PO3-640 updates, issues, & shocking drive upgrades 7356 - 7908 MB/s (a few tested)

I tried upgrading my Acer PO3-640 PC and had varied success in doing so. Given this system comes with limited storage, on the entry level RTX 3060 Ti version, from a Gaming perspective, I started with various types of drives.

A quick note on the BIOS:

I updated the BIOS to the latest R01-B1.

At first I was dismayed to find XMP Memory Support disabled and greyed out, meaning that currently available ram would drop to it's lowest possible speed.

(The base model of this PC comes with the now discontinued Kingston Hyper Fury X , even though the manual shows, XMP enabled Kingston Fury Beast ram.)

Next I found Gen 4 for the NVMe unselectable and greyed out, even with a WD Black SN850X NVMe attached to the additional M.2 slot.

I found the Auto setting provided poor performance, so I set it to Gen 5, which was selectable.

(I was surprised this Intel Alder Lake-S IMC board was not capable of selecting Gen 4, but able to select Gen 5?)

Set on Gen 5, I noticed a huge performance increase across all my SSD based drives.

Now I'll try an post screen shots of all the data I collected first confirmation of Gen 5 x16 in use.

Gen 5 in use.jpg

Next drive speeds from Samsung Magician 8.0.0 & Crystal Mark 8.0.4 x64.

(Fastest to slowest.)

Samsung 870 EVO 4TB Performance Mode Test 1.png

Samsung Evo 870 CrystalDiskMark_20231120233916.png

WD Black SN850X Gaming Mode Enabled Test.png

WD Black SN850X Gaming Mode Enabled CrystalDiskMark_20231120233315.png

SK Hynix HFM256GD3JX016N Gen 3 NVMe Test.png

SK Hynix CrystalDiskMark_20231120232721.png

Samsung T7 Portable USB 3.1 Port.png

Samsung T7 USB 3.1 Port CrystalDiskMark_20231120234820.png

Let me know what you think so far.

Accepted answers

All comments

billsey

With Alder Lake based systems the ports directly connected to the CPU are different than those connected through the PCH. The GPU slot on the CPU supports x16 PCIe gen 5.0, the M.2 slot on the CPU supports NVMe x4 PCIe gen 4. The M.2 slot on the PCH is NVMe x4 but PCIe gen 3.0. All the rest of the PCIe interfaces (the x1 slot and all internals like the Ethernet) are PCIe gen 3.0. So, if you had put the faster SSD in the first slot it would be using the 4.0 speeds instead of the 3.0 speeds the second port supports.

billsey

Time to send it back to the vendor and get a replacement… That is called a 'child failure' and there are always a certain number of them in any production batch.

Garyrt

The EVO is definitely not able to run in "Performance mode" without problems. So I put it in "Standard mode".

I ran Samsung Magician's "Full Scan", this time instead of the "Extended SMART Self-test" and it completed without error. (This scan is supposed to fix errors but didn't show any.)

Crystal Disk Info shows the drives health at 99% (after an up time of 189 hours it worried me).

So I bought HD Sentinel (as I read good things about it). It shows the EVO at 100% drive health. So I ran Sentinel's "Extended Self-test". It passed, completing in a little over five hours and twenty minutes.

This probably means that the timer just ran out, in Samsung's Magician software, during it's "Extended SMART Self-test", and that the LBA error, was just the point where the test was aborted by me, thinking it had failed. (Something I could seriously have done without, as it looked like a test failure.)

I added Steam's backup of "Halo The Master Chief Collection" to a Rar file, with the Store setting, and moved it back and forth between my WD SN850X, and the EVO. Running a SHA-512 checksum each time, and it passed that, as well.

So after the EVO crashing in "Performance mode", and those **** tests looking like they had errored in Magician. Then the Halo game getting corrupted on transferring it within Steam. It now appears that the drive works fine as long as it's in "Standard mode".

Another thing that still worries me a bit, is that Samsung's tech support "Hanaro" told me to return the drive to the store, or send it to them, under warranty (before I ran HD Sentinel).

So now I'm not sure if it's my PC, or the EVO that's causing "Performance mode" to be very unstable, and possibly cause file corruption. Luckily all my other files seem to be ok, and I didn't lose any data from my checks so far.

Ironically I went through all this, and had even more problems with upgrades to my Acer PC.

I bought some Ram that failed to work from Kingstonmemoryshop online, "Kingston KVR32N22S8/16 16GB DDR4 3200MT/s Non ECC Memory RAM DIMM".

Before they even sent it, I told them all about my Acer PC, and it's memory timings from CPU-Z. And they still sent me the "double density" version of the RAM that did not work (you could tell the workmanship on the modules was bad as well). Now they keep telling me they are refunding me, but are not doing so!