Page 10 - Conclusion
The XPG Mars 980 Blade 2TB with Silicon Motion's latest SM2508 controller does indeed have similar specifications as other flagship PCIe 5.0-based NVMe SSDs like the Crucial T710 2TB and Sandisk WD_BLACK SN8100 2TB, but were the test results the same? Far from it. But before we even get to the test results, let us look at if they are really as similar as we think they are. All of them have native full drive encryption support thanks to the controller and 1200TBW rated write endurance. However, this is about where the hardware similarities end. The Mars 980 Blade 2TB features Micron 232-layer TLCs, while the T710 has Micron G9 276-layer TLCs, and the SN8100 has Kioxia BiCS8 TLC 218-layer TLCs. The XPG flagship drive has a slim heatsink that is not attached from the factory, which is convenient for those who want to choose. Both the XPG and Sandisk uses DDR4 for system memory, while the Crucial alone uses LPDDR4 for better energy efficiency. The rated DDR4 IC speed is different for all three drives, ranging from DDR4-1600 in the Sandisk to DDR4-2666 in the XPG. So how did all these translate to the numbers on the charts? For the most part, the XPG Mars 980 Blade 2TB's performance was mostly within the ballpark of other flagship PCIe 5.0-based NVMe drives in linear and medium workload tests. The emphasis is on mostly. The only way to describe the Mars 980 Blade is its performance was inconsistent. In places where the XPG flagship fell behind, it really fell behind, such as Crystal Disk Mark's Seq1M Q1T1 test. The Mars 980 Blade also delivered significantly lower performance than the T710 and SN8100 in real world simulations such as PCMark and 3DMark. In terms of hardware, one drawback of the Mars 980 Blade 2TB is that it is double-sided with twice as many RAM and flash ICs as the competition, which may cause compatibility issues in specialized cases and slightly higher power consumption. For about $190 at press time, the XPG Mars 980 Blade 2TB is about $40 cheaper than both the Crucial and Sandisk, making a good proposition trading some performance for some money.
XPG provided this product to APH Networks for the purpose of evaluation.
Since April 30, 2007, Number Ratings have been dropped for all CPUs, motherboards, RAM, SSD/HDDs, and graphics cards. This is to ensure the most appropriate ratings are reflected without the inherent limits of using numbers. Everything else will continue using the Number Rating System.
More information in our Review Focus.
The XPG Mars 980 Blade 2TB PCIe 5.0-based NVMe SSD delivers mostly flagship performance at a lower-than-flagship price.
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 9.0
6. Benchmark: HD Tune Pro 5.70
7. Benchmark: PassMark PerformanceTest 11
8. Benchmark: PCMark 10
9. Benchmark: 3DMark
10. Conclusion
