ADATA's Gammix S10 SSD comes with a sexy heatsink that will look great in any system. Underneath, the drive uses a Silicon Motion SM2260 controller and Micron 3D TLC flash; the same configuration as the Intel 600p. In terms of positioning, the S10 is on the same level as the ADATA SX7000 (which is the same drive, just without the heatsink), which puts it below the ADATA SX8000 with MLC flash.

In our real-life performance testing, we see excellent results from the Gammix S10, making it the fastest SSD we have tested so far. Most competing M.2 NVMe drives are about in the same ballpark, though, and SATA drives are not far behind. When looking at our synthetic benchmarks, the drive can't impress at all, which is due to the choice to go with TLC flash memory. TLC chips reduce cost by storing data more efficiently, but do so at the cost of write performance. ADATA is using DRAM and pseudo-SLC caching on the drive to mitigate this effect. According to our testing, the drive can soak up write bursts up to 16 GB at full speed, which explains the good results in our real-life testing. No consumer application will write that much data in such a short time, so real-life performance isn't affected. Synthetics, however, will hammer the drive with a much higher workload and can thus paint the wrong picture. Still, I wouldn't recommend the S10 for a high-end workstation setup since MLC based drives are still a better choice here; for everyday consumer workloads, the S10 is an excellent choice, though.

The integrated heatsink does a good job of keeping the drive cooler than other heatsinks on competing drives. In our thermal test, which runs a worst-case scenario, we saw only minor throttling after three minutes of full-on writes; the drive merely reached 74°C. Looking at how the heatsink is attached, though, I wonder if this is the best way of doing it since the thermal pads should cover the full width of the chips and not just the sides.

With a price of $210, the ADATA Gammix S10 is one of the more affordable NVMe-based drives. Most of the cheaper models are using the much slower M.2 SATA interface, recognizable by the two notches on the connector. "Big-name" competing drives are the Intel 600p and Samsung 960 EVO, which all use TLC flash as well. If you spend a few more bucks, you can get an MLC drive, which comes with better write-performance, performance you probably don't need anyway (unless you write more than 20 GB in a short time). For me, the ADATA Gammix S10 is an excellent value-oriented entry-level NVMe drive that doesn't break the bank yet still delivers good performance.