Go Fast for Less With a Samsung 980 Pro 1TB for $99: Real Deals

While the 1Ttb 980 Pro is a good deal it's silly to claim that you can never have enough storage.

Yeah, it is a nice deal for the 980 Pro. Albeit to make full use of it, one needs a M.2 PCIe 4.0 slot on their MB. As rough orientation, AMD had support for PCIe 4.0 SSDs starting with the 3rd-gen Ryzen, and Intel with the 11th-gen Core CPU (/Intel 500 series chipsets). So everything older than that (3 years with AMD and less than 2 years with Intel), it is not likely to fully support a PCIe 4.0 SSD. One can still use it with a M.2 PCIe 3.0 slot, but it will cap at the PCIe 3.0 speed.

For me this issue was one of the reasons why I went with AMD this time (having upgraded from a DDR3 rig), specifically with a X670E MB, which has a Gen5x4 M.2 slot, and 3 more (the 4 of which are actually running out for me, having two filled, a 3rd reserved for Gen5, and for the 4th hoping that manufacturers realize that there is a demand for high-capacity SSDs even if at Gen3 speed, such as the Crucial P3 4TB, but a bit cheaper).

Intel is still lagging behind in that regard, with Raptor Lake's PCIe 5.0 lanes limited to 16 - meaning that if one goes for a high-end Z790 and then wants to make use of the M.2 Gen5 slot, that cuts the GPU slot to x8... which is still plenty of bandwidth for current GPUs, effectively like PCIe 4 x16, but not necessarily much future-proof.

In any case, if one considers upgrading with a tight budget, I would say that is worth looking for something which has Gen4 M.2, as it is a nice boost. And 1TB may not sound much, but e.g. Steam lets one move the installation folder of games easily. So alongside a storage drive, one can have more than 1 TB of installed games, while not missing out on that boost and then another boost with DirectStorage, for whichever gaming mood of the week.

Not the headline deal but further down on the page, got three of the Samsung 34in WQHD 75Hz monitors for the $229 price. While 75Hz is nothing much these days they are way better than the 60Hz 23in FHD 10 year old Acers they are replacing. These will go on computers I've built for my brothers and my son. Too bad they are now out of stock since Walmart dropped the price to $199.