RickyTick wrote:
I'm at the top end of my budget, so the NVMe drives are pushing me a little higher than I'd like to go.
I noticed that the Crucial MX300 1TB SATA is the same price as the Crucial MX300 1TB M.2 2280. Is there an advantage of one over the other, except for the obvious sata cables cluttering the case?
If you are at the top end of your budget, why not get an RX 480 as even the 8gb versions are running near $200 now, and then put the $130 savings v. the 1070 towards a solid 1TB SSD and the rest towards a solid Freesync monitor? I'm using an 8gb RX 480 right now and its absolutely perfect (with some headroom) at 1080p. I think the only limiting factor may be my older 3570K (overclocked to 4.4ghz).
I'm all for getting a higher end GPU, but I continue to have concerns of Nvidia cards long term viability compared to AMD. The AMD cards seem to slightly underperform right out of the gate, but have better tech built in for better longevity, like a much better implementation of async compute which seems to make a difference in DX12. And regardless, a 1070 is way overkill for 1080p.
For gaming, a SATA SSD is perfectly fine. I'm running old Samsung SATA SSDs and my load times are already crazy fast. Just look at the latest SSD reviews from TR and pick a drive (at least 500gb imo) that has solid price for performance. See [img=http://techreport.com/review/31177/patriot-hellfire-480gb-nvme-ssd-reviewed/7]here[/img] and [img=http://techreport.com/review/30993/samsung-960-evo-ssd-reviewed/7]here[/img]. $269 for a 960 EVO seems pretty great, but even an older 850 EVO is essentially the same for game loading times - highly unlikely your games will notice differences in the rest of the stats between the two.
You can't really go wrong with any of your choices (as long as you avoid real bargain bin SSDs), so you'll be fine however you go.
Gaming: i5-3570k/Z77/212 Evo/Corsair 500R/16GB 1600 CL8/RX 480 8GB/840 250gb, EVO 500gb, SG 3tb/Tachyon 650w/Win10