A quick trip to see Patriot at CES 2019 netted us a chance to look over a massive number of products from SSDs and DDR4 memory, to flash drives and Micro SD cards. In general, when it comes to anything memory or storage related they had everything but the kitchen sink on hand. That said, let's start with system memory. To begin with, they had their Signature Line on hand which uses a simple black aluminum heatshield and comes in capacities up to 16 GB per module with speeds up to 2666 MHz. For a single 16 GB stick at 2666 MHz the listed the timings at 19-19-19-43. Next was the new Viper Steel DDR4 SODIMMs with capacity that ranged from 8 GB to 32 GB and feature XMP 2.0 support for automatic overclocking. As for speeds they top out at 3000 MHz for these kits. Next up was the Viper RGB memory which comes in speeds of up to 4133 MHz and with timings listed at 19-21-21-41. They are also compatible with motherboard RGB sync applications and have been tested on the latest Intel and AMD platforms. Last but not least were the Viper Steel kits which top out at 4400 MHz with 19-19-19-39 timings.

Phison isn't just a budget controller brand, as you well know, so in addition to their interesting, 2-channel NVMe NAND controller in the Phison E8, which should see products hitting retail in the following months, the company is also catering to the high performance crowds with the impressive E12 and S12 controllers. The E12 is definitely the star of Phison's new controller line-up - just look at those ratings of 3200 MB/s sequential read, 3000 MB/s sequential write, and 600K random read and random write IOPS. Naturally, those rated speeds should be taken with a measure of salt, as NAND type, its implementation and firmware tweaks all matter tremendously in extracting the best possible performance from high speed storage.

Contrary to the E8 budget Phison controller, the E12 will feature a full NVMe PCIe x4 interface, which allows for those speed ratings. The S12, on the other hand, is a more common SATA III controller, which means that its speeds of 550 MB/s sequential read and 530 MB/s sequential write are already hitting the interface's limits. Other than the interface and the rated speeds and IOPS, though, the specs are the same on these controllers: support for 3D NAND on MLC/TLC/QLC arrangements, 8-channel, LDPC, SmartECC, and End-to-End DPP support.