Packaging

The Drive

The drive uses the M.2 2280 form factor, making it 22 mm wide and 80 mm long.


While most other M.2 NVMe SSDs transfer data over the PCI-Express 3.0 x4 interface, the Acer Predator GM7000 connects to the host system using PCI-Express 4.0 x4, doubling the theoretical bandwidth.


On the PCB you'll find the controller and four flash chips, two DRAM cache chips are also present.


The GM7000 comes with an interesting heatsink. It's some kind of foamy substance, from time to time I see claims of "graphene" on Acer's website and then they disappear again. Graphene is a single-atom thick sheet of carbon organized in a honeycomb pattern that conducts heats very well ALONG ITS PLANE. So not "upwards," away from the controller, just sideways, like a heatspreader. Multi-layer graphene sheets exist, but their thermal properties along the Z axis aren't significantly better than copper, for example.

I tested the foam, and it is not electrically conductive, so it can't be graphene, which is carbon, and carbon is conductive. On top of the foam, Acer installed a piece of plastic with the "Predator" logo on it. I double checked and it is plastic, not metal.

This is the exact same cooling solution as on the 2 TB version that I reviewed a while ago.

Chip Component Analysis

The Innogrit IG5236 is the company's first controller to support PCI-Express 4.0. It uses eight channels to maximize transfer rates and is fabricated on a 12 nm process at TSMC Taiwan.


The four flash chips are Micron 176-layer 3D TLC NAND. They have been rebranded by BIWIN. Each chip has a capacity of 1 TB.


Two Hynix DDR4-3200 chips provide 4 GB of fast DRAM storage for the controller to store the mapping tables.