Since building my new Tom's Guide test rig, I've become more interested than usual in PC gaming components One of the things I noticed was the three M2 SSD slots on the motherboard, and another was the fact that many of the best PC games today consume a great deal of storage space

For those unfamiliar with M2 format SSDs, they are very small PC components that require very little power while providing fast, high-capacity storage They can be fastened directly to the motherboard with a single screw and require no wiring or fixtures

If you play games on traditional HDDs, as I did, the transition to M2 SSDs is full of surprises Games load in seconds, not minutes; it is quite possible to go from the Windows desktop to a fully rendered, playable level in 15 or 20 seconds

That's why I was excited when WD got in touch with Tom's Guide and offered the new WD Black SN850 NVMe SSD This brand new M2 SSD could, in theory, load games even faster than the WD Blue I had been using Sure, the Black is significantly more expensive than the Blue ($230 vs $130 for the 1TB model), but if there is a significant difference in performance, it might be worth the extra $100, especially if you've already spent $1,500+ on other components

That's why I was surprised when I tested the WD Black

I don't have the proper setup to run professional hardware benchmarks, but I figured I could at least gather some general data with Tom's Guide test PC The process was simple First, I installed five popular games on a WD Blue M2 SSD and used a stopwatch to measure the time it took from the desktop to the first fully loaded boot screen ("desktop" in the graph below) Next, we measured the time it took to get from the main menu to the saved game ("Menu" in the chart below)

(The time taken to go from "desktop to gameplay" was not measured, as the number of startup screens varies from game to game and some cannot be skipped)

From there, we uninstalled the games on the Blue SSD, installed them on the Black SSD, and redid the test In a vacuum, load times on the Black SSD were quite impressive However, when compared to the Blue SSD, the effect was more limited than expected All numbers below are in "load time (seconds)"

Before comparing the numbers, it is worth pointing out that all of these results are simply amazing, especially compared to previous HDDs Many PC builders suggest running Windows on an SSD and games on an HDD to optimize the balance between performance and price My previous gaming desktop did that, and there is a lot of logic to it However, the PS5 and Xbox Series X spoiled me with faster loading games If you choose the right M2 SSD, you will get even faster performance on your PC

However, I was surprised that the WD Black, optimized for gaming, did not improve loading times in any meaningful way; how much faster can FFXIV load times be than 4 seconds? But if you look at the read and write speeds that the WD Black offers compared to the WD Blue, there should be a significant difference between the two, not just a second or so

After speaking with some WD staff, I got to the root of the problem: my motherboard does not support PCIe 40 For those of you who are not familiar with this powerful protocol, PCIe 40 allows GPUs and SSDs to utilize more bandwidth when transferring data It is obviously more complicated than that, but for the purposes of this article, it means that a new GPU or SSD may not work at maximum output on a motherboard that only supports PCIe 30

Of course, new GPUs and SSDs will work on PCIe 30 motherboards Therefore, we had no problems installing the WD Black SSD (or the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 GPU) However, without the latest and greatest motherboard, you are limited to what the latest and greatest SSD can do

Since I have no plans to build an entirely new PC right now, my honest assessment of WD Black SSDs is this: they are easy to install, incredibly fast, and not much different than the non-gaming SSDs on most motherboards available today Of course, this will change in the next year or two

As for whether we'd recommend upgrading to the more expensive WD Black, it depends largely on the type of hardware you have and how much you're willing to spend; at $230 for a 1TB model, it's not a cheap component On older motherboards, the Blue model will work just fine

If you don't yet have the hardware needed to run PCIe 40 at top speed, you'll need to spend a few hundred dollars more for the right CPU and motherboard For now, you basically need an AMD Ryzen 3000 or 5000 chip and an AMD X570 or B550 motherboard Some Intel motherboard chipsets support PCIe 40, but Intel desktop CPUs do not currently support PCIe 40 (6]

Still, if you have the money to spare and the right hardware in mind, Black may make HDD load times look downright lethargic