Acer is a fairly new player on the SSD market. While they are one of the most well-known tech companies on the planet, their experience with SSDs is limited, which is why they teamed up with Taiwan-based storage specialist BIWIN Tech, who's been providing SSD engineering for companies like HP, among others. Under the hood, we found an Innogrit IG5236 controller on the Predator GM7000. It's the company's latest 8-channel high-end design with support for the modern PCI-Express 4.0 interface. Innogrit was founded a few years ago by ex-Marvell staff who decided to engineer their own SSD controller, so these people know what they're doing. Previously, the chips from Innogrit were limited to the low and mid-range segment, but with the new IG5236 controller, they are targeting the high-end enthusiast market. The IG5236 supports TLC NAND, DRAM cache, and eight flash channels. The other components on the Acer Predator GM7000 are four 96-layer 3D TLC flash chips made by Micron and 2 GB of fast Hynix DDR4-2666 DRAM for the mapping tables of the SSD. It's worth mentioning that the ADATA XPG Gammix S70 Blade we reviewed a few weeks ago uses the same controller, but more modern 176-layer NAND.

The PCI-Express 4.0 interface has become mainstream due to the success of AMD's Ryzen processors. Intel finally added support for PCIe 4.0 with their Rocket Lake CPUs, which should help the push for PCIe 4.0 SSDs. You can also pair these drives with Ice Lake or Tiger Lake notebooks to have them work at maximum speed, and of course the Sony PlayStation 5. Acer made sure the heatsink of the GM7000 fits into the space constraints of the PS5 chassis.

When looking at the synthetic results of our test suite, one has to be impressed. The GM700 has higher random IOPS than the Samsung 980 Pro and WD Black SN850, only the MP600 Pro is a tiny bit faster. Random writes and random mixed results are also fantastic. In our 4K Random Mixed performance test, the GM7000 is actually the fastest drive in our test group. Sequential throughput is also very impressive as it is the fastest drive in sequential read, second-fastest in sequential write, and third-fastest in sequential mixed.

If our review stopped here, I'd say this drive is at least as fast as the Samsung 980 Pro, WD Black SN850, and Corsair MP600—possibly even faster. But we also have our extensive suite of real-life tests, which run actual applications with the drive at 80% filled capacity, a highly realistic scenario. Here, things are a bit different. It seems the Innogrit controller has been heavily optimized for synthetic benchmarks on a nearly empty drive—just the way most SSD reviewers conduct their testing. When averaged over all our tests, the Acer Predator GM7000 still achieves fantastic performance. It's only 1% behind the Samsung 980 Pro and 2% behind the WD Black—a tiny gap. The Corsair MP600 Pro using the Phison E18 matches the GM7000.

PCI-Express 4.0 promises double the transfer rate, but this doesn't translate into 1:1 real-life performance improvements. The underlying reason is that most applications don't just read or write a huge sequential stream of data. Actually, most applications perform random accesses at low queue depths, where scaling isn't that big. That's why we're seeing PCIe 3.0 drives so close behind the Acer Predator. For example, the Samsung 980 non-Pro and ADATA SX8200 Pro are only 2–3% slower than the GM7000, and the Hynix P31 almost matches it with a 1% difference. Value-oriented Gen 3 TLC SSDs are roughly 10% slower, just like the various QLC options on the market. Compared to SATA SSDs, the performance uplift is over 20%, almost twice as fast as the Samsung 870 QVO and Crucial BX500.

Owing to a large pseudo-SLC cache, sustained write performance of the Acer Predator GM7000 Blade is very good; filling the whole drive completes at 1.3 GB/s on average. When the cache is empty, this process runs at over 5 GB/s until the SLC cache has been exhausted. When the SLC cache is full, writes still complete at around 1 GB/s, which is sufficient for nearly all scenarios. Only five drives in our test group are faster at this task. The most noteworthy ones are the WD Black SN850 (1.6 GB/s), Samsung 980 Pro (1.9 GB/s), and MLC-based Samsung 970 Pro (2.2 GB/s). Of course, momentarily stopping the write activity has the SLC cache free up capacity immediately, so full write rates are available as soon as you give the drive a moment to settle down.

Acer includes an interesting heatsink with the GM7000. While you'd expect a heatsink made out of a chunk of metal, which can soak up heat and dissipate it thanks to its fins, Acer went with some kind of plastic foam. This results in less than stellar performance—in our worst case thermal loading test, the drive even throttles when a 120 mm fan is blowing right onto it—very uncommon for any M.2 SSD. While I didn't expect such a result, the heatsink does reduce the impact of throttling a bit compared to the bare uncooled drive. Innogrit's controller does have quite high heat output, as we've seen from similar results on other drives running the IG5236, too. What makes things worse is that the thermal limit at which throttling starts is set relatively low, at only 85°C. Other vendors go beyond 100°C here. I suspect the reason for the basic heatsink is that Acer wanted to make sure the GM7000 can fit into the limited space available on Sony's PlayStation 5.

At $350 for the tested 2 TB version, the Acer Predator GM7000 is competitively priced for a PCIe 4.0 SSD. Most other high-end PCIe 4.0 drives are slightly more expensive; WD Black SN850: $360, Corsair MP600 Pro: $365, Crucial P5 Plus: $370. The Samsung 980 Pro is $342, though. Unless you're running very specific applications, you won't notice much of a performance difference between these drives on average. The only really interesting alternative is the ADATA Gammix S70 Blade, which is based on the same controller, but has more modern 176-layer TLC flash, which gives it an advantage in sustained write speeds. Last but not least, high-end PCIe 3.0 drives are achieving almost the same real-life performance for even less money. Options to consider here are the ADATA SX8200 Pro: $220, Kingston KC2500: $277, HP EX950: $283, Crucial P5: $290, and Samsung 970 EVO Plus: $290.