ADATA's XPG Gammix S70 Blade is very similar to the non-"Blade" versions in terms of technology. The most important component is the Innogrit IG5236 controller. 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 XPG Gammix S70 Blade are four 3D TLC flash chips, most probably made by Intel/Micron, and 2 GB of fast Samsung DDR4-2666 DRAM for the mapping tables of the SSD. DRAM is the only noteworthy difference: The "Blade" version uses 2 GB Samsung DDR4-2666, while the non-"Blade" version uses 2 GB Hynix DDR4-3200—I doubt that makes much of a difference.

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. ADATA made sure the heatsink of the S70 Blade fits into the space constraints of the PS5 chassis. The plain S70 will not fit due to its heatsink being too thick.

When looking at the synthetic results of our test suite, one has to be impressed. The Gammix S70 Blade 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 Gammix S70 Blade is actually the fastest drive we ever tested. Sequential throughput is also very impressive, as it is the fastest drive in sequential read, second-fastest in sequential mixed, and third-fastest in sequential write.

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 XPG Gammix S70 Blade still achieves very good performance. It's only 3% behind the Samsung 980 Pro and 4% behind the WD Black—a small gap. The Corsair MP600 Pro using the Phison E18 is barely faster, by 1%.

PCI-Express 4.0 promises double the transfer rate, but this doesn't translate 1:1 into 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 Gammix S70 Blade. For example, the Samsung 980 non-Pro and ADATA SX8200 Pro are only 1% slower than the S70 Blade, and the Hynix P31 even matches it. 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 Samsung 870 QVO and Crucial BX500.

When comparing the Gammix S70 and Gammix S70 Blade, the performance difference is 2% mostly due to firmware differences. Since the S70's release, Innogrit has found some performance optimizations that help specifically when the drive is at more than 50% filled—exactly the scenario we're testing with our real-life performance test suite.

Owing to a large pseudo-SLC cache, sustained write performance of the Gammix S70 Blade is very good; filling the whole drive completes at 1.6 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. The only drives that significantly beat that are the 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.

ADATA is including a very basic heatsink with the S70 Blade. In our testing, we saw no noteworthy cooling improvement after installing it. That's not really surprisingly because it really is just a thin rectangular sheet of metal without much mass or any fins. I have to say I liked the heatsink on the original S70 much better, but you'd lose PS5 compatibility, which seems to be the most important SSD capability these days.

At $300 for the tested 2 TB version, the XPG Gammix S70 is very affordable for a PCIe 4.0 SSD, especially considering its performance. Other high-end PCIe 4.0 drives are much more expensive; Samsung 980 Pro: $342, WD Black SN850: $360, Corsair MP600 Pro: $365, Crucial P5 Plus: $370. Unless you're running very specific applications, you won't notice much of a performance difference between these drives on average. As such, you might as well save some money and go for the Gammix S70 Blade. On the other hand, 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.

This review was updated on Sep 20 with performance results for a new firmware version provided by ADATA. Firmware 3.2.F.2A comes with additional performance improvements. In our charts these results are marked as "New Firmware".