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When we recently reviewed Samsung's first Gen 5 SSD, we mentioned that it has taken quite some time for some of the very well-known drive manufacturers to get involved in the Gen 5 market sector, and it seems as if the latest batch of controllers has given them a nudge in the right direction.
Kingston's first consumer PCIe 5.0 x4 has arrived in the shape of the Fury Renegade G5, a drive aimed at the performance end of the market with quoted sequential performance of up to 14,800MB/s for reads (4TB model) and up to 14,000MB/s for writes.
The Fury Renegade G5 is built around a SiliconMotion SM2508 controller, one of the new breed of eight-channel controllers that manage the neat trick of blending performance with cooler running and better power efficiency, which is why the initial Fury Renegade G5 doesn't come with a big old heatsink pre-installed.
At launch, the drive comes in three capacities: 1TB, 2TB (the drive we are reviewing) and a 4TB flagship model. Kingston rates the sequential performance of the 2TB drive as up to 14,700MB/s for reads and up to 14,000MB/s for writes. The 1TB model has read/write figures of up to 14,200MB/s and up to 11,000MB/s respectively. The 4TB flagship model has the same up to 14,000MB/s sequential write rating as the 2TB drive but has slightly better read performance of up to 14,800MB/s.
All three drives have the same 4K random read rating of up to 2,200,000 IOPS, and while the 2TB and 4TB have the same speed rating for random writes, the 1TB drive has to make do with up to 2,150,000 IOPS random write performance.
Kingston rates the sequential performance of the 2TB drive as up to 14,700MB/s for reads and up to 14,000MB/s for writes. When we tested the drive with the ATTO benchmark, the best we saw from the drive was 13,900MB/s for reads and 12,410MB/s for writes, good enough to place the drive in third spot on the graph.
Switching over to the CrystalDiskMark 8 default benchmark, we could confirm the official maximum figures with test results of 14,765MB/s for reads and 14,130MB/s for writes – the fastest sequential speeds we've seen for a consumer Gen 5 drive to date using this benchmark.
When it came to 4K random performance, we couldn't get anywhere close to the official figures using our 4-threaded testing. Kingston rates the 4K random performance of the 2TB Fury Renegade G5 as up to 2,200K IOPS for both reads and writes. The best we saw from testing was 519,939 IOPS and 476,761 IOPS (both QD16) for reads and writes, respectively. The best performance figures we saw from the drive came from using the default Peak Performance profile in CrystalDiskMark 8 with reads (default) at 1,872,870 IOPS and writes at 1,537,681 IOPS.
The Fury Renegade G5 doesn't use a heatsink, but it stayed cool under the heatsink of the Gigabyte AORUS X670E Xtreme motherboard we used for testing. The hottest the drive got while benchmarking was 36° C during a CrystalDiskMark 8 sequential Write QD1-32 T1 test run. For the bulk of our testing, the drive averaged 31° C, with the 4K focused tests averaging 27° C, both of these averages a long way from the 70° C maximum operating temperature of the drive.
We found the 2TB Kingston Fury Renegade G5 on ebuyer for £289.98 (inc VAT) HERE.
Pros
- Overall performance.
- Thermal design.
- 5-year warranty.
Cons
- Tested 4K performance couldn’t match the official maximum figures.
KitGuru says: It might have been a long time coming, but the Fury Renegade G5, Kingston's first PCIe 5.0 drive, combines very fast performance with impressive thermals. It's a very good drive, though it doesn't come cheap!
