Do I even need a desktop anymore?

Get any laptop with TB3 or higher and some of the fastest USB C 3.1 ports you can get.

This will let you dock into powerful solutions around your laptop for HTPC duty or for when you need some extra juice (for instance some GPU housings available with power bricks, plug into laptop TB3 port and boom - you got desktop GPU power for your laptop when @ home)

Anyway thats just one use case - latest USB/Thunderbolt standard lets you access things that make your laptop more 'desktop-ey' when you need it!

 

I've moved away from desktops long ago, now my debate is should I stick with Windows or go Android?

 

Thunderbolt 3

 

I still love desktops - cause I love building computers and being able to swap out parts and taking care on cable management and shit.

Also the power is umatchable in portable and even portables do max out even through our fastest USB interfaces like - i mentioned you can get a GPU housing and connect it to a laptop when you're home to get desktop power thats fine for most people.

But if you want the absolute fastest in GPU and CPU horsepower - desktop parts are still king.

As we go lower on fab nodes this is not always going to remain true.

 

Sweet - yes I have the Samsung 960 Evo and its plugged into an add-in card i have plugged into my mobo's PCI-E slot - I have a few m.2 slots but found out these are capped at x2 speed - i got full x4 speed using the add-in card which basically means about four times as fast as SATA SSD - life changing, OS loads up super quickly. Basically my mobo was one of the very first which allowed you to boot to the OS on a pCI-E SSD and its built in m.2 slots have a bit less bandwidth than available through the actual PCI-E slots on the board.

My OS loads up so frickin fast now! This is one of the most meaningful upgrades attainable right now - going from SATA to PCI-E interface for storage....

 

There are people putting 4 of these in RAID 1 stripes on specialty add in cards - each one taking x4 out of a x16 PCI-E Slot.

Speed is absolutely off the charts:



HighPoint SSD7101A-1 NVMe RAID Controller Review – Samsung and Toshiba M.2 SSDs Tested - The SSD Review

I have one measly quarter of this performance and Im super happy with it..

 

Also would just note - you are likely going to be practically limited in laptops to a 2-stick Raid 1 stripe of m.2 drives, conceivably some monstrous enthusiast 10k+ concept laptop could come with 4 of these sticks inside a mobo made for it

But on PC? You can get controller cards from multiple manufacturers and make this work on any pc with a x16 PCI-E slot (which is all of them really) and any mobo that is not 4 years old should let you boot from it (though there are some boot/OS questions to sort out once you are deciding to pursue this, Win10 should work but question if XP needs a special hack or something)

 

Funny this came up, I was just reading about M.2 for the first time yesterday. Do I need a M.2 slot to use one of these SSDs or can I plug it into the SATA slot? Wondering if I can use it on my old laptop which currently uses a 2.5" SATA SSD.

Apparently SSD prices have been falling quite a bit lately, you can get a 500GB for under $100 now.

 

If you don't have an m.2 slot then all you need is an add in card, and a minimum x4 slot for PCI-E.

Almost all motherboards currently in use have these save the most ancient.

The only trick of it is that Intel Chipsets that supported booting the OS off of PCI-E and not SATA started with the Z97 chipset - around 2014 or so.

So you could probably get an add in card that would make it read-able by OS in later mobo than that but you could boot, most likely, on any mobo made 2014+

Im using a card like this for my mobo:

Silverstone Expansion Card Model SST-ECM20 - Newegg.ca

Mostly cause of speed limitations on my native m.2 slots - but could work in a board without m.2 slots just fine!

 

^^That's for a desktop, I am talking laptop. My laptop is older than 2014 so I guess I am out of luck.

 

Probably out of luck in your current lappy as I expect you are not blessed with a Thunderbolt 3 interface which is a 2015-2016 thing when it started coming out.

Options exist for laptops like this:

AKiTiO Thunder3 PCIe SSD | 1.2TB Thunderbolt 3 NVMe SSD | AKiTiO

Thunderbolt is like a pipeline into the PCI-E lanes on your motherboard so external devices are able to pipe into your CPU super quickly.

There might be a tiny bit of overhead but you should be able to achieve similar to desktop performance even with external hookups on modern laptops.