and I have thrashed those suckers long and hard, so I wouldn't worry too much about longevity - especially since you are enlightened enough to keep up your image backups.

Yup, Samsung Evo 850 and other inexpensive M.2 SATA drives, especially when found on sale for nice discounts, will do a great job.

 

SM961 looks more attractive price to performance ratio. 450 IOPS 4K writes. It's behind 960 Pro.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/10168/samsung-shows-off-sm961-and-pm961-ssds-oem-drives-get-a-boost

I didn't realize there was a difference between SM961 and PM961. Many similarities.

 

I don't do any gaming.

 

That's only if your applications will actually use / demand that level of throughput, most applications won't.

Check out those video's starting at the "results" timecode, I think you'll see what I mean.

 

So what applications are you going to run? As a test / benchmark, games run like many applications, with load time, write / read periods, interspersed with hardly any storage IO during use.

You'd want to profile disk throughput peaks, and demand throughput duration to see if you'd benefit from higher performance.

For most applications IO throughput is very short and far between, hardly worth it even if you could halve the time duration. From .5 sec to .25 sec isn't going to be noticeable to the end user, even if it is 2x faster.

 

I am sure I upgrade way below the average on this forum. My workstation was a beast when I got it and still is, at 11 years old. It was top of the line, 6 grand new. I got it when it was 1.5 years old for $1500. In 2008. I compared it to many new machines and did not see an noticeable difference. Except of course the SSD piece, but these commercial-grade data-center type 15.5K hard drives are something. Especially when RAID'ed. It was the best HDD you could get.

Judging by the past performance, I will probably keep the Titan until 2024. Though it's possible I will relegate it to a backup role.
My philosophy has been - get something expensive, then keep it forever. And buying something a generation behind, which is what GT80 is today, even the SLI version, is also perfectly OK.

You know how it is -- life is what happens when you have other plans.

 

well that's a legitimate point. Still, when I do expect performance, I can get it. I brought down my boot time by 7 seconds and it was already near-instantaneous. I have 24GB of RAM so that's not a bottle neck either. I will wait until the 1TB Samsung SM961 comes down to below $300 and then buy it. Right now it is still floating above that, it seems.

 

IDK how it is on the GT80, but others mention slow boot times on NVME drives vs SATA drives - due to POST initialization delay. Maybe someone with a GT80S / GT83 can let you know what the optimal UEFI settings are for faster NVME startup.

Yeah, that's how I do it too, wait for sale price that is too good to pass up. Best to plan and wait for the best price, especially when I was buying 4x at a time.

Please post your results when you make a move.

 

Well, "slow" means not any faster than SATA. Or, if faster, then only by a few seconds. I do see a speed difference between SATA I had via SanDisk X400 and the Samsung PM951 I currently have (which is a good value) but it's not 5x or 3x but more like 10 or 15% perception-wise.
Of course I haven't thrown gigabytes or terabytes around, maybe if I did, I would see a real difference.

CrystalDiskMark doesn't mean anything.

I need to trade the 2280 SATA3 SanDisk for a 2.5" SSD SATA to stick it into another, all HDD laptop at the moment. Now that would be a quantitative improvement.

 

As asked,benchmarks from my RAID0.

Boot time from cold is 15 seconds(windows reports a 5.6 seconds BIOS time), to Windows 10 Pro, running stock BIOS, only updated ME Firmware.

The sequential read/write speeds are not bad, but 4k/random is as good/bad as a single SATA SSD.

Usually NVMe takes more time due to the oROM/drivers take a bit to be loaded before the UEFI can really see the drivers and boot from them.

 

Do you have Fast Startup enabled along with Hibernation enabled?

If you have time, try disabling Hibernation for full shutdown and startup. See what boot time is then.

In a cmd shell Start As Administrator:

powercfg /h off

Then reboot once and shutdown, then time the boot.

If you already did that, cool.

 

Ok, disabled hibernation,shutdown with Shift+Shutdown, from power button press to desktop, 20.61 seconds, forgot about the Fast Startup, sorry

7 seconds just for the MSI logo/BIOS to pass before Windows circle appears.

 

How to enable fast startup:

https://windowsable.com/how-to-enable-or-disable-fast-startup-in-windows-10/

Not sure about this feature, as it's writing files to disk. Seems to be a sleep-like function. I will disable hibernation but do not want to enable fast startup.

 

Fast Startup requires Hibernation enabled, so rather than select Fast Start for disable, turn off Hibernation instead. That way you get real startup / shutdown, and get rid of that 1x RAM sized hiberfil.sys file in C:\.

In a cmd shell Start As Administrator:

powercfg /h off

To turn it back on (not recommended):

powercfg /h on

 

I will record boot time before and after.

 

I did find one area where MSI could have done a better component - the video camera glass in GT80 SLI is just cheap plastic without any scratch resistance and very easy to scratch. Be careful when wiping it. Every wipe results in micro-scratches, even when using a microfiber cloth. The correct method of cleaning it is to first wipe it with a moist micro fiber cloth to remove any dust particles and then dry it with a dry microfiber cloth.

They could have installed a real glass or at least a plastic with some kind of "Gorilla glass" coating like in smart phones. Admittedly, you would have to wipe it a thousand times to notice any degradation in video picture quality, but still.

 

This seems like a great match for the primary boot drive in this fine machine.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/samsung-sm961-ssd,4608.html

 

What wi-fi card (adapter) does GT80 SLI use?

 

Killer LAN & Killer Wireless LAN.

 

I am using the BPX from mydigitalssd, and it has been very good. I have 2 480Gb drives in Raid 0.

 

What do you guys use to migrate all the programs and games from one computer to another? Is there a way? I used to always start from scratch and reinstall everything but with ever so increasing storage capacity it's becoming ever so increasing PITA due to the sheer amount of programs and games installed.

 

Macrium Reflect (Free) works well to backup and migrate to another new storage device. You can resize the partitions on the restore to shrink or increase to fit the destination.

Macrium Reflect (Free)
https://www.macrium.com/reflectfree

To restore a boot drive you create a bootable (4GB) flash drive to boot on, keep the Macrium Backup image on a USB drive and restore from there. If you want you can get a large enough flash drive to hold the restore image as well.

I use the vendor restore backup tool to make a recovery image bootable flash drive, to be able to restore back to the original out of the box configuration too.

For all other restores I keep a Macrium Reflect image backup to restore to the lastest configuration. So I'll restore to the OEM image, do the Windows Updates and vendor driver, app, etc upgrades, install apps and games, and tweak the configuration of everything, and backup with Macrium Reflect so I can avoid all that busy work next time.

Have fun

 

Useful info as usual. Thanks a lot Scott. I'll give the Macrium a try.
Can I choose which programs to back up (or restore), or is it just "all or nothing" solution?

 

I did earlier use Laplink PCmover http://web.laplink.com/pcmover_feature_overview/ - it works well but it isn't free.

 

I use it as an imaging tool to backup whole partitions, and it's got compression - plus it doesn't backup empty space - so it's not demanding on storage, but the images can get large - or multiple.

The paid version (only?) does incremental backup's, not sure how that works, as I don't use it, but it sounds like what you might want.

I keep 1 original OEM image, and then 1 image most recently done, and depending on space or interest in between versions I'll rotate 3 image's back, dropping the oldest when I create a new one. I'll also save an archive like when I drop a laptop for a new one, or when I take it offline for a while pulling the upgraded storage.

It's pretty easy to backup folders and files by drag and drop though, so don't count that out

 

That isn't a problem. What I'm concerned about are installed programs. Many of these are paid for and registered a loooong time ago (with multiple updates) and I'm not even sure that I will be able to find the registration info and keys.

 

Do use some key finder utility - there are several free ones.

 

In that case you *do* want to use the full partition/drive image backup, as it will resize to fit your new larger drive and restore a working full bootable Windows with apps already installed.

If you have programs installed on other than the C drive, then image backup the other drive/partitions and restore using the same Letter drive on the new computer.

If there is anything you don't want backed up / restored - large programs you don't want on the new computer or Steam games you can re-download later as you want them again, uninstall / clean your drive(s) before you backup.

It's tough for a backup program to backup an application in toto and restore it to a new system install - all the registry entries and dll's and app installed will not quite match on a clean Windows install, it's better to do a full system backup and restore / resize on the new system, then do a Windows Update to download / install new drivers for new hardware - and / or install drivers downloaded from the new laptop support area as part of the spin up after booting on the restored image on the new machine.

That's a good idea too, to find all the "lost" key's, so you could do a reinstall should the situation arise; or just dig up the boxes/manuals and scan in the license info and keep it digitally backed up for future use.

 

Yes! That's what's I was afraid you'd say and that's what the point of my original question. I'm not following IT tech progress anymore as I was before, but I knew, there was nothing to be able to parse all the .inis, .regs and .dlls successfully. Heck, even genuine uninstall utilities from the software creators won't even remove everything that was installed by their software, so I was kinda naive to even think that they would come up with an utility to be able to migrate the whole software environment onto a clean windows installation.
I don't want to do a whole system restore, because that would restore my old windows installation, which is, after almost two years pretty "dirty" and doesn't run optimally anymore.
Then there is a problem restoring my old windows on a different hardware. Not sure whether that would go smoothly as well even though the changes aren't that significant and windows *should* be able to deal with it just fine. But... With these things, one never knows.
So i will do the whole reinstall song and dance I used to do many times in the past.
The keyfinder thing is a great idea and I will look into it. Thanks.

 

That's a bit of a myth, that as a Windows install ages it's worth less and less. I've got a few that are going on 10 years old, and I keep them tuned up and cleaned up and they run just like they were when first installed and configured with applications.

Of course I don't install crazy things, and I check the disk integrity every time I do an improper shutdown, few crashes occur but I also check the disk then too, and occasionally it does a fix.

I use DDU to clean up video driver installs too.

And, with Windows Update it installs what's missing.

IDK about Windows 10 though, I think there are versions old enough that Windows won't update them, right? So you'd have to reinstall to "catch up" to the current fork "major update".

It's worth a try to image it and restore it on the new machine - but first backup the OEM image on the new laptop so you can restore to it as a base for starting fresh later - or RMA or eventual sale.

That way you don't need to spend hours re-installing everything.

 

Sure. If you take care of your car, it'll run forever. I never even change oil. LOL
I can't be bothered cleaning windows or do checkcisk and it definitely boots up slower than it used to.
I'm beginning to look forward to slim it down to barebones. I've got quite a few programs installed that I never use, but that I hesitate to uninstall because "what if I needed them"

 

ccleaner and other system management tools will help a great deal.

If you've never have used them, you probably have 10's of GB's of useless cruft hanging around slowing everything down, including browsing.

It really doesn't take much time to run ccleaner / ccenhancer or the occasional disk check at boot - scheduling it upon boot after an incident that might have caused a problem.

It lets me have continuity over many years, eliminates crashes from corrupt disk files, and all that contentious effort puts me in touch with what's going on with my computer.

 

Yeah ,I did use CCleaner before, but then there were versions of it infected with malware so I stayed away ever since since I don't use any antivirus besides the built-in one. That was quite a while ago . Maybe I should give it another shot

 

One version of ccleaner, out for a couple of hours over 10 years...

Click on the blue text in the previous post for the downloads.

Install ccleaner first, then ccenhancer, it loads 1000+ app profiles, so when you start ccleaner check the Applications tab to load with all the extra profiles, before starting to clean/analyze.

By default you should be safe from cleaning anything you'd miss, so after the first cleaning, run through all the applications listed in the Applications tab to click on them to enable each one.

Don't enable something you don't want deleted - most likely it'll just be passwords or setup details you'd have to re-enter, which is just a matter of resetting them up - but if you've forgotten a password over time, now you gotta re-set it

The first time it takes a little time to set it up completely, going through both tabs listed things getting cleaned, heed the warnings from clicking some - I don't enable them, but there might be some you'd enable - and every time you install new apps, don't forget to run down the tab lists again as ccleaner will notice new app installs and look for new things to clean, but you have to click them to enable them.

How much space did you save?

Did you do a boot time disk check before, or after, doing this...?