As prices of DDR5 memory kits set records in the U.S., in Europe they begin to show signs of descend. At least, this is what a DDR5 pricing graph published to a renowned PC enthusiasts community is meant to show. We also analyzed the pricing of several DDR5 kits from prominent suppliers in Germany, and we can certainly say that these kits cost less than they used to cost just weeks ago.

The chart allegedly depicts aggregated pricing of an 'average' 32 GB DDR5 kit across the European Union from late July 2025 to February 2026. Prices hovered around €95 (minimum, green) – €100 (average, blue) through early autumn, then began climbing sharply in October, accelerating through November and peaking in early February at roughly €430 – €470 on average, with minimum prices slightly lower. Toward the end of the period, both lines trend downward, which may either indicate a modest correction after the spike or an actual drop in prices due to certain factors.

While the graph from deserves attention, it lacks clarity and details (which kits, which countries, retailers, is VAT included, etc.), so we decided to do our own price trend checks of five popular 32 GB DDR5-6000/6400 dual-channel kits* from renowned brands like Crucial, Corsair, G.Skill, Kingston, and Patriot in Amazon Germany using the CamelCamelCamel service.

Among the 32 GB DDR5-6000/6400 kits that we checked, only two models — from Corsair and Kingston — demonstrated steep declines: from around €480 in early February to around €425 now for Corsair and from around €550 in early January to €463 at press time for Kingston. Nonetheless, all memory kits that we checked are now priced below their peaks several weeks ago. Note that all retail prices in Europe include VAT, unlike retail prices in the U.S.

We also checked price trends for the same 32 GB DDR5 kits in the U.S., and while the prices are far from where they were in September, some of them (G.Skill, Patriot) are also showing a modest correction, though we certainly cannot say that they are heading downwards.

While $400 is certainly way too high for a 32 GB DDR5-6000 memory kit in 2026, we are not going to see prices decline to normal levels due to shortages of memory chips, which is going to happen either when excessive demand for all kinds of memory drops, when new DRAM production capacities come online in late 2026 – 2027, or when DRAM makers transit to more efficient process technologies. Yet, the signs of correction clearly show that the retail DDR5 kits' prices are way too high, which affects demand significantly enough for retailers to slash their price tags.

*We used the following kits for our checks, as memory prices currently depend on supply, we did not specify based on whether the kits feature AMD Expo or Intel XMP profiles:

• Crucial Pro 32 GB DDR5-6400 (CP2K16G64C38U5B)
• Corsair Vengeance RGB 32 GB DDR5-6000 (CMH32GX5M2E6000C36)
• G.Skill Flare X5 Series 32 GB DDR5-6000 (F5-6000J3636F16GX2-FX5)
• Kingston Fury Beast 32 GB DDR5-6000 (KF560C30BBEK2-32)
• Patriot Viper Venom 32 GB DDR5-6000 (PVV532G600C36K)

Patriot just dropped a plethora of new memory modules and SSDs, as well as several storage solutions for mobile devices and gaming handhelds. Despite the ongoing DRAM and storage pricing squeeze, the Tom’s Hardware team checked out Patriot's booth at CES 2026 in Las Vegas, Nevada, to check out 15 new DDR5 RAM kits, as well as a DDR5 SODIMM with a maximum capacity of 48GB (1x48GB).

Out of all the displayed modules, the company's Viper Xtreme 5 Aurum stood out with its delightfully opulent, flashy exterior. The company said that it designed the color specifically to blend well with both light and dark builds, ensuring that it wouldn’t stand out as either too bright or too dark. But, you might need to wear a pair of gloves to not litter it with pesky fingerprints. Patriot also showed off a prototype with the same eye-catching heat-spreader, running in a 2x24GB configuration, at speeds of up to 10,000 MT/s.

There are also four Viper-branded SSDs — the Viper VP4300 Lite PCIe 4.0 x4 SSD available in 500GB, 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB capacities, and the Viper PV563 PCIe 5.0 x4 SSD, which you can get in either 1TB, 2TB, or 4TB capacities. Additionally, the PV563 can be had with either a graphene strip or a full heatsink. Lastly, there’s the top-of-the-line Viper PV593, offering up 14,000 and 13,000 MB/s sequential read and write speeds, plus a random read speed of up to 2,000K IOPS, Patriot claims. We have no word on how much the memory or storage might cost you; however, as pricing for both DRAM and NAND storage remain extremely volatile. An IDC report suggests that PC prices may jump as much as 8% as a result.

Aside from these PC components, it also released a wide range of USB flash drives and enclosures for those that need portable memory on the go. The company also introduced a Storage Hub designed for mobile devices. This plugs in to your gear via a USB-C 3.2 Gen 1 connector, giving you one HDMI port capable of 4K@60Hz and a USB-C PD 3.0 port that accepts up to 100 watts of power. More importantly, it will give you extra storage options in 128GB, 256GB, 512GB, and 1TB capacities, allowing you to turn your phone or tablet into a proper productivity tool.

Nintendo Switch 2 owners are also getting another microSD Express option with the Patriot EP Express. This PCIe 3.0 x1 expansion card delivers sequential read and write speeds of up to 800 MB/s and 600 MB/s, allowing you to quickly load games directly from it. Aside from that, it also supports 4K and high-bitrate video recording, allowing you to use it with video recording and photography equipment as well, available in 256GB, 512GB, and 1TB capacities. The company also showed off a DDR5-10000 engineering sample with a 48GB (2x24GB) capacity. While this is still being tested, it gives us a glimpse of what Patriot has in store for us in the future. But you might want to start saving up now if you have your eye on any of the new products.

Patriot Memory has been around a very long time, and we’re glad to see some newer, faster drives coming out of its halls. Known for its inexpensive and practical SSDs, the company is being a bit bolder with some of its latest products, like the Viper PV593. This is a high-end, PCIe 5.0 SSD that promises up to 14 GB/s of bandwidth for your newest build. At the same time, it’s positioned to be more affordable without any fanfare or extra flair. RGB drives have their place, but we’re glad Patriot took a more straightforward approach with this one.

Pairing “budget” and “high-end PCIe 5.0” seems like a combined misnomer, but in fact, the market is unexpectedly headed that way. When some of these drives were taped out, there were early warning signs of impending doom for AI memory demand, but in past years, SSDs have resisted price increases quite well. It’s therefore reasonable to assume that Patriot planned the PV593 at a time when it could get a drive like it out the door, and less-informed builders or prebuilt buyers would just assume it’s among the best. Its price savings would keep it attractive for those markets.

Now that we’re seeing much larger and swifter price swings than we have in a long time, the PV593 seems to make even more sense because you might need to save every dollar on storage with a lot of pressure to build early at hand. In fact, this market puts more stress on Patriot because many users will opt for a solid PCIe 4.0 drive or go all-in on the very best PCIe 5.0 drives without much exposure in between. That’s a psychological perspective because, in reality, the biggest costs are from the NAND flash, and that’s going to be a problem at all levels. This means that a drive like the PV593 needs to be priced very carefully, and, at the time of review, that’s just not the case, with the recently reviewed Adata XPG Mars 980 Blade handling that much better at the moment. The drive still makes sense for a system with multiple PCIe 5.0 SSDs, where it could slot in beneath your fastest primary drive. Still, the relative attractiveness very much depends on volatile price competitiveness.

Patriot Viper PV593 Specifications

The Patriot Viper PV593, or PV593 for short, is – on paper – available at 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB. At the time of review only the 1TB and 4TB were in stock at $159.99 and $399.99, respectively. These prices are high compared to the competition but they may be MSRP rather than street and, further, recent massive cost increases for SSD components has changed the pricing baseline. You may be able to find this drive available at a more reasonable price but we’re judging things based on current market conditions.

It’s a high-end drive capable of hitting 14,000 / 13,000 MB/s for sequential reads and writes and up to 2,000K / 1,650K random read and write IOPS. These numbers are pretty standard for a high-end PCIe 5.0 SSD but we have seen higher. The warranty is also standard at five years with up to 700TB of writes per TB capacity, which is higher than the 600TB baseline but not considerably so. However, if prices are equal with other drives in its class this might tip the PV593 into your favor.

Patriot Viper PV593 Software and Accessories

For more information about your drive we recommend the CrystalDiskInfo application which is free to download and use. Its partner application, CrystalDiskMark, is a solid baseline benchmark that’s also free. For cloning and data backup we recommend the free MultiDrive, although this is Windows-only at this time. For other operating systems or booting we suggest Clonezilla or SystemRescue.

Patriot Viper PV593: A Closer Look

We’ll cut to the chase as this drive doesn’t have a fancy heatsink or heatspreader: it’s a double-sided drive with a full-fledged SSD controller, one DRAM package, and four NAND flash packages. We expected a double-sided drive at this capacity and the specifications from Patriot suggest that all capacities are double-sided. This is similar to the case in our recent Adata XPG Mars 980 Blade review, possibly done to save on cost.

The form factor used for the flash packages also emphasizes the intent to minimize the use of space. A majority of the heat production will be on the top side so this drive should not be difficult to cool if you choose to do so. This is further helped by the fact that the PV593, unlike the 980 Blade, uses LPDDR4x in a single package for the DRAM.

For full details on the Silicon Motion SM2508 SSD controller please see our original review where we discuss some of the technical aspects of the hardware. Now that the controller is out with a range of flash we can sum it up as being a high-end controller with eight flash channels and DRAM, making it one of the fastest consumer options out there. The exact height of its performance depends on the flash being used.

In this case, we can interpret the flash coding “B58R” part to indicate that this is Micron’s B58R 232-layer TLC flash. This flash has been very popular on a number of drives but is technically outdated by today’s standards. Micron’s 276-Layer TLC flash on the Crucial T710 and SanDisk’s BiCS8 TLC flash on the Kingston Fury Renegade G5, to name two leading drives, both have advantages over the older flash. Using older flash can reduce cost, however, which is becoming a more serious concern with challenges due to an emerging memory supercycle. When an entire class of products is seeing inflated costs any savings can be more impactful.

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Comparison Products

We select relevant drives for comparison to keep our charts more readable and give you a better sense of how each drive compares with similarly priced solutions. In most cases, you will not be looking at a 4TB Patriot Viper VP593 thinking that it’s a good way to save money on your newest barebones build. This is a high-end drive, and even if it’s intended to be on the low end of that pricing range, if it struggles, you need to know about it.

We begin with the two heavy hitters: the SanDisk WD Black SN8100 and the Samsung 9100 Pro. WD/SanDisk and Samsung have long made the drives by which all are judged, and any high-end review needs to incorporate their data. Crucial's T710 and Kingston's Fury Renegade G5 demonstrate what different flash can do on a cutting-edge platform, with the knowledge that SanDisk’s solution has unique firmware in comparison. We’re also looking at what Phison has planned with its E28 SSD controller – we have a review of a retail drive coming up next – and what it can still muster for its original E26 with the Sabrent Rocket 5. Rounding out the list, we have the very similar Adata XPG Mars 980 Blade, which is a direct competitor to the PV593, and the DRAM-less Biwin Black Opal X570, which is also vying for the niche “budget” high-end PCIe 5.0 market segment.

Trace Testing — 3DMark Storage Benchmark

Built for gamers, 3DMark’s Storage Benchmark focuses on real-world gaming performance. Each round in this benchmark stresses storage based on gaming activities including loading games, saving progress, installing game files, and recording gameplay video streams. Future gaming benchmarks will be DirectStorage-inclusive and we also include notes about which drives may be future-proofed.

The Patriot Viper PV593 is a great games drive if you’re dead set on having a high-end PCIe 5.0 SSD for that. Yeah, it’s nowhere near the fastest in 3DMark, but it’s still very fast and faster than any PCIe 40 SSD. It should provide ample performance for DirectStorage titles when they arrive. You don’t need cutting-edge hardware for gaming but having enough space – 4TB is a good size – is important. Is the PV593 overkill for this? Absolutely, but you can say you have a high-end drive and potentially save some money at the same time, if that’s your thing.

Trace Testing — PCMark 10 Storage Benchmark

PCMark 10 is a trace-based benchmark that uses a wide-ranging set of real-world traces from popular applications and everyday tasks to measure the performance of storage devices. The results are particularly useful when analyzing drives for their use as primary/boot storage devices and in work environments.

We’d say the same for productivity. The PV593 is fast enough that your workstation or HEDT won’t complain about it. Again, there are faster drives, but this will beat any PCIe 4.0, and it should be able to do it at a lower price than its peers. Well, theoretically anyway. We’re still waiting for prices to settle down, but Patriot needs to aim in that direction. If you want the very best, we recommend waiting for E28-based drives, though the Black SN8100 is an excellent pick if you need a drive right away.

Console Testing — PlayStation 5 Transfers

The PlayStation 5 is capable of taking one additional PCIe 4.0 or faster SSD for extra game storage. While any 4.0 drive will technically work, Sony recommends drives that can deliver at least 5,500 MB/s of sequential read bandwidth for optimal performance. In our testing, PCIe 5.0 SSDs don’t bring much to the table and generally shouldn’t be used in the PS5, especially as they may require additional cooling. Check our Best PS5 SSDs article for more information.

Our testing utilizes the PS5’s internal storage test and manual read/write tests with over 192GB of data both from and to the internal storage. Throttling is prevented where possible to see how each drive operates under ideal conditions. While game load times should not deviate much from drive to drive, our results can indicate which drives may be more responsive in long-term use.

The PV593 would be a great PS5 drive, too. The problem is there are many PCIe 4.0 drives that will perform just as well and will cost you a lot less. Over time this may change as we get newer consoles and as PCIe 4.0 drives start coming up in relative cost. It might be an okay strategy to get a PCIe 5.0 drive now for plans you have down the road and parking it in the PS5 is better than in a drawer. That said, we would not recommend the PV593 if you are strictly buying an SSD for the PS5.

Transfer Rates — DiskBench

We use the DiskBench storage benchmarking tool to test file transfer performance with a custom, 50GB dataset. We write 31,227 files of various types, such as pictures, PDFs, and videos to the test drive, then make a copy of that data to a new folder, and follow up with a reading test of a newly-written 6.5GB zip file. This is a real world type workload that fits into the cache of most drives.

[Charts]

The PV593 scores more or less the same as the XPG Mars 980 Blade, which is exactly as expected – the two drives use the same hardware. We question why the copy performance is this bad, considering we know the flash can do better, but it’s impossible to deny that this “budget” flash choice impacts read and write performance, which, in turn, affects copying. One reason is that newer controllers are optimized for faster flash, and even relatively minor differences, say in latency, can extend to differences in areas like file transfers.

Running flash slower can have secondary benefits such as improved power efficiency or higher effective endurance and it’s possible some trade-offs were made in firmware to make a drive like this happen. From the user’s perspective this means the drive has to translate that to cost savings if you’re an educated buyer. Prebuilt machine makers and everyday builders might look at the maximum specs and call it a day, though, but we always recommend exercising caution on big purchases.

Synthetic Testing — ATTO / CrystalDiskMark

ATTO and CrystalDiskMark (CDM) are free and easy-to-use storage benchmarking tools that SSD vendors commonly use to assign performance specifications to their products. Both of these tools give us insight into how each device handles different file sizes and at different queue depths for both sequential and random workloads.

No real surprises in ATTO; the drive performs mostly as expected, with dips following what we see for the XPG Mars 980 Blade. We’ve concluded that the drop we see with 2MiB reads is a factor of the flash rather than the controller, as we also see a similar drop with the older Rocket 5.

In past reviews, when we first came across Micron’s 232-layer TLC flash – which has six planes rather than four, a characteristic also of YMTC’s 232-Layer TLC – we assumed this was a matter of alignment. In brief, we know flash uses 16KiB physical pages, and if each die can parallelize that six ways via the plane count, and we’re juggling two dies per each of eight flash channels, we’re talking about 1.5MiB of data at a time. The result is, perhaps, a drop at 2MiB without full recovery possible at 4MiB. We also see this with writes in ATTO in some cases, which does apply to the PV593. This does not necessarily translate directly to real-world performance drops for a variety of reasons. Data usually isn’t pretty or uniform, and you have more than just storage in play. For specialized applications, this might be something to keep in consideration, though.

We see some poor marks with CDM’s sequential results, too, although the only one really worth looking at is reads at QD1. This is a typical transfer workload and is one area you would expect good performance from a high-end drive. The PV593 and XPG Mars 980 Blade both fall short and lag the DRAM-less Black Opal X570. DRAM helps more with random workloads, so this gap is better explained by the flash being used. We would add that the PV593 is 4TB, which can put more strain on a drive, especially at higher speeds, but the 9100 Pro still makes a mockery of it. The PV593 does good work with queue depth and would be adequate as a secondary drive, but you can definitely get better all-around primary drives in this market segment.

Random read and write latency for the drive at QD1 – and QD1 is the most common consumer workload for 4KB, with most workloads being QD2 at worst, with a blanket maximum around QD4 – is thankfully better. The drive performs perfectly well for both, and this is in part because you aren’t hitting multiple dies with such small I/O. While Micron’s newer flash is still better here, as demonstrated with the T710, the older flash is good enough to surpass all but the newer PCIe 5.0 drives. We still think you should go with the Black SN8100 if latency is king for your intended workload, but if you just want a PCIe 5.0 upgrade with reasonable performance, then the PV593 would be better than any of the earlier E26-based drives. We have the Rocket 5 here as a bit of an exception because it can rival newer drives in sustained writes, as we’ll see in the next section.

Sustained Write Performance and Cache Recovery

Official write specifications are only part of the performance picture. Most SSDs implement a write cache, which is a fast area of pseudo-SLC (single-bit) programmed flash that absorbs incoming data. Sustained write speeds can suffer tremendously once the workload spills outside of the cache and into the "native" TLC (three-bit) or QLC (four-bit) flash. Performance can suffer even more if the drive is forced to fold, which is the process of migrating data out of the cache in order to free up space for further incoming data.

We use Iometer to hammer the SSD with sequential writes for 15 minutes to measure both the size of the write cache and performance after the cache is saturated. We also monitor cache recovery via multiple idle rounds. This process shows the performance of the drive in various states as well as the steady state write performance.

The PV593 puts out an impressive 12.5 GB/s for over 64 seconds with an 800GB pSLC cache. This is a large cache but not the largest we’ve seen, and in technical terms it could be significantly bigger. However, it’s a good compromise between having too large a cache – this can lead to inconsistent sustained performance and higher latency in edge cases – and too small a cache. A smaller cache is usually preferable for consistency, but it depends on the user and workload. As high-end drives like the PV593 are intended to really move data, going middle-of-the-road is not a bad idea.

If we look at steady state write performance – this is the average write speed after the cache is exhausted – we see that the older Rocket 5 is still the fastest drive on record. That drive is using the same flash as the PV593 but with cache optimization it has a very fast TLC mode. The E28, which is the successor controller to the Rocket 5’s E26, has a somewhat similar cache strategy but with its BiCS8 TLC flash the baseline TLC speed is lower. What this means is, if you are buying a drive purely for sustained writes then the newer drives aren’t quite as exciting as you might expect. That includes the PV593. Your interest should be more on the power efficiency gains.

Power Consumption and Temperature

We use the Quarch HD Programmable Power Module to gain a deeper understanding of power characteristics. Idle power consumption is an important aspect to consider, especially if you're looking for a laptop upgrade as even the best ultrabooks can have mediocre stock storage. Desktops may be more performance-oriented with less support for power-saving features, so we show the worst-case.

Some SSDs can consume watts of power at idle while better-suited ones sip just milliwatts. Average workload power consumption and max consumption are two other aspects of power consumption but performance-per-watt, or efficiency, is more important. A drive might consume more power during any given workload, but accomplishing a task faster allows the drive to drop into an idle state more quickly, ultimately saving energy.

For temperature recording we currently poll the drive’s primary composite sensor during testing with a ~22°C ambient. Our testing is rigorous enough to heat the drive to a realistic ceiling temperature.

There is no doubt that the PV593 and other newer, high-end PCIe 5.0 drives handle power much more gracefully than the first generation. The Rocket 5 is inefficient in comparison with high power usage even at idle, albeit that is desktop idle. With proper cooling and a high-end system, the difference in power draw and heat production is relatively small, but this scales with more drives. We do think that upgrading from, say, a PCIe 3.0 drive to a newer PCIe 5.0 one can make sense if you want a sleek-running system.

In other cases, such an upgrade is unneeded. If you already have a Gen 5 drive or find a good sale on an original generation one, you can certainly make do without reaching for the very best. The PV593 falls between these options, as it’s not as performant as the very latest but should be somewhat more affordable. It’s also not too hard to cool, as we reached a maximum of 69°C during write testing, leaving about 14°C of headroom in a decently cooled system. That’s not amazing, but it’s definitely better than anything we saw out of the first generation of high-end PCIe 5.0 SSDs.

Test Bench and Testing Notes

We use an Alder Lake platform with most background applications such as indexing, Windows updates, and anti-virus disabled in the OS to reduce run-to-run variability. Each SSD is prefilled to 50% capacity and tested as a secondary device. Unless noted, we use active cooling for all SSDs.

Patriot Viper PV593 Bottom Line

The Patriot Viper PV593 looks attractive from a distance, but as you get up and close with the drive, it ends up being mediocre at best. Its performance is still high relative to most drives, and any PCIe 4.0 drive, and its power efficiency is better than the original crop of PCIe 5.0 drives.

The problem is, that’s no longer good enough. We recently reviewed the Adata XPG Mars 980 Blade, which has the same hardware, and that drive left us with a better feeling because it had some availability at bang-on pricing at the time of review. The PV593, instead, looks to be too little, too late, and too expensive at that. We suspect this could change, but there are enough drives in this exact spot – the Acer Predator GM9000 is another example – that it might be difficult for it to gain traction. This is especially true for Patriot, which doesn’t really have a flagship tradition, and even if it did, this drive isn’t that.

To break it down more simply, if you’re going for a budget high-end PCIe 5.0 SSD, you already have multiple choices, and the Viper PV593 just doesn’t stand out. If you’re spending this kind of money, you’re probably also looking at the excellent SanDisk WD Black SN8100, the Samsung 9100 Pro for 8TB goodness, the Crucial T710 with its newer Micron flash, or even the Kingston Fury Renegade G5, a well-known name with good support. We also have E28-based drives like Corsair’s MP700 Pro XT coming out, which just means even more options.

The PV593 has to compete on price, and at the moment, it’s just not doing so. Patriot is definitely capable of doing that and, in fact, is known for its inexpensive but capable drives, but that’s a double-edged sword when you’re looking at the higher end of products, especially in such a tumultuous storage market.

That leaves the Viper PV593 in an unenviable place: it has to be the least expensive option to make sense, but the amount of budget shoppers looking at this class of drives might be short in number. We suspect this drive will make more sense in regions of the world with fewer options, and it could also be a good pick for prebuilts and budget builders who need to check the high-end PCIe 5.0 SSD box. This is also true of the XPG Mars 980 Blade, but we feel the Adata drive is in a slightly better spot, given it’s already been priced effectively. We’re fully aware of the fact that Adata does not have the best reputation, but even with some enthusiast stigma, it can hold its own against Patriot. We reluctantly have to give the PV593 a weaker score, given the current market outlook, but we want to emphasize that it is not a bad drive at all. It’s just not targeting the right segment at the right time, and you will probably have better options.

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Patriot Memory has revealed a slew of memory devices at CES 2025 commemorating its 40th Anniversary. Founded in 1985, Patriot started as PDP Systems, named after its founders, primarily focusing on supplying PC manufacturers with DRAM modules. PDP launched a new lineup of DDR SDRAM memory in 2003, dubbed "Patriot Memory" which later transformed into the Patriot we know today.

At Las Vegas, Patriot showcased several products including new CAMM2, LPCAMM2 modules, CFExpress 2.0 cards, CKD-equipped memory kits, and several new SSDs including its first DRAM-less PCIe 5.0 SSD. First on the list, Patriot has expanded its existing Viper Xtreme 5 lineup of RAM with a special 40th-anniversary edition and a variant with a built-in CKD (Client Clock Driver).

The 40th Anniversary version comes in a blue heatsink stamped with a "40 Years" label, with speeds of up to 8,000 MT/s. No special edition is complete without RGB, and Patriot delivers, with RGB atop the heat spreader. The exact capacity and specifications are unknown, however, since the regular version offers CL38 timing, we can expect much of the same for this model.

Following is the Viper Xtreme 5 CKD version that lacks RGB but can offer speeds of up to DDR5-9600. The kit carries a silverish tone, emanating a professional aesthetic. The CKD is a small chip that acts as a buffer and amplifies the clock signal; increasing stability and allowing for higher frequencies, as seen on this kit.

Building on the success of its existing iLuxe series, Patriot showcased the iLuxe Stick C for Apple Devices. This cute flash drive-esque stick acts as a media backup solution for your iPhone and iPad with capacities of up to 2TB. Since modern mobile phones don't offer upgradable storage, this is a convenient one-stop solution to manage storage while preserving your valuable photos and videos. Just like the iLuxe Cube, expect the Stick C to offer a robust management system; assigning a dedicated folder to each Apple ID in your household.

As CES was just an exhibition, information on the retail pricing and availability of many products is scarce. We can expect more details from Patriot in the near future.

The Patriot Viper VP4300 Lite just about has it all, on paper, taking on the best SSDs. It offers up to 4TB of single-sided goodness capable of over 7 GB/s of performance, and it's inexpensive on top of all that. It matches its rival and our best budget SSD, the Teamgroup MP44, on almost all marks, and promises to run just as efficiently and cooler if anything. All that sounds great, but there's one big caveat: The 4TB Viper VP4300 Lite uses QLC flash, albeit the newest available on the market.

This is reminiscent of the HP FX700, a drive that pleasantly surprised us. Unlike the FX700, the VP4300 Lite 4TB is actually readily available on Amazon for $234 and it’s pretty compelling. It launched with TLC flash, like its competitors the Addlink A93 and Lexar NM790, but our review sample arrived with QLC NAND instead. The drive holds its own where it matters and does so with excellent efficiency and low heat output. That makes it a winner for laptops, HTPCs, the PS5, some portable gaming systems like the Asus ROG Ally X, and as a secondary or gaming drive for desktop PCs. But the switch from the original TLC to QLC NAND still disappoints. 

Patriot Viper VP4300 Lite Specifications

The Patriot Viper VP4300 Lite, from here on out known as the VP4300 Lite, is available at 500GB, 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB. At the moment these are going for $46.99, $64.99, $109.99, and $239.99. Assuming the non-4TB SKUs are still TLC-based, this pricing is pretty good. It would probably be the best value for all three of the lower capacities, beating out the Teamgroup MP44, its primary budget rival.

However, at 4TB with QLC flash, the VP4300 Lite doesn’t edge out the MP44 and the Lexar NM790 is close enough to make it the better pick. Those two competitors are likely still TLC-based as both manufacturers have models with the same controller but with QLC flash — the Teamgroup MP44Q and the Lexar NQ790, respectively. We've seen similar concerns with previous SSDs, where companies switch from TLC to QLC NAND without changing the model name. It's a terrible practice as it muddies the waters and potential buyers can't know for certain which drive they're getting.

The VP4300 Lite is rated for up to 7,400 / 6,400 MB/s for sequential reads and writes and up to 1,000K / 700K random read and write IOPS. The 4TB model takes a small hit to write performance in both categories, an expected side effect of using QLC flash. Patriot might have left open the door to this possibility at launch, given the NM790 and Addlink A93 are rated higher.

The drive comes with a five-year warranty and 800TB of writes per TB capacity, except for the 4TB SKU that has 2,000 TBW (500TB per TB of capacity). This also points to Patriot leaving open the door to a flash switch as the NM790, MP44, and A93 are all warrantied for 3,000TB at this capacity. 

Patriot Viper VP4300 Lite Software and Accessories

 Patriot doesn’t have much in the way of software downloads for this drive. It does have a product sheet and a PS5 compatibility list, but neither of these are particularly useful. Firmware updates are available for the 1TB and 2TB models and fix temperature sensor readings. Drives sold today should have updated firmware for the most part, though, and the 500GB and 4TB SKUs do not require this fix.

Patriot Viper VP4300 Lite: A  Closer Look

The VP4300 Lite has a basic heat spreading label and a sticker on the back with drive information. This drive is single-sided, which potentially makes it a better choice than double-sided SSDs for use in laptops and the PS5. It can be easier to cool a drive like this and we do recommend a heatsink if you can manage it, in the PS5 or a desktop computer, as the controller is known to act as a hotspot. That said, as we address in the Power Consumption and Temperature section on the next page, this drive runs surprisingly cool, in part due to its use of QLC flash. 

We’re familiar with this layout — an SSD controller, four NAND packages to keep the drive single-sided, power management circuitry, and no external DRAM. As mentioned previously, the controller can get a little hot in operation due to its small size and the lack of a metal-based IHS. It’s not likely to overheat but spreading the heat to the NAND packages would probably be a win-win scenario.

Taking a look at the controller, we have the Maxio MAP1602, in this case the MAP1602A-F3C U. This is a variation of the base MAP1602 that can be NVMe 2.0 compliant — not a big deal for a consumer SSD — and also handle 4TB of flash. Normally, the controller is made to handle up to four dies for each of its four channels, for a total of sixteen, and with dense 1Tb dies that gets it to 2TB. Allowing for eight dies a channel pushes the limit to 4TB, and with the Lexar NM790 and Addlink A93 we’ve seen that put to good use.

The VP4300 Lite then deviates from those SSDs by using QLC rather than TLC flash. This makes it closer to the HP FX700, which we deemed a halfway decent drive. YMTC’s 232-Layer QLC flash is relatively fast and very efficient. This makes it ideal for larger-capacity drives sold at a discount — great especially for a secondary or game drive. We’ve covered this flash before in the linked FX700 review, but the main point is that it uses a four-plane design — unlike the six- or hexa-plane design of the 1Tb/die TLC flash — which suggests optimizations for general performance over raw density or throughput.

That said, drives will vary not only in the flash used but also the controller. Given the performance specifications of the VP4300 Lite, a side-grade controller like the Phison E27T is a possible substitution. This is more likely to be the case at lower capacities, that is 2TB and below. If so, the drive might move from the launch YMTC 232-Layer TLC flash to Kioxia’s 162-Layer BiCS6 TLC flash, which is comparable in practice. Performance would be similar to the Corsair MP600 Elite, Inland TN470, Sabrent’s new Rocket 4, or in M.2 2230 form factor the Corsair MP600 Mini revision. This would not be a bad change in comparison to the launch hardware and should not be considered a downgrade.

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Comparison Products and Testing

The Patriot Viper VP4300 Lite is remarkably close in design to the Lexar NM790 and Addlink A93, drives with the same base hardware that also launched with TLC flash. Unlike those two, the VP4300 Lite has swapped to QLC at 4TB, making it a larger version of the HP FX700. One point of comparison is so-called mid-range PCIe 4.0 SSDs, budget drives that can’t quite use all of the interface’s bandwidth. Such drives include the recently-reviewed WD Blue SN5000, which performed very well for a QLC-based drive, and the older Teamgroup Carda Z44Q and Sabrent Rocket Q4.

For newer drives, perhaps the best 4.0 drive we’ve tested at this capacity is the Samsung 990 Pro that had updated flash for that capacity. But that's definitely a more expensive drive these days, currently sitting at $329 on Amazon. It’s more fair to compare the VP4300 Lite to older DRAM-equipped drives that usually use the Phison E18 controller — some may side grade to the InnoGrit IG5236 — such as the Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus-G, the Seagate FireCuda 530, the Teamgroup Carda A440 Pro Series, and the Netac NV7000. The first two can use Phison’s DirectStorage-optimized firmware, not tested here today.

Trace Testing — 3DMark Storage Benchmark

Built for gamers, 3DMark’s Storage Benchmark focuses on real-world gaming performance. Each round in this benchmark stresses storage based on gaming activities including loading games, saving progress, installing game files, and recording gameplay video streams. Future gaming benchmarks will be DirectStorage-inclusive and we include details of that where possible.

The use of QLC flash doesn’t hurt one bit in 3DMark, as the VP4300 Lite is neck-and-neck with the TLC-equipped NM790. There’s no real reason to get a more expensive drive if you’re just gaming. That's assuming retail prices are in fact higher, which isn't necessarily the case with the Addlink A93 at $231.

Games typically rely on reads and, contrary to popular opinion, often sequential reads. Such data will usually be pulled from the native flash rather than the faster pSLC mode. However, data written to pSLC may remain there at least in the short term — such as with benchmarks — to improve read performance. Further, QLC flash’s higher latency can be mitigated by intelligent flash management, and usually there’s a bottleneck on the software end anyway. The result is that newer QLC-based drives like this are an excellent choice for game storage except in cases where you’re moving or updating a huge amount of data at once. 

Trace Testing — PCMark 10 Storage Benchmark

PCMark 10 is a trace-based benchmark that uses a wide-ranging set of real-world traces from popular applications and everyday tasks to measure the performance of storage devices.

The VP4300 Lite again lands close to the NM790 and comes out slightly ahead on the whole. It’s very, very close to the recently-reviewed WD Blue SN5000, a drive using the newest QLC flash from Kioxia. That BiCS6 QLC surprised us with its performance, but we can see that the alternative from YMTC on the VP4300 Lite is comparable in practice, keeping in mind WD did not open the SN5000 to its full performance potential. For the record, Micron’s newest QLC — check out our recent review of the Crucial P310 to see it in action — is even better yet. The short summary here is that newer QLC flash is starting to reach performance levels once reserved only for TLC. 

Console Testing — PlayStation 5 Transfers

The PlayStation 5 is capable of taking one additional PCIe 4.0 or faster SSD for extra game storage, with some requirements. Launch models could not take 8TB drives but this limit has since been removed. While any 4.0 drive will work, Sony specifies drives that can deliver at least 5,500 MB/s of sequential read bandwidth are optimal. The PS5 does not support the host memory buffer (HMB) feature but DRAM-less drives will still work. In our testing, PCIe 5.0 SSDs did not bring much to the table and preferably should not be used in the PS5, especially as they may require additional cooling. Please see our Best PS5 SSDs article for more information.

Our testing utilizes the PS5’s internal storage test and manual read/write tests with over 192GB of data both from and to the internal storage. Throttling is prevented where possible to see how each drive operates under ideal conditions.

Dense QLC-based drives are not only good for PC gaming but PS5 gaming as well. It’s usually the best way to get as much capacity as possible for the lowest price per gigabyte. The PS5 isn’t particularly demanding and most games will load in about the same time regardless of drive, although it can be advantageous to have extra performance in some cases. The VP4300 Lite has no problem either way and is an excellent fit for the PS5. 

Transfer Rates — DiskBench

We use the DiskBench storage benchmarking tool to test file transfer performance with a custom, 50GB dataset. We write 31,227 files of various types, such as pictures, PDFs, and videos to the test drive, then make a copy of that data to a new folder, and follow up with a reading test of a newly-written 6.5GB zip file. This is a real world type workload that fits into the cache of most drives.

The VP4300 Lite uses the full bandwidth of its PCIe 4.0 interface and matches other high-end drives. The VP4300 Lite is plenty fast with transfers, at least within its pSLC cache. It has no possibility of catching the PCIe 5.0 Crucial T700, but neither does it have to — these drives are in a very different category. Its real competition lies in drives like the A93 and NM790, which so far offer no additional real-world performance gains over it. 

Synthetic Testing — ATTO / CrystalDiskMark

ATTO and CrystalDiskMark (CDM) are free and easy-to-use storage benchmarking tools that SSD vendors commonly use to assign performance specifications to their products. Both of these tools give us insight into how each device handles different file sizes and at different queue depths. For ATTO, we show both linear and logarithmic scaling on the Y-axis, with the latter showing more differentiation at low queue depths.

The ATTO results are relatively normal but somewhat underwhelming. This drive can’t quite push larger I/O as well as its TLC-based peers. Small I/O is good enough, though. The one anomaly here is a dip at the 1MiB block size for both reads and writes — we saw something similar with the FX700. This is not something that realistically hurts performance and appears to be a nuance of this flash.

CDM sequential performance is good but not great. SSDs are often sold based on theoretical sequential performance, usually at a queue depth of 32 when a queue depth of 1 is most typical. The VP4300 Lite is not a drive that’s going to feel slow. It will rocket past PCIe 3.0 drives and lower-end 4.0 models. It’s just not the fastest drive on the block, if that’s what you’re going for in a drive.

Random performance is usually more coveted and for this the VP4300 Lite is again good but not great. Specifically, its random 4K QD1 read performance — a metric commonly regarded as the most important for real world feel — is good enough to rival many fast drives.

Sustained Write Performance and Cache Recovery

Official write specifications are only part of the performance picture. Most SSDs implement a write cache, which is a fast area of (usually) pseudo-SLC programmed flash that absorbs incoming data.  Sustained write speeds can suffer tremendously once the workload spills outside of the cache and into the "native" TLC or QLC flash.

We use Iometer to hammer the SSD with sequential writes for over 15 minutes to measure both the size of the write cache and performance after the cache is saturated. We also monitor cache recovery via multiple idle rounds. This process shows the performance of the drive in various states as well as the steady state write performance.

The 4TB VP4300 Lite writes in pSLC mode at almost 5.6 GB/s for approximately 189 seconds. This means that the entire drive is utilized for caching, as 4-bit QLC flash acts in a 1-bit pSLC mode for write caching such that 4TB becomes 1TB. After this, the drive necessarily enters a folding state, which is where the drive is forced to empty the pSLC cache in order to free up the full amount of QLC space. Because the drive is trying to juggle already-written data as well as still-incoming data, performance drops drastically.

This is more pronounced with QLC than 3-bit TLC flash as TLC is faster by design, since it has to juggle fewer potential data states in each cell. With TLC flash, less sensitivity is required to read data and likewise data can be written more quickly with coarser granularity. Over time flash bandwidth has increased significantly from generation to generation, but even the newest QLC only manages 239 MB/s here after the cache is exhausted (we've seen up to ~320 MB/s with certain QLC drives, though not in 4TB trim yet). Performance would be better if the drive could write straight to the QLC flash, but this would require a smaller pSLC cache. It’s all about trade-offs.

Having a large cache makes a lot of sense for consumer duty because the average workload is bursty in nature — there’s a lot of idle time between significant I/O. However, if you’re one to do heavier workloads or large writes, this is detrimental to performance. Also, the cache shrinks as the drive gets filled, which can make it easier to exhaust the cache in some cases. For this reason QLC flash is often derided, but it’s actually a potentially good way to save on money for a secondary or gaming drive. It’s fine for a primary drive, too, but a light user probably won't need 4TB (yet). 

Power Consumption and Temperature

We use the Quarch HD Programmable Power Module to gain a deeper understanding of power characteristics. Idle power consumption is an important aspect to consider, especially if you're looking for a laptop upgrade as even the best ultrabooks can have mediocre stock storage. Desktops may be more performance-oriented with less support for power-saving features, so we show the worst-case.

Some SSDs can consume watts of power at idle while better-suited ones sip just milliwatts. Average workload power consumption and max consumption are two other aspects of power consumption but performance-per-watt, or efficiency, is more important. A drive might consume more power during any given workload, but accomplishing a task faster allows the drive to drop into an idle state more quickly, ultimately saving energy.

For temperature recording we currently poll the drive’s primary composite sensor during testing with a 21-22°C ambient. Our testing is rigorous enough to heat the drive to a realistic ceiling temperature. 

The VP4300 Lite’s excellent power efficiency is certainly a bright spot after the weak sustained performance. This drive is every bit as efficient as its TLC-equipped cousins — the A93 and NM790 — while being easily better than the rest of the competition. This makes it a great choice for laptops, the PS5, and HTPCs.

Better yet, the drive also runs cool, and in fact even cooler than the A93 and NM790. Our readings were so low that we thought it was in error. The 1TB and 2TB versions of this drive had a firmware update to fix improper temperature reporting in the past, but that was for reporting them too high. We confirmed with Patriot that this drive does indeed run super cool — they tested around 50°C while we were about 5°C lower — and that it does not require any sort of extra cooling. The results are in-line with the FX700, so we shouldn’t have been so surprised.

Test Bench and Testing Notes

We use an Alder Lake platform with most background applications such as indexing, Windows updates, and anti-virus disabled in the OS to reduce run-to-run variability. Each SSD is prefilled to 50% capacity and tested as a secondary device. Unless noted, we use active cooling for all SSDs.

Patriot Viper VP4300 Lite Bottom Line 

The Patriot Viper VP4300 Lite is by no means a bad drive. It actually performs well in most of our tests, but it does stumble a bit at common QLC flash problem areas. This includes sustained writes which, while not a 'normal' real-world workload for most people, can demonstrate performance pitfalls that might show up with long-term use and with a fuller drive. This is not disqualifying, as the drive could be an excellent choice as a secondary drive in a laptop/desktop PC or the PS5. It’s perhaps not the best choice for your primary and only drive in a system, especially a work system, but if you’re not filling it to the brim or doing a lot of large file shuffling it should be okay — certainly enough for a pure gaming system.

That reasoning applies to all QLC-based drives, but you’re probably not getting a 4TB just for casual use. You want that much capacity in a single M.2 drive for a reason. The VP4300 Lite also needs to be less expensive than the alternatives, since many of them — such as the NM790 and A93 — come with TLC flash, which is more consistent. If it clears that bar, it still must contend with slower QLC-based drives like the Blue SN5000, Crucial’s P3 Plus, and the Corsair MP600 Core XT. These drives are slower in sequential performance, which might not be terribly important for a drive like this. The VP4300 Lite is the most efficient of the bunch, though, and its native flash is a generation beyond what’s in the latter two drives. Investing in the newest hardware can have its benefits.

One of the biggest benefits is that the VP4300 Lite runs extremely cool. None of the listed drives should overheat in general use in most systems, and they are also all single-sided at 4TB — something that used to be rare and is preferred for laptops — but the VP4300 Lite should never require any sort of modification to avoid throttling. Right now, this drive is inexpensive enough to be a viable alternative to the drives listed above, although you can reach for the NM790 or keep an eye out for the Teamgroup MP44, which is often around the same price, including right now. There’s a reason the latter is our choice for best budget SSD. However, prices are constantly in flux and have generally been trending north over the past year or so.

It’s also worth remembering that the VP4300 Lite could and should  be TLC-based at lower capacities. This makes it the best value drive at 500GB, 1TB, and 2TB at the time of review. However, we do have to raise a warning flag as the swap to QLC could potentially happen with the VP4300 Lite at lower 1TB or 2TB capacities — though such a swap should be unlikely — which would make the Teamgroup MP44 a safer bet. Patriot would have been better served, in our view, if it had simply added a "Q" to the product name when it opted for different flash memory. Other companies have certainly taken that approach and we applaud such transparency.

The swap to QLC flash at 4TB isn’t something we like, but it’s understandable given the budget positioning of this drive and the fact that this QLC actually performs pretty well where it matters. Unfortunately, we can’t give it a higher score due to that change, especially when there are drives with TLC flash and DRAM that are simply more consistent — check out the Silicon Power XS70 4TB at $249 as an example. A slight shift in pricing can easily make the difference in overall value, however, so we recommend keeping an eye on street prices.

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Although solid-state drives with a PCIe 5.0 x4 host interface have been around for a while, drives that are capable of 14 GB/s sequential read speeds are still expensive. This is largely because the market has been dominated with Phison's PS5026-E26 controller. But this soon may change as Patriot is prepping a particularly interesting product — the Viper PD573 SSD, with a prototype being demonstrated at Computex 2024, that promises to bring together very high performance and a relatively low price.

The Patriot Viper PD573 is based on Maxio Technology's MAP1802 DRAM-less controller (four NAND channels at up to 4800 MT/s, 14.4 GB/s, 3.4M read IOPS, 3.5M write IOPS) designed for inexpensive SSDs and 3D NAND from Yangtze Memory Technologies Co. (YMTC). As for capacities, expect the Viper PD573 to come in 1TB, 2TB, 4TB, and 8TB configurations.

Patriot expects the Viper PD573 drives to hit up to 14,000 MB/s read speed as well as up to 12,000 MB/s write speed, which is a relatively conservative target given the numbers outlined by Maxio itself. The combination of a Maxio controller and YMTC 3D NAND memory is not new to Patriot, so the company is familiar in how to use and tune it, so it can probably achieve its performance targets.

There is a catch about achieving up to 14,000 MB/s sequential read speeds using a controller with four NAND channels. Considering encoding overhead of an ONFi interface (8b/10b encoding, overhead is 20%), to get to 14,000 MB/s, one needs to use 3D NAND with at least 4200 MT/s interface and that memory does not exist yet.

YMTC's existing 3D NAND devices with the Xtacking 3.0 architecture feature an interface of up to 2400 MT/s, which is fast. The company's next-generation Xtacking 4.0 devices could get an even faster interface given YMTC's unique architectural advantage over competitors (peripheral logic and PHY are produced on a different wafer using an optimized process technology, 3D NAND array produced on a separate wafer), but we do not know whether it is going to support a 4200 MT/s interface from the start.

In any case, the MAP1802 is at its early stages, both Maxio and Patriot will spend time optimizing the controller firmware, ready for YMTC's next-generation 3D NAND to enter mass production. Patriot believes that that YMTC will have the memory it needs to build inexpensive PCIe Gen5 x4 SSDs rather sooner than later, so the Viper PD573 could hit the market late in 2024, though this is an optimistic assumption.

Patriot demonstrated its upcoming flagship solid-state drive with a PCIe 5.0 x4 interface at CES this week. The Viper PV573 SSD has a massive cooler with a blower fan, but Patriot says it can boast up to 14,000 MB/s sequential read speed and maintain a temperature of 45ºC due to the powerful cooling system.

Patriot's Viper PV573 SSD is powered by the Phison PS5026-E26 controller and Micron's B58R 3D TLC NAND with a 2400 MT/s data transfer rate. The drives will be available in 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB capacities, and the manufacturer says that they will offer a sequential read speed of up to 14,000 MB/s and a sequential write speed of up to 12,000 MB/s, which is in line with premium drives based on this Phison E26 platform from some other makers and enough to make it one of the best SSDs available.

What differentiates Patriot's Viper PV573 from the rest of the range-topping PCIe Gen5 drives in an M.2-2280 form factor is its cooling system featuring an aluminum radiator, a heatshield, and a blower fan. The heatshield ensures that the fan blows air through the heatsink, not just against the heatsink, which Patriot says guarantees an operating temperature of just 45ºC. Such a relatively low temperature means that the drive will not throttle under high loads due to overheating.

Meanwhile, the cooling system is pretty large: it has a 16.5 mm z-height and requires and external power (which is why Patriot uses a cable with a SATA and four-pin Molex plug). The good news is that the blower fan design is rated at 25,000 hours, or two years and 10 months.

Patriot says that the Viper PV573 SSD will be available in 2024 and does not mention pricing. However, we would expect it to be close to release and be priced in line with other premium PCIe Gen5 SSDs. 

At CES 2024, Patriot showcased its storage devices ready for 2024, starting with its next-generation PCIe 5.0 NVMe SSDs. However, the company also showed several new external storage drives for 2024, including the portable SSD USB Duo A/C and an interesting prototype called the Portable SSD USB 4.0. 

The Portable SSD USB 4 prototype is still a work in progress as there's no casing on it, though Patriot plans to release this drive in 2024. It will use a Realtek 5772DL controller paired with an ASMedia ASM2464 bridge controller and WD BiCS5 NAND chips. This portable USB 4 SSD will be available in 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB capacities and is advertised to yield sequential reads up to 3,720 MB/s and writes up to 3,720 MB/s. 

Patriot also prepared two other external drives. Being true to its name, the Portable SSD Duo A/C features Type-C and Type-A ports in its casing. The company promises this drive will provide read and write speeds up to 1,000 MB/s and will be available in 512GB, 1TB, and 2TB storage capacities. 

The Portable SSD was also marked as a prototype, featuring only a Type-C port and a much higher transfer data speed. In its display, Patriot mentions it provides up to 2,100 MB/s reads and writes up to 1,800 MB/s. It is clear these drives are made for two different user bases- one provides versatile physical compatibility and the other with more performance throughput.

Patriot also provides a Type-C to dual Type A/C cable for the drives, which looks similar to the cable that comes with the Transporter external SSD.

The State of USB 4 External SSDs

We already have PCs and Macs that leverage USB 4, so it is about time we see more manufacturers roll out USB 4 SSD and NVMe enclosures. We tested the ZikeDrive USB 4 enclosure for NVMe SSDs, which provides roughly the same speeds, and there are native USB 4 drives like the Adata SE920.

Portable drives are in high demand due to the need to have mass storage for mobile and handheld devices. This is where the products like the SSD Duo A/C and the Portable SSD fill the void. Unfortunately, pricing and retail availability were not provided by Patriot at CES. Hopefully, we'll learn these details in the coming months as these prototypes give way to production-ready designs. 

The age of PCIe Gen 5 SSDs has only just begun, with the current focus being on high-performance drives that push the envelope. Just this week, we reviewed the Crucial T700 , which promises sequential read and write speeds of 12,400 and 11,700 MBps respectively but costs a whopping $339 for the 2TB model.

Over time, all Gen 5 SSDs will get cheaper, especially as NAND prices sink. However, one sure-fire way to get budget Gen 5 SSDs is to go with a DRAMless configuration. There are a slew of PCIe Gen 3 and Gen 4 drives without DRAM and, though they can't quite hit the same speeds as more expensive SSDs that have a DRAM cache, they give you a lot for your money.

At Computex 2023, Patriot Memory showed a prototype of a DRAMless Gen 5 SSD that is still pretty far away from launch. A company rep said that it could take up to a year before the unnamed drive hits the market. 

We don't know the speeds or specs for the unnamed drive, but we do know about the drive is that it uses a Maxiotek brand controller and Patriot expects it to have surprisingly good performance. The rep said "we're working a lot to bring our DRAMless drives damn close to our DRAM drives."

Speaking of SSDs that have DRAM, Patriot also introduced the Viper PV553, a PCIe Gen 5 drive that has a full 4GB of DDR4 cache memory on its 2TB capacity. The drive, which uses a Phison E26 controller and speedy 2400 MT/s NAND, will be available in 1TB, 2TB and 4GB capacities starting within the next month or so.

The PV553 uses an active fan for cooling, but makes up for the potential noise by having an extremely thin profile. Patriot said that they are still refining the fan speeds so that the plastic on the heatsink doesn't degrade from the heat. 

Designed to compete with the best SSDs, the Patriot PV553 is rated for 12,400 MBps sequential reads and 11,800 MBps writes, which is about on par with the T700. That makes sense since it uses the same controller. 

Though the unit we saw on display had a thin and not-very-attractive looking power cable, Patriot told us that it will have a connector that is black, sleeved and have a black connector you can plug into a fan header on your motherboard. There will also be an extension cable should you need to connect the SSD to your PSU.

There's no word yet on pricing for the PV553, but since it's due out next month, we should find out soon. 

California-based Patriot Group has been teasing (PDF) a super-fast new SSD, which it intends to fully unveil at the Computex 2023 in a few week's time. The new Patriot Viper PV553 is one of the latest breed of PCIe Gen5 x4 M.2 SSDs, and has a touted top transfer speed of 12.4 GB/s. If it lives up to its promise, we could see the new Patriot Viper PV553 swelling the ranks of our Best SSDs of 2023.

We don't have a great deal of information about the new Patriot Viper PV553, as it is still at pre-launch stage. For example, we don't know what controller or NAND will be used. The key facts we have about this SSD at this stage are provided in the following table.

With the recent (bad) news regarding PCIe Gen5 SSDs overheating, throttling, or even grinding to a complete halt, it is good to see that Patriot's Viper PV553 looks like it has an active cooler as standard (rather than an option). At the connector end, the tiny fan is visible, and there follows a fluted and vented design, which looks like it is capped by an aluminum shield. The overall design makes this writer wonder if some kind of music can be produced by covering the various holes once the fan is running. A final observation is that the Viper PV533 appears to eschew RGB LED lighting.

We hope that the Patriot Viper PV553 can live up to its performance claims, as if it follows through, we could have one of the fastest new generation PCIe Gen5 SSDs available, sitting alongside the likes of the Crucial T700 (which also achieves 12.4 GB/s).

Patriot isn't only going to launch the new PCIe Gen5 SSD as part of a refreshed Viper gaming storage line. It says that at Computex it will also talk about updates to its PCIe Gen4 SSD lineup, as well as a RAM showcase centered around the Viper Xtreme 5 DDR5 extreme performance memory and Viper Elite 5 DDR5 mainstream performance memory. There will also be a host of new peripherals and a showcase of the recently released Viper VXD M.2 SSD Enclosure.

The Team Group MP44L SSD is a mid-range PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD that’s best if you are looking for a drive with 1TB capacity or less. It’s a basic budget SSD that you could slot into a laptop, desktop, or PlayStation 5 without much trouble or additional fanfare. It utilizes a newer controller and newer flash, so it is both fast and efficient. It’s not the fastest drive on the market but it will give any last-generation PCIe 3.0 drive a run for its money. There is quite a bit of competition in the market, so choosing this drive comes down to pricing and availability.

The Team Group, or just Team, has put out a crazy amount of drives in the last few years. We last reviewed Team’s T-Force Cardea A440 Pro/Special Series in April with some questions about its flash selection. It’s no mystery that many manufacturers are swapping hardware and some of Team’s low-end SATA drives have been spotted with multiple controllers and flash. The MP44L sample under review has hardware of decent quality and we have no issues in recommending it today with the hope that the use of newer hardware will encourage Team to maintain a certain level of performance.

Specifications

The Team MP44L is available at 250GB, 500GB, 1TB, and 2TB. The reason we suggested 1TB or less in the introduction is because that is where this drive hits its peak performance - that is, where it has the ideal amount of flash dies. Performance does dip a little at 2TB but, moreover, there are better options for your money at that capacity. Current Amazon pricing is at $38.99, $56.99, $96.99, and $181.99 for the listed capacities, respectively. This makes the 500GB and 1TB models the most compelling. It’s difficult to get good performance out of NVMe with fewer dies at 250GB especially as flash is getting denser, so that capacity is also not recommended.

Performance is up to 5,000/4,500 MBps for sequential read and write with up to 525K/550K IOPS read and write. This places it in the middle of the pack with PCIe 4.0 drives, along with those that are using the SM2269XT and IG5220 controllers. Many of those drives are using the same flash as the MP44L. We recommend ones with QLC, like the Crucial P3 Plus or Solidigm P41 Plus, if you’re looking for 2TB or more to get the best bang for your buck.

Team rates the MP44L for 200TB, 300TB, 600TB, or 1200TB of writes by capacity, respectively. All models have a 5-year warranty according to Team’s website.

Software and Accessories

Team provides S.M.A.R.T. monitoring software for its SSDs. This application shows disk and system information. It also has a performance tab for quick testing. This information can alternatively be read with free software like CrystalDiskInfo, HWiNFO, and CrystalDiskMark. We recommend Macrium Reflect Free for image and cloning needs.

A Closer Look

The 1TB MP44L is single-sided, which is a nice benefit. The top has a label that Team states is constructed of graphene-coated aluminum, which should be useful for heat dissipation. Under the label, we spy 4 NAND packages and a controller with no DRAM. The controller is in the center of the PCB which can have benefits for heat spreading.

The controller is the DRAM-less Phison E21T. We have reviewed this controller before with the excellent budget drive, the Silicon Power UD90. The MP44L is extremely similar to the UD90 on paper. The E21T is also present on the Crucial P3 and Crucial P3 Plus, both using Micron’s 176-layer QLC, the latter being PCIe 4.0 and former PCIe 3.0.

The Phison E21T has competition from the InnoGrit IG5220 and the SMI SM2269XT, as well as WD’s custom controller on the Black SN770. All of these controllers are DRAM-less and in the middle of PCIe 4.0 bandwidth, which effectively makes them a replacement for the old Phison E16 with DRAM. Newer flash allows them to rival even very fast drives from the previous generation, certainly PCIe 3.0 drives, while having generally high levels of efficiency.

Efficiency usually translates to less heat generation, all else being equal, so drives in this class are suitable for laptops. However, they only have four channels so are limited in capacity when paired with TLC. 2TB options, where available, may not be quite as performant and are also often not cost-competitive.

The flash is labeled IA7BG94AYA, which is very familiar. It’s Micron’s 176-layer TLC. This popular and now ubiquitous flash that has worked well with multiple controllers. Each of these packages is 256GB in size with four 64GB dies for a total of 1TB. It’s possible to fit this much memory into fewer packages, but this is a popular configuration and is balanced well on this drive for heat dissipation.

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Comparison Products

The Team MP44L is up against the budget-oriented Inland Prime, other mid-range PCIe 4.0 SSDs including the HP FX900, the Patriot P400, the WD SN770, and the Solidigm P41 Plus, plus an old stalwart - the Sabrent Rocket NVMe 4.0. The higher-end Crucial P5 Plus is also in the mix. The P41 Plus is the only QLC drive in the list. Most of these drives, including the MP44L, are utilizing Micron’s 176-layer TLC, so we can see what difference a controller can make.

Trace Testing - 3DMark Storage Benchmark

3DMark’s Storage Benchmark focuses on real-world gaming performance. Each round in this benchmark stresses storage based on gaming activities including loading games, saving progress, installing game files, and recording gameplay video streams.

The MP44L is average to above average in 3DMark. The InnoGrit controller in the FX900 and P400 does not seem well-optimized for this benchmark. Older 28nm technology in the Inland Prime and Rocket NVMe 4.0 - the E15T and E16 controllers, respectively - also fall behind, even though the latter has DRAM. The P41 Plus does surprisingly well.

Trace Testing – PCMark 10 Storage Benchmark

PCMark 10 is a trace-based benchmark that uses a wide-ranging set of real-world traces from popular applications and everyday tasks to measure the performance of storage devices.

Results for PCMark 10 are similar to those for 3DMark. The MP44L is above average and the P41 Plus punches above its weight.

Transfer Rates – DiskBench

We use the DiskBench storage benchmarking tool to test file transfer performance with a custom, 50GB dataset. We copy 31,227 files of various types, such as pictures, PDFs, and videos to a new folder and then follow-up with a reading test of a newly-written 6.5GB zip file.

In DiskBench, we are essentially looking at the copy transfer rate to get a feel for how well the drive would copy files to itself. This takes both read and write performance into consideration. The MP44L is again a bit above average, with the P5 Plus and SN770 remaining at the top.

Synthetic Testing - ATTO / CrystalDiskMark

ATTO and CrystalDiskMark (CDM) are free and easy-to-use storage benchmarking tools that SSD vendors commonly use to assign performance specifications to their products. Both of these tools give us insight into how each device handles different file sizes.

The MP44L does exceptionally well on ATTO. Phison controllers tend to do well in this test, particularly with reads at larger I/O sizes. CDM sequentials show it falling behind the P5 Plus and SN770, however; it is decidedly average at best. 4K low queue depth results are better but not quite capable of matching the best. Specifically, the SN770 is better across-the-board and the FX900 and P400 - using the IG5220 controller - are better with all-important low queue depth read latency. The P41 Plus continues to surprise, considering it’s using QLC, while the DRAM-equipped Rocket NVMe 4.0 shows how old hardware can fall behind.

Sustained Write Performance and Cache Recovery

Official write specifications are only part of the performance picture. Most SSDs implement a write cache, which is a fast area of (usually) pseudo-SLC programmed flash that absorbs incoming data.  Sustained write speeds can suffer tremendously once the workload spills outside of the cache and into the "native" TLC or QLC flash. We use Iometer to hammer the SSD with sequential writes for 15 minutes to measure both the size of the write cache and performance after the cache is saturated. We also monitor cache recovery via multiple idle rounds.

The 1TB MP44L writes in pSLC at 4.6 GBps for up to 15 seconds, with a cache size around 69GB. This is a fairly small cache, so we would expect higher sequential write performance in TLC mode. This is indeed the case as the MP44L writes at around 1.75 GBps after the cache is exhausted. The E21T controller has a limited amount of channels and die interleaving so eventually the drive must fold to around 250 MBps.

Although the pSLC cache will vary with how full the drive is, having a smaller cache means being able to retain a similar absolute size with space utilization. A certain amount of cache for a 1TB drive is sufficient to cache small, random writes as well as writes in bursts, which is ample to maintain high performance and make the best use of the pSLC for endurance purposes. The relatively high and elongated TLC performance phase suggests additional consistency that should be present even if the drive is very full. Typically budget drives have leaned on larger pSLC caches to hide their poor native performance, but this controller and flash combination is fast enough to offer an excellent experience without compromise.

The most direct comparison would be to the FX900 and P400, which are using the IG5220 controller instead. The pSLC cache design for those drives emphasizes a much larger cache and much shorter intermediate performance period, although all of these drives seem to take a bit of time to recover their cache when idle. Recovery time varies because there are good reasons to defer clearing the pSLC, such as avoiding additional wear, while having it ready again means better performance. Therefore there is a balance to be struck, but DRAM-less drives with good TLC performance generally opt to be conservative, particularly as consumer usage on a budget drive tends to demonstrate lots of idle time.

Power Consumption and Temperature

We use the Quarch HD Programmable Power Module to gain a deeper understanding of power characteristics. Idle power consumption is an important aspect to consider, especially if you're looking for a laptop upgrade as even the best ultrabooks can have mediocre storage.

Some SSDs can consume watts of power at idle while better-suited ones sip just milliwatts. Average workload power consumption and max consumption are two other aspects of power consumption, but performance-per-watt is more important. A drive might consume more power during any given workload, but accomplishing a task faster allows the drive to drop into an idle state more quickly, ultimately saving energy.

We also monitor the drive’s temperature via the S.M.A.R.T. data and an IR thermometer to see when (or if) thermal throttling kicks in and how it impacts performance. Remember that results will vary based on the workload and ambient air temperature.

High power efficiency has been one of the most obvious benefits of newer controller and flash technology. Budget drives in particular have been impressive, for example with the FX900 and SN770. The MP44L falls in-between these two drives with very high efficiency. A DRAM-less, 4-channel controller is bound to be more efficient and makes for an excellent drive choice for a laptop, especially with a single-sided design. With very light usage something like the P41 Plus might be the better choice - given that it should be cheaper - but the MP44L would be superior if you intend to do a bit more.

We measured the MP44L at 41C during idle with a maximum temperature of 77C under load. This temperature was reached by writing for over one-half of the 1TB drive’s capacity. At that point it hit a folding state which precluded throttling - no heatsink is required under normal conditions.

Test Bench and Testing Notes

We use an Alder Lake platform with most background applications such as indexing, windows updates, and anti-virus disabled in the OS to reduce run-to-run variability. Each SSD is prefilled to 50% capacity and tested as a secondary device. Unless noted, we use active cooling for all SSDs.

Conclusion

The Team MP44L is a solid all-around budget PCIe 4.0 SSD with generally above average performance, good power efficiency, and a simple but effective design. Team backs it with a reasonable warranty and basic software support. There’s not much more to ask for in a drive, especially as this would work well in a laptop or possibly a PlayStation 5. These results are not surprising as we found the Silicon Power UD90, which has the same hardware, to be perhaps the best budget SSD available at the time of its review.

The MP44L scores a bit worse, but there are good reasons for that. The UD90 tends to offer the same package at a bit lower cost. Other drives within this range also offer a similar experience for the same price or less. The SSD market continues to trend downwards with pricing and significant sales have made for a competitive environment. There are also new competitors for the MP44L that the UD90 didn’t face at its time of review, for example the Solidigm P41 Plus. QLC is best at 1TB or 2TB which still leaves the MP44L a compelling 500GB choice, but the MP44L’s performance is good enough to make it a better all-around choice at 1TB as well.

We scored the P41 Plus rather harshly in part due to its MSRP because a QLC SSD, especially a DRAM-less QLC one, really should be cheaper. That drive has since had excellent pricing at 2TB and we would recommend it there. A drive like the MP44L is superior at lower capacities, especially if pricing is close. This is partly because benchmarks often show performance in ideal conditions, an especially valid criticism as the P41 Plus is best when it is less than 50% full. Taking this into consideration, the performance consistency of the MP44L combined with its exceptional efficiency - significantly better in our testing than the P41 Plus - makes it an objectively better choice in the general case, and worthy of a higher score.

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The Acer Predator GM7000 takes a winning formula of components and puts unique branding on it. This combination is powerful, efficient and particularly compelling at 2TB, but the GM7000 is in a crowded market. This high-end PCIe 4.0 drive would be happy in the PlayStation 5 or in your PC with help from Acronis True Image OEM software. Otherwise, this SSD does not stand out, particularly against the very fastest drives we’ve tested, like the SK hynix Platinum P41 and WD Black SN850X. 

The GM7000 is best compared to the HP FX900 Pro, since it has the same controller and flash. The pSLC caching scheme is also similar. While it appears some tweaks were made to the GM7000, possibly through updated firmware, it largely falls into the same position as the FX900 Pro and other drives like it. These drives are often a bit cheaper than other high-end PCIe 4.0 SSDs, particularly at 2TB.

Acer announced a partnership with Biwin more than a year ago, and we see its flash on the GM7000. Biwin previously worked heavily with HP, which includes the FX900 Pro. Biwin provides services with flash binning and the manufacture of drives. It is not surprising that the GM7000 is so close to the FX900 Pro. It does mean that you have a bit better idea of what you’re getting. Otherwise, you are relying on Acer’s support for warranty and software.

Specifications

The Acer GM7000 is available at 512GB, 1TB, 2TB and 4TB capacities. This is a nice range, but we were not able to find the drive available at its highest capacity at the time of this review. The other capacities actually lowered in price during writing, reflecting that the NAND and SSD markets have been, and remain, in a steady price decline.

The closest competitor, the HP FX900 Pro which is slightly cheaper at 2TB. 2TB has become an increasingly popular capacity and there have been many sales on drives of this size this year, so it is a competitive space. One advantage the GM7000 has is its graphene foam heat pad, something the FX900 Pro also uses. Graphene has very high thermal conductivity and PCIe 4.0 SSDs can get quite hot, so this is a solution that saves a bit of physical space.

The GM7000 is otherwise unexceptional, coming with a 5-year warranty and 300, 600, 1,300, and 3,000 TBW ratings for its respective capacity options. Rated IOPS are quite high, as on the FX900 Pro. Sequential performance can top out at 7.4/6.7GBps for reads and writes, respectively, thanks to the use of newer flash with the IG5236 controller. This makes for a powerful drive that checks all the expected boxes.

Software and Accessories

The GM7000 comes with a free, customized copy of Acronis True Image OEM. This is a piece of software that allows you to clone, backup, or image your drives, which can make upgrading your storage easier. This is barebones software and there are good freeware options, but it’s still nice to have it bundled.

A Closer Look

This is a double-sided drive at 2TB, with a label on the rear covering two NAND packages and one DRAM package. Removing the top graphene pad reveals a single DRAM module, the controller and two NAND packages.

The controller is an InnoGrit IG5236, a popular and powerful PCIe 4.0 solution. It competes with the Phison E18, the upcoming SMI SM2264, and proprietary designs from Western Digital, Samsung, Crucial and SK hynix. InnoGrit as a company is a relative newcomer, but it has veterans at its helm. Its latest controller designs have proven quite effective, and are often paired with drives that are a bit cheaper than the competition.

The DRAM package is NANYA NT5AD512M16A4, DDR4 in a 512M x 16b configuration for a total of 8Gb or 1GB. As there are two packages, the total DRAM on this 2TB drive is 2GB. This is an ample amount of memory, even for heavy workloads.

The flash packages are labeled BW29F4T08ENLEE. This is the same flash that we saw on the 2TB FX900 Pro. Biwin has long managed HP’s SSDs and, over a year ago, it was announced that it would also work with Acer. Historically this has not been an issue as some of HP’s SSD products have been quite excellent, such as with the EX920 and EX950.

The “BW” represents Biwin, with 29 being the common code for Micron (or Intel) Technology. These are 4Tb or 512GB modules, four for a total of 2TB, in a typical 8-bit configuration. The flash is of the 176-layer generation and TLC. This flash is found on a ton of drives and has proven to be quite fast. It is in fact the flash that Phison chose for its preliminary I/O+ firmware, albeit at 1600 MT/s. The flash on the GM7000 is the standard 1200 MT’s, although this does not have a huge impact on performance.

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Comparison Products

The Acer GM7000 is very close in hardware and design to the HP FX900 Pro, so we will be comparing our test subject to the latter. The Patriot Viper VP4300 is also similar but arrived with older Micron TLC. Proprietary designs are represented by the newer WD Black SN850X and SK hynix Platinum P41, plus the older Crucial P5 Plus and Samsung 980 Pro. The Kingston KC3000 represents one of the fastest drives built on Phison’s E18 controller. All in all, this is stiff competition for the GM7000.

Trace Testing - 3DMark Storage Benchmark

3DMark’s Storage Benchmark focuses on real-world gaming performance. Each round in this benchmark stresses storage based on gaming activities including loading games, saving progress, installing game files and recording gameplay video streams.

In 3DMark the GM7000 falls into the middle of the pack. It matches the FX900 Pro, as expected, but falls behind the faster drives - the SN850X, Platinum P41 and KC3000.

Trace Testing – PCMark 10 Storage Benchmark

PCMark 10 is a trace-based benchmark that uses a wide-ranging set of real-world traces from popular applications and everyday tasks to measure the performance of storage devices.

The GM7000 performs similarly in PCMark 10 to how it did in 3DMark. It does fare a bit better, only falling behind the Platinum P41 and SN850X, two drives that we consider to be the overall best SSDs on the market.

Transfer Rates – DiskBench

We use the DiskBench storage benchmarking tool to test file transfer performance with a custom, 50GB dataset. We copy 31,227 files of various types, such as pictures, PDFs and videos to a new folder and then follow-up with a reading test of a newly-written 6.5GB zip file.

DiskBench is largely a bandwidth test and, as a result, most of the drives perform very similarly. So far, however, it’s clear that upgrading the flash on the IG5236 controller brings worthwhile gains. The VP4300 falls a bit behind with reads on this test but was very much behind in 3DMark and PCMark 10. The Predator GM7000 matches the FX900 Pro, as expected, and does well enough otherwise with copies.

Synthetic Testing - ATTO & CrystalDiskMark

ATTO and CrystalDiskMark (CDM) are free and easy-to-use storage benchmarking tools that SSD vendors commonly use to assign performance specifications to their products. These tools give us insight into how each device handles different file sizes.

ATTO’s sequential results favor Phison, that is the KC3000, particularly with reads. That being said, the SN850X has definitely caught up. The drives based on the IG5236 controller - the GM7000, FX900 Pro and VP4300 - have a notable dip with sequential reads. The dip being in a different place for the VP4300 may indicate differences in flash architecture, but overall this controller may have some inconsistencies. Sequential write performance in ATTO looks good.

Sequential results in CDM are also good, except for reads at QD1. That is a place where the Platinum P41 excels in particular, with the SN850X a bit behind. The GM7000 improves on the VP4300, but is otherwise lackluster. Luckily, it makes up for it with excellent random read and good random write performance. Those results are probably more important than the sequential ones, at least for the time being.

Sustained Write Performance and Cache Recovery

Official write specifications are only part of the performance picture. Most SSDs implement a write cache, which is a fast area of (usually) pseudo-SLC programmed flash that absorbs incoming data.  Sustained write speeds can suffer tremendously once the workload spills outside of the cache and into the "native" TLC or QLC flash. We use Iometer to hammer the SSD with sequential writes for 15 minutes to measure both the size of the write cache and performance after the cache is saturated. We also monitor cache recovery via multiple idle rounds.

The GM7000’s pSLC cache response is very similar to the FX900 Pro’s. A large cache, about one-third the TLC capacity of the drive, allows it to write at around 6.6GBps for up to 105 seconds. There is then a briefer middle state of direct-to-TLC at around 2.85GBps before the drive has to fold at 1.35GBps. The GM7000 seems a bit more consistent than the FX900 Pro but is otherwise functionally the same in this as it is in other tests. Overall, this is a fast drive and there are no complaints about what it can get out of this flash.

Recovery is not great on the GM7000, as was the case with the FX900 Pro, probably due to the relatively large nature of the pSLC cache. You can get more consistent results out of the Platinum P41 or even the SN850X. However, it’s clearly superior to the older VP4300. On the whole, the GM7000 is more than fast enough, and the overall write performance is pretty good thanks to the flash.

Power Consumption and Temperature

We use the Quarch HD Programmable Power Module to gain a deeper understanding of power characteristics. Idle power consumption is an important aspect to consider, especially if you're looking for a laptop upgrade as even the best ultrabooks can have mediocre storage.

Some SSDs can consume watts of power at idle while better-suited ones sip just milliwatts. Average workload power consumption and max consumption are two other aspects of power consumption, but performance-per-watt is more important. A drive might consume more power during any given workload, but accomplishing a task faster allows the drive to drop into an idle state more quickly, ultimately saving energy.

We also monitor the drive’s temperature via the S.M.A.R.T. data and an IR thermometer to see when (or if) thermal throttling kicks in and how it impacts performance. Remember that results will vary based on the workload and ambient air temperature.

PCIe 4.0 drives draw more power and run hotter, but can also finish workloads faster. Modern drives in particular may have controllers made in a smaller process node and newer flash always inches to be more efficient over time. This combination means that there’s a surprising trend towards better results on our Quarch power tests. This does not necessarily indicate what drive is best for your laptop or hot environment, but rather reflects how well the drive does on basic transfer tasks.

The Platinum P41 surprised us with its efficiency when we reviewed it, but the GM7000 comes surprisingly close. It’s the second best in terms of efficiency in this test and significantly better than the older VP4300.

For thermal testing, we checked the drive temperature at both idle and max under a sustained write workload. We also looked for throttling. The GM7000 idled at 47 degrees C and hit a maximum temperature of 85 C, where it throttled, during a transfer of 1TB of video files. The speed degraded at first to 1.35 GBps and then 800 MBps with heavy throttling. The graphene cooler is not sufficient for super heavy workloads, so you may want to consider additional cooling.

Test Bench and Testing Notes

We use an Alder Lake platform with most background applications such as indexing, Windows updates, and anti-virus disabled in the OS to reduce run-to-run variability. Each SSD is prefilled to 50% capacity and tested as a secondary device. Unless otherwise noted, we use active cooling for all SSDs.

Conclusion

The Acer Predator GM7000 does not disappoint, nor does it excite. It's a well-rounded drive for most use cases, and those who  don’t need the fastest performance, you can save some money. The GM7000 really needs to be priced right in order for it to be compelling. There is a lot of competition, particularly at 2TB with recent pricing trends and the availability of higher-capacity drives.

This is an efficient drive with reasonable support and good all-around performance. Biwin is not an unknown brand anymore and has proven itself with HP SSDs. That fact may give you a bit of confidence when you look at the Acer Predator drives. Nevertheless, it finds itself in a crowded segment and if you are discerning then you will have to weigh it against the other options. At the same price, the Platinum P41 or SN850X would be superior, and even the KC3000 or similar would probably be a better bet. The GM7000 is best at the 2TB capacity, especially if you can find it on sale.

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Patriot's Viper Venom DDR5 kit arrives with DDR5-6200 CL40 speeds and an option for a bright RGB exterior, vying for a spot on our list of best RAM. Patriot may seem a bit late to the DDR5 party, but some brands took a bit more time to develop and consequently release their first DDR5 memory kits to the market. Of course, that isn't a big deal since DDR5 is here to stay, and it still carries a premium. Patriot, in particular, has opted to extend the brand's prominent Viper series with the new Venom DDR5 lineup, which the manufacturer offers in RGB and black variants. The Viper Venom DDR5 features kit capacities from 16GB (2x8GB) up to 32GB (2x16GB) and data rates spanning from DDR5-5200 to DDR5-6200.

The Viper Venom DDR5 memory modules sport a two-tone exterior with a primary matte black design complemented with brushed aluminum accents. In addition, Patriot has tactically placed its red Viper logos in different parts of the heat spreader to be visible to bystanders from every direction. Overall, the memory modules look pretty cool without being overly tall. On the other hand, they measure 43mm (1.69 inches), so they don't precisely fall into the low-profile category, either.

The RGB version of the Viper Venom comes with an RGB diffuser. The diffuser doesn't add height to the memory module as the non-RGB versions also stand 43mm tall. For the non-RGB versions, the memory module has a black bar instead of a diffuser. You can customize the RGB-lit memory modules to your heart's content through Patriot's own Viper Venom RGB software or your motherboard's software. For the latter, the memory is compatible with Asus, ASRock, MSI, and Gigabyte software.

Patriot's memory kit arrives with two 16GB DDR5 memory modules with a single-rank design. The integrated circuits (ICs) are from SK hynix, specifically the latest H5CG48MEBDX014 (M-die) chips. As for the power management IC (PMIC), Patriot opted to use the "0D=9B 409" unit, which according to the CPU-Z dump, comes from Richtek.

For compatibility sake, the memory modules default to DDR5-4800 with standard 40-40-40-77 timings. Patriot has capitalized on the XMP 3.0 standard and loaded the memory modules with three profiles. Profile 1 sets the memory to DDR5-6200 with 40-40-40-76 timings and a 1.35V DRAM voltage. Profile 2 drops it to DDR5-6000 with identical timings but with the DRAM voltage down to 1.25V. Finally, profile 3 puts the Viper Venom RGB to DDR5-5600 at 36-36-36-68 with 1.25V. See our PC Memory 101 feature and How to Shop for RAM story for more on timings and frequency considerations.

Comparison Hardware

Our DDR5 test system consists of Intel's Core i9-12900K flagship Alder Lake processor with Corsair's CUE H100i Elite LCD liquid cooler taking care of the cooling. The 16-core Alder Lake chip resides on the MSI MEG Z690 Unify-X motherboard, running the 7D28vA8 firmware. On the other hand, the MSI GeForce RTX 2080 Ti Gaming Trio is responsible for our gaming RAM benchmarks.

Our Windows 11 installation, benchmarking software, and games reside on Crucial's MX500 SSDs, whereas the RM650x feeds our entire system with power. Lastly, the Streacom BC1 open bench table ensures all of our hardware is well kept and tidy.

Intel Performance

The Viper Venom RGB placed fifth overall in the performance chart. The memory kit didn't win any first places, but it frequently found itself in the top three positions in many workloads.

Overclocking and Latency Tuning

When you run hardware outside of the manufacturer's specifications, there's always a potential risk of damage. That's the standard caveat with overclocking any hardware, not just memory. Although we've already reached out to SK hynix to inquire about the maximum safe voltage for its ICs, we haven't received any feedback on safe voltages for overclocking. However, after speaking with various memory vendors, they've agreed that 1.4V is the maximum voltage you would want to pump into DDR5 for an extended time.

One advantage of the Viper Venom RGB is that the memory uses SK hynix M-die ICs similar to other faster rivals, such as the V-Color Manta XPrism DDR5-6200 C36. As a result, we didn't have any issues getting the Patriot's memory to DDR5-6400 with 36-38-38-76 timings once we pumped 1.4V into the memory modules.

Lowest Stable Timings

Similar to the Manta XPrism, the Viper Venom RGB could also do 36-37-37-76 on 1.4V at DDR5-6200. Therefore, with some diligent tweaking, the Viper Venom RGB has the potential to counterpoise the Manta XPrism's stock performance.

Bottom Line

There aren't many DDR5-6200 memory kits on the market right now, so the Viper Venom RGB DDR5-6200 C40 doesn't have a lot of rivals. On the other hand, the memory kit was slightly slower than the V-Color Manta XPrism DDR5-6200 C36 ($399.99) right out of the gate. So the margin isn't huge. If we add overclocking to the equation, however, the Viper Venom RGB can be on par with its more expensive competitors since SK hynix's M-die ICs are presently very popular in high-speed DDR5 memory kits. The Viper Venom RGB also comes with three XMP profiles, which is an excellent detail if your system can't handle the advertised DDR5-6200 data rate.

The DDR5-6200 category has intense competition. The Viper Venom RGB DDR5-6200 C40 currently retails for $284.99. It's a reasonable price for a DDR5-6200 memory kit. Patriot's memory kit is a decent option if you don't mind the standard timings.

The Silicon Power UD90 is the first drive we’ve had on our testbed with Phison’s new E21T SSD controller. If you only need 1TB of capacity, this is a relatively inexpensive PCIe 4.0 drive that would work great in a Playstation 5 or desktop PC. Thanks to the DRAM-less controller and 176-layer TLC flash, it’s also power efficient enough to work great with laptops. It comes with a fairly decent warranty and some software support, too, earning a spot on our list of Best SSDs. However, we do recommend additional cooling, if possible.

The UD90 finds itself up against tough competition from drives we’ve recently reviewed, including the HP FX900 and Patriot P400. If you’re looking for a high-end PCIe 4.0 drive, there are better options, but this segment is the better value for your dollar. Many top-tier PCIe 3.0 drives with DRAM have come down significantly in price, so the real question is if it’s worth compromising with a drive like the UD90. For the PS5, absolutely; for PCs, it depends. These newer drives can be very efficient for laptops and make good primary or secondary drives for desktops, assuming you don’t need more than about 1TB of space.

The UD90 uses the same flash as many other great drives we’ve reviewed, but it has a new controller. We’re seeing more competition in this space as Silicon Motion has its SM2269XT controller on the way, too. This is a good thing as you have more choices, but it can make it challenging to pick the perfect drive. Perhaps the most significant factor here is cost, and the UD90 should launch at a very attractive price point on Amazon. Let’s see how it measures up to the excellent but more expensive FX900.

Specifications

The UD90 comes in three capacities of 250GB, 500GB, and 1TB. Silicon Power has informed us that it intends to launch with just the 1TB SKU in the U.S. The smaller SKUs are for other regions and markets for now. This drive reaches peak performance at 1TB, and that capacity tends to be the “sweet spot” for mid-range drives like this, so this is not too terrible. Some users prefer smaller drives for the OS in multi-drive builds, but it’s hard to get the most out of a fast PCIe 4.0 drive without a higher capacity for more flash and interleaving.

The 1TB drive reaches 4.8/4.2 GBps for sequential read and write and 570K/600K IOPS for random read and write, both respectively. These numbers are firmly in the mid-range against drives like the FX900 and P400, which use a different controller but the same flash. It’s faster than entry-level PCIe 4.0 drives like the S50 Lite and SN750 SE. The UD90 is warrantied for five years and 600 TB of data writes (TBW) at 1TB, which is pretty solid.

Silicon Power says this will arrive at $94.99, making it very competitive in its intended market segment. This is a bit cheaper than the HP FX900 and the Patriot P400, making it a good budget choice or alternative for the Playstation 5 as well as for cheaper PCIe 4.0 builds.

Software and Accessories

Silicon Power has a download of its “SP ToolBox” available on its site. This piece of software offers information about the drive, including SMART and other diagnostics. It’s basic but better than nothing. You can clone and image the drive with free software options.

A Closer Look

The UD90 has a label on top showing basic information about the drive, such as the capacity and serial number. Under the label, we see the controller in the middle along with a PMIC, flanked by two NAND packages to either side. There is no DRAM. This type of layout can have some advantages, for example as WD touted with its WD Black and SN750, but the average user can just look at it and imagine a balancing of heat dissipation.

The Phison E21T is Phison’s new PCIe 4.0 DRAM-less controller, positioned to compete with InnoGrit’s IG5220 and SMI’s SM2269XT. It also competes with WD’s proprietary controller used on the SN770. This controller has four channels with a bus speed of 1600 MT/s, capable of using current and upcoming TLC and QLC flash. It has Phison’s 4th-Gen LDPC error correction, end-to-end data path protection, and RAID error correction through Smart ECC 2.0. Encryption support for TCG OPAL 2.0 and Pyrite is optionally available but not activated on this drive.

Performance-wise, this controller can hit up to 5/4.5 GBps for sequential read and write, respectively, and up to 780K/800K random read and write IOPS, also respectively. This matches up nicely with the IG5220, which we’ve seen in past reviews of drives like the HP FX900 and Patriot P400. This is our first review of a drive using the E21T, but we expect to see more drives using this controller. We also expect it to be competitive.

The flash packages are labeled IA7BG94AYA which means they contain dies of Micron’s 176-layer TLC. Each package should host four dies, that is 4DP or QDP, at 64GB per die. The total of sixteen dies is ideal for this four-channel controller, allowing peak interleaving at 1TB.

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Comparison Products

We compared the 1TB Silicon Power UD90 to direct rivals like the Patriot P400, HP FX900, and SN770. The rest of the field includes high-end PCIe 4.0 drives including proprietary designs with the Crucial P5 Plus, Samsung 980 Pro, and SK hynix Platinum P41. Lastly, the Kingston Fury Renegade represents drives built on Phison’s E18 controller with 176-layer flash. This excellent flash is found in five of the eight 1TB drives on this list.

Trace Testing - 3DMark Storage Benchmark

Built for gamers, 3DMark’s Storage Benchmark focuses on real-world gaming performance. Each round in this benchmark stresses storage based on gaming activities including loading games, saving progress, installing game files, and recording gameplay video streams.

The UD90 performs favorably here, beating the P400 and FX900. The SN770 manages to pull away from its peers. This test isn’t the be-all and end-all for gaming performance, which in fact tends to be the same for any SSD. Load times can vary, but in general, the advantages are pretty small.

Trace Testing – PCMark 10 Storage Benchmark

PCMark 10 is a trace-based benchmark that uses a wide-ranging set of real-world traces from popular applications and everyday tasks to measure the performance of storage devices.

The UD90 again beats the FX900 and P400 in this test but falls behind the high-end PCIe 4.0 drives. This is still a strong showing for what is basically a budget drive. Once again, the SN770 punches above its weight.

Transfer Rates – DiskBench

We use the DiskBench storage benchmarking tool to test file transfer performance with a custom, 50GB dataset. We copy 31,227 files of various types, such as pictures, PDFs, and videos to a new folder and then follow-up with a reading test of a newly-written 6.5GB zip file.

The UD90’s first misstep is here, but it’s not a big one and not unexpected. DiskBench results are limited by a drive’s bandwidth potential, and as such, the lower-end drives like the SN770, FX900, P400, and UD90, fall behind on reads and copies. The UD90 still remains pretty close to its direct rivals. If you absolutely need the fastest file transfers, you should be looking at a high-end PCIe 4.0 drive.

Synthetic Testing - ATTO / CrystalDiskMark

ATTO and CrystalDiskMark (CDM) are free and easy-to-use storage benchmarking tools that SSD vendors commonly use to assign performance specifications to their products. Both of these tools give us insight into how each device handles different file sizes.

Phison controllers tend to do well with sequential reads in ATTO, and the UD90’s new controller is no different. It’s actually up there with the Fury Renegade and Platinum P41. Its sequential write performance is a bit more modest, but it still matches or beats most drives. This is a very strong showing for a drive of this caliber. Phison’s E21T controller is a bit late to the game, but it was worth the wait: This is more than a suitable replacement for the E16, popular in budget PS5 drives.

Sequential results in CrystalDiskMark are limited by the interface or controller bandwidth, as determined by its channel count and bus speed, leaving the UD90 in the lower tiers. However, it’s still faster than any PCIe 3.0 drive. Random low queue depth 4K performance is good, as we’d expect from this flash with an optimized controller, but it falls behind with reads versus the FX900 and P400. In practice, this might not mean much as all of these drives are very quick here, but InnoGrit’s IG5220 controller is better optimized for that all-important metric.

Higher queue depth 4K results are a mixed bag, but this drive isn’t intended for those sorts of workloads. However, we do still see lagging with reads in particular. Nevertheless, these numbers are good and beat anything from the last generation of DRAM-less NVMe drives.

Sustained Write Performance and Cache Recovery

Official write specifications are only part of the performance picture. Most SSDs implement a write cache, which is a fast area of (usually) pseudo-SLC programmed flash that absorbs incoming data.  Sustained write speeds can suffer tremendously once the workload spills outside of the cache and into the "native" TLC or QLC flash. We use Iometer to hammer the SSD with sequential writes for 15 minutes to measure both the size of the write cache and performance after the cache is saturated. We also monitor cache recovery via multiple idle rounds.

The UD90 writes in its fastest, pseudo-SLC state at over 4.6 GBps for almost 15 seconds. This implies a dynamic cache of around 69GB which, although presumably shrinking with drive usage, is sufficient to absorb random and smaller sequential writes. The UD90 then drops down to around 1.8 GBps for another eight minutes of writes. Then, finally, it hits its slowest state at about 275 MBps.

We can reasonably compare this to its peers and see that it has a significantly smaller SLC cache, a faster middle state, and a very slow worst-case scenario when SLC must be emptied. It nevertheless manages to outwrite the FX900 given enough time, but this is not a typical workload. Therefore, this design seems closer to something like a Phison E12-powered drive, as in our Corsair MP510 review, than launch Phison E16 drives like the Sabrent Rocket 4.0.

DRAM-less drives often have large SLC caches to hide their weak native performance states, but a more conservative design (as with newer DRAM-equipped E16 drives, like the MSI Spatium M470) can offer better consistency. Most users will not see the worst a drive has to offer, but dynamic cache inevitably shrinks with drive usage, and sustained writes will eventually slow down the drive. The UD90 offers a nice, balanced approach, with higher speeds in the middle state than we see on E12 and E16 SSDs, although in practice what we see with the FX900 and P400 might offer a slightly better user experience.

The UD90 did not recover its SLC cache quickly, instead bouncing back to its middle state, which is still plenty quick. This drive can better handle bursty writes, especially random ones, as befits normal consumer usage. You'll need to jump to a high-end model if you want faster performance in sustained write workloads.

Power Consumption and Temperature

We use the Quarch HD Programmable Power Module to gain a deeper understanding of power characteristics. Idle power consumption is an important aspect to consider, especially if you're looking for a laptop upgrade as even the best ultrabooks can have mediocre storage.

Some SSDs can consume watts of power at idle while better-suited ones sip just milliwatts. Average workload power consumption and max consumption are two other aspects of power consumption, but performance-per-watt is more important. A drive might consume more power during any given workload, but accomplishing a task faster allows the drive to drop into an idle state more quickly, ultimately saving energy.

We also monitor the drive’s temperature via the S.M.A.R.T. data and an IR thermometer to see when (or if) thermal throttling kicks in and how it impacts performance. Remember that results will vary based on the workload and ambient air temperature.

The UD90 is extremely efficient in our power consumption test, right up there with the FX900 and Platinum P41. Although this result is limited by testing only a file copy, it does demonstrate that this drive is quick enough to finish tasks without much delay. A DRAM-less, four-channel controller design like this, coupled with an efficient 176-layer flash, is bound to be an excellent choice for laptops.

Its top power state is rated for 5W versus 3.5W for competitors, but it is more efficient in its other states with the trade-off of higher overall enter and exit latencies for idle. It can also move between active states freely with little delay. These numbers are only a guideline, anyway, but do offer a general idea of drive responsiveness and power draw. In practice, this is a flexible and efficient design.

We measured the drive temperature at idle and under sustained writes, both via SMART and with a temperature gun. The UD90 idled in the mid-40s degrees Celsius but reached 81C as measured by SMART and 73C as measured by gun after 380GB of sustained writes. Although not a realistic workload, this suggests that additional cooling could benefit this drive.

Test Bench and Testing Notes

We use a Rocket Lake platform with most background applications such as indexing, windows updates, and anti-virus disabled in the OS to reduce run-to-run variability. Each SSD is prefilled to 50% capacity and tested as a secondary device. Unless noted, we use active cooling for all SSDs.

Conclusion

The Silicon Power UD90 is yet another winner in a stream of affordable, DRAM-less SSDs that manage to exceed expectations. Improvements to controller design and flash have allowed manufacturers to offer efficient, powerful drives at a reasonable price point. Of course, these aren’t the fastest drives — they don’t saturate your PCIe 4.0 connection, and in everyday use, they might not be a huge upgrade over older PCIe 3.0 drives that had DRAM. However, they work with the PS5 and offer a great experience on PC — if only at limited capacities.

The UD90 compares favorably with drives like the FX900 and P400, plus other popular drives like the ADATA Atom 50. It scores a bit better with peak sequential read performance over bigger block sizes but tends to fall behind a bit during random read workloads. This probably doesn’t mean much to most users, and it more than passes the threshold for an excellent user experience. The SLC cache is more conservative than what’s found on its peers, including the SN770, which does suggest it should be more consistent across a range of workloads and fill rates, but it will not absorb as many writes at maximum speed.

Silicon Power backs this drive with an SSD toolbox and decent support; no three-year, low-endurance warranty here. We think it may benefit from a heatsink, but it is probably not required — most other drives in this segment also lack full heatsinks. This drive should be cheaper at launch than its competition. That makes it a fantastic budget choice and hard to beat, but be aware it may not be possible to get it at capacities other than 1TB in the U.S.

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The Patriot Viper VPR400 is a mid-range PCIe 4.0 SSD designed with a bright aesthetic in mind. The stylish heatsink features bright RGB lighting, and the SSD has software support for RGB sync. The VPR400's hardware is similar to two other drives we have reviewed, the HP FX900 and Patriot's own P400, so it’s effectively a gaming-oriented version of the latter. The P400 proved to be a stalwart drive with good performance for its price. Like that drive, the VPR400 is DRAM-less, but it comes equipped with a fast controller and newer flash that deliver solid performance in tandem with the bright lighting, earning a spot on our list of Best SSDs.

RGB is still all the rage, especially in the “gamer” space, although some drives do not support color control like the VPR400. The downside to this feature is that, historically, drives with RGB tended to run hotter with a higher risk of throttling. We'll test the drive in both the on and off states. The VPR400's heatsink, while aesthetically pleasing, doesn't seem well-designed for heat dissipation. That said, we didn't have much trouble with the P400 overheating.

The SSD market is becoming a bit oversaturated, especially in the mid-range, and more drives are on the way. New SSD controllers and flash are also on the horizon. It’s important for individual drives to stand out; therefore, Patriot has chosen to focus on RGB with the VPR400. If you only want the performance, you can opt for the cheaper P400 or one of its competitors, but if you're interested in adding some RGB to your M.2 port, this might just be the right fit for your build’s theme.

Specifications

The Patriot VPR400 comes in three capacities of 512GB, 1TB, and 2TB. At the time of review, only the 512GB and 1TB SKUs were available and documented. Compared to drives like the P400, the VPR400 comes with a significant premium in the interest of aesthetics: you’re paying more for the heatsink and RGB. The drive is otherwise standard fare for its hardware in terms of performance. The warranty, at least, is quite good, with a full five years of coverage with endurance of up to 800 TB of data writes (TBW) at 1TB.

Software and Accessories

Patriot offers an RGB sync app for download on its website, and it's compatible with the RGB sync systems from ASRock, ASUS, Gigabyte, and MSI. Patriot also cites support for their Viper toolbox, a typical SSD application for information and utility use. Patriot additionally says that the VPR400 has an advanced temperature control function.

A Closer Look

The VPR400 has a black heatsink on top with sixteen windows for LEDs to shine and an informative label on the back. The thermal padding appears to make relatively good contact. Under the heatsink, we see the controller and two NAND packages, with no DRAM present. We can also spot the LEDs.

The VPR400 uses the InnoGrit IG5220 SSD controller, which has proven quite popular. It’s present in the HP FX900 and Patriot P400, two drives we have previously reviewed. The VPR400 is, in fact, quite similar in layout to the latter. However, the P400 and FX900 had the BAA revision of this controller. This SSD has the BCA revision, with the difference appearing to be in the material of the integrated heatsink (IHS). It’s possible this will demonstrate better heat dissipation with the VPR400. The IG5220 does not run particularly hot, but it is still a fast controller, and this drive does have RGB lighting that typically adds a bit of heat. 

The VPR400 uses Micron’s 176-layer TLC flash, known as B47R. This flash is also on the P400 and FX900, as well as numerous other drives like the P5 Plus. Presumably, this SSD uses the standard 512Gb or 64GB dies, or eight per 8DP/OCP for a total of sixteen dies at 1TB. This is an excellent amount to saturate the IG5220 controller with four dies for each of its four channels.

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Comparison Products

We compare the 1TB Patriot Viper VPR400 to the Patriot P400 and HP FX900, two drives that have the same type of hardware. We also include the Silicon Power UD90, which uses a rival Phison E21T controller. The WD Black SN770 is also included because it is a strong competitor in this segment. Lastly, we have three high-end drives: the SK hynix Platinum P41, the Samsung 980 Pro, and the Crucial P5 Plus. As usual, we test all drives at the same capacity.

Trace Testing - 3DMark Storage Benchmark

Built for gamers, 3DMark’s Storage Benchmark focuses on real-world gaming performance. Each round in this benchmark stresses storage based on gaming activities including loading games, saving progress, installing game files, and recording gameplay video streams.

The VPR400 actually seems to do better than its two direct peers in this test. It falls behind the rest, but its performance is still adequate.

Trace Testing – PCMark 10 Storage Benchmark

PCMark 10 is a trace-based benchmark that uses a wide-ranging set of real-world traces from popular applications and everyday tasks to measure the performance of storage devices.

In contrast to the 3DMark results above, the VPR400 comes in dead last in PCMark. The differences in these tests may be down to optimization or firmware, particularly as the VPR400 is specifically designed for gaming.

Transfer Rates – DiskBench

We use the DiskBench storage benchmarking tool to test file transfer performance with a custom, 50GB dataset. We copy 31,227 files of various types, such as pictures, PDFs, and videos to a new folder and then follow-up with a reading test of a newly-written 6.5GB zip file.

The VPR400 lands exactly where we’d expect it to in this bandwidth-limited test: right in the middle. It performs well against its direct competitors, including the UD90 and SN770.

Synthetic Testing - ATTO / CrystalDiskMark

ATTO and CrystalDiskMark (CDM) are free and easy-to-use storage benchmarking tools that SSD vendors commonly use to assign performance specifications to their products. Both of these tools give us insight into how each device handles different file sizes.

There are no surprises with the ATTO tests — the VPR400 matches the P400. It’s also a fair match for the SN770. What we do see is the UD90 pulling away in sequential read performance, a Phison staple that indicates the E21T SSD controller has a shared lineage with the popular E18.

The VPR400's sequential performance is also solid in CrystalDiskMark. Performance in random workloads lags a little bit, particularly with writes, but reads tend to be more important, and these results are good on the whole. This hardware combination - controller and flash - has proven itself to be consistently above par. Nevertheless, the SN770 and UD90 remain competitive.

Sustained Write Performance and Cache Recovery

Official write specifications are only part of the performance picture. Most SSDs implement a write cache, which is a fast area of (usually) pseudo-SLC programmed flash that absorbs incoming data. Sustained write speeds can suffer tremendously once the workload spills outside of the cache and into the "native" TLC or QLC flash. We use Iometer to hammer the SSD with sequential writes for 15 minutes to measure both the size of the write cache and performance after the cache is saturated. We also monitor cache recovery via multiple idle rounds.

The VPR400 has three distinct performance states with SLC, TLC, and folding modes. The primary mode of pseudo-SLC writes at 4.65 GBps for up to 73 seconds, indicating an SLC cache of around 340GB. This is a bit larger than what is found on the FX900 and P400. Its TLC state at 2 GBps is correspondingly much shorter before hitting the 500 MBps bottleneck.

The VPR400 is clearly optimized a bit differently than those two peers, although the difference would not usually be noticeable in practice. This flash is quite fast in its native state, which makes for relatively quick writes for a four-channel controller. In addition, the large SLC cache should catch most things even if the drive is fuller. That being said, the SN770 matches it quite well, while the UD90 would be more consistent.

Power Consumption and Temperature

We use the Quarch HD Programmable Power Module to gain a deeper understanding of power characteristics. Idle power consumption is an important aspect to consider, especially if you're looking for a laptop upgrade as even the best ultrabooks can have mediocre storage.

Some SSDs can consume watts of power at idle while better-suited ones sip just milliwatts. Average workload power consumption and max consumption are two other aspects of power consumption, but performance-per-watt is more important. A drive might consume more power during any given workload, but accomplishing a task faster allows the drive to drop into an idle state more quickly, ultimately saving energy.

We also monitor the drive’s temperature via the S.M.A.R.T. data and an IR thermometer to see when (or if) thermal throttling kicks in and how it impacts performance. Remember that results will vary based on the workload and ambient air temperature.

We’ve charted the VPR400’s power consumption both with and without the LEDs illuminated. Unsurprisingly, the drive is more efficient without the LEDs enabled. As expected, it comes close to the P400 in that state, rivaling the SN770. However, the drive consumes significantly more power with the RGB enabled, although this is probably not a concern with use in a desktop PC.

We also tested thermals under both conditions. With RGB disabled, the drive idled around 50C with a maximum of around 69C after an extreme amount of writes; no throttling was seen even after 600GB. With RGB enabled, the idle temperature rose to the mid-50s Celsius, hitting over 73C with sustained writes. This was sufficient to engage throttling after about 420GB of writing. So we can say that the heatsink does work and helps compensate for the extra LED heat sufficiently for its intended use.

Test Bench and Testing Notes

We use a Rocket Lake platform with most background applications such as indexing, windows updates, and anti-virus disabled in the OS to reduce run-to-run variability. Each SSD is prefilled to 50% capacity and tested as a secondary device. Unless noted, we use active cooling for all SSDs.

Conclusion

The Patriot VPR400 is essentially more of a good thing, serving as a Patriot P400 with a better warranty, a heatsink, and RGB. The RGB lighting syncs with most major platforms with Patriot’s software, as well. The InnoGrit IG5220 is a proven SSD controller and Micron’s 176-layer TLC remains the best flash on the market. What’s not to love?

Part of the problem is that this market segment is becoming crowded and competitive. There are other drives with the same hardware, sure, but also WD’s stellar SN770. Moreover, we have newcomers like Silicon Power’s UD90, which uses Phison’s new E21T controller, nipping at the heels. The VPR400 certainly stands out with its looks and the performance is nothing to ignore. However, it doesn’t really do anything new.

Patriot says a 2TB SKU is forthcoming, which would be nice as we don’t see that with the P400 or HP’s FX900 (yet), but it's still missing at the time of writing. That’s okay as 1TB is the sweet spot with this type of drive, but then we have to start looking at the price. The VPR400, as priced today on Amazon, is simply far too expensive unless you absolutely need matching RGB for your build. We do appreciate the heatsink and metal heat spreader, but ultimately it’s not a lot more effective than plain drives with the same hardware.

If you’re looking for a budget drive or even an entry-level PCIe 4.0 SSD, this is simply not the drive for you. It’s more along the lines of the Lexar SL660 Blaze, a portable drive with RGB, in the sense that it’s aimed at the gamer aesthetic. Patriot does separate the VPR400 a bit from its own P400 with a better warranty, but similar drives like the FX900 plus ADATA’s Legend 840 and Atom 50 already do that at a competitive price. That’s not to mention the SN770, which for the average gamer, assuming they don’t care about RGB, is a safer bet.

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Patriot’s P400 is an entry-level PCIe 4.0 SSD that's designed to be affordable for the PlayStation 5 (PS5) or budget PC builds. The P400 is cheap enough to be a strong choice for new buyers who want an NVMe drive that gets the job done without any fanfare. 

The P400 lacks DRAM and has a shorter warranty than its peers, which include the Adata Legend 840 and ATOM 50, as well as the HP FX900 we recently reviewed. It compensates with higher endurance, but the P400's cooling solution leaves something to be desired. Nevertheless, we expect that its performance is more than adequate for most users, and pricing is competitive.

The budget NVMe SSD space has many contenders, including the WD SN570 and Samsung 980 in the PCIe 3.0 category. Meanwhile, the WD SN770 remains a powerful contender in the PCIe 4.0 camp. However, if you absolutely need the bandwidth or want a cheap drive for the PlayStation 5, you will lean more toward the latter or a drive like the P400. These drives are priced about the same, with the exception of the SN570 being a bit cheaper, helping make it a good compromise against the Samsung 980.

With so much selection, it’s a good time to be an SSD fan. But that can be a bittersweet proposition: Too many options can create indecision. Should you get the FX900 or the P400? We will compare these two drives in our performance benchmarks to hopefully demonstrate that you can’t go wrong — it’s all a matter of where your priorities lie.

Specifications

The Patriot P400 only comes in 512GB and 1TB capacities, which is similar to the HP FX900, Adata Legend 840, and Atom 50. This is fine, as these are budget drives meant to be quick and affordable. This is especially true at 1TB, where the P400 comes in at just $0.10 a GB. That's currently a bit cheaper than the FX900 and SN770. It’s certainly possible to get SSDs cheaper than this, particularly SATA SSDs and cheaper PCIe 3.0 options, including the 670p with QLC. That's why you'll have to take performance into consideration.

The P400 is PS5-compliant and is rated for up to 5/4.8 GBps of sequential read/write throughput and 620K/550K read/write IOPS. This also makes it a good choice for a PC that can handle PCIe 4.0 drives. The P400 is still fast on a 3.0 system, but it’s possible to get a cheaper drive like the SN570 in that case. If you’re looking at future-proofing, there are also faster 4.0 drives available. While this seems to make a drive like this a bit niche, in fact, the P400 is a bit of a jack-of-all-trades that we generally find more compelling than drives based on Phison’s E16 SSD controller.

In contrast to the five-year warranty you'll find with the HP FX900 and other rivals, the P400 only has a three-year warranty. This is a downside because the warranty period tends to be more important than the endurance rating for the average user. However, the P400 does offer 800 TB of write endurance per TB of capacity, which far exceeds the FX900 and also exceeds what you often find in high-end drives. As this is within a smaller period of time, the drive writes per day rating is rather high. However, the P400 would not be our first choice for a drive for heavier write workloads.

A Closer Look

The P400 is topped with a graphene label that acts as a heat spreader, although this is less substantial than the FX900’s graphene padding. ADATA’s similar drives use a metal heat spreader instead, which at least appears to be a bit more functional. Under the P400’s label, we see the DRAM-less controller and two NAND packages. The rear of the drive contains a second label that shows basic information about the drive.

The InnoGrit IG5220 is a DRAM-less, entry-level PCIe 4.0 SSD controller designed for cheaper drives. Nevertheless, it's a cut above what is available at PCIe 3.0, with higher peak bandwidth and impressive IOPS. This controller has proven popular as it fills the gap that the Phison E16 once did, albeit without DRAM. In fact, this controller helped usher in a new era of fast DRAM-less controllers, even though WD’s earlier Blue drives were quite good. 

This controller actually gained some competition when WD brought out its SN770 with a proprietary controller. While certainly better than the SN750 SE’s E19T, the IG5220 potentially has more competition on the horizon. This includes Phison’s E21T, which may be a pseudo-replacement for the E16 and should see both TLC and QLC, and SMI’s SM2269XT, which recently popped up on ADATA’s Legend 850. This is all good news for users as it heralds greater options and, hopefully, more competition. 

The flash appears to be Micron’s 176-layer TLC, or B47R, a popular pairing with this controller. This flash is also on the Crucial P5 Plus, some InnoGrit IG5236-powered drives like the FX900 Pro, and the faster models using Phison’s E18 controller, like the updated Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus. This flash has been more or less unparalleled  — that is until SK hynix brought out the Platinum P41 with its own 176-layer NAND. There are many technical differences between these two types of flash; however, for the general user, it just means better performance with less power draw.

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Comparison Products

We compare the Patriot P400 to all of its primary rivals, like the similarly-equipped HP FX900, the WD Blue SN570, the Samsung 980, and the WD Black SN770. We also threw in other high-end PCIe 4.0 drives, like the proprietary Crucial P5 Plus and Samsung 980 Pro. We also included a drive that uses the same flash as the P400 but coupled with DRAM and the Phison E18 controller, the Kingston Fury Renegade. All of these drives are 1TB.

Trace Testing - 3DMark Storage Benchmark

Built for gamers, 3DMark’s Storage Benchmark focuses on real-world gaming performance. Each round in this benchmark stresses storage based on gaming activities including loading games, saving progress, installing game files, and recording gameplay video streams.

As expected, the P400 scores right alongside the FX900, with the closest rival otherwise being the WD SN570. This test shows how well-optimized the WD SN770 is as it pulls away from the pack, challenging even high-end drives.

Trace Testing – PCMark 10 Storage Benchmark

PCMark 10 is a trace-based benchmark that uses a wide-ranging set of real-world traces from popular applications and everyday tasks to measure the performance of storage devices.

PCMark shows a similar distribution, although some drives, like the P5 Plus, do better here than on 3DMark.

Transfer Rates – DiskBench

We use the DiskBench storage benchmarking tool to test file transfer performance with a custom, 50GB dataset. We copy 31,227 files of various types, such as pictures, PDFs, and videos to a new folder and then follow-up with a reading test of a newly-written 6.5GB zip file.

DiskBench has three distinct performance bands due to bandwidth differences: the PCIe 3.0 drives at the bottom, the lower-end PCIe 4.0 drives in the middle, and the high-end 4.0 drives at the top. The exception would be the Crucial P5 Plus with file copies. Therefore, this test does not accurately reflect something like PS5 load times, and any compliant drive, including the P400, should be more than fast enough for that type of usage.

We see that the lower-end 4.0 drives offer a compromise when it comes to bandwidth which might help separate these options from even high-end 3.0 drives. The P400 lacks DRAM but has flash of a speed that can be difficult to find on PCIe 3.0 drives, possibly positively impacting workloads not bound by bandwidth.

Synthetic Testing - ATTO / CrystalDiskMark

ATTO and CrystalDiskMark (CDM) are free and easy-to-use storage benchmarking tools that SSD vendors commonly use to assign performance specifications to their products. Both of these tools give us insight into how each device handles different file sizes.

The P400 performs similarly to the FX900 in ATTO, with good write results but only mediocre results during the read workload. As with the FX900, there’s a bit of a drop in the read graph. This seems to be a “feature” of InnoGrit controllers, which may require a bit more optimization.

With the CDM sequential results, we see a similar pattern as we did with DiskBench: three zones that vary more or less by available bandwidth. This again makes the P400 and its direct competition a bit of a compromise for those with PCIe 4.0-compatible systems. However, we can see by the low queue depth random results that flash quality plays a role. The P400 and FX900 do well there, especially with random reads. Traditionally that has been a valuable metric for “real world” performance and demonstrates that this drive is more than enough.

The IG5220 also demonstrates that it’s a powerful SSD controller with its results at higher queue depths. It helps the P400 exceed the Crucial SN770 and even the Crucial P5 Plus during read workloads while matching the P5 Plus with writes and handily beating the WD SN570 and Samsung 980 in either scenario. Those two last drives are, again, PCIe 3.0 drives. We hinted above that 4.0 drives are more likely to have newer flash and more powerful controllers, which seems borne out by the results here, even if these are unrealistic workloads that may also be bound by the interface.

Sustained Write Performance and Cache Recovery

Official write specifications are only part of the performance picture. Most SSDs implement a write cache, which is a fast area of (usually) pseudo-SLC programmed flash that absorbs incoming data.  Sustained write speeds can suffer tremendously once the workload spills outside of the cache and into the "native" TLC or QLC flash. We use Iometer to hammer the SSD with sequential writes for 15 minutes to measure both the size of the write cache and performance after the cache is saturated. We also monitor cache recovery via multiple idle rounds.

The P400’s SLC cache capacity is similar to the FX900’s, coming in at around 300GB. This is very large but leaves some room for TLC so that it has a graceful post-SLC decline. The P400 generally writes a tiny bit slower than the FX900, but conversely, it can write a bit longer in both SLC and TLC modes. The outcome is almost precisely the same: 4.7 GBps or so for SLC, almost 2 GBps for TLC, then folding around 500 MBps. InnoGrit drives tend not to have great SLC recovery but can usually manage to jump back up to TLC speeds if tested.

As with the FX900, this is a very good result for a budget, DRAM-less drive. This is largely thanks to the excellent flash and how these drives are designed with the IG5220 controller. It’s flexible and fast, obviously faster than the WD SN570 and Samsung 980. The WD SN770 is much closer but lacks that middle-performance state. It’s possible you could make use of the P400’s heavy endurance with this realization, although we wouldn't consider that a realistic selling point.

Power Consumption & Temperature

We use the Quarch HD Programmable Power Module to gain a deeper understanding of power characteristics. Idle power consumption is an important aspect to consider, especially if you're looking for a laptop upgrade as even the best ultrabooks can have mediocre storage.

Some SSDs can consume watts of power at idle while better-suited ones sip just milliwatts. Average workload power consumption and max consumption are two other aspects of power consumption, but performance-per-watt is more important. A drive might consume more power during any given workload, but accomplishing a task faster allows the drive to drop into an idle state more quickly, ultimately saving energy.

We also monitor the drive’s temperature via the S.M.A.R.T. data and an IR thermometer to see when (or if) thermal throttling kicks in and how it impacts performance. Remember that results will vary based on the workload and ambient air temperature.

Since our power testing is currently based on a large file copy, it tends to favor drives that can finish that task faster. That’s usually faster drives in terms of interface and flash. That’s one reason the SK hynix Platinum P41 (not shown) did so well in our recent review, beating even the legendary Gold P31. The HP FX900 also beat the Gold P31 as it uses the fastest flash coupled with an efficient 4-channel controller.

The P400, however, has given us different and unexpected results than the FX900. It’s less power-efficient, although it still beats the PCIe 3.0 drives. It’s also within contention of many high-end drives. Our idle power result — which is worst-case and should not be used to gauge a potential laptop experience — is also peculiarly high. This seems to be a firmware quirk with the P400 not using its power states as effectively as possible. It’s possible Patriot tuned this drive for maximum performance, although we suspect this makes little subjective difference in practice.

The P400 also ran hotter than the FX900, as perhaps anticipated above when looking at the heat spreader. It idled in the mid-to-high-50Cs, with a 24C ambient. The heat spreader surface was a bit cooler, but also quite warm. However, the heat spreader proved sufficient to keep the drive from throttling. We measured a peak of 75C. This is still significantly hotter than the FX900 and likely hotter than the ADATA offerings; however, it's adequate for its intended market.

Test Bench and Testing Notes

We use a Rocket Lake platform with most background applications such as indexing, windows updates, and anti-virus disabled in the OS to reduce run-to-run variability. Each SSD is prefilled to 50% capacity and tested as a secondary device. Unless noted, we use active cooling for all SSDs.

Conclusion

Patriot is a known brand but has rarely stood out of the pack, and that’s no different with the P400. It’s very similar to the HP FX900 we previously reviewed. The PCIe 4.0 market has been getting more complex over time with more hardware and different drives available. Our review of WD’s SN770 has shown what a DRAM-less drive is capable of — which is to say, they're enough for everyone but don't carry a premium price. The P400 has stiff competition that grows by the day, as we have not yet seen what the E21T and SM2269XT controllers can do, not to mention newer flash from manufacturers not named Micron.

Moving away from those technical aspects, what does the P400 offer uniquely? It does have a graphene heat spreader, which is better than a plain label. The FX900 has graphene padding and other drives have metal heat spreaders or even heatsinks, though. That’s particularly true for PS5 drives, although we suspect good cooling is not at all a requirement there. The Platinum P41, which is a high-end drive, manages without any special cooling. The P400 also has a shorter warranty than its peers, at three years instead of five, although it makes up for it with a very high endurance rating. We suspect this is mostly for marketing purposes, but it’s there for those that care.

In any case, we had no problems with overheating, and the P400's overall performance was quite good. For general use, this will get you there and then some, all while offering a taste of the benefits PCIe 4.0 bandwidth can provide. Budget PCIe 3.0 drives can be had a bit more cheaply in many cases, so this type of drive fits a nice milieu; after all, having more options is not a bad thing. The competition will likely be tougher in the future. It was tempting to drop this drive down half a point since it doesn’t seem quite as polished as the FX900; however, it’s cheaper than that drive and the SN770, making it a fair trade. We have not tested Adata’s analogous drives yet, but those might be the most compelling alternative.

The P400 is an easy choice for a cheap PS5 drive if you don’t need the capacity. Technically, the FX900 has a larger 2TB SKU, but we have not seen it available. In any case, 1TB is the sweet spot for this type of hardware, and that’s where most of the competition lies. For a PC, this is an excellent choice for a first-time PCIe 4.0 build that’s on a budget; you get more bandwidth without any real downsides in general performance. It’s a safe purchase, and we’re glad users have lots of options with more to come.

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Patriot is expanding its SSD offerings with the addition of the Viper VPR400, which it claims is the world's first PCIe 4.0 x4 M.2 SSD with RGB flourishes. For those that keep up with the latest developments in the SSD space, this is the successor to the Viper VPR100 that we reviewed just over two years ago.

Before we dive into the glitz and glam of RGB, let's talk about performance. The Viper VPR400 uses an InnoGrit IG5220 SSD controller, which is geared towards the value segment. In this case, we're looking at 4K random read/write performance of 600K IOPs and 500K IOPs, respectively. In addition, sequential reads are listed at 4,600 MBps across the board. However, sequential writes are listed at 3,600 MBps for the entry-level 512GB SKU, while the 1TB version of the SSD boosts that figure to 4,400 MBps.

Those performance numbers won't win any speed records, considering that SSDs equipped with the more performance InnoGrit IG5221 'RainierQX' controller can handle sequential reads/writes of 7,000 MBps/6,000 MBps. However, Patriot hopes the Viper VPR400's performance/value will attract price-conscious gamers.

To manage heat generated by the controller and onboard 3D NAND, Patriot employs an aluminum heatsink and a dynamic thermal throttling algorithm to keep heat levels within a given performance envelope. Patriot also claims endurance of 400 terabytes written for the 512GB SSD, while the 1TB SSD doubles that to 800 terabytes written. A 5-year limited warranty also backs the SSDs.

Of course, the real reason to purchase the Viper VPR400 is its Viper RGB lighting, which is integrated into the aluminum heatsink. The RGBs can be customized using Patriot's Viper RGB 3.0 software. As you might expect, the RGB effects are compatible with leading platforms, including Asus Aurora Sync, ASRock Polychrome Sync, Gigabyte RGB Fusion and MSI Mystic Light Sync.

As previously stated, the Viper VPR400 family consists of 512GB and 1TB SKUs. However, the product sheet for the SSDs makes mention of a more capacious 2TB version, so it could potentially come at a later date.

Patriot hasn't announced pricing yet for the Viper VPR400, but we'd imagine a starting price around the $100 mark for the 512GB SSD. Of course, once we get one in for review, we'll have to see if it's up to par with the best SSDs on the market.

The Patriot Viper V765, which is one of our favorite gaming keyboards, has matched the lowest price we've ever seen at $59.99 for the Black Friday deals section. So if you want a keyboard with a number pad and clicky switches, this one is worth a look.

We've seen this keyboard as high as $90, though it often sells a bit lower. To get this new low price, you'll have to go through Newegg, which has it for $64.99, and stacks a $5 off code on top of it. To get the deal, use the code BCMAY22362 at checkout.

Our editor-in-chief Avram Piltch reviewed this keyboard back in 2018 and wrote that "the Patriot Viper V765 provides a best-in-class clicky typing and gaming experience that's superior to those provided by the Cherry MX Blue switches you'll find in many of its competitors."

This keyboard uses Kailh Box White switches. It also features dedicated media keys and a volume roller. Of course, if you prefer a smaller keyboard, like a TKL or even something smaller for the sake of ergonomics, you're going to want to pass on this one. This is also worth skipping if you prefer linear switches. 

You can find even more savings at our best Black Friday PC gaming deals page. We're also tracking the best Black Friday monitor deals, best Black Friday CPU deals, best Black Friday SSD deals, best Black Friday gaming laptop deals, best Black Friday 3D printer deals, best Black Friday Raspberry Pi deals and the Best Black Friday PC hardware deals overall.

Although far from being one of the best SSDs, the Viper VPN100 is a solid SSD for the money. Unfortunately, the drive recently made the Reddit headlines because a consumer discovered that it arrived with different components than originally advertised. Patriot has provided an official statement to Tom's Hardware explaining the reason behind the component swap.

One Redditor recently purchased one of Patriot's Viper VPN100 2TB SSDs, and much to his surprise, the drive arrived with Phison's E12S SSD controller and 512MB of DRAM. This certainly raised the alarm since the SSD not only utilizes a different SSD controller but also came with 1/4 the DRAM. For comparison, the original Viper VPN100 2TB used the Phison E12 SSD controller and had 2GB of DRAM.

Like many vendors, including Adata and PNY, Patriot also fell victim to the global semiconductor shortage, so the company explored other options for its VPN100. Unfortunately, the majority of SSD manufacturers don't produce their own components and have to buy them elsewhere. The thing here is transparency, and if there is a substantial change to a product, then it's the vendor's responsibility to communicate the change to the consumer in a timely matter. That didn't happen in this situation, though. 

Despite the drastic difference in components, Patriot guarantees that both configurations offer the same performance in sequential and random workloads. The brand advertises the VPN100 with sequential read and write speeds up to 3,400 MBps and 3,200 MBps, respectively, depending on the capacity. Random performance is rated for 700,000 IOPS reads and writes.

In its statement, Patriot claims that the new E12S setup features the same endurance limits as the original E12 configuration "sans Chia mining." However, that doesn't seem to be the case. The original specification sheet had the VPN100 2TB at 3,115 TBW, while the new specification sheet reveals an endurance level of 900 TBW. We're following up for clarification. 

Although it's now public that there are two versions of the VPN100 on the market, consumers still have no way to really differentiate one from the other. Patriot seems to be using the same part number for both variations, turning the purchasing process into a lottery.

You can find Patriot's full statement below.

Patriot's statement:

We at Patriot would like to address the current situation surrounding our Viper VPN100 M.2 solid state drive. We have become aware that some customers have noted the reduction in cache on the VPN100 SSD. Over the past few days we have taken time to investigate this matter thoroughly internally and listen to the feedback generated online.

Due to the ongoing fab shortages affecting the global IC supply chain, in 2020 Patriot opted to utilize the Phison E12S controller in addition to the Phison E12 for the full VPN100 series (256GB/512GB/1TB/2TB). We confirm this is the only Viper SSD series affected. The E12S uses less cache but offers the same performance as the E12 controller because it is produced using the latest fab process and innovative firmware development. As an advanced version of the E12 controller, Patriot still guarantees that the VPN100 using the E12S will hit the same performance specs in sequential read/write, and random IOPS, and same endurance limits (sans Chia mining) as the VPN100 using the original E12 controller. Please see the comparison of performances below:

However, we do not deny that when doing so, we have failed to update our information sheets that are available online for public viewing and reference respectively, this should have been performed immediately. For this we apologize and take responsibility for any inconveniences caused to all partners and customers. Any consumer that has any questions or concerns regarding their VPN100 solution with E12S controller is free to get in touch with our Customer Service department at:

support@patriotmem.com

Going forward, we commit to our information sheets and website reflecting the actual available product specifications at all times.

We are excited to be introducing a new Viper Gen3 x4 m.2 SSD solution launching in Q4 2021 that will replace the VPN100 and hope it will continue to please hardware enthusiasts worldwide and meet their standards.

It has been a pleasure being a part of the IT hardware community for the past 35 years and we hope to continuously bring out ground-breaking products in a time where technology is ever-evolving.

Sincerely,

Patriot Memory, Inc.

With a high-speed PCIe 3.0 x4 controller, enterprise-grade TLC flash, and a 12-year warranty, Team Group’s T-Create Expert delivers respectable performance and boasts incredibly high endurance figures that put some of the Best SSDs on the market to shame. Due to its impressive endurance, the company positions this SSD as the best consumer NVMe SSD for Chia Coin mining. Enterprise-grade TLC isn’t cheap, though, so it'll cost you a pretty penny if you want one of these ultra-endurant SSDs. 

Chia Coin farming has exploded in just a few short months, and with that, so has the demand for high-performance and high endurance NVMe SSDs for plotting. Chia plotting is taxing due to its heavy write and mixed workloads, so we typically recommend enterprise-grade SSDs for the task. However, Team Group is singing a different tune. Instead of dissuading Chia farmers from purchasing their SSDs, Team Group has begun marketing its drives to them.

Unfortunately, many Chia farmers still use standard consumer-grade hardware, and some vendors are going as far as to void the warranty of SSDs used for Chia plotting, while others are having mixed thoughts. In contrast, even though Team Group initially designed the T-Create Expert for content creators with heavy multi-media file manipulation workloads, the company now claims it is the best NVMe SSD for Chia plotting.

Specifications

Team Group’s T-Create Expert is available in two capacities of 1TB and 2TB at $430 and $830, respectively, meaning the SSDs are twice as expensive as standard M.2 NVMe drives. The company rates the Expert to deliver 3.4/3 GBps of read/write throughput and sustain up to 180,000/140,000 random read/write IOPS through the use of SLC caching. 

The high endurance ratings and warranty duration certainly stand out from the crowd. Team Group rates the 1TB model to endure up to 6,000TB of writes while the 2TB model is rated for up to 12,000 TB of writes within a staggeringly long twelve-year warranty period. Surprisingly, the T-Create Expert ships with very little factory over-provisioning at just 7.4%. Still, thanks to Silicon Motion’s special mix of LDPC ECC and high-grade flash, these SSDs can handle tons of wear and keep going.

A Closer Look

The Team Group T-Create Expert comes in an M.2 2280 double-sided form factor, restricting it in some mobile applications that call for a single-sided design. It should fit in most desktops, though. It also features a grey heat spreader over the controller to help keep it cool, and the black PCB is a plus. Two small activity LEDs on the PCB blink during use, one blue and one red.

Team Group’s T-Create Expert leverages Silicon Motion’s SM2262EN PCIe 3.0 x4 NVMe SSD controller. This NVMe 1.3-compliant SSD is an older design at this point, but it should still deliver responsive performance under most consumer workloads. It leverages dual ARM Cortex R5 CPU cores, along with an eight-channel architecture for enhanced interleaving. It interfaces with DRAM to accelerate FTL layer access, too. 

The controller is clocked at 625 MHz, while the two 8Gb Micron DDR3L ICs operate at 800 MHz. The controller features ASPM, ASPT, and L1.2 support for low power consumption at idle. It will also thermal throttle to prioritize data protection at high temperatures exceeding 75 degrees Celsius. The drive supports Trim and comes with S.M.A.R.T data reporting capability, but lacks AES 256-bit encryption.

The company has opted to use Micron’s FortisMax high-endurance enterprise-grade 64L TLC flash, which is rated to handle 10,000 P/E cycles or roughly 3-6x more endurance than your standard consumer-binned flash. This is part of why this SSD is so expensive. Sixteen 512Gb quad-plane dies are spread across four NAND packages, each operating at 650 MTps.

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Comparison Products

We put the T-Create Expert up against the best SSD on the market, including the WD_Black SN850, Samsung 980 Pro, Gigabyte Aorus Gen4 7000s, and Patriot Viper VP4300. We also include some PCIe 3.0 competition, like the WD_Black SN750, Samsung 970 EVO Plus, and Crucial P5.

Game Scene Loading - Final Fantasy XIV

Final Fantasy XIV Shadowbringers is a free real-world game benchmark that easily and accurately compares game load times without the inaccuracy of using a stopwatch.

Scoring fourth place, Team Group’s T-Create Expert tied the Samsung 970 EVO Plus. The Expert surpassed the 980 Pro but couldn’t catch the WD_Black SN850 and Gigabyte Aorus Gen4 7000s.

Transfer Rates – DiskBench

We use the DiskBench storage benchmarking tool to test file transfer performance with a custom dataset. We copy a 50GB dataset including 31,227 files of various types, like pictures, PDFs, and videos to a new folder and then follow-up with a reading test of a newly-written 6.5GB zip file.

While it delivered responsive game load results, the Team Group T-Create Expert lagged the competition during our file transfer benchmarks. Landing in last place during both the 50GB copy and large file read, the T-Create Expert appears to be more optimized for endurance than responsiveness.

Trace Testing – PCMark 10 Storage Test

PCMark 10 is a trace-based benchmark that uses a wide-ranging set of real-world traces from popular applications and everyday tasks to measure the performance of storage devices. The quick benchmark is more relatable to those who use their PCs for leisure or basic office work, while the full benchmark relates more to power users.

In contrast to the DiskBench results, the Expert delivered respectable results in both of PCMark 10’s workloads. It surpassed the Crucial P5, Samsung 970 EVO Plus, and WD_Black SN750, but ultimately trailed the PCIe 4.0 competitors due to its limited throughput.

Synthetic Testing - ATTO / CrystalDiskMark

ATTO and CrystalDiskMark (CDM) are free and easy-to-use storage benchmarking tools that SSD vendors commonly use to assign performance specifications to their products. Both of these tools give us insight into how each device handles different file sizes.

The Expert delivered solid sequential read and write performance across most block sizes at a QD of one (QD1). As a matter of fact, its read performance results were much faster at smaller file sizes than the Crucial P5 and WD_Black SN750. Furthermore, the Expert delivered the fastest random responsiveness out of any PCIe 3.0 competitor, and peak performance exceeded the official spec ratings, too. 

However, it couldn't keep up with the likes of the PCIe 4.0 Samsung 980 Pro nor WD_Black SN850. At a QD of 8, throughput measured 3.5/3.2 GBps read/write. Performance in random workloads maxed out at roughly 327,000/374,000 read/write IOPS at a QD of 256.

Sustained Write Performance and Cache Recovery

Official write specifications are only part of the performance picture. Most SSDs implement a write cache, which is a fast area of (usually) pseudo-SLC programmed flash that absorbs incoming data.  Sustained write speeds can suffer tremendously once the workload spills outside of the cache and into the "native" TLC or QLC flash. We use iometer to hammer the SSD with sequential writes for 15 minutes to measure both the size of the write cache and performance after the cache is saturated. We also monitor cache recovery via multiple idle rounds.

The T-Create Expert has a large dynamic SLC cache that spans roughly 326GB of our 2TB sample. The Expert wrote at an average rate of 2.8 GBps before it filled the cache. Once filled, the Expert’s write speed degraded to roughly 1,200MBps on average, fluctuating between 950 MBps to 1,450 MBps for the remainder of the test. After idle time, the T-Create Expert recouped roughly 20GB of SLC cache during each of our idle rounds.

Power Consumption and Temperature

We use the Quarch HD Programmable Power Module to gain a deeper understanding of power characteristics. Idle power consumption is an important aspect to consider, especially if you're looking for a laptop upgrade. Some SSDs can consume watts of power at idle while better-suited ones sip just milliwatts. Average workload power consumption and max consumption are two other aspects of power consumption, but performance-per-watt is more important. A drive might consume more power during any given workload, but accomplishing a task faster allows the drive to drop into an idle state more quickly, ultimately saving energy.

We also monitor the drive’s temperature via the S.M.A.R.T. data and an IR thermometer to see when (or if) thermal throttling kicks in and how it impacts performance. Bear in mind that results will vary based on the workload and ambient air temperature.

Power efficiency isn’t the T-Create Expert’s strong suit. Overall, it lands in last place in terms of efficiency. It manages its idle power consumption fairly well, sipping just 741mW at idle with ASPM disabled.

Idle temps measure roughly 40 degrees Celsius, while peak temps hit 77 degrees at the controller after we wrote 450GB of data to the SSD. However, the drive began throttling after we wrote roughly 250GB of data. While active airflow isn’t needed in most cases, it is recommended if you plan to constantly task the T-Create Expert with heavy write or copy workloads like we see during Chia plotting. 

Test Bench and Testing Notes

We use a Rocket Lake platform with most background applications such as indexing, windows updates, and anti-virus disabled in the OS to reduce run-to-run variability. Each SSD is prefilled to 50% capacity and tested as a secondary device. Unless noted, we use active cooling for all SSDs.

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Team Group’s T-Create Expert is a speedy NVMe SSD that easily outpaces any SATA drive and is competitive with many of the best PCIe 3.0 SSDs, but it isn’t the most agile SSD we've come across. With limited throughput due to its PCIe 3.0 interface and slower hardware, it can’t keep up with the PCIe 4.0 competition, like WD’s Black SN850 or the Samsung 980 Pro. Both of those SSDs leverage faster flash and more complex controller designs to serve up faster, more responsive performance.

However, mature hardware tends to bring higher reliability, and Team Group claims the Expert is a reliable and durable SSD. Furthermore, instead of running a pool of QLC flash in static SLC mode as we’ve seen in the Enmotus FuzeDrive and what we speculate that Sabrent plans for its recently-announced Plotripper Pro, the Expert takes advantage of high-quality enterprise-grade TLC flash and optimized firmware to endure the toughest workloads that Chia plotters and creators can throw at it. 

Team Group stands by the T-Create Expert with endurance ratings that span up to 12,000 TBW and twelve years of warranty coverage. No other consumer SSD can come close to the reliability of the T-Create Expert. With high-endurance like this, it is also perfect for Chia plotting. However, the Expert costs twice as much as an average SSD, so purchasing one of these SSDs will cost you a pretty penny. 

Alternatively, if you don’t need such high endurance or the peace of mind brought to you by a very lengthy warranty, you could also consider SSDs like the 4TB WD_Black SN750 or 4TB Sabrent Rocket, which will get you twice the usable capacity of the 2TB T-Create Expert for a similar price. 

That's not to mention that there are plenty of cheaper QLC options, like the Sabrent Rocket Q, Mushkin Alpha, and Corsair Force MP400. However, they lack anywhere near the endurance capability and can’t always keep up with heavy workloads like Chia plotting or heavy media manipulation. 

The T-Create Expert is great at what it does, serving up the ultimate in endurance at its capacity point to appeal to Chia farmers and content creators with the most punishing workloads. Still, its high price and PCIe 3.0 interface relegate it to a niche product. 

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Patriot, which produces some of the best RAM on the market, has presented the new Viper Elite II, the successor to the brand's award-winning Viper Elite family. Retaining its successor's DNA, the Viper Elite II memory arrives with an aggressive design that's devoid of flashy RGB illumination.

The Viper Elite II, which is built for performance and overclocking, featuring a 10-layer PCB with hand-tested memory integrated circuits. Patriot offers the memory in a single module presentation and a dual-channel package. The Viper Elite II comes with densities, spanning from 16GB (2x8GB) to 64GB (2x32GB). There are four data rates to choose from: DDR4-2666, DDR4-3200, DDR4-3600 and DDR4-4000.

The maximum capacity varies depending on the data rate. The DDR4-2666 and DDR4-4000 memory kits max out at 32GB (2x16B), while the DDR4-3200 and DDR4-3600 memory kits are available up to 64GB. (2x32GB).

As far as timings go, the DDR4-2666 and DDR4-3200 variants come with 16-17-17-36 and 18-22-22-42 timings, respectively. The faster DDR4-3600 and DDR4-4000 variants, on the other hand, are rated for 20-26-26-46.

The Viper Elite II is compatible with the latest Intel and AMD platforms. As expected, the memory modules support XMP 2.0 for automatic overclocking on compatible platforms. Patriot backs its Viper Elite II memory with a limited lifetime warranty.

Patriot's new memory is already available for purchase at Amazon and Newegg. The DDR4-2666, DDR4-3200, DDR4-3600 and DDR4-4000 memory kits start at $89.99, $91.99, $97.99 and $132.99, respectively.

Patriot will release a new DDR4 kit next month to compete with the best RAM in the budget category. During The Tom’s Hardware Show yesterday, Roger Shinmoto, Patriot VP of product, revealed the DDR4-4000 Viper Elite 2.

The brand already has DDR4-4000 kits available in its other Viper-branded products, such as the Patriot Viper Steel, but the Viper Elite lineup currently maxes out at DDR4-2400. The Viper Elite 2 will kick things up to DDR4-4000, while keeping with the more wallet-friendly pricing of the Elite series.

4,000 MHz is a sweet spot for AMD platforms, but Shinmoto told us that the kits target both AMD and Intel builders. 

But it’s not just about keeping your bank account happy. After 6 years of the Viper Elite being in the market, the new Viper Elite 2 is supposed to bring some new style too.

“Engineering team decided it was time to give it a facelift, so they went out and designed a brand new heat spreader from the ground up,” Shintomo said on The Tom’s Hardware Show. “It’s a really nice red and black design. Very aggressive styling.”

The exec pointed to the DDR4-4000 RAM as being a good fit for overclocking, as well as enthusiasts building a PC for the first time or builders simply seeking an upgrade that doesn’t cost a fortune. 

We still don’t know the Viper Elite 2’s pricing, partially due to the memory market's volatility. 

“Just like NAND, DRAM pricing is so volatile,” Shinmoto explained. “We can quote a price today and it might change by May. So they'll be competitive, but these aren’t the highest-end solutions we have. They’re geared more for the entry-level and price-minded sector.” 

But although memory prices have been “going up for a couple months now” and “allocations have been tight,” according to Les Henry, Patriot’s VP of North America and South America sales, Shinmoto assured the Viper Elite 2’s pricing will be “very affordable.” 

We currently see Patriot's high-end Viper Steel DDR4-4000 (2x 8GB) going for about $145, so we hope the Viper Elite 2 is cheaper upon release. 

The Tom’s Hardware Show livestream is every Thursday at 3 p.m. ET on YouTube, Facebook and Twitch, and is also available as a podcast. 

Patriot recently expanded the brand's existing Viper Steel DDR4 lineup. The new Viper Steel RGB not only arrives with a redesigned heat spreader, but also features a RGB diffuser with five multi-zone lighting.

Patriot fabricates the Viper Steel RGB memory on a 10-layer PCB and offers it in different presentations. The single-DIMM kits come in 8GB, 16GB and 32GB flavors, while the dual-DIMM kits are available in 16GB (2x8GB), 32GB (2x16GB) and 64GB (2x32GB) capacities.

In regards to frequency, the Viper Steel RGB doesn't really offer much options to choose from. The DDR4-3200 kits feature 18-22-22-42 timings, while the DDR4-3600 kits have their timings configured to 20-26-26-46. Regardless of the frequency, both SKUs require a 1.35V DRAM voltage to work.

All Viper Steel RGB memory kits are equipped with XMP 2.0 support, making setup a fast and painless process. Compatibility-wise, the memory plays nice with the latest Intel and AMD platforms.

Patriot backs the Viper Steel RGB with a limitied lifetime warranty and has already put up the different kits on sale at Newegg and Amazon. The pricing for the DDR4-3200 memory kits span from $84.99 to $265.99 and the DDR4-3600 ones sell for between $89.99 and $275.99.

Keeping with the times, Patriot has expanded its Viper 4 Blackout series with a trio of high-speed memory kits. The new dual-channel memory kits announced this week come in DDR4-4133, DDR4-4266 and DDR4-4400 flavors.

The new memory kits continue to leverage the sleek and RGB-less exterior that's emblematic of the Viper 4 Blackout series. The design will surely be make for some of the best RAM for performance enthusiasts that haven't bought into all this RGB business. The memory modules feature a black PCB with a matching aluminum heat spreader. Coming in at 42.6mm, the Viper 4 Blackout memory modules will easily fit under even the largest CPU air coolers.

Specs

Patriot currently sells the new Viper 4 Blackout memory kits with a density of 16GB. The DDR4-4400 and DDR4-4133 versions come with 18-26-26-46 CAS latency timings and require 1.45V to operate at the advertised speeds. The first retails for $129.99, while the latter carries a $124.99 price tag. The DDR4-4133 kit, on the other hand, comes with timings set to CL18-22-22-42 and only needs 1.4V. The memory kit sells for $119.99.

All Viper 4 Blackout memory kits are XMP 2.0-ready and should work without a hitch on both AMD and Intel platforms. Patriot backs them up with a limited lifetime warranty.

Viper Gaming, Patriot Memory's elite gaming sub-brand, expanded its Viper Steel family today with 32GB DDR4 RAM modules available in the smaller SO-DIMM form factor as well as UDIMM.

The new memory modules retain the gunmetal grey heat spreader that has characterized the Viper Steel series thus far. The dual-channel kits are compatible with the latest Intel and AMD platforms, whether they be in a desktop PC or laptop. 

The Viper Steel memory kits are available with one or two 32GB modules. Patriot offers the UDIMMs with memory speeds spanning from DDR4-3000 to DDR4-3600. The SO-DIMMs range from DDR4-2400 to DDR4-3000.

Patriot Viper Steel 32GB DDR4 Specifications

It's impressive to see Patriot cram 32GB onto one SO-DIMM module. Since these are smaller than the DIMMs used in desktops, Patriot's new SO-DIMM kits may be some of the best RAM to consider for anyone looking to fit a lot of memory into a laptop, or even a NUC or Mini-ITX PC build.

On the SO-DIMM side, the DDR4-3000 module has 18-20-20-43 CAS latency timings and runs at 1.25V. The DDR4-2666 and DDR4-2400 offerings come equipped with CL18-18-18-43 and CL18-18-18-43 timings, respectively, and require 1.2V.

On the UDIMM side, the Viper Steel sticks rated for DDR4-3600 are configured to CL18-22-22-42, while the DDR4-3400 and DDR4-3000 parts come with CL16-18-18-36 timings. The modules operate with 1.35V at their corresponding memory speeds. 

As is the norm, Viper Steel memory comes with support for XMP 2.0, making the setup process a breeze.

The Viper Steel 32GB memory kits are available for purchase on Amazon and Newegg now. If you're in the market for SO-DIMM, the 32GB DDR4-3600 module carries a $144.99 price tag, and the DDR4-2400 module will set you back $139.99. The 64GB UDIMM kits cost $309.99 for DDR4-3600 and $279.99 for DDR4-2400. 

Patriot has announced its latest M.2 SSD series in the P300, which spans from 128GB up to 2TB. The P300 flaunts a single-sided M.2 2280 design and fits into your typical PCIe 3.0 x4 slot. The SSDs don't rely on a bulky heatsink so it should fit inside tight spaces, including inside laptops.

The P300 features a DRAM-less a architecture and unspecified 3D NAND flash. In its announcement today, Patriot described the SSD controller as a "next-generation, mid-tier controller" but didn't reveal the exact model. However, Newegg lists the P300 with a Phison PS5013-E13T SSD controller.

Patriot's P300 SSD offers sequential read speeds of 1,700 MBps on the 256 and 512GB units and 2,100 MBps on the 1TB unit. The sequential write speeds for the 256GB and 512GB models are 1,100 MBps and 1,200 MBps, respectively. The 1TB model delivers sequential writes up to 1,650 MBps. 

Patriot P300 Specs

Regardless of the capacity, the P300's random performance is the same across all capacities. The SSD is rated for 290,000 IOPS reads and 260,000 IOPS writes. The P300's list of attributes includes support for LDPC (low-density parity-check), advanced wear leveling and power-saving modes, such as APST, ASPM and L1.2.

The 256GB and 512GB models are rated for 80 TBW and 160 TBW, respectively, while the 1TB is listed for 320 TBW. Patriot backs the P300 SSD with a limited three-year warranty.

The P300 is already available at Amazon, Newegg and Patriot's webstore. It starts at $34.99 for the 128GB model and tops out at $324.99 for 2TB. 

Thanks to the addition of PCIe 4.0, AMD has one-upped Intel and enables enthusiasts the opportunity to deck out their systems with some of the fastest flash ever. If you recently upgraded to AMD’s latest-gen X570 motherboards, you are well equipped to handle what we’re going to show you today.

The Viper VP4100 is a high-end SSD through and through. The drive is one of the fastest SSDs in terms of sequential performance, and yet it is just a fraction of the size of your typical hard drive. Enabled by a Phison E16 PCIe 4.0 x4 NVMe controller and Kioxia’s (formerly Toshiba Memory) BiCS4 TLC, it can handle large file transfers without a sweat.

Specifications

The VP4100 comes in capacities of 1TB and 2TB. Patriot rates sequential performance at up to 5.5/4.4 GBps read/write, and random performance stretches up to 800,000 read/write IOPS. 

As a result, the drive commands a premium price. The 1TB model retails for $219.99 while the 2TB model lands at $439.99. The drives also come with high endurance ratings of 1,800TB for the 1TB model and 3,600TB for the 2TB model.

Unlike Corsair’s Force MP600, however, the VP4100 does not feature hardware-accelerated AES 256-bit encryption support. But it does come with the standard support S.M.A.R.T. data reporting, trim support, and you can secure erase the drive via the Format NVM command.

Software and Accessories

Patriot provides a rather basic toolbox, but it lets you monitor your drive’s S.M.A.R.T. data, update firmware, and run the secure erase command. And, unlike Corsair’s SSD Toolbox, Patriot’s actually issues a proper secure erase instead of just overwriting the drive.

A Closer Look

Patriot’s Viper VP4100 is an M.2 2280 form factor SSD. Unfortunately, the VP4100 features a blue PCB rather than black, but Patriot manufactured it with an edgy looking heatsink that efficiently cools the SSD when it is under load.

We don’t recommend trying to pull the heatsink off, as the adhesive is very strong, and you can rather easily damage the drive. 

Peeling back the heatsink, we see Phison’s E16 PCIe 4.0 x4 NVMe 1.3 controller. The E16 is similar to the company’s E12 controller, only it comes with support for the newer and faster PCIe 4.0 interface, features a newer LDPC ECC algorithm, and interfaces with Kioxia’s BiCS4 96L TLC flash. The NAND dies on our 2TB sample are 512Gbit in density, while the 1TB features a lower density 256Gbit die. This helps to balance performance between the two capacities. 

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Comparison Products

As a top-ranking SSD, we threw the Viper VP4100 into the pit against some of the best SSDs on the market. 

We include the 1.5TB Intel Optane 905P with its 3D XPoint memory that is easily the most expensive consumer SSD on the market. We also threw in a 1TB Samsung 970 PRO (Phoenix + 64L MLC V-NAND) and 2TB 970 EVO Plus (Phoenix + 9xL TLC V-NAND) as high-end contenders. The 1TB Corsair Force MP600 (Phison E16 + Kioxia BiCS4 96L TLC) provides capacity/performance comparisons.

Additionally, we included we added in the MyDigitalSSD BPX Pro 1.92TB (Phison E12 + Kioxia BiCS3 64L TLC) HP SSD EX950 (SM2262EN + Micron 64L TLC), and one of the cheapest NVMe SSDs available, the Intel SSD 660p (SM2263EN + Micron 64L QLC). We even threw in a 1TB Crucial MX500 (SM2258 + Micron 64L TLC), a SATA SSD, and a 6TB WD Black HDD for good measure. 

Game Scene Loading - Final Fantasy XIV

The Final Fantasy XIV StormBlood benchmark is a free real-world game benchmark that easily and accurately compares game load times without the inaccuracy of using a stopwatch.

While the PCIe 4.0 interface enables double the potential throughput, ordinary tasks don’t yet take advantage due to unoptimized software. Game load performance is one of these tasks. The Intel Optane 905P is the winner here with its industry-leading random performance. The Viper VP4100 still yielded an average result, however. With a total load time of 11.75 seconds, it nearly matches the 1TB Force MP600 and significantly outperforms the HDD.  

System Restore – Macrium Reflect

A system clone or restoration isn’t something many people do often. But it can become a time-consuming task with slow storage devices like HDDs or entry-level SSDs - especially if you have a lot of data. Therefore, we developed a test to measure how long this task takes. To ensure repeatable results, we secure erase each SSD to ensure the pSLC cache is empty before we restore an average-sized 222GB operating system and files from a 1.5TB Intel Optane SSD 905P.

With an interface bottleneck holding it back, the MX500 writes the system image in roughly 11 minutes while the HDD takes almost 15 minutes. Upgrading to NVMe goodness enables faster image restoration times. All NVMe SSDs, including the VP4100, restore the image within 9 minutes.

Transfer Rates – DiskBench

We use the DiskBench storage benchmarking tool to test file transfer performance with our own custom 50GB block of data. Our data set includes 31,227 files of various types, like pictures, PDFs, and videos. We copy the files to a new folder and then follow up with a reading test of a newly-written 6.5 GB file.

Patriot’s Viper VP4100 is fast at file copying tasks. At an average pace of 874 MBps, it falls just behind the Intel Optane 905P and the 1TB Corsair Force MP600, but outperforms the Samsung 970 Pro. Overall, the VP4100 comes in fourth place when copying the 50GB test folder.

When reading back out 6.5GB test file, it out-classes any competitor that can’t take advantage of the PCIe 4.0 interface. With a read speed of almost 2.9 GBps, it scores second place next to the MP600, leads the rest of the comparison pool by over 500 MBps, and absolutely smokes the HDD.

Trace Testing – PCMark 8 Storage Test 2.0

PCMark 8 is a trace-based benchmark that uses Microsoft Office, Adobe Creative Suite, World of Warcraft, and Battlefield 3 to measure the performance of storage devices in real-world scenarios.

With a total score of 5,093 points and an average bandwidth of 673 MBps, Patriot’s Viper VP4100 comes in fourth place in our PCMark 8 tests. This is a good indicator that when it comes to most consumer-based tasks, the VP4100 is more than capable of keeping up. Most NVMe SSDs perform similarly enough, but they wipe the floor with the HDD in responsiveness and throughput.   

Trace Testing – SPECworkstation 3

Like PCMark 8, SPECworkstation 3 is a trace-based benchmark, but it is designed to push the system harder by measuring workstation performance in professional applications. The full suite consists of more than 30 workloads, but we've opted to only run the storage benchmark which uses only 15 of them and categorizes the results into 5 market segments for scoring: Media & Entertainment, Product Development, Life Sciences, Energy, and General Operations.

Under heavier prosumer workloads, the VP4100 one-ups the 970 PRO thanks to its increased bandwidth. Overall, it scored similarly to the 1TB MP600, but couldn't surpass the Intel Optane 905P. Intel’s Optane is the best drive for heavy workloads with its ultra-low response times, but those who opt for the Patriot Viper VP4100 won’t be left disappointed. 

Synthetic Testing - ATTO

ATTO is a simple and free application that SSD vendors commonly use to assign sequential performance specifications to their products. It also gives us insight into how the device handles different file sizes. We test at a QD (queue depth) of 1, which better represents consumer performance, instead of the default value of 4.

Patriot’s Viper VP4100 scores just under 5/4 GBps read/write in ATTO. This outscores every other SSD out from the 16KB file size and up, similar to the Force MP600.

Synthetic Testing - iometer

iometer is an advanced and highly configurable storage benchmarking tool that vendors often use to measure the performance of their devices.

The Viper VP4100 and Force MP600 are in a league of their own in sequential throughput, scoring roughly 5/4.3 GBps in the read/write tests.

Random responsiveness and performance results at lower queue depths are also very good. Overall, on average, the random performance is similar to most other competitors, though. Peak performance numbers are within a hair of the Force MP600, with performance coming in at 592,000/536,000 read/write IOPS.

Sustained Sequential Write Performance

Official write specifications are only part of the performance picture. Most SSD makers implement a pseudo-SLC cache buffer, which is a fast area of SLC-programmed flash that absorbs incoming data. Sustained write speeds can suffer tremendously once the workload spills outside of the pSLC cache and into the "native" TLC or QLC flash. We use iometer to hammer the SSD with sequential writes for 15 minutes to measure both the size of the pSLC buffer and performance after the buffer is saturated.

Patriot’s Viper VP4100 features the largest pSLC cache we've come across. While it is rated to be 666GB, we could still write to the SSD at a rate of 4.2 GBps for about three minutes before performance degraded. This result comes out to a total of just over 740GB of data written, which is impressive performance that aided the Viper VP4100 in our previous application testing. Once the cache is filled, the write performance degrades to about 600 MBps on average, however. As a result, the Viper is the fastest drive during our three-minute test, but beyond that, it scored fifth place overall.

Power Consumption

We use the Quarch HD Programmable Power Module to gain a deeper understanding of power characteristics. Idle power consumption is a very important aspect to consider, especially if you're looking for a new drive for your laptop. Some SSDs can consume watts of power at idle while better-suited ones sip just milliwatts. Average workload power consumption and max consumption are two other aspects of power consumption, but performance-per-watt is more important. A drive might consume more power during any given workload, but accomplishing a task faster allows the drive to drop into an idle state faster, which ultimately saves power.

Overall, the 2TB Viper VP4100 is a very efficient SSD thanks to its high performance. With an average consumption of 4.2W during the 50GB transfer test, it averaged 208 MBps per watt and peaked at 7.12W. Also, at idle it barely sips any more power than the MP600, which has half the capacity. When ASPM is enabled, it draws only 70mW. With the feature disabled, it pulls just over 1.2W.

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The VP4100 is one of the fastest SSDs on the market and comes with a premium price, but it’s still cheaper than both of Samsung’s 1TB and 2TB SSDs. Patriot’s Viper VP4100 even has significantly higher endurance ratings, too: Neither the Samsung 970 EVO Plus or PRO can top it there. However, Samsung's advantage is that those drives come in single-sided form factors for mobile and small form factor devices, while the VP4100 is strictly for desktop systems with its nearly-impossible-to-remove heatsink. You can’t remove it, so you might as well enjoy the view.

The new PCIe 4.0 interface opens doors to new speed records for file transfers, but it can generate a lot of heat. Patriot designed an edgy-looking and efficient low profile heatsink that is quite the improvement aesthetically over the company’s standard VPN100. Plus, it keeps the device cool regardless of the workload.

While performing multiple simultaneous 100GB transfers, the VP4100’s temperatures remained under 75C with very little airflow in our 25C environment. Although it wasn’t as good as the Corsair Force MP600’s cooling, the trade-off is a smaller overall size and better appearance.

Additionally, we see a similar situation as we've seen in the past with other controller architecture changes. When drive vendors enable a larger write cache, it usually results in slower direct-to-TLC writes. This happens again with the transition from Phison's E12 controller to the E16.

The older Phison E12-powered BPX Pro sustains higher direct-to-TLC write performance once the cache fills, but the trade-off is having a smaller cache to begin with. However, with growing storage demands from higher bit-rate/resolution media, we feel the larger dynamic write cache is better for day-to-day use. It also replenishes very quickly: The drive recovers about 30GB of capacity every minute, and sustained speed is still pretty good. 

In addition to media files becoming larger, so are games with high-resolution textures. The newest Call of Duty Modern Warfare requires 175GB of storage, Red Dead Redemption 2’s pre-load weighs in at 110GB, and Final Fantasy XV is up to 155GB. That means just three games can fill a 500GB drive. There is most definitely a need for high capacity drives to store most gamer’s libraries.

At capacities that stretch up to 2TB, the Patriot Viper VP4100 is not only a fast SSD, but unlike the Samsung 970 Pro that maxes out at 1TB and Intel’s Optane 905P that tops out at 1.5TB, the VPN100 is also a spacious SSD that can store plenty of the latest and largest titles, and then load them quickly when needed. If you're searching for a high-end NVMe SSD, be sure to check out Patriot’s Viper VP4100. It’s a fast SSD that’s ready to strike when you are.

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Patriot has announced the brand's latest Viper VPR100 product line that features capacities from 256GB up to 2TB. The VPR100 promises to deliver uncompromised storage speed and performance while also adding some bling-bling to your build.

The VPR100 adheres to the M.2 2280 form factor and utilizes a standard PCIe 3.0 x4 interface. The SSD shows up with a low-profile, military-grade aluminum heatsink decked out with RGB lighting. Patriot even added an external thermal sensor to the SSD to monitor the drive's internal operating temperatures to prevent overheating. 

What makes the VPR100's lighting unique is that you can personalize it to your liking through the included Viper RGB software. There are five customizable lighting profiles and eight pre-programmed RGB lighting patterns to choose from. Additionally, the VPR100's lighting is compatible with many motherboard ecosystems, including Asus Aura Sync, Gigabyte RGB Fusion, MSI Mystic Light Sync, and ASRock Polychrome Sync.

Patriot notes that using RGB sync could decrease the drive's performance between 20% to 30% depending on the RGB mode selected.

Underneath the VPR100, you'll find a 10-layer PCB that houses Phison's E12 SSD controller. Patriot doesn't specify the type of NAND it uses for the VPR100. The 256GB and 512GB models feature a 512GB DRAM cache while the 1TB and 2TB models come with DRAM cache sizes that match their capacities.

The VPR100 delivers sequential read speeds up to 3,300 MB/s across all capacities. The 256GB and 512GB variants offer sequential write speeds up to 1,000 MB/s and 2,100 MBs, respectively, while the other remaining variants boast speeds up to 2,900 MB/s. 

In terms of random performance, the 256GB drive features 300,000 IOPS reads and 250,000 IOPS writes and the 512GB drive offers 700,000 IOPS reads and 400,000 IOPS writes. As for the 1TB and 2TB models, both come with random read and write speeds of 700,000 IOPS and 650,000 IOPS, respectively.

The 256GB, 512GB, 1TB and 2TB drives are rated with an endurance of 300 TBW, 800 TBW, 1,600 TBW and 3,115 TBW, respectively. The VPR100 is backed with a limited five-year warranty.

The VPR100 256GB and 512GB models should be available on Amazon soon for $94.99 and $134.99, respectively. The 1TB model costs $229.99 while the 2TB will set you back $399.99.

Are you in the market for a new gaming headset? How about one with flashy RGBs and surround? How about a 256GB USB drive and a mechanical keyboard to go with it? Well look no further. Tom’s Hardware has you covered with our latest giveaway for the Patriot VIPER V370 RGB Gaming Headset. Engineered with a closed back and ergonomic ear cups, the V370 blocks out environmental noise and fits comfortably over the ears to help keep you relaxed and focused on your game.

To sweeten the deal we're also including Viper Fang USB-256GB flash drive, V765 Red switch Keyboard, and a Headset Stand in the prize package. Enter below for your chance to win!

Head over the giveaway thread and and follow the instructions there for your chance to win.

No purchase necessary. Void where prohibited. Giveaway is only open to legal residents of the fifty (50) United States, the District of Columbia, and the United Kingdom 18 or older. For a complete list of rules please see the Terms and Conditions on the Gleam Giveaway Widget. This giveaway is open until November 22nd, 2019.

Perhaps the most frustrating thing about owning an H370 or B360 motherboard is watching the world of high-performance memory pass you by. These cheaper chipsets certainly seem like a smart buy when you know in advance that you’re not going to overclock the CPU and won’t need bifurcation (multi-card support) for the CPUs sixteen PCIe lanes, but the enthusiast market has moved well beyond these chipset’s top memory clock speed of 2666 MHz (with Core i5 or higher CPUs). These days, it’s arguable that DDR4-3200 is effectively mainstream. But just because your rig’s memory clocks are locked well below 3000 MHz doesn’t mean your PC can’t look like the ultimate gaming machine. That’s where Patriot’s Viper Gaming RGB 2666 kit comes in. 

Each Patriot Viper RGB kit includes a pair of stickers to highlight the outside and a pair of RGB modules to highlight the inside of your PC. The kit’s 15-17-17-35 timings are far from spectacular, though they do come at the DDR4 default of 1.20V. 

You’ll still need XMP to get those slightly-enhanced DDR4-2666 timings, or even for your board to configure the DDR4-2666 data rate at all. Unlike the HyperX Predator kit we reviewed recently, there is no JEDEC-standard DDR4-2400 profile for this Viper to fall back to. And you can forget about running enhanced timings on anything less than a Core i5 processor: The next step down in programming is DDR4-2133 CAS 15. 

 Compatible with the RGB software of most motherboards (certified for ASRock, Asus, Gigabyte and MSI), Viper RGB also supports the firm’s RGB App 1.0, with patterns that include Breathing, Viper (custom RGB scroll pattern), Heartbeat, Marquee, Raindrop, Aurora and Neon. 

Comparison Hardware

 Each of the kits in today’s comparison has at least one feature to help it stand out from the pack. While none of the other kits has RGB, the Vengeance LPX uses low-density chips to produce a performance-boosting dual-rank configuration, the Ripjaws V pulls at your value heartstrings with enhanced timings at a low price, the Predator kit has the tighter timings we crave for both DDR4-2666 and DDR4-2400, and the Ballistix Sport offers its DDR4-2666 profile to non-XMP motherboards. 

We continue to use our classic benchmark suite with a classic graphics card and lower-priced CPU to better match the B360/H370 target market. Intel’s Core i5-9700K is locked to 4.30 GHz for the ultimate performance consistency, MSI’s classic GTX 1080 Armor OC graphics card sets on its B360M Mortar motherboard, and Toshiba’s OCZ RD400 NVMe SSD reduces load times.

Lowest Stable Timings at 1.35V (Max) on MSI B360M Mortar BIOS 1.70 (08/08/2019)

 Not being able to overclock past DDR4-2666 doesn’t mean we can’t try for fewer cycles of latency to improve performance. Th Viper Gaming RGB kit didn’t fare well at DDR4-2666, allowing only one cycle to be shaved from its mediocre XMP timings after we increased voltage to 1.35V.

Benchmark Results

 The Viper kit finishes fourth in both Sandra Bandwidth and Latency, but the race is  tight enough between it and the other three single-rank modules that only the dual-rank Vengeance LPX stands apart from the pack.

The situation is only slightly worsein F1 2015, with the Ripjaws V kit standing out as the best kit to have single-rank DIMMs. 

7-Zip finally gives us some hope for the lower-latency kits, but it also makes the Viper Gaming RGB look even worse. At least the Viper kit still beats the CAS 16 Ballistix Sport. 

Final Analysis

Overall performance losses and ties didn’t average out too badly for the Viper Gaming RGB, but you’re still paying around $15 more than its closest-performing rival just to get that lighting. That seems fair to us, but if you don’t prioritize light shows over absolute performance, there are better options out there for less money.

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Patriot’s new Blackout series trumpets Ryzen 3000 compatibility and a new all-black finish while providing data rates up to DDR4-4000. The DDR4-3600 we snagged also happens to be at the highest data rate that most technical types recommend for the Ryzen 3000 series, making this arguably the most-appealing model  before we even removed it from the box. On the other hand, the DDR4-3600 competition is so tight that buyers might just pick this kit (or something else) just for aesthetics or based on brand reputation.

The first thing we noticed when Patriot decided to trumpet its Ryzen 3000-series compatibility with a new Viper 4 Blackout series was that that apart from the color scheme, several of these kits appear identical to the red modules that came before it. There’s more to this story, though, as DRAM ICs and even PCBs get updated as old components go out of production and are replaced. Buying from the new series assures that you’ll get the freshest stock.

Our modules are so fresh that they aren’t even in stock at the moment as we write this review. So we're using this kit's (part number PVB416G360C7K) $120 MSRP to deduce comparative value and hoping that we’ll have stock will arrive by the time this review is published. Inside the package are two black-adorned DDR4-3600 C17 modules and two Patriot Viper case stickers.

The full XMP timing set for its DDR4-3600 profile is 17-19-19-39. CAS 18 becomes the number to beat in a market where we label “low latency” anything with less than one cycle of latency for every 200 MHz data rate. This kit’s 19-cycle tRCD and tRP timings combine with a tCAS of only 17 cycles to sit on the fence, though the moderate price should give it a slight value bump compared to better-rated kits.

Users whose motherboards don’t support XMP will be stuck at DDR4-2133 CAS 15 until they’re willing to learn how to manually adjust their memory for optimal performance, but our tests will provide some numbers to help you get started there. Our manual optimizations start at DDR4-2666, which is where some platforms (Intel B/H series motherboards and most of its current non-K-series desktop processors) stop.

Comparison Hardware

One of the biggest memory performance divisions we’ve recently seen has been between kits that have two or four ranks of ICs (chips). All 8GB modules we’ve tested for the past two or more years have been single rank, so the only fair comparison parts must contain two 8GB DDR4-3600 modules. Since we haven’t reviewed many of those in non-RGB versions, we’re instead comparing similar-spec RGB kits and will note the RGB/non-RGB price differences in our final analysis.

Class-beating memory overclocking capability forced us to select MSI’s X570 Ace with AMD’s Ryzen 7 3700X as our new test platform, complete with the 256GB Toshiba/OCZ  RD400 and Gigabyte's RTX 2070.

Overclocking And Latency Reduction

The Hynix ICs of the Viper 4 Blackout must be a different version than we used in our X570 Ace review, as a pair of those modules were stable all the way up to DDR4-4400. Not that DDR4-4266 is a bad result, but it’s a tick behind the B-Die ICs of the Spectrix D60G and Patriot’s earlier Viper RGB kit.

We’re also seeing less room for latency optimization, particularly in the areas of tRCD and tRP, when compared to the XPG Spectrix and earlier-model Viper RGB kits. Less latency means quicker response time.

Benchmark Results

The Viper 4 Blackout kit performs well in Sandra Memory Bandwidth, but still gets edged out by the XPG Spectrix and elder Viper RGB kits and merely matches the XCalibur RGB at most settings.

We have to scroll through to the Blender bench before we see an oddity where both Viper kits are consistently slower than competing modules at everything but XMP ratings. This is mostly a matter of a few milliseconds that either round up or down, but it’s still consistent.  Blackout also falls to third place in 7-Zip file compression, which is the most important metric on this platform since the memory-bottlenecked F1 racing game also appears to be CPU bottlenecked by our 4.20GHz fixed frequency.

Final Analysis

Patriot’s Viper 4 Blackout kit is at least $5 cheaper than the compared RGB kits, and that would be enough to give it a 4% value lead even without the performance advantage is has over XCalibur RGB. But one remaining problem for the Viper 4 Blackout is that, being only $5-10 cheaper than RGB kits, it faces tough competition against even cheaper non-RGB kits.

So small a price difference makes us continuously reconsider the Viper 4 Blackout’s tiny performance deficit. It’s almost small enough to forget, but so is the price difference. And as much as we like the look of the kit and the reputation of its producer, that kind of statement has us awash in indifference. Perhaps once this kit actually arrives in stock, its price will tick a little higher or a little lower, making it easier to pin as a good value or a kit worth skipping.

Photo Credits: Tom's Hardware

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Patriot's Burst SSD may not be the speediest SSD around, but the 960GB model is currently selling for a just $75.99 on Newegg, which works out to just under 8 cents per gigabyte. That's one of the lowest prices we've seen for a SATA SSD from a recognizable name brand. It would make a great secondary drive to house the games you're currently playing. And it should be decent as a boot drive as well, as it has a 32MB DRAM cache, unlike many low-priced solid-state drives.

• Get the 960GB Patriot Burst SSD for $75.99 on Newegg ($17 off)

The 2.5-inch Burst uses a Phison 11 controller. It ships with a 3-year warranty, standard for a budget-priced drive, and is rated for sequential reads of up to 560MBps and sequential writes of up to 540MBps, which is about as fast as you're going to get on the SATA III interface.

For more savings, check out our list of best Amazon Prime Day deals and best pc hardware deals overall as well as dedicated lists of current sales on SSDs, CPUs, GPUs, gaming laptops and Raspberry Pi stuff.

Blackouts may be a problem for human memory, but Patriot hopes its new Viper 4 Blackout will be the name you remember when it comes to DDR4 for AMD. Its Viper 4 Blackout series spans a range from 8GB (2x 4GB) DDR4-3000 to 16GB (2x 8GB) DDR4-4000 dual-channel kits priced from $52 to $185.

Programmed with XMP to enable higher frequency/voltage and tighter timings, each kit comes with DDR4-2133 C15 base timings (at 1.20V) to expand compatibility to boards that have difficulty overclocking. As AMD’s Infinity Fabric ratio is automatically halved beyond DDR4-3600, the above C17 kit is Patriot’s best Viper 4 Blackout solution for the new AMD Ryzen 3000-series CPUs.

Like all of Patriot's DRAM, Viper 4 Blackout comes with a limited lifetime warranty. Unlike Patriot's other part numbers, these offerings are not yet in stock at retailers.

Patriot understands that value-seeking performance enthusiast often chose data-rate-limited CPUs such as the immensely-overclockable Core i3-8350K. While standard DDR4-2400 would probably do the trick for some of these builders, the ubiquity of glass-sided cases means that they’ll probably want something that at least looks better than stock. And hey, while you're adding some pretty heatsinks, why not bump the timings up a notch, too?

The greatest limitation of Patriot's part number PVE432G240C5KRD is probably that the company bumped the timings up by only one notch, from the currently-common CAS 16 to a mere CAS 15. Although standardized “DDR4-2400P” modules are also available at CAS 15, the organization that sets these standards has listed support for this as optional. Patriot thus chose to broaden compatibility with XMP-enabled motherboards that may not include a DDR4-2400P configuration by including it in an XMP profile. But the company chose not to include those same settings within the memory’s standard configuration table.

As a result, the only way to get these modules automatically configured at their rated DDR4-2400 is to put them in a board that supports XMP mode, and then enable the XMP setting. Not doing this results in the modules defaulting to a mere DDR4-2133. This, despite the module’s low XMP voltage and mediocre timings.

We define low-latency memory as having less than one cycle of latency for every 200 MHz of data rate, and that means CAS 12 would have been needed to even put them on our performance threshold. Elite thus refers to the module’s appearance, as these settings fit within what we’d define as standard replacement memory. Then again, perhaps we can push them a little farther?

Comparison Hardware

Though we’re generally recommending 32GB of installed capacity to all heavy multitaskers (especially after recent price drops), we’ve recently tested only a handful of 2x 16GB configurations, and some of those were DDR4-3600. The lowest data rate of our test group was DDR4-3200, so this is the only speed which we can compare. Fortunately for value seekers, the Viper Elite DDR4-2400 kit is cheap enough ($129/£106) that we expect it to strike hard in our price-to-performance comparison.

Comparison kits include Patriot’s own Viper Steel DDR4-3200 C16, G.Skill’s Ripjaws V DDR4-3200 C16, and HyperX Predator RGB DDR4-3200 C16. Configured to reduce non-DRAM bottlenecks, support hardware includes Asus’ Maximus XI Hero, Toshiba’s OCZ RD400 NVMe SSD, MSI’s GTX 1080 Armor OC, and Intel’s Core i9-9900K processor at a fixed 4.80 GHz frequency using Fractal Design’s Celsius S24 to keep it cool.

Overclocking and Latency Tuning

The Viper Elite DDR4-2400 proves itself an overclocking exception rather than an exceptional overclocker, as it's been over a year since we’ve tested a kit that couldn’t reach DDR4-3466. Then again, it’s been even longer since we tested a kit that was rated at only DDR4-2400.

And now for the good news: Even though the Viper Elite DDR4-2400 wasn’t rated at a performance-enhancing CAS 12, we did get it to go that low with a little tweaking. This took many hours to figure out due to random crashes at similar timings. We ended up lowering the overclocking voltage from our 1.35V default to 1.325V in order to prevent this.

Benchmark Results

Sandra Bandwidth for the DDR4-2400 kit’s XMP settings wasn’t impressive, but the Patriot kit fared passably when manually tuned to tighter timings. It’s a shame that most users won’t configure their own timings, as most DDR4-2400 CAS 12 kits have reached EOL (end of life) production status.

The performance story doesn’t look much better in F1 2015 or 7.Zip file compression, though the DDR4-2400 kit will at least benefit from our inclusion of normalizing benchmarks--Metro Last Light and Blender CPU Render--in the overall performance profile used for our value analysis.

Final Analysis

Reduced price and increased compatibility are the best reasons to buy DDR4-2400. But just pushing this data rate to mediocre performance levels requires lower latencies than this kit offers. The strongest argument in the Viper Elite’s favor is probably that nearly every other current DDR4-2400 kit has similarly bad rated timings. Our value chart hammers the point home, with a DDR4-3200 kit winning the value race despite its higher price.

The fact that most performance enthusiasts put their overclocking efforts into CPU overclocks while ignoring the potential benefit of manually configuring their memory means that we can’t make a broad recommendation. Those few who don’t mind searching for an old-stock DDR4-2400 C12 kit are welcomed to do so, but the majority of DDR4-2400 buyers will instead be given a choice of various kits with CAS 15, 16, or 17 timings. Eliminating the C16 and C17 kits from consideration still leaves them over a dozen choices, and the best thing we can say for Patriot’s kit is that it at least looks better than most of those.

Photo Credits: Tom's Hardware

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Time to Get Tactical

Patriot's latest SSD comes with a powerful and proven design from Phison, an impressive heatsink, and write endurance to handle any task. The Viper VPN100 is ready for some of the most intense gaming or work sessions you can throw its way, and the aggressive heatsink keeps the drive cool while it delivers speeds up to 3.45/3.20 GB/s. Better yet, Patriot's pricing still undercuts other top-end competitors to make the Viper VPN100 a sweet value.

The Viper VPN100 is based on Phison’s reference design for SSDs with the E12 NVMe controller. The SSD comes paired with Toshiba’s BiCS3 64L TLC flash, so performance is close to other E12-powered SSDs we’ve taken a look at already, like the BPX Pro and Aorus RGB. Similar to the Aorus RGB, the VPN100 features an impressive heatsink but lacks the RGB shine. Instead, Patriot takes a more tactical approach to the design.

In contrast to the Aorus RGB’s blingy appearance, the VPN100 has a matte black aluminum heatsink with multiple fins and cuts. It’s more about cooling performance than looks here, though it might be attractive to FPS players as it does look strikingly similar to the actual tactical rail on a military weapon. And, if the big heatsink isn’t enough, the Viper VPN100 features an external thermal sensor to provide accurate thermal data to keep it, as the company states, “cool and healthy.”

Specifications

The Viper VPN100 comes in capacities ranging from 256GB to 2TB, but the 2TB variant isn't available yet. The 256GB model retails for $0.21 per GB, and the 512 and 1TB variants are a bit cheaper at $0.17 per GB, which is fairly competitive.

The drive delivers speeds of up to 3.45/3.2 GB/s of read/write throughput. Patriot also lists the Viper VPN100’s random read and write performance as up to 700K IOPS, but that is either based on a test system that isn’t patched with the Spectre and Meltdown mitigations, or just overzealous marketing.

In addition to its blisteringly fast speeds, the drive comes with a plentiful helping of write endurance up to 3.1 petabytes at the 2TB capacity. But while the endurance is class-leading, the warranty is not. While most established SSDs come with lengthy five-year warranties, the VPN100 comes with just a three-year warranty.

The Viper supports standard features like Trim, S.M.A.R.T. data monitoring, and Secure Erase.

Software and Accessories

Patriot enables product monitoring and firmware updates through its SSD Toolbox. Unfortunately, at the time of writing, it’s a bit hard to find on the company's website. In fact, it is actually mislabeled as a firmware download on the product page. If you manage to get the download, the SSD Toolbox will allow you to monitor the device’s S.M.A.R.T. data and update the firmware.

Additionally, you can Secure Erase the SSD even when it is in use as the active operating system drive. Be careful: The software will allow you to execute the command while the OS is running on the device. Once you execute the command, there’s no going back. The system will blue screen once the command goes through, and all the data will be lost forever. That's good for James Bond-type missions, we guess.

A Closer Look

Patriot’s Viper VPN100 comes in an M.2 2280 form factor and uses a PCIe 3.0 x4 link and the NVMe 1.3 protocol to communicate with the host. As we mentioned earlier, the drive features a Phison’s latest E12 NVMe controller and Toshiba BiCS3 64L TLC flash.

Our 1TB sample has four flash packages, two on each side of the PCB, and unlike the BPX Pro, the VPN100 doesn’t have much factory overprovisioning. That leads to an extra ~60GB of storage capacity after you format the drive in Windows. The drive also has two 512GB DDR4 DRAM packages for a total of 1GB for caching the device’s file translation layer.

Measuring in at 12mm at its thickest point, the heatsink is a bit thicker than the Gigabyte Aorus RGB’s and WD Black SN750’s. There are no clearance issues for graphics cards and other AICs when it is plugged into an onboard M.2 slot. The heatsink is bigger, but we found that the heatsink doesn’t fully touch the surface of the NVMe controller on our sample. Instead, the thicker NAND packages created a slight gap between the heatsink and the controller. While it may seem like a crucial mistake, temperatures mostly ranged within the 40’s while using the device, which is more than acceptable. 

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1TB Performance Results

Comparison Products

Our comparison products represent many of the most popular options on the market. For starters, we pit the Viper VPN100 against the all-mighty Samsung 970 Pro and EVO Plus, as well as WD’s newly revised Black SN750. We also threw in the SMI 2262EN-powered HP SSD EX950 and Adata XPG SX8200 Pro. The lineup wouldn’t be complete without MyDigitalSSD’s BPX Pro with updated 12.1 firmware and Intel’s SSD 660p.

Trace Testing – PCMark 8 Storage Test 2.0

PCMark 8 is a trace-based benchmark that uses Microsoft Office, Adobe Creative Suite, World of Warcraft, and Battlefield 3 to measure the performance of storage devices in real-world scenarios.

Samsung’s 970 Pro took the win as the fastest flash-based product on our charts, followed by the Silicon Motion-powered SX8200 Pro and EX950. Patriot’s Viper VPN100 came in behind the 970 EVO Plus, taking sixth place overall.

Game Scene Loading - Final Fantasy XIV

The Final Fantasy XIV StormBlood benchmark is a free real-world game benchmark that easily and accurately compares game load times without the inaccuracy of using a stopwatch.

The Viper's game load times weren’t at the top of our charts. To the contrary, it ranked last in our comparison pool of flash SSDs and was even beat by Intel’s QLC 660p. But, at 22 seconds vs. 20 seconds, the total load time wasn’t far off from some of the best. That’s not to mention it was over 30% faster than an archaic HDD.

Transfer Rates – DiskBench

We use the DiskBench storage benchmarking tool to test file transfer performance with our own custom 50GB block of data. Our data set includes 31,227 files of various types, like pictures, PDFs, and videos. We copy the files to a new folder and then follow up with a read test of a newly-written 6 GB file.

Moving files around on the Viper VPN100 went quickly. While you would think that the extra over-provisioning from the BPX Pro would give it the lead over the Viper VPN100, we can see that wasn't the case without the burdens of a heavy enterprise-class workload. With an average of 292MB/s, it essentially tied the BPX Pro and was significantly faster than a SATA SSD or HDD. The Viper ranked eighth overall during the 50GB copy test, and second in read performance.

SYSmark 2014 SE

Like PCMark, SYSmark uses real applications to measure system performance. SYSmark takes things much further, however. It utilizes fourteen different applications to run real workloads with real data sets to measure how overall system performance impacts the user experience. BAPCo's SYSmark 2014 SE installs a full suite of applications for its tests, which includes Microsoft Office, Google Chrome, Corel WinZip, several Adobe software applications, and GIMP. That also makes it a great test to measure the amount of time it takes to install widely-used programs after you install a fresh operating system.

The Viper installed SYSmark in 14 minutes and 51 seconds, the same as Intel’s Optane 905P, which was quite impressive.

ATTO

ATTO is a simple and free application that SSD vendors commonly use to assign sequential performance specifications to their products. It also gives us insight into how the device handles different file sizes.

The Viper VPN100 delivered impressive results, but it just wasn’t as impressive as some other drives. Following a similar performance result as the BPX Pro, the Viper's read and write performance hit the rated target speeds of 3.45/3.00 GB/s of read/write throughput in ATTO. But it took a hit along the way. At the 128KB file size, write performance dropped before it improved to its rated specification.

CrystalDiskMark

CrystalDiskMark (CDM) is a simple and easy to use file size benchmarking tool.

Sequential performance came in at 3.47/3.05 GB/s read/write at a queue depth (QD) of 32. Scaling our workload down to a more realistic QD1 revealed performance wasn’t quite as good, but competitive nonetheless. At QD1 the Patriot Viper VPN100 delivered ~2.1/2 GB/s of sequential read/write throughput.

At QD1 the Viper delivered over 13,000/43,000 read/write IOPS, but this wasn’t as impressive as some of its competition. Pushing harder to a QD of 64 unlocked 380,000/~500,000 random read/write IOPS. The BPX Pro's overprovisioning seemed to give it a slight advantage in both reads and writes, but overall, the Viper VPN100 is far more capable than any SATA SSD.

Sustained Sequential Write Performance

Official write specifications are only part of the performance picture. Most SSD makers implement an SLC cache buffer, which is a fast area of SLC-programmed flash that absorbs incoming data. Sustained write speeds can suffer tremendously once the workload spills outside of the SLC cache and into the "native" TLC or QLC flash. We hammer the SSDs with sequential writes for 15 minutes to measure both the size of the SLC buffer and performance after the buffer is saturated.

Like all Phison E12-powered SSDs, the Viper VPN100 has an SLC cache that absorbs inbound writes. While the Viper is rated for up to 3 GB/s of write throughput, we found that it is limited to a cache capacity of about 24GB (the same as the BPX Pro). Once the cache is full, the controller pushes any remaining inbound data directly to the die, causing performance to drop to roughly ~1075 MB/s until the drive is completely full.

Power Consumption

We use the Quarch HD Programmable Power Module to gain a deeper understanding of power characteristics. Idle power consumption is a very important aspect to consider, especially if you're looking for a new drive for your laptop. Some SSDs can consume watts of power at idle while better-suited ones sip just milliwatts. Average workload power consumption and max consumption are two other aspects of power consumption, but performance-per-watt is more important. A drive might consume more power during any given workload, but accomplishing a task faster allows the drive to drop into an idle state faster, which ultimately saves power.

At idle the Viper consumed a little under half a watt with ASPM disabled and sipped just 48mW with the feature enabled. The drive maxed out at 5W during our 50GB copy test and averaged 2.66W. Putting that together with our transfer speed data, we see that the Viper VPN100 is fairly efficient–more so than the Samsung 970 series and BPX Pro.

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Conclusion

We were surprised to see the slight mating issue with the Viper's heatsink. With the NAND packages being slightly thicker than the controller package, there was a slight gap left between the controller and the heatsink on our 1TB sample. While not a deal breaker, it isn't optimal because heat still radiates out from the NAND. It also isn't the attention to detail we like to see.

The design actually keeps the NAND cooler than the controller, which is the opposite of what you want to happen: NAND prefers higher temperatures during operation. If anything, the controller should have a thermal pad between it and the heatsink, as this is the most critical component to cool.

Furthermore, unlike the Gigabyte Aorus RGB, the Viper VPN100’s PCB is blue rather than black, and the heatsink isn’t easily removed. Patriot bonded the heatsink to the PCB via a very strong adhesive, so removing it may leave you with a broken SSD. In contrast, the Aorus RGB SSD allows you to swap the heatsink to either side of the PCB by removing and replacing two small screws. That allows the drive to work in M.2 slots on both the left and the right side of the motherboard.

Who wants to buy an item for looks if it is going to sit upside down in the M.2 socket? These are small details, but they are vital to creating a more attractive and user-friendly device.

While the heatsink still looks great on its own, we’re a bit disappointed with the lack of RGB. There was a missed opportunity here to match the Viper RGB RAM and to make the Viper VPN100 an even cooler buy. Sure, many of the anti-RGB union will be delighted with this revelation, but there are many out there who enjoy the accent of a well-made RGB product. An aura of illumination throughout the slits of the heatsink, in my eyes, would have been the cherry on top.

On a more positive note, Patriot’s Viper VPN100 is still a really good value. As an NVMe SSD, it’s classed with many competitors that are priced significantly higher than SATA drives, but the VPN100 is closer to SATA pricing than most of its competition. It isn’t a chart-topper, but it is pretty efficient and can keep up with some of the best NVMe SSDs at times. The Viper certainly has what it takes to put both hard drives and SATA SSDs to shame.

Speaking of best, the Viper VPN100 does feature one of the best endurance ratings for a consumer SSD. With a rating of just over 1.6PB of endurance, our 1TB sample is bound to outlast even some of the most demanding consumer and workstation workloads. Whether you have a content-driven workflow where you are constantly working with large media files or you game at a competitive level, or even if you just sit around and watch cats of the internet all day, the VPN100 will keep on chugging. It really is a good value option.

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We've all been there. You're on a VoIP call with someone boring and you start multitasking, typing an email on your clicky keyboard, when the other person on the line busts you for not paying full attention. Or maybe you're on a Discord chat, and the music from your roommate's stereo keeps bleeding through, so everyone on the team has to battle royale to Celine Dion. Due out later this year, Patriot's Viper V380 USB gaming headset promises to save you from embarrassment by filtering out background noise from the microphone while providing top-notch comfort and style.

I had a chance to try on the Patriot Viper V380 headset at Patriot Memory's Computex suite, though I was not able to test the audio quality or noise filtering properties. Looking at the headset, I was struck by its attractive and premium design, from the smooth leather-like headband with its sleek red stitching to the large rectangular ear cans with their sci-fi-esque vents and bright RGB rings, which are addressable using Patriot software. If Deckard from Blade Runner wanted a gaming headset, this would be the one.

The Viper V380 is also exceedingly light. Patriot didn't share an official weight for the headset, but it felt paper light. There's no way that this is going to feel heavy on your head.

When I put the Viper V380 on, I immediately noticed that the artificial leather cups were large enough to fit around my fairly big ears, rather than pressing against them, like most cushions do. I only wore them for a few minutes, but I can imagine these staying comfortable for hours, unlike many other headsets that start annoying me after an hour or more of smushing my auricles.

Patriot says that the Viper V380's environmental noise cancelling capability is built into the hardware so that you don't need any kind of special application to make it work. So, even if you use the headset with an operating system other than Windows, it should work the same way. When not chatting, you can remove the microphone.

In terms of audio output, the Viper V380 features 50mm drivers and 7.1 surround sound. I was not able to test the listening quality but these seem like decent specs. The fact that this headset uses USB rather than 3.5mm audio means that even if you don't have a good sound card (or any sound card), you should get good, hiss-free audio.

Patriot did not announce final pricing for the Viper V380, but said that it is hoping to come in under $100 if possible.

Image Credits: Tom's Hardware

Buyers within the performance PC market really have only two excuses to stop at DDR4-3200: Either they’re trying to save money, or they’re trying to coax good performance from a system that really can’t be pushed much farther.

For those in either camp, but the former in particular, Patriot Patriot’s 32GB Viper Steel 3200 kit slams the competition on price, undercutting its closest rival in our analysis by nearly 18%. And that’s without any performance penalties, beyond those of having the same mid-market timings as its competitors.

Having recently taken home our Editor’s Choice award for its Viper Steel DDR4-4400, Patriot decided to take a run for yet another crown as the best value in a 2x16GB kit. Submitting a late-stage entry into our recent 32GB dual-stick shootout may have given the company time to flush expensive 2018 stock out of select seller’s inventory and restock at lower 2019 prices.

Patriot’s competitors might call this a dirty trick, but the rules of fair play do not apply in love and war. We rechecked competing modules to make sure competing prices of earlier kits hadn’t fallen as well prices hadn’t dropped since its reviews, but at $154 /£166.79, this kit is easily undercuts similar models from other memory sellers.

Like the Viper Steel that went before it, the word “steel” is simply Patriot’s branding for low-cost reliability in these aluminum-clad modules, though the darker finish is a bit more iron-like here. Buyers of the PVS432G320C6K kit get two sixteen-chip dual-rank DIMMs, with 8GB on each of the four sides, which have been overclocked from the IC manufacturer’s DDR4-2133 C16 rating to DDR4-3200 C16 via Intel’s Extreme Memory Profiles (XMP) technology.

XMP is nothing more than extended information within the memory’s configuration table, which is stored on a tiny ROM along with its standard settings. Among XMP’s added information is the voltage needed to overclock the memory with stability, which in this case is 1.35V.

Enabling XMP requires that the motherboard be XMP compatible (including XMP-compatibility routines in many AMD motherboard firmware), and enabling a DDR4-3200 XMP requires that both the board and the processor are unlocked for higher-than-standard settings. FYI, the highest standard for Intel’s H370 and B350 is only DDR4-2666, and the only fallback settings on these modules is DDR4-2133. So don’t buy a speedy kit like this if your board and CPU don’t support it.

Latency is measured in clock cycles, which happen in less time as frequency increases. Our standard for performance memory latency is one cycle for every 200 MHz of data rate, so that anything quicker can legitimately be called “low latency.” The Viper Steel DDR4-3200 C16’s settings are right in the middle, its good CAS 16 being slightly hampered by 18-cycle tRCD (RAS to CAS delay) and tRP (Row Precharge delay).

Comparison Hardware and Test Configuration

While the timings of this Viper Steel kit are rather middle-of-the-road, it’s competing here against two other kits that vie for similar value-minded customers. The HyperX Predator RGB kit costs a bit more, but the premium isn’t great enough for its buyers to step up to a significantly faster non-RGB kit.

Asus’s Maximus XI Hero hosts Intel’s Core i9-9900K processor at a fixed 4.80 GHz frequency, using Fractal Design’s Celsius S24 to keep it cool. Toshiba’s OCZ RD400 NVMe SSD and MSI’s GTX 1080 Armor OC reduce non-DRAM bottlenecks.

Overclocking and Latency Reduction

The Viper Steel DDR4-3200’s overclocking ability falls between that of the competing G.Skill and HyperX kits, though its closer to the more-expensive Predator RGB.

None of these low-cost kits reached DDR4-4000, nor were they expected to on this Core i9-9900K. The Viper Steel surprised us by requiring extra tRCD/tRP to stabilize its CAS 13 setting at DDR4-2933, and the Ripjaws V had already surprised us in its review with the requirement of extra tRAS (35 cycles) at the same DDR4-2933 data rate. Overall, the Viper Steel appears to fall between the Ripjaws V and Predator RGB’s timings, and that sets us up for some interesting benchmarks.

Benchmark Results

Many users simply install their memory and forget to enable XMP, but even the neophytes here us won’t make that mistake--at least we hope. Sandra indicates that simply enabling XMP leaves quite a bit of performance on the table however, as our best DDR4-3466 settings shredded rated DDR4-3200 settings on all three kits.

The Viper Steel DDR4-3200 beats competitors where it counts, our F1 2015 and 7-Zip tests, even though its XMP margin of victory was rather small. Another surprise comes from our normalization benchmarks, Metro Last Light Redux and Blender, where its minor wins are a rarity.

Final Analysis

Even though the Patriot Viper Steel’s performance victories are less than 1% overall, its low price puts it well ahead of even the least-expensive competitor in our basic performance-to-price comparison.  Value seekers within the performance PC market have just found their new champion. Of course, that’s assuming pricing stays fixed, or at least at fixed between competing kits, which is never a certainty. So check the price of all competing kits before buying. But as it stands today, Patriot’s Viper Steel 32GB DDR4-3200 kit is unbeatable for the price.

Photo Credits: Tom's Hardware

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With AMD's new 3rd-Gen Ryzen Platform supporting PCIe 4.0, a number of storage manufacturers have announced SSDs that take advantage of the increased bandwidth. Earlier in the week, both Gigabyte and Corsair took the wraps off of their high-speed drives, and today Patriot Memory revealed that it is also working on an M.2 SSD based on the same Phison E16 controller.

Unlike Corsair, which has targeted July 2019 as a release date for its MP600 SSD, Patriot says its as-yet-unnamed drive probably won't arrive until late 2019 or even early 2020. The product is still very-much in development as Patriot works on both the heatsink and the firmware that will make its product stand out from competitors that use the same controller.

Patriot said that it is targeting sequential read speeds of up to 4.8 GB/s and writes of 4 GB/s. Those numbers aren't final so it's quite possible that the final product will match the 4.95 GB/s write and 4.2 GB/s read that Corsair is claiming for its drive.

Patriot also expects its drive to provide 4K random reads at up to 750,000 IOPS and writes at up to 700,000 IOPS. Phison has said that its controller can hit up to 900,000 IOPS, meaning it's possible Patriot's final product will have even higher rates.

The SSD will come in 512GB, 1TB and 2TB capacities and will have up to 2GB of DDR cache. It's a standard M.2 2280 form factor, and Patriot confirmed that it is using Toshiba TLC NAND. Though executives didn't say which Toshiba NAND, it's clearly BiCS4, the only type of flash memory that the Phison E16 controller supports.

There's no word on pricing, and because of sinking NAND prices and rising tariffs, it's hard for anyone to predict the MSRP this many months in advance of launch. 

Patriot today announced its latest “Premium” DDR4, minus the pricing premium, in its Signature Premium standard DDR4 UDIMMs. And by standard we mean that XMP (automatic overclocking settings) is not required to get these to rated speeds and timings: All Signature Line UDIMMs use JEDEC-qualified settings.

Heat spreaders set the Premium-branded modules apart from previous Patriot Signature Line products, while the low prices and Patriot-provided warranty set every Signature Line apart from “generic” memory. That low price will be enough to get many of us value-seekers onboard, and nobody said that we couldn’t try our hand at manual overclocking.

Packaged in single and two-DIMM kits at 4GB to 16GB per-module capacities, the availability fairy says that Signature Premium buyers will need to wait for the slow boat from Taiwan.

The best-performing DRAM we’ve ever tested, Patriot Viper Steel, is now available in the SODIMM format. System tuners might need to work a little harder with these though as the SODIMMs aren’t available at the frightening DDR4-4400 rating of their larger siblings. They’re not even available at the DDR4-4000 we tested in a four-SODIMM kit a year ago, or even at the DDR4-3800 data rate of last year’s roundup. Instead of pushing for overclocking insanity, Patriot hopes its competitive pricing will appeal to the larger market of portable gaming enthusiasts that occasionally uses gaming notebooks and SODIMM-equipped mini desktops.

The pursuit of an expanding market for increasingly portable LAN gaming configurations is the boldest part of Patriot’s strategy. Understanding that few of the notebooks can even support the voltage increases demanded by the highest XMPs, the modules instead have a higher non-XMP starting point of DDR4-2400 for the slowest modules and DDR4-2666 for the faster models. A quick search of Patriot’s website revealed information for the DDR4-3000 kit that wasn’t specified in its press release, even though it was mentioned. And, as it turns out, that kit is the only one that even needs XMP to reach its rated timings at a close-to-stock 1.25V.

Patriot has announced immediate availability, which might be true by the time you read this. We couldn’t find these part numbers for sale prior to publishing.

The last and most confusing detail could be that even though these are dual-channel compatible, Patriot Steel SODIMMs will only be sold in single packs. So buy two?

Patriot Viper Gaming has launched a new PCIe M.2 SSD in the high-performance Viper VPN100. The Viper drives will start at 256 GB capacities up to a large 2 TB. The VPN100 uses the latest controller from Phison to reach speeds of 3,450/3,000 MB/s reads and writes (1 TB SKU), making it one of the fastest PCIe M.2 SSDs around. The VPN100 targets hardcore gamers, PC enthusiasts, content creators and video rendering professionals.

As is typical with SSDs, drive performance will vary depending on capacity. In this case, the 256 GB and 512 GB drives take a hit in write performance and IOPS compared to the two larger capacities. To that end, the 1 TB drive is the fastest Viper SSD in the lineup (details in the table below).

In order to maintain these speeds over longer periods of time, the VPN100 comes with a built-in aluminum heat spreader with six fins, which should reduce the chance of overheating and performance drops due to thermal limitations. Though the heatsink looks pretty big, it will still fit below a graphics cards in the PCIe slot. The heatsink also has an external built-in thermal sensor for monitoring the drive when it is in the system. 

The Viper’s Phison E12 controller was announced last year (PS5012-E12) and uses the PCIe 3.0 x4 interface and supports NVMe 1.3. It has eight NAND channels along with 32 NAND chip-enabled lines supporting 3D TLC and 3D QLC NAND along with DDR4 or DDR3L DRAM support. The VPN100 uses 512MB DRAM cache. The E12 controller supports LDPC and Strong ECC error correction. 

Patriot VPN100 PCIe-NVMe SSD Specs and Price

Patriot says the VPN100 is engineered with advanced wear leveling for maximum performance and endurance with a MTBF of 2,000,000 hours and comes with a 3-year warranty. Pricing for the drives are $79.99, $137.99, $244.99 and $499.99 for the 256 GB, 512 GB, 1 TB and 2 TB models, respectively. The units are available now but are sold out at the Patriot website. You can, however, pick them up from other retailers, like Newegg. 

Patriot's Viper Steel memory lineup encompasses a range of products from DDR4-3000 to DDR4-4400, with models above DDR4-3200 available only as 2x 8GB kits. 16GB isn’t a whole lot of memory capacity these days, particularly when considering that most of the boards capable of supporting this data rate have only two slots.

Yet keeping the kit simple has allowed Patriot to equip the Viper Steel with enhanced timings that dramatically boost the performance of certain programs, including some games. Since the market for pure gaming rigs and focused builds designed for singular tasks is still competitive, the Viper Steel DDR4-4400 sits comfortably in this niche.

Stick an ordinary household magnet on the side of the Viper Steel's cooler and you’ll soon find out that there isn’t enough ferric content in Patriot’s kit to technically justify the back half of its name. For the record, the kit doesn't contain any actual vipers either, but that part of the name didn’t require any scientific testing. What we instead find with this kit a pair of ordinary 8GB single-rank modules equipped with Samsung’s venerable B-Die  integrated circuits (ICs) and a pair of red Viper-logo stickers.

Two XMP profiles are included to make that level of overclocking as simple as picking one from the list in your firmware’s GUI.

The DDR4-4400 and DDR4-4266 XMP profiles have the same enhanced 19-19-19-39 primary timings, but the “as simple as” configuration option mentioned above might be an overstatement. Because neither profile worked with our Maximus XI Hero, even after updating its firmware to version 0805. Swapping in the two-slot Maximus XI Gene, we found both profiles completely stable at their respective 1.45V and 1.35V.

While the higher 1.45V violates Intel’s limit, compatible boards will increase the memory controller’s voltage to keep the voltage difference within a safe range. It should be obvious, then, that DDR4-4400 isn’t for every builder, particularly when most motherboards can’t produce a stable DDR4-4400 configuration. Patriot hasn’t published a list of approved boards, leaving buyers to instead check to see if its part number -- PVS416G440C9K -- appears on their motherboard’s approved memory list. And since those lists are never inclusive, you may have to look to your favorite search engine to find out if anyone else has had success pairing this memory with your board of choice. No one said life on the bleeding edge of memory performance was going to be easy.

Comparison Parts and Test Configuration

We wanted to bring you a complete collection of comparison modules specced above DDR4-4000, but the two DDR4-4600 kits are scarcely available and still holding last-year’s prices. That leaves the Super Luce RGB Sync as the only cost-competitive alternative to the Viper Steel, but we’ll still get to see how the higher-rated DDR4-4600 compares in our performance metrics. Since our four-DIMM motherboard didn’t support the full rating of these modules, the dual-DIMM Asus Maximus XI Gene steps in to host our Core i9-9900K at the same fixed 4.80GHz frequency as prior reviews. A GTX 1080 from MSI continues to complement our 256GB OCZ RD400 SSD  to minimize other bottlenecks.

Overclocking and Timing Optimization

Call us stubborn, but we continue to use 1.35V to optimize memory despite the insistence of certain vendors that it’s OK to exceed that Intel-defined limit. Surprisingly, the Viper Steel kit came up only 50MHz shy of its rating when using this lower voltage. Perhaps more surprising was that GeIL’s 1.40V-rated DDR4-4133 reached an even higher DDR4-4400.

We pushed each kit to its lowest-stable primary timings to see how much performance might be gained by making them quicker, and there were a few standouts: Adata’s DDR4-4600 had the worst minimum timings at both DDR4-4000 and DDR4-2400, but somehow tied the Viper Steel for best timings at DDR4-3466. The Asus motherboard obviously makes many behind-the-scenes changes to advanced timings that can impact how far we can tweak the primary timings, but the firm is also known for optimizing performance across most memory brands and settings.

Benchmark Results

One unusual thing we noticed is that the Maximus XI Gene has two configurations for every XMP profile, standard and Asus-optimized with (usually) tighter advanced timings (RRD, RFC, FAW).  Listed as XMP II, this alternative is not be confused with XMP Profile 2, which can be selected separately. Asus’ optimizations gave the Viper Steel DDR4-4400 an approximate 10 percent boost in both Sandra measurements, but had a far-less-significant impact on the other modules tested. Given that these optimizations are Asus-specific, we wouldn’t expect this level of Viper Steel dominance on other motherboards.

That Asus-specific performance benefit continues into F1 2015, where average frame rate increased significantly from 152 frames per second (FPS) to 174 FPS after switching between stock XMP and Asus XMP settings. Once again, those settings had minimal impact on the other modules. Furthermore, using the looser timings would have simply decreased the size of the Viper Steel victory.

The performance improvement continued into 7-Zip, where our initial completion time of 7:46 using XMP defaults was dropped from the charts after getting a time of 6:57 with a switch to Asus’ XMP optimizations. And yes, 7:46 would have still beaten the closest kit’s 7:51.

Final Analysis

The real shocker here is the Viper Steel DDR4-4400’s value victory, even though it doesn't exactly seem fair to compare the DDR4-4600 kits that are stuck at last-year’s prices.  Furthermore, had we not used Asus’ automatic memory optimization, the Viper Steel’s performance margin would have been too small to even overcome its minuscule $10 price penalty compared to the Super Luce DDR4-4133. And then there’s the price-per-feature aspect of the RGB kit having pretty lights. But of course, not everyone wants lights.

Given everything we just said, the Viper Steel’s value victory isn't quite as clear as it looks on the chart. And not everyone will weigh the kits advantages evenly, of course. But one thing is clear: This is the best-performing 2x 8GB kit we’ve tested, and it doesn't command an exorbitant price. That's enough to earn this kit an award, while making it easy to recommend for speed-craving gamers with compatible boards and those whose workloads would benefit from high clock speed at a limited 16GB capacity.

Want to comment on this story? Let us know what you think in the Tom's Hardware Forums.

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RGB is everywhere in the PC component world, from CPU coolers to power cables. There are only a few RGB-enabled SATA and PCIe Card SSDs and, if you want an RGB-enabled M.2 SSD, your options are really limited. Enter Patriot's upcoming Viper VPR 100 SSD, a speedy new M.2 drive with over a dozen different LED lights built right onto its PCB, which is probably a first for the industry.

I say "probably," the first, because there are other manufacturers coming out with their own ways of giving you an RGB M.2 drive. Right now, ADATA sells an RGB heatspreader for M.2 SSDs called the XPG Storm. While you'll get some lighting effects this way, you only get them by covering the drive up, sort of like wearing a red wig so you can call yourself a ginger.

Klevv showed off its own RGB M.2 drive back at Computex 2018, but we haven't seen it for sale. And finally, there's a Taiwanese vendor named V-Color that lists a couple of 2017-era drives with an RGB letter V on their PCBs. We didn't see either the V-Color or Klevv drives for sale anywhere we looked (at least on U.S. websites).

Whether it's the first, second or third to market with an RGB M.2 SSD, Patriot's Viper might well be the best looking M.2 drive around. During a brief demo at Patriot's CES suite, I was impressed with the brightness and color quality of the 13 LEDs which line the top surface of the PCB, with the upper and lower edges and a column of three between some chips. The removable black heat spreader makes the lights seem more focused and the entire drive look more like a spaceship or a robot suit.

Patriot says that the VPR 100 will work with lighting control apps from major motherboard vendors such as Gigabyte or Asus, but it did not provide a complete list of partners. There will also be a standalone app from Patriot, in case your motherboard can't control it.

Of course, any SSD is only as good as its performance. The Viper VPR 100 is powered by a Phison e12 controller and promises over 3,000 MBps read and write speeds. It will come in capacities up to 1TB.

Patriot is also releasing a non-RGB version of the drive, which will be called the Viper VPN 100. Because it doesn't need to divert power from the M.2 slot or make space for the LED lights, it will be available in a 2TB capacity and will have slightly faster read and write rates.

The company didn't have pricing or an exact availability date for either SSD, but said that they should be available in the May / June time frame.

Professional Quality and Performance

G-Technology's Thunderbolt 3 and NVMe external SSD is ready to take the performance crown from Samsung's speedy X5. With performance numbers peaking at over 2.8GB/s read and 2.5GB/s write, G-Technology designed the mobile Pro to be a media eating beast that can even handle multi-stream 8K footage editing. With killer build quality and a five-year warranty, the G-Drive mobile Pro is a media professionals dream come true.

G-Technology, now a brand owned by Western Digital, is no newcomer to high-speed storage devices. The company has designed external storage devices specifically for creative professionals for years. It should come as no surprise, then, that the company's latest device sports some of the fastest speeds in the industry and has the looks to match.

The G-Drive mobile Pro has an aluminum heatsink at its core to keep it cool, even under the heaviest of workflows. It was designed to take a beating, too: The drive has a 1000lb crush-proof rating and can survive a three-meter drop in its durable shock-resistant case.

While Thunderbolt 3 devices are typically aimed towards Apple fanatics that have workflows dominated by multimedia editing, Windows support for the interface is coming along, abet slowly. By default, the G-Drive mobile Pro SSD comes plug and play for Mac with the HFS+ file system, but it also comes with Paragon's HFS+ for Windows software that provides compatibility with Windows. If you don't plan to use an Apple device, G-Technology’s Format Wizard can format the drive for native Windows use, too.

Specifications

G-Technology’s G-Drive mobile Pro SSD is currently available in capacities of 500GB and 1TB. The 500GB model retails for $399.99, and the 1TB model weighs in at $699.99. Both drives are rated for up to 2.8/2.4 GB/s of sequential read/write throughput over the Thunderbolt 3 interface.

Like many other modern consumer SSDs, the mobile Pro SSD comes with a respectable endurance rating of 300TBW for the 500GB model and 400TBW for the 1TB model (similar to the WD Black NVMe M.2 SSD). It also has a lengthy five-year warranty, just as a professional product should, even though that isn’t always the case.

The G-Drive mobile Pro pulls its power over a single Thunderbolt 3 connection, but it is only compatible with actual Thunderbolt 3 ports. It will not work with USB Type C ports.

Closer Look

G-Technology includes a 0.5m Thunderbolt 3 cable along with warranty and quick start pamphlets.

The G-Drive mobile Pro measures 112 x 80 x 17 mm and weighs a little over 0.45 lbs. (0.2kg). The casing has a rubber-like feel for added grip and to prevent slippage on smooth surfaces.

A Western Digital SN720 NVMe SSD hides within the casing. This is the OEM version of the SanDisk Extreme Pro and WD Black NVMe SSDs that you can buy in retail channels. In fact, the drive even registers as a SanDisk Extreme Pro SSD in Windows device manager.

This M.2 SSD boasts high-end performance figures on its own with its 64-layer 3D TLC flash and WD's in-house eight-channel NVMe controller. Usable capacity in Windows comes in at 931.5 GB after formatting.

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Performance Results

Comparison Products

Today we're comparing the 1TB G-Technology G-Drive mobile Pro SSD to a few other NVMe Thunderbolt 3 devices, like the high-end 1TB Patriot Evlvr and 1TB Samsung X5. We also included the 1TB SanDisk Extreme Portable SSD, a USB 3.1 Gen 2 product with SATA-like performance, and finally, our DIY WD Blue 3D SSD and HDD USB 3.0 solutions.

ATTO

ATTO is a simple and free application that SSD vendors commonly use to assign sequential performance specifications to their products. It also gives us insight into how the device handles different file sizes.

G-Technology’s G-Drive mobile Pro SSD easily matched its rated 2.8/2.4GB/s sequential read/write specification. The drive is faster overall than the Samsung X5, despite a notable dip in performance at the 64KB file size during our read workload.

CrystalDiskMark

CrystalDiskMark (CDM) is a simple and easy to use storage benchmarking tool.

The G-Drive mobile Pro SSD surpasses the Samsung X5 during a sequential write test at a QD (Queue Depth) of 32, ranking first. The Pro maintains its leading write performance at QD1, but the X5 slips out ahead slightly during the read test. The Pro outperforms the Samsung X5 again during the 4K random tests, maintaining its first-place rank.

Transfer Rates – DiskBench

DiskBench is a storage benchmarking tool that allows us to test the read and write performance of a storage device with real data. We test external drives with three file transfers that consist of 25GB of photos (10GB of jpegs and 15GB of RAW photos), 50GB of movies, and 25GB of documents. We transfer the files from a 1TB NVMe SSD to the external device and then follow up by reading a 3.7GB 7-zip file and a 15GB movie back from the device.

The G-Drive mobile Pro delivered great performance during the initial file transfer, but it wasn't as fast during the 25GB document transfer. The G-Drive mobile Pro trailed the Samsung X5 by 268 MB/s during the document transfer.

The G-Drive mobile Pro was faster than the Samsung X5 during our read tests, again taking first place on our charts.

Trace Testing – PCMark 8 Storage Test 2.0

PCMark 8 is a trace-based benchmark that uses Microsoft Office, Adobe Creative Suite, World of Warcraft, and Battlefield 3 to measure the performance of storage devices in real-world application scenarios.

G-Technology’s G-Drive mobile Pro SSD scored a total of 5084 points and an average bandwidth of 567MB/s in PCMark 8’s storage benchmark, once again leading our test pool. 

Write Saturation and Temperature

Write speed and temperature are two important and interrelated metrics for external devices. We threw in one last test to measure the performance of the drive over a 15-minute window as we wrote to the full span of the drive. We logged the temperature of the drive via the S.M.A.R.T. data to see when (or if) thermal throttling kicks in and how it impacts performance. This test also reveals if the drive has an SLC cache, which is a small portion of faster-programmed flash that absorbs incoming write workloads. Bear in mind that results will vary based on the workload and ambient air temperature.

The G-Drive mobile Pro SSD comes equipped with an SLC write cache, so while it is rated for 2.4GB/s write speeds, that peak speed only lasts for the first 14GB of data you transfer. Sequential write performance degrades after you exceed 14GB of data, but unlike other drives, sustained performance levels off at a respectable 1.5GB/s.

As with performance, temperature is not much of concern here. Even during our extreme write bombardment, the drive stayed under 50C and was just warm to the touch.

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Conclusion

With speeds of 2.8GB/s read and up to 2.4GB/s write, the G-Technology G-Drive mobile Pro SSD is a very capable portable SSD that can transfer a terabyte of data in just 7 minutes. That makes it an excellent choice for professional 4K, 8K, and VR media editing.

The drive consistently trades blows with, and even beats, the Samsung X5 that previously held the crown of the fastest external SSD to cross our test bench. The drive even stayed cool during our demanding benchmarks, which is important to maintain a high level of performance during extended use. It even outpaced the X5 during the PCMark 8 Storage test by almost 100MB/s.

Large media files whiz quickly to and from the G-Drive mobile Pro SSD, but smaller files are a little more challenging. The only time the G-Drive let up was when we threw our 25GB folder of documents at it. During this test, the Samsung X5 beat it out by more than 260MB/s. That's something to keep in mind if you plan to use the drive for anything other than media editing. It also doesn’t support hardware-based data encryption like the X5, either.

G-Technology designed the G-Drive mobile Pro for professional users, so it comes with the price tag to match the prestige. The $300 price tag for the 500GB model and $600 asking price for the 1TB can be a real shocker to most consumers, especially considering a standard 1TB WD Black NVMe M.2 SSD goes for a just bit over $200. Most 1TB SATA SSDs also retail for less than $150. Bear in mind that there aren't many bare external Thunderbolt 3 enclosures available, so it would be challenging to create a similar do-it-yourself package for less money.

Should you get the G-Technology G-Drive mobile Pro SSD? If you regularly edit media files, we believe so. It’s sleek, it’s durable, and it’s optimized for multi-stream workflows. It eats through video faster than an HDD RAID array and is small and lightweight enough to carry in your pocket. If you need to speed up your workflow and you’ve grown tired of slower SSDs and HDDs for your day-to-day editing, the G-Drive mobile Pro SSD is a solid option.

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While customizable RGB backlighting, media controls and other features are important, ultimately, every keyboard is judged first and foremost on key feel. One of the first keyboards to utilize Kailh Box White switches, the Patriot Viper V765 provides a best-in-class clicky typing and gaming experience that’s superior to those provided by the Cherry MX Blue switches you’ll find in many of its competitors. Throw in colorful RGB keys and a space-age aluminum chassis and the $89 Viper V765 is not only a great keyboard, but also a great bargain.

White-Switch Typing Experience

If you’re looking for a quiet keyboard or one with a flat, linear feel, look elsewhere. The Kailh Box White switches are loud and proud, making a sharp, but very pleasant clicking sound every time you press them. As a clicky keyboard lover, I found these switches to be a revelation, allowing me to type at high speeds with arguably greater comfort than on my other favorite keyboards: a Razer Black Widow with that company’s green switches and my Unicomp Model M, which utilizes old-fashioned IBM Buckling Spring technology.

First unveiled in 2017, Kailh’s Box line of mechanical switches gets its name from their plastic casing, which protects the mechanical parts from liquid and dust. As a result, keyboards that uses these switches, including the Viper V765, are rated as IP56 water-resistant.

The white switches give the Viper V765 ever-so-slightly less travel than Cherry MX Blue and Razer Green clicky switches. While both of those have 4mm of travel and actuate (register your press) at 2mm, the Kailh White Boxes actuate at 1.8mm and have 3.6mm of travel total. The shorter throw allowed me to type fast while still providing plenty of room for me to depress the keys without bottoming out (hitting the base with maximum force).

I can’t say with certainty that I was able to type faster -- I hit my typical 95 to 100 words per minute on 10fastfingers.com -- but my fingers felt less sore afterwards. The only real downside to the typing experience is that flipping out the feet on the bottom of the Viper V765 doesn’t give the rear of the keyboard much elevation. I would have preferred taller feet that gave the keyboard more of a slope.

The shorter throw allows for better repeat firing and movement while gaming. When I fired up a game of Dig Dug, I was able to pump up the bad guys faster than on my regular keyboard because I could hit the spacebar more quickly. My colleague, Andrew Freedman, used the Patriot V765 to play Battlefield V and reported that he was able to move around and engage the game with ease.

Design

With its gunmetal gray aluminum surface, tapered angular corners and RGB light panels that adorn the left and right sides, the Viper V765 looks a little like a glam-rock spaceship. However, the gray is such a dark shade that it doesn’t look quite as interesting unless it’s in a bright area.

At 1.1 x 18.4 x 6.4 inches (4 x 46.6 x 20.3 cm), the Viper V765 is really compact for a full-size keyboard. Yet, it still finds room for a top row that has media control keys and a volume dial. It squeezed into my relatively small backpack and, at just 2.5 pounds (1,134 grams), didn’t add much weight.

The keyboard’s biggest design drawback is its relatively stubby, retractable feet. When flipped out, they add a mere 0.5 inches (1.3 cm) of lift to the top of the keyboard, giving it a slope that wasn’t quite steep enough for my taste. My classic-style Unicomp keyboard, which is far larger (1.75 x 19.25 x 8.25 inches, 4.4 x 48.9 x 21 cm), has feet that provide a more pleasant 0.75 inches (1.9 cm) of lift. At least the Viper V765 has feet; the Tesoro Gram XS we tested a few months ago doesn’t have any.

The keyboard connects to your PC using a braided, 5.9-foot (1.8 meter) USB cable, which has an attached cable tie to make it more manageable. It would be nice if the Viper’s cable was removable for better portability, but most full-size keyboards also use built-in cables, presumably to prevent you from accidentally yanking them out.

The V765 also comes with a tiny, 1.75-inch deep, 0.5-inch (4.5 x 1.3 cm) high wrist rest, which attaches via magnet. The wrist rest has a pleasant, soft touch surface, but I found it too shallow and low to the desk to provide the kind of support I need. My hands hung off the edge. I quickly switched back to my normal 2.75-inch deep (7 cm) , 0.75-inch (1.9 cm) high gel rest.

RGB Lighting

Like many of its competitors, the Patriot Viper V765 has keys which support 16.8 million different colors, and each one is programmable. Unlike most other RGB keyboards, this one has attractive light strips on the left and right sides of the chassis. Out of the box, these strips were stuck on a bland white, and there was no mention of how to configure them in either the Viper application or the keyboard’s instructions. After reaching out to Patriot, I found out that you can switch the strips from white to off to a rainbow animation by hitting the Fn and right CTRL keys.

The keyboard comes with a series of 10 RGB animations built-in, which range from Radar (colors change in a circle pattern) to Raindrops (colors fill in one key at a time) to my favorite, Wave (colors wash over the keyboard). You can invoke any of these modes using the Fn key and one of the function keys. Then, you can adjust the speed, brightness and direction of it with additional keyboard shortcuts.

You can also create up to five custom profiles that have individual keys light up in whatever color you choose. So, if you want the WASD keys plus I,O and P to be custom colors, this is where you can do it.

Viper Software

The Patriot Viper software is nothing to type home about. You can use the app to set all of the same lighting effects and custom profiles that are available via keyboard shortcuts and can get fine grain control over the RGB values for each custom key.

In the app, you can create a series of keyboard macros, but there are plenty of third-party macro apps for Windows that offer more functionality. You can also turn up the response time and report rate to try to decrease lag, but we didn’t notice any, even at the default settings.

If you have other RGB peripherals, the Viper V765 isn’t compatible with their software. So, if you have Razer Chroma, or Corsair iCue, Asus Aura Sync, it won’t control the Viper. And, unlike these vastly superior RGB apps, the Viper app doesn’t sync your settings to the cloud. You can use an import / export function to save your settings to a file, but you’d have to copy it manually.

On the bright side, you don’t need to run the Viper software in the background, so it doesn’t eat up memory unless you’re using it, and you don’t really need to use it, eve for creating profiles. And, since all the custom RGB profiles are stored in the keyboard’s memory, you probably don’t need to export a profile to keep your settings if you move to another computer.

The Bottom Line

While it’s not a perfect keyboard, the Patriot Viper V765 offers a near-perfect typing experience thanks to its excellent Kailh Box White switches. I wish the flip-out feet were a little taller for typing comfort, and anyone with other RGB peripherals would probably prefer more robust software or at-least compatibility with other companies’ apps.

If you don’t like clicky keys, this keyboard obviously isn’t for you. However, considering the price, the features and fantastic key feel, the Viper V765 is a great choice for gamers and typists alike.

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Photo Credit: Patriot

But Is It Really Savage?

Today, we take a look at Kingston’s latest USB 3.1 Gen 2 external SSD. The HyperX Savage EXO delivers up to 500/480 MB/s of sequential read/write throughput to help expedite your file transfers and game load times, and the edgy design looks good while it's doing it. Perhaps most importantly, it's compatible with game consoles like the Xbox One and PS4. But the specifications only paint part of the performance picture. Poor real-world write performance taints our outlook on this new external, although competitive pricing helps offset some of the drive's shortcomings.

High-speed Thunderbolt 3 NVMe external SSDs are coming to market, like the Samsung X5 and Patriot Evlvr we just reviewed. That makes it easy to overlook the other mainstream drives, but new external SSDs with the latest USB 3.1 Gen 2 interface are making their way to market with exceptional performance for the size and price.

The HyperX team has expanded its product lines greatly since their launch all the way back in 2002. Today, HyperX delivers gamer-focused products, like gaming headsets, keyboards, mouse pads, mice, and obviously RAM and storage products, that the company says offer the best quality and reliability available.

We just had to take a look for ourselves when we got wind of a new high-performance external SSD using the latest USB interface at CES 2018. Nearly ten months later, we finally have the chance. Unlike the new Thunderbolt 3 devices, the Savage EXO isn't designed only for traditional PC gamers that want fast flash storage – console gamers can take advantage of its flash goodness, too.

HyperX designed the Savage EXO for a range of applications, including expanding the storage of a game console and speeding gaming installs. The company also claims the drive will help “deliver 20% faster load times” than an HDD for a more fluid gaming experience, but that speed does come with a significant price premium over much cheaper and more capacious HDDs.

Specifications

HyperX’s Savage EXO delivers up to 500/480 MB/s of sequential read/write throughput over its USB 3.1 Gen 2 interface. The SSDs are currently available in 480GB and 960GB capacities at prices of $127.99 and $249.99, respectively. Like many external SSDs, the Savage EXO does not have an endurance restriction that limits the three-year warranty. It also comes with free technical support over the warranty period.

HyperX rates the drive with a maximum power draw up to 4.5W. That shouldn’t be a problem for most USB 3.0 ports, but the power consumption is at the specification’s maximum limit.

In addition to game console compatibility, drive support starts at Windows 7 (SP1), Mac OS X 10.9, and Linux 2.6x (and newer versions). For testing, we formatted the drive with NTFS to take advantage of TRIM in our Windows test environment. TRIM keeps performance snappy even after extended use and works flawlessly with the drive.

Closer Look

The Savage EXO has a single USB Type C port. The white indicator light shows when the device is active. Kingston includes two one-foot USB cables and a HyperX sticker in the box. One of the included cables is USB Type C to C, and the other is USB Type C to A. 

The drive measures 123.82 x 48.61 x 10.24mm and weighs in at just 56 grams, making it a very small and lightweight external. We couldn’t pry open the case to get the controller information without destroying the drive, but we know the internal SSD uses Toshiba's BiCS3 64-layer TLC flash.

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Performance Results

Comparison Products

We pitted the HyperX Savage EXO against the high-end Thunderbolt 3 Patriot Evlvr 1TB and 1TB Samsung X5 drives. We also included the 1TB SanDisk Extreme Portable SSD, which is another USB 3.1 Gen 2 product with similar specs, and an older Samsung T1. Finally, we included our USB 3.0 DIY WD Blue 3D SSD and HDD. 

ATTO

ATTO is a simple and free application that SSD vendors commonly use to assign sequential performance specifications to their products. It also gives us insight into how the device handles different file sizes.

The Savage EXO delivered a peak of 547/525 MB/s of sequential read/write throughput. The SanDisk Extreme led slightly during the small-file read and write tests.

CrystalDiskMark

CrystalDiskMark (CDM) is a simple and easy to use file benchmarking tool that many storage vendors use to assign specs to their products.

The Savage EXO provided middling performance during our sequential read and write tests at a queue depth (QD) of 32. We also tested with a lighter QD1 load that is more representative of real-world performance. The Savage EXO outperformed the Samsung Extreme slightly during those light sequential read tests, but the roles reversed during the QD1 write test.

Random performance, on the other hand, wasn't as impressive. The Savage EXO lagged even the much smaller and multiple-generations old Samsung T1. The Thunderbolt 3-based devices also opened up a sizable lead due to their faster interface and protocol.

Transfer Rates – DiskBench

We use the DiskBench storage benchmarking tool to test file transfer performance with our own custom block of real data. We test external drives with three file transfers that consist of 25GB of photos (10GB of iPhone jpgs and 15GB of RAW photos), 50GB of movies, and 25GB of documents. First, we transfer each folder from a 1TB NVMe SSD to the external device; then we follow up by reading a 3.7GB 7-zip file and a 15GB movie back from the device.

The HyperX Savage EXO showed its true colors during our real-world file transfer tests. While it was faster than the HDD in all three tests, it ranked last among the SSDs by a fairly large margin.

The Savage EXO was actually quite savage during the read tests, though. It surpassed the other USB-based drives, even the SanDisk Extreme, and delivered an average read speed of 475 MB/s in both our read tests.

Trace Testing – PCMark 8 Storage Test 2.0

PCMark 8 is a trace-based benchmark that uses Microsoft Office, Adobe Creative Suite, World of Warcraft, and Battlefield 3 to measure the performance of storage devices in real-world scenarios

HyperX’s Savage EXO outstripped both of the DIY WD Blue externals but trailed the SanDisk Extreme and older Samsung T1. It should go without saying that Thunderbolt devices are still in a league of their own compared to USB.

Write Saturation and Temperature

Write speed and temperature are two important and inter-related metrics for external devices. We threw in one last test to measure the performance of the Patriot Evlvr over the course of 15 minutes of writing to the full span of the drive. We logged the temperature of the drive via the S.M.A.R.T. data to see when (or if) thermal throttling kicks in and how it impacts performance. This test also reveals if the drive has an SLC cache, which is a small portion of fast flash that absorbs incoming write workloads. Bear in mind that results will vary based on the workload and ambient air temperature.

The Savage EXO comes with a stingy ~3GB performance-boosting SLC write cache. Sequential write performance plummets from over 500MB/s to just 166MB/s after the workload saturates the tiny cache.

The temperature reading remained rather static for most of this test. That's because the Savage EXO's SMART data doesn’t actively update when the drive is being read or written to–instead it only updates periodically. That means our measurements aren't as granular as we would like.

The EXO's temperature jumped to 50C around the 200-second mark, where it remained for the rest of the test. After the write workload finished, our SMART data logger captured a maximum temperature of 54C. The drive cooled off quickly thereafter, so we don't think extended write workloads will trigger thermal throttling.

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Conclusion

The HyperX team did a phenomenal job designing a slim and very lightweight external SSD that looks ready for battle. With slick, edgy looks and excellent read performance, the Savage EXO appears to be a great buy for those looking to get a taste of what flash has to offer. 

But products aren’t always as good as they appear on the surface. Flash can be extremely fast, but that doesn’t mean it is fast all the time. Many new SSDs, including externals, feature an SLC write cache. This means a portion of the drive has a fast layer of flash that boosts write performance, but it has a finite capacity. Unfortunately, performance plummets when the SLC cache is full. In the case of the HyperX Savage EXO, the small size of the cache is its Achilles heel.

The Savage EXO excelled in synthetic tests where its read and write performance matched or exceeded the 500/480 MB/s specs, but that was short lived. The Savage EXO displayed very good read performance during our real-world file transfer tests, but it suffered from very poor write performance during the extended tests. The EXO averaged just 136 MB/s when we wrote 100GB of photos, movies, and documents to the drive. For reference, the much older Samsung T1 averaged 233 MB/s.

That means you shouldn't expect top-tier performance when you write large media files. The SanDisk Extreme Portable SSD and Samsung’s latest T-series external, the T5, are both better for that job, especially given their price. But, to be fair, Thunderbolt 3 devices are still the best for those use-cases if you have the money.

The Savage EXO performed within our expectations during application-focused tests. It trailed the SanDisk Extreme and Samsung T1 slightly during the PCMark 8 test, but performance was adequate. The Savage EXO also performed well during light, bursty workloads where the SLC buffer helps deliver a fairly speedy experience. These types of applications are representative of many common applications, like games, so the EXO is a good fit for both PC and console gamers. Its small size, edgy look, and competitive pricing are plenty attractive, too.

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Evolve your workflow

Tired of long file transfer times? Want a speedy portable SSD to compliment your NVMe SSD powered system for media work? Or do you just need a fast, go-to pocket drive for your game library? Patriot claims that its new Evlvr (short for Evolver) external NVMe drive can handle all these tasks, and more.

The Evlvr is Patriot's first Thunderbolt 3 product. The speedy interface paired with the NVMe protocol unlocks more performance potential than traditional connections, like USB. In our tests, the Evlvr provides up to 1.6/1GB/s of sequential read/write throughput, and looks good doing it. The ultra-competitive pricing cements this as a great deal for creators and semi-professionals that want a no-compromise solution at a great price.

Thunderbolt 3 (TB3) portable SSDs bring some of the fastest external storage devices on the market right into your pocket. There were very few TB3 SSDs to choose from just a few months ago, but now the selection is expanding rapidly. While TB3 SSDs are fast, which comes courtesy of the latest external interface technology, they are significantly costlier than their USB competitors. You'll also need either a fairly expensive adapter for your PC or one of the latest TB3-equipped models.

The Evlvr's sleek aluminum finish helps cool the beastly M.2 PCIe NVMe SSD that delivers performance numbers that far exceed both USB and SATA specifications.

Specifications

Patriot’s Evlvr sports a sequential read/write speed rating of up to 1.6/1 GB/s, but write speed varies based on capacity. The drive is currently available in 512GB and 1TB capacities, but the 256GB model will come to market soon.

Unlike most external SSDs, the Evlvr has an endurance rating. The 512GB model can absorb 600 TB of write data (TBW) and still remain under warranty, but the smaller devices have less endurance (as listed above). As with any SSD, endurance can be a concern, but Patriot's two-year warranty period will probably expire before you hit the write endurance limitation.

Patriot rates power consumption at 5.2W for the 256GB model and up to 6W for the 1TB model. That means you shouldn’t have a problem powering up the device with the TB3 port, which can supply upwards of 15W for bus-powered devices. That amount of power generates some heat, so we'll test temperatures shortly. Patriot claims the drive shouldn't exceed 0°C ~ 70°C during normal operation. The devices throttles (slows performance) as a self-protection measure if the controller reaches 70C.

Closer Look

The Evlvr comes pre-formatted with the exFAT file system for compatibility with all major OSes. We tested the drive in Windows and used the NTFS file system. This filesystem also enables TRIM support, which helps maintain a consistent level of performance even after heavy use. After formatting, the drive offers 954GB of usable space.

The drive measures roughly half the size of a wallet (102x48x14mm) and weighs in at 88 grams, which makes for a nice small and light package. Two rubber feet on the bottom help prevent the Evlvr from sliding around. The three screws that hold the case together are hidden under the rubber feet.

A large piece of thermal tape transfers the heat from the M.2 drive into the aluminum enclosure. The internal SSD is based on Phison’s PCIe 3.0 x2 E8 NVMe controller and Toshiba's 64-Layer TLC NAND flash, much like Kingston's A1000 SSD. The adapter board hosts the Phison E8-powered PCIe SSD and transmits data over the Thunderbolt 3 connection.

The drive comes with a 28cm (11”) Thunderbolt 3 cable with USB Type C connectors on each end, but it isn’t compatible with USB Type C ports. Instead, it will only work with true TB3 ports.

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Performance Results

Comparison Products

In today’s review, the 1TB Patriot Evlvr faces storage options that range from a slow 1TB DIY external hard drive all the way up to one of the fastest externals we have reviewed so far, the 1TB Samsung X5. The USB 3.1 Gen 2 1TB SanDisk Extreme Portable SSD and the 512GB Angelbird SSD2go represent middle-range products. We also threw in the older USB 3.0 the 250GB Samsung T1 and 256GB Patriot Supersonic Phoenix SSDs. Finally, we paired a DIY external from Aukey with a WD Blue 3D SSD.

ATTO

ATTO is a simple and free application that SSD vendors commonly use to assign sequential performance specifications to their products. It also gives us insight into how the device handles different file sizes.

Patriot’s Evlvr ramps up to its rated sequential read speed slowly, but it places second to the Samsung X5 once it reaches the 128K file size. The Evlvr's 1.6GB/s of read throughput is three times faster than any USB device.

The Evlvr has a distinct advantage over the USB devices with 1GB/s of sequential write throughput across the entire range of file sizes.

CrystalDiskMark

CrystalDiskMark (CDM) is a simple and easy to use file benchmarking tool that many storage vendors use to assign specs to their products.

The Patriot Evlvr ranks second again with sequential performance of 1.6/1GB/s read/write at QD32, which is right in line with the manufacturer's specifications.

The Evlvr’s QD1 performance is more representative of the performance we normally see in day-to-day use. At QD1, the Patriot Evlvr delivers twice the performance of the 1TB SanDisk Extreme in both sequential reads and writes. It also performs well during small file transfers.

Transfer Rates – DiskBench

We use the DiskBench storage benchmarking tool to test file transfer performance with our own custom block of real data. We test external drives with three file transfers that consist of 25GB of photos (10GB of iPhone jpgs and 15GB of RAW photos), 50GB of movies, and 25GB of documents. First, we transfer each folder from a 1TB NVMe SSD to the external device; then we follow up by reading a 3.7GB 7-zip file and a 15GB movie back from the device.

The Patriot Evlvr again delivers two to three times more performance than standard USB-based SSDs. It ranks second to the Samsung X5 in four out of five of these tests, but it pulled off a win during the photo transfer. That's surprising because of its much lower write speed during our synthetic testing.

Write Saturation and Temperature

Write speed and temperature are two important and inter-related metrics for external devices. We threw in one last test to measure the performance of the Patriot Evlvr over the course of 15 minutes of writing to the full span of the drive. We logged the temperature of the drive via the S.M.A.R.T. data to see when (or if) thermal throttling kicks in and how it impacts performance. This test also reveals if the drive has an SLC cache, which is a small portion of fast flash that absorbs incoming write workloads. Bear in mind that results will vary based on the workload and ambient air temperature.

Like the Samsung X5, Patriot’s Evlvr features an SLC write cache. Here, we wrote 5GB of data before the Evlvr's buffer filled and it began writing directly to TLC flash. Unlike the Samsung X5, however, it didn’t thermal throttle and maintained a very consistent 720MB/s write speed.

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Conclusion

Patriot's Evlvr bridges the gap between the ultra-performance (and price) Samsung X5 and "standard" USB SSDs. Patriot's pricing undercuts other devices with similar specs so the drive is a comparative value, but it is still a pricey storage device that has a few quirks you should be aware of before you press the buy button.

You'll need to use the supplied cable and a true Thunderbolt 3 port. We tried using a USB Type C cable we had in the lab, but it didn’t work with the Evlvr. We also tried using the drive in a USB 3.1 Gen 2 Type C port, but we were greeted with a “Thunderbolt device functionality might be limited” popup notification and the Evlvr didn’t show up in Windows Explorer or disk management.

The Evlvr also has a relatively short two-year warranty. If you're looking for a longer warranty period, the MyDigitalSSD PVX appears to be the same drive with a darker finish and a five-year warranty. It also doesn’t have a listed endurance rating, but it does cost a bit more.

The Evlvr's read/write speeds of 1.6/1GB/s are nothing to sneeze at. The drive even surpassed Samsung’s X5 during our photo transfer test, which is great news for photographers weighing if high-performance TB3 devices are worth the extra bucks over mid-range drives.

Overall, the Evlvr offers plenty of performance for most users. Iif you do a lot of video work, it might be worth stepping up to the Samsung X5, which is twice as fast in some workloads, but the Evlvr offers a great mix of price and performance for most users.

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Leading Edge Performance and Security

Leading edge technology almost always comes at a premium, and the latest storage products are no exception. Samsung's attractive Portable SSD X5 builds on the company's reputation for creating some of the fastest and classiest SSD storage solutions on the market, but it is pricey: The Portable SSD X5 is easily three times more expensive per gigabyte than most portable USB SSDs.

The Portable X5 does bring a lot to the table, though. Samsung says the drive has supercar design influences and the performance to match. Samsung’s Portable SSD X5 is the company's first NVMe-based portable SSD with the Thunderbolt 3 interface. The interface enables high-end performance that stretches up to a blistering 2.8/2.3 GB/s of read/write throughput.

The Portable SSD X5 also comes with a durable design, AES 256-bit hardware encryption, and capacities that range from 500GB to 2TB. That makes it a solid choice if you're a professional or storage geek that needs high capacity and fast external storage, but you'll have to pay a premium for the leading performance.

External storage interfaces have evolved over the last few years. Samsung's T1, its first external SSD, used the USB 3.0 interface and delivered hundreds of MB/s for those looking for faster alternatives to HDD external storage. Samsung released the T3 a year later. This portable SSD used the updated USB 3.1 Gen 1 interface with a USB Type-C connector. The T3 only offered a mild performance improvement over the first-gen T1, so it just wasn’t that impressive.

Advancements in interface design led to the USB 3.1 Gen 2 specification that enables speeds of up to 10Gb/s. The Samsung T5 wielded the speedy interface, but it only provided a mild performance improvement because the internal SSD topped out at ~540 MB/s. 

Thunderbolt steps in as the next step up on the performance ladder. First-gen Thunderbolt matched USB 3.1 Gen 2’s speed specification of 10GB/s, but it used the Mini DisplayPort connector and most cable lengths required power, which often required an extra power adapter. Today the industry has progressed to Thunderbolt 3. This faster interface pushes data at up to 40 Gb/s (up to four times faster than the first-gen interface) and uses the more common USB-C connector. The X5 also doesn't require an additional power adapter.

Thunderbolt 3 kicks the bandwidth up a notch, but that doesn’t mean you can saturate it without speedy components. That’s where Samsung’s expertise comes into play.

Specifications

The Samsung Portable SSD X5 comes in capacities of 500GB, 1TB, and 2TB with price tags of $400, $700, and $1,400, respectively. The drives will be available globally on September 3, 2018. The 1TB and 2TB models blend Thunderbolt’s massive bandwidth with the goodness of the efficient NVMe protocol to deliver peak speeds of 2.8/2.3 GB/s of sequential read/write throughput. As expected, the 500GB model has a lower write performance rating.

Unfortunately, the newest technology isn’t always backward compatible. The Samsung X5 needs a true Thunderbolt connection to work correctly. Systems equipped with USB-C still require built-in Thunderbolt 3 support. USB-A (USB 3.0/2.0) systems are also not supported. The drive also requires the latest operating systems (macOS Sierra 10.12 or higher / Windows 10 64bit RS 2 or higher).

Samsung’s X5 supports TRIM when the drive is formatted with NTFS. That means your external SSD will not be bogged down as much by background garbage collection. It also comes backed by a three-year warranty. We do know that the warranty includes an endurance limit, but Samsung hasn't provided specifics yet.

Accessories

The Samsung Portable SSD X5 comes with a 20-inch Thunderbolt 3 cable and preloaded Portable SSD software for Mac and Windows. This application allows you to enable or disable the optional device encryption feature.

After you open the application, you simply enter a device name and password to enable full AES 256-bit hardware encryption with no performance penalty. The device will prompt you for the password each time you establish a connection to a device, but otherwise, it functions as normal.

A Closer Look

A Samsung OEM M.2 SSD serves as the high-performance engine. The internal SSD's part number (MZBLB1T0HALR) is similar to the PM981 (MZVLB1T0HALR), but they aren’t an exact match. This speedy M.2 SSD makes the X5’s blazing speeds a reality, but the performance comes at the cost of a somewhat larger enclosure.

This X5 consumes more power than most SATA SSDs, and it has the heat output to prove it. Therefore, unlike the T-Series, Samsung designed the new X5 with a larger magnesium body to help dissipate heat. The drive measures 119x62x19.7mm, which is three times larger than Samsung's T-Series SSDs, and weighs 150 grams (5.3oz).

Even the larger enclosure won't be able to keep the components cool under all conditions. Samsung's Dynamic Thermal Guard prevents overheating by regulating the operating temperature. In other words, the drive will throttle performance to compensate for temperatures that exceed the safe operating range.

A supercar may have influenced Samsung's X5 design, but its color options, or lack thereof, scream economy car. Rather than having two or three colors to choose from like the T5, the X5 only comes with one option: a glossy silver on the top-side and a bright red non-slip coated bottom-side.

The non-slip coating on the bottom of the device is much less effective than standard rubber feet or pads, so you'll need to be careful if you place the drive on a smooth surface. Samsung claims the X5 can withstand a fall from 6.6 feet.

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Performance Results

Comparison Products

We brought in a diverse range of external storage devices for comparison. The 1TB Patriot EVLVR is a high-performance drive that also wields the Thunderbolt 3 interface paired with the NVMe protocol. This drive is the Samsung X5's closest competitor in our test pool.

We included a couple of the latest external USB 3.1 Gen 2 devices: the 1TB SanDisk Extreme Portable SSD and the 512GB Angelbird SSD2go.

The older USB 3.0 250GB Samsung T1 and 256GB Patriot Supersonic Phoenix highlight the relative performance differences between older and newer interfaces. We also threw in a DIY external drive enclosure from Aukey that connects via USB 3.0 Gen 1. We paired this device with both a WD Blue 3D SSD and an HDD.

ATTO

ATTO is a simple and free application that SSD vendors commonly use to assign sequential performance specifications to their products. It also gives us insight into how the device handles different file sizes. 

The Samsung X5 delivers very fast performance across the board. Here the X5 tops out at 2.5/2 GB/s of read/write throughput. Thunderbolt doesn’t allow for transfer sizes under 4KB in our benchmark, but you can see the new interconnect carries five times more bandwidth than any USB device. The X5 also outperforms the Patriot EVLVR across the entire range of file sizes. 

CrystalDiskMark

CrystalDiskMark (CDM) is a simple and easy to use file benchmarking tool. The Samsung X5 takes first place in total throughput with sequential speeds of 2,810/2,245 MB/s read/write at a queue depth (QD) of thirty-two, which is representative of performance under an extreme load.

We tested sequential performance at QD1, which is more representative of what you would encounter during a real-world file transfer, and the X5 delivered ~1.5/1.2 GB/s of read/write throughput. The drive proved to be pretty agile, too. The X5's 4K random performance led the pool once again, though the Patriot EVLVR is very competitive during small file transfers.

Transfer Rates – DiskBench

DiskBench is a storage benchmarking tool that allows us to test the transfer or copy performance of a storage device with real data. We test external drives with three file transfers that consist of 25GB of photos, 50GB of movies, and 25GB of documents. First, we transfer each folder from a 1TB Plextor M9Pe to the external device; then we follow up by reading a 3.7GB 7-zip file and a 15GB movie back from the device.

The Samsung X5 performed extremely well in our real-world movie and document file transfers, but the Patriot EVLVR managed to eke out a slight win during our photo transfer test. Overall, the Samsung X5 delivered roughly three times the performance of the USB 3.1 Gen 2-based SanDisk Extreme Portable SSD.

The X5 read both test files at over 1.8GB/s, meaning it was four times faster than the USB-based comparison drives.

Write Saturation and Temperature

Write speed and temperature are two important and inter-related metrics for external devices. We threw in one last test to measure the performance of the Samsung X5 over the course of 15 minutes of writing to the full span of the drive. We logged the temperature of the drive via the S.M.A.R.T. data to see when (or if) thermal throttling kicks in and how it impacts performance. This test also reveals if the drive has an SLC cache, which is a small portion of fast flash that absorbs incoming write workloads.

Bear in mind that results will vary based on the workload and ambient air temperature. We have charted readings from the Samsung X5's two internal temperature sensors. These sensors measure case and controller temperatures.

The Samsung X5 maintained a write speed of 1.75 GB/s for 25 seconds. That means the drive absorbed 43GB of data before the workload spilled outside of the SLC cache. Native TLC performance stabilized at 1.25 GB/s before throttling kicked in.

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Conclusion

Samsung's Portable SSD X5 is a great storage device for professionals looking to spend less time waiting and more time working. And, unlike many of its competitors, it comes with easy-to-use AES 256-bit hardware encryption.

The X5 is pricey, though. The 500GB model retails for $400, while the 1TB model costs $700. Meanwhile, the big 2TB drive weighs in at a staggering $1,400. These prices are not for the faint of wallet, but the drive is a solid solution for content creators and media professionals.

Dealing with large amounts of content, like video, audio, and pictures often require time-consuming file transfers to editing platforms. Ultimately, transferring files consumes time that could be used for more productive tasks. For professionals and content creators, saving time can equate to saving dollars: Saving a few minutes in any single production can tally up to hours over the course of a month, let alone a year.

We would like to see more color options, and the non-slip coating isn't very effective. The three-year warranty also doesn’t suit this product, especially given its obvious appeal to professional users. Samsung also hasn't shared endurance information yet, which is a critical consideration given the relatively short warranty period.

The Samsung Portable SSD X5 is one of the fastest external SSDs available. The peak speeds of up to 2.8GB/s read and 2.3GB/s write are up to three times faster than the best USB-based storage devices. You’ll pay a hefty premium for the fastest high-end tech, though, which relegates this drive to the professional crowd.

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Patriot bucks the trend of pairing cosmetic features with mainstream DRAM ICs, instead pushing data rates up to 4,133 megahertz (MHz) on its Viper RGB. This DDR4-3600 kit is only $10 more than the white-LED version and several dollars cheaper than competing products with similar latency. That makes it a great value at this speed, though slower kits have greater pricing advantages.

The kit includes two single-rank 8GB DIMMs, which would have put it at a competitive disadvantage against dual-rank DIMMs of the same capacity. But dual-rank DIMMs require twice as many chips, and those less-dense ICs have been out of production for around two years. Buyers who can’t afford 32GB are stuck with single-rank DIMMs with today’s 8GB ranks.

Patriot’s part number PVR416G360C6K requires the Intel-developed extreme memory profile (XMP) mode to get past DDR4-2133, which in turn requires an XMP-compatible motherboard. While some competing modules have DDR4-2400 or even DDR4-2666, non-XMP programming as a backup plan, anyone paying extra for DDR4-3600 should be well-informed to not need a backup plan.

The single XMP value of DDR4-3600 comes at excellent 16-18-18-36 timings, edging out our performance-memory standard of one latency cycle for every 200MHz data rate. That standard is derived from simple math, since DDR-400 CAS 2, DDR2-800 CAS 4, DDR3-1600 CAS 8 and DDR4-3200 CAS 16 all have the same latency time. Lower is better.

Compatible with motherboard-supplied RGB software from Asus, ASRock, Gigabyte and MSI, Patriot also offers customers their own control software. Besides offering more lighting modes than MSI Mystic, it’s also compatible with boards that don’t have an RGB suite.

Test & Comparison Hardware

Latency Tuning, Overclocking & Benchmarks

Spoiler: The Viper LED reached at least DDR4-4000 according to our latency tuning table. Before we get to the overclocking chart, we’d like to point out that it reached that high speed at a mere 18-19-19-38 timing set. Noting that Thaiphoon Burner lists the IC’s as “K4A8G085W?-BCPB," we treated the question mark as a “B,” as in Samsung B-die. Doing so saved several hours in our search for the lowest stable timings at various data rates. Patriot’s Viper RGB DDR4-3600 had the lowest stable timings across the gamut compared to our other DDR4-3200 to DDR4-3600 kits.

We’ve reached DDR4-4040 several times with higher rated parts, but putting Patriot Viper RGB within the perspective of similarly rated parts makes it appear a master of the overclocking arena.

Viper RGB also runs the board in Sandra when using custom-tuned timings. Viper RGB and the Viper LED are identically rated and have similar XMP values, and both Patriot kits showed a consistent lead over the competing brand at all settings.

Our F1 2015 and 7-Zip tests represent the truly rare example of programs that scale upward with memory at any performance level, while Blender CPU Render and Metro LL Redux represent a wider variety of programs which are hampered with really poor memory configurations (think single-channel or below DDR4-2400 data rates). As such, the custom-tuned Viper RGB surges ahead of the competition in F1 2015 and 7-Zip.

Given the high cost of RAM, it’s tough to imagine that a $10 price difference could put Patriot’s high-flying Viper RGB noticeably behind the Viper LED in performance-per-dollar; however, that $10 savings make the Viper LED the DDR4-3600 Value Champ.

On the other hand, G.Skill’s DDR4-3200 has a $90 price advantage. That’s enough to wipe out its performance loss in the value chart. Those who can’t afford DDR4-3600 will want to consider this.

Bottom Line

For those willing to pay an extra $10, Patriot Viper RGB’s overclocking and latency tuning wins over its own monochromatic LED counterpart make this product a supreme value. And for those who would rather have any lighting features rather than none, both Patriot kits--this RGB model and the LED version--outrank G.Skill's Sniper X DDR4-3600.

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Patriot said at Computex 2018 that it's preparing two new SSDs, the Viper M.2 SSD and an S12 SATA SSD, to round out its 2018 product line.

The Viper M.2 SSD packs up to 1TB of NVMe high-speed storage on a slim 2280 form factor with up to 3,200 MB/s read and 3,000 MB/s write speeds using sequential data. The random performance will peak at 600,000 IOPS, enough to satisfy any gamer, the line's target audience. We've already briefly experienced the performance on tap from an early Phison PS5012-E12 reference design and shared our early thoughts.

What Patriot adds to the story is just how close the Viper M.2 is to market. The company plans to ship the drive in 256GB, 512GB, and 1TB sizes in the next 30 days and hopes to sweep others with similar products as well as those based on Silicon Motion's SM2262EN coming later in the year. We didn't hear anything about retail pricing from the company, but don't expect this SSD to break the bank.

The successor to Phison's successful and diverse S10 SATA controller, which played dual roles as high-performance beast with MLC flash and low-cost general use SSD with TLC, is closer to reality. The Phison S12 will play a similar role with support for both 3D TLC and QLC making it a potent weapon in any SSD manufacturer's arsenal.

Patriot displayed the first retail S12 SATA SSD at Computex 2018 but says this model will only come after the Viper M.2 ships. With performance limited by the SATA bus at roughly 550 MB/s, we feel this drive is best suited for legacy system upgrades not compatible with NVMe and lower cost mainstream builds pieced together with a focus on maximizing the best bang for the buck.