The Ryzen 9 7900X3D carries the X3D suffix without a full X3D performance leap, and SSDs are often much slower than advertised. When it comes to technology and PC hardware, marketing in particular often delivers more appearances than reality, which Jan and Fabian discuss using a few examples. And they also chat out of the box again.
CB radio: The tenth episode
The test of the new gaming top model Ryzen 9 7950X3D was followed this week by the test of the Ryzen 9 7900X3D – AMD did not sample the smaller and cheaper processor and the CPU was a little long in coming until it finally found its way into the ComputerBase editorial team found. There are reasons why there was no test pattern: The twelve-core model with only six “cache cores” cannot fully match the X3D performance leap of the Ryzen 7 5800X3D and Ryzen 9 7950X3D. This puts the CPU behind the Raptor Lake squad of the competition, which is also cheaper and available on a cheaper platform. So does the name on the box promise more than the Ryzen 9 7900X3D can deliver?
“More appearances than reality” This week there were also two supposedly very fast external SSDs from Corsair and Western Digital. And Fabian still (un)happily remembers gaming mice that threw about superlatives but couldn't keep up in practice. This episode of CB radio is about the recurring contradiction between "marketing promises" and what the customer really gets in practice.
Of states and bits in SSDs
One detail that has been omitted needs to be submitted later in the form of a note: Of course, TLC and QLC SSDs store more than just 3 or 4 states in the NAND flash, but even 8 or 16 respectively – and these voltage states are then made up of 3 or 4 bits together that can be stored in a NAND cell. Equating states and bits in this context served to make things easier to understand in the podcast, but is of course technically incorrect.
SLC, MLC, TLC and QLC: What are the differences? NAND memory cells can now be written with 1 (SLC), 2 (MLC), 3 (TLC) or even 4 (QLC) bits. This is possible by having different voltage states for different stored (combinations) of bits. SLC with only one bit per cell needs only two voltage states to distinguish “1” and “0”. TLC needs eight to be able to clearly read the status 0 or 1 for three stored bits. QLC requires sixteen.
More bits of information have the advantage that fewer memory chips are required for the same storage capacity, or more information can be stored in the same number of chips. This reduces costs and meanwhile makes standard-format end customer SSDs with a capacity of up to 8 TB possible. However, writing more bits into a cell also has disadvantages: the more voltage states a cell has to store clearly and permanently so that they can be read out, the longer it takes to store them – write performance and durability decrease. How does a NAND cell store 1, 2, 3 or 4 bits?
SLC mode or SLC cache: what is it? TLC and especially QLC SSDs today usually have an SLC mode or “SLC cache”. This is not a separate memory on the SSD, instead the controllers can write cells with 1 bit as well as 3 bits (TLC) or 4 bits (QLC). Using the example of the Samsung SSD 870 QVO with 1 TB QLC, this should be described in more detail in the following diagram. The diagram shows how the SSD is written non-stop with 10GB RAR files until it is full.
The regularly updated SSD purchase advice provides even more details and background knowledge on SATA and NVMe SSDs.
CB radio on Spotify, Apple, Google and Deezer
CB radio can not only be played via the embedded Podigee player, but also conveniently heard in the podcast apps of your choice. The ComputerBase podcast is available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Amazon Music and Deezer.
Per RSS feed in most podcasts -Player
At this point comes the obligatory note: CB radio can also be integrated into most podcast players via RSS. The corresponding URL is: https://computerbase.podigee.io/feed/mp3.
CB-Funk Podcast Episode #10: “More appearances than reality” also applies far too often to Hardware