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 M.2 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 M.2 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 M.2 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 M.2 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 M.2 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 M.2 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 4.0. For those of you who are not familiar with this powerful protocol, PCIe 4.0 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 3.0.

Of course, new GPUs and SSDs will work on PCIe 3.0 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 4.0 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 4.0, but Intel desktop CPUs do not currently support PCIe 4.0. (6]

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