PC Gamer UK 01.2021 @InternationalPress75

Aorus 1TB NVMe Gen4

GIGABYTE £179

A next-gen drive that adds a little old school bling

On release there was

so little between the

Corsair MP600 and

this Gigabyte Aorus drive that

you wouldn’t be able to tell

them apart even if you had a

whole raft of benchmark

results to look over. And that’s

because beneath the wildly

different heatsinks, they were

essentially the same drives;

using the same Phison E16

controller and the same

Toshiba 3D TLC NAND flash.

Since launch, however,

Gigabyte has tweaked the

firmware of the drive so that it

performs slightly better, and

more on a par with the likes of

the Sabrent and Addlink drives.

This means that we recommend

it over the Corsair MP600, but

honestly the difference is so

slight you probably wouldn’t

notice in the real world. About

the only thing that is different

is that copper heatsink, which

adds a certain retro charm to

any motherboard – it also does

a decent job of keeping the

SSD cool. Just make sure you

have room for it in your case

before you buy.

SPECS CAPACITY: 1TB / CONTROLLER: PHISON PS5016-E16 / MEMORY: TOSHIBA 3D TLC

/ INTERFACE: M.2 PCIE 4.0 X4 / SEQ. READ: 5,000MB/S / SEQ. WRITE: 4,400MB/S

4

33

GROUP TEST

Strong overall performance

Good value for money

Integrated heatsink

VERDICT

Black AN1500 2TB

WESTERN DIGITAL £452

Next-gen performance for PCIe 3.0 motherboards

Apart from looking
completely different to
the rest of the drives in
this group test, this Western
Digital drive is actually a bit of a
cheat entry because it isn’t
actually a PCIe 4.0 drive at all.
No, this WD Black add-in-card is
actually a PCIe 3.0 device that
manages to hit next-gen levels of
performance thanks to running a
pair of M.2 PCIe 3.0 drives as a
striped array. This means it
can hit incredible throughput
numbers on Intel’s current
platforms, or AMD’s first-gen
Ryzen CPUs.
Such performance will cost
you of course, and in this case

there’s a very real hit on your

wallet waiting if you want to

see what 6.5GB/s reads feel

like. You will need a free PCIe

3.0 x8 slot in order to hit these

performance figures too, which

could knock your graphics

card bandwidth down to x8

throughput as well (not as big

a deal as you might think),

depending on your platform.

Even so, this is a clever solution

that could give older systems a

new lease of life.

SPECS CAPACITY: 2TB / CONTROLLER: MARVELL 88NR2241 / MEMORY: WD 96L TLC
/ INTERFACE: PCIE 3.0 X8 AIC / SEQ. READ: 6,500MB/S / SEQ. WRITE: 4,100MB/S

3

Impressively strong performance

Decent software suite

Great looking

VERDICT

3

CAN HIT INCREDIBLE

THROUGHPUT

NUMBERS ON INTEL’S

CURRENT PLATFORM