Page 2 - A Closer Look, Test System
The XPG Gammix S70 Blade 1TB is the company's latest PCIe 4.0-based NVMe SSD. Compared to the non-Blade version, the Gammix S70 Blade comes with a low profile heatsink for universal compatibility, including the PlayStation 5. Regardless of the model you get, the XPG Gammix S70 Blade 1TB will be an M.2 2280 format SSD. If you are not familiar with the M.2 physical standard, M.2 2280 means it the size of the drive is 22mm by 80mm, hence its numerical designation. Its components are located on the black printed circuit board, which we will take a closer look at in just a moment. A black XPG-branded aluminum heatsink can be placed on by yourself. It comes with double-sided tape from the factory. I think it is nice it is not attached by default, so you can choose whether to put it on or not. The XPG Gammix S70 Blade 1TB works on the NVMe 1.4 logical device interface and plugs into compatible motherboards directly. Electrically, M.2 NVMe interfaces with PCIe 4.0. The Gammix uses four lanes for up to 8000MB/s bandwidth in each direction. The specified weight is a paltry 7g for this SSD with the heatsink off and 10g with it on.
Behind where you would normally put the heatsink, you can see what the XPG Gammix S70 Blade 1TB is made from. There are four different components that can be seen. At the heart of XPG's Gammix S70 Blade 1TB is an InnoGrit Rainier IG5236. It is an NVMe solution on the M.2 socket to utilize the bandwidth afforded by the PCIe 4.0 standard. The controller features LDPC ECC technology and AES 256-bit encryption support. One Samsung K4A8G165WC-BCTD DDR4-2666 1GB memory chips is present on this side; it is used by the controller for system memory. The XPG Gammix S70 Blade's flash memory are ADATA-rebranded Micron 96-layer 3D triple-level cells in four chips, with two on each side. Its rated write endurance is an excellent 740TBW, which equates to about 405GB per day for five years. This is better than the Western Digital WD_BLACK SN850 NVMe SSD 1TB at 600TBW, which is very good, but not anywhere close to the Seagate FireCuda 510 1TB at 1300TBW. Its rated power consumption is not published. Nothing out of the 1024GB total capacity is provisioned for the drive controller for overhead, so the actual usable space is 1024GB. You will see 953GB in Windows, which is a little more than the 931GB you typically see with 1TB drives.
Flipping the XPG Gammix S70 Blade 1TB around and you will find more components of interest. Two more Micron 96-layer 3D TLC flash ICs can be found along with a second Samsung K4A8G165WC-BCTD memory chip, making the total system memory present to be 2GB. A label on the Gammix S70 Blade itself carries miscellaneous information such as its model name, serial number, and regulatory certifications. Like many ADATA XPG products we have reviewed in the past, this SSD is made in Taiwan.
Specified at 7400MB/s read, 5500MB/s write, and up to 740,000 IOPS read and write over NVMe 1.4 on PCIe 4.0 x4, these figures are extremely impressive. It is roughly twice as fast as any PCIe 3.0-based drive and the highest rated drive we have ever tested here at APH Networks. For comparison, the company's PCIe 3.0 x4 NVMe flagship, the XPG SX8200 Pro 512GB we reviewed a couple of years ago, was rated at only 3500MB/s read and 2300MB/s write. Meanwhile, the PCIe 3.0 x8-based AN1500 2TB add-in card featuring multiple WD_BLACK SSDs in RAID 0 can only hit 6500MB/s read and 4100MB/s write.
To see how all this hardware translates to numbers in our benchmarks, we will pit the XPG Gammix S70 Blade 1TB against the big boys of this game to see how this new performance drive from XPG steps up against some popular NVMe-based SSDs from manufacturers like Crucial, Gigabyte, Kingston, Patriot, Seagate, Western Digital, and even XPG themselves in the next seven pages or so.
Do not worry about the lack of a heatsink -- I attached the one that came with my motherboard.
Our test configuration is as follows:
CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 5600X
CPU Cooling: Noctua NH-D15 chromax.black
Motherboard: ASUS TUF Gaming B550-Plus
RAM: Crucial Ballistix DDR4-3600 4x32GB
Graphics: ASUS Dual GeForce GTX 1060 3GB
Chassis: NZXT H710i
Storage: Western Digital WD_BLACK AN1500 2TB
Power: Seasonic PRIME Ultra Titanium 850W
Operating System: Microsoft Windows 10 Pro
Compared Hardware:
- XPG Gammix S70 Blade 1TB
- ADATA XPG SX8200 Pro 512GB
- Crucial P1 1TB
- Crucial P2 500GB
- Crucial P5 500GB
- Crucial P5 Plus 1TB
- Gigabyte AORUS RGB AIC NVMe SSD 512GB
- Kingston KC2500 1TB
- Patriot P300 512GB
- Patriot Viper VPN100 512GB
- Seagate FireCuda 510 1TB
- Western Digital Black SN750 NVMe SSD 1TB
- Western Digital Blue SN550 NVMe SSD 1TB
- Western Digital WD_BLACK AN1500 2TB
- Western Digital WD_BLACK SN850 NVMe SSD 1TB
Page Index
1. Introduction, Packaging, Specifications
2. A Closer Look, Test System
3. Benchmark: AIDA64 Disk Benchmark
4. Benchmark: ATTO Disk Benchmark
5. Benchmark: Crystal Disk Mark 8.0
6. Benchmark: HD Tach 3.0.1.0
7. Benchmark: HD Tune Pro 5.70
8. Benchmark: PassMark PerformanceTest 10
9. Benchmark: PCMark 10
10. Conclusion
