Final Words

In the past, high-performance enterprise PCIe drives didn't do all that well in our client test suite. Intel's SSD DC P3700 on the other hand does remarkably well, thanks in no small part to its excellent performance at low queue depths. A continued focus on IO consistency and performance recovery also help tremendously. In our heaviest client workload (our 2013/Destroyer benchmark), the P3700 takes the crown as the fastest SSD we've ever tested.

At $3/GB, the P3700 is a clear fit for enterprise workloads but I can see that being a bit too pricey for even a high end client PC. The real question is how close can Intel's cheaper, lower endurance NVMe drives get to the P3700's performance. The P3500 and P3600 will be available at much lower price points, and may be able to deliver a good portion of the P3700's performance.

Intel won't be shipping the rest of its lineup for a little while longer, but as soon as we get those drives in house we'll provide an update.

Performance vs. Transfer Size
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  • TelstarTOS - Tuesday, June 10, 2014 - link

    +1
  • TelstarTOS - Tuesday, June 10, 2014 - link

    YES! Thank you for doing these further tests :)
  • aperson2437 - Tuesday, June 10, 2014 - link

    If I had money burning a hole in my pocket and there were computers available that could support these new SSDs I'd be buying one as soon as possible ... especially the P3700. Love those endurance numbers as much as the speed benchmarks. I can't wait until there is intense competition for these NVMe drives and the prices for 500 GB+ 3700s become as affordable as the Samsung 840 Pro SSD etc.

    Looks like the days of being irritated having to twiddle your thumbs looking at an hourglass while some program or game loads is about to be over with in the next few years. Near instantaneous full reboots of Windows. Awesome just thinking about it. THIS is what will amaze people once everyone can afford these NVMe drives. I think these SSDs will be a huge hit. Just gotta get that freakin price down!
  • seapeople - Tuesday, June 10, 2014 - link

    I can see it now. The year is 2020. Joe Schmo unpacks his brand new screaming fast Dell with a top notch PCIE SSD. He gets out the timer and boots it up. Total boot time is 47 seconds, with 42 of that being the BIOS load. Then it only takes 45 more seconds for the wireless card to connect to the network. Yes.
  • xMoe - Sunday, June 15, 2014 - link

    hopefully the PCIe is on PCIe 4 and the time is down to 4.5 sec total boot to desktop/network ready time. If Windows 9 is worse than Windows 8 - all bets are off!

    Windows 8x - The Worst! of BOTH worlds! - for the price of 1/2 (or is it no charge already?).
  • Cerb - Saturday, June 14, 2014 - link

    Impressive. The earliest tests didn't look at that hot for client work, but these sure do, and match up with PCPer's results. Now we just need to see the <$0.75/GB consumer models, how they fare, and how quickly NVMe support matures. If it's anything like AHCI was for HDDs, 2016 will be a killer year for storage :).

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