Product Listing

Aorus NVMe Gen4 SSD 2TB review: Early mover advantage?

By Wong Chung Wee - 13 Jan 2020
Launch SRP: S$699

Test Setup & PCMark 8

Test Setup

The Gigabyte Aorus NVMe Gen4 SSD will be tested on our updated storage testbed using the Windows 10 operating system, which has the following specifications:

Our benchmarks list is as follows:

  • AS SSD benchmark 2.0.6821.41776
  • CrystalDiskMark 6.0.2
  • PCMark 8 (Storage suite)
  • Atto Disk Benchmark 4.01.0f1

This is the list of drives and their capacities tested:

  • Gigabyte Aorus NVMe Gen4 SSD (2TB)
  • Samsung SSD 970 Evo Plus (1TB)
  • Samsung SSD 970 Pro (512GB)
  • WD Black SN750 NVMe SSD (500GB)

 

PCMark 8 (Storage)

PCMark 10 is the latest from benchmarking specialists Futuremark; however, at the time of testing, its storage suite test isn’t available yet. So we fell back to PCMark 8’s storage suite test, which puts drives through a collection of 10 different real life workloads involving applications such as Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Word, Excel and even games like Battlefield 3 and World of Warcraft.

The Gigabyte Aorus NVMe Gen4 drive ranks second to the Samsung SSD 970 Pro drive; the Gigabyte Aorus drive has a score of 5082, while the Samsung SSD 970 Pro’s score is 5089. In terms of storage bandwidth, the Gigabyte drive measures 9.4% lower than the leading Samsung SSD 970 Pro.

All the drives were quite evenly matched for their workload scores, especially when it came to Office productivity scores.

We can safely say the differentiating factor is storage bandwidth, where the Samsung SSD 970 Pro drive outranks the Gigabyte Aorus drive by 9.4%. The WD Black SN750 NVMe SSD has the lowest score as well as the measured bandwidth among all the drives.

The results are not conclusive and we can allude to the fact PCMark 8 is unable to benchmark the new PCIe 4.0 standard. We have to wait for the latest PCMark 10 storage benchmark to be ready for future testing on the new standard.

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8.5
  • Performance 8.5
  • Features 8
  • Value 8.5
The Good
Fast sequential read and write speeds
PCIe 4.0 support
Heatsink helps keep chips cool
Good price point
5-year warranty
High endurance rating
The Bad
Speed only evident with large data blocks and files
Heatsink must be removed if space is tight
Performance advantage limited to AMD X570 platforms for now
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