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PCMark 8 Real-World Software
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Here's your first real look at the two SM951s compared to Samsung's 850 Pro in real-world desktop applications. We didn't expect to see the SM951-NVMe improve over the AHCI model, but that's not the case; there is in fact a slight speed-up. Many of these tests run in a single thread at low queue depths, the Photoshop Heavy metric serving as the sole exception.
Singling out that benchmark, the two SM951s finish within two seconds of each other. The SM951-NVMe wraps up the job a full 10 seconds faster than Samsung's 850 Pro. Photoshop Heavy also shows the widest gap between the three drives. Most of the other benchmarks are separated by a few seconds or less.
Each run takes about 20 minutes to complete. Over that span of time, we see a large divide between the three products in question. The results above are presented in MB/s rather than time to complete, if only to show that those small time differences really do equate to a big impact on user experience.
