Addlink is a relatively new player on the SSD market. I have seen the name in Amazon store listings before, but never looked into them further. Today, we're reviewing the Addlink X70 RGB, which, as the name suggests, features RGB lighting that's software-adjustable, which is an important capability for many modders and gamers, as they want to match the illumination across all components in their PC.

Unlike most SATA 2.5" RGB SSDs, the Addlink X70 does not require an additional power/control cable for the RGB functionality to work. Simply plop the drive into an empty M.2 slot in your system and it will light up in a great-looking animated rainbow pattern once the system is powered on. If your motherboard software supports RGB control, you should see the Addlink X70 listed in its software with options to adjust the color. I tested this on an ASUS motherboard, and the SSD was not detected. According to Addlink there are some ASUS software compatibility issue they're working on. When tested with an ASRock board, everything worked fine. I was able to pick a uniform color for the Addlink X70—changing the color of the individual RGB LEDs or creating custom patterns isn't possible at this time. I previously reviewed the ADATA XPG Spectrix S40G, which comes with its own software that lets you control each LED individually.

Averaged over all our benchmarks, we see the Addlink X70 roughly in the middle of our M.2 NVMe SSD test group; faster than the WD Blue and Crucial P1, roughly matching the Samsung 950 Pro and Intel 760p, a little bit behind the ADATA SX8200 Pro and Samsung 970 Pro. The differences are small, though. Especially in random-write heavy tests does the X70 do well (WinRAR); it also has very good sequential write performance. Our testing shows that the SLC cache is 24 GB big, which should suffice for all but the largest workloads. What's also worth mentioning is that even when the SLC cache is exhausted, write speeds remain very high—1 GB/s until the drive is full. This is better than nearly all other TLC SSDs we've reviewed so far.

Addlink includes a preinstalled metal heatsink with their X70, which works well to keep temperatures down with even the LEDs active. While there is still a little bit of thermal throttling in our torture test, the throttle rate is extremely reasonable. In our "Thermal Limits" test we achieved a constant write rate of 1.6 GB/s for extended periods of time without any throttling, which is better than even the MLC-based Samsung 970 Pro.

Currently, the Addlink X70 is listed online for $163, with Amazon being their main point of distribution. When looking at price/GB and performance per dollar I find that price a little bit high. The most affordable M.2 NVMe SSDs start at around $120, the ADATA SX8200 Pro is currently $140, and the WD Black is $150. Now, all these SSDs of course don't offer RGB capability. The added heatsink and RGB LEDs definitely increase production cost a bit. Competing M.2 RGB SSDs are priced similarly as the ADATA Spectrix S40G is $160 and the Patriot VPR100 RGB is $175, so Addlink's pricing is definitely fair when comparing it like that. Another plus is that the X70 RGB SSD comes with a five-year warranty—many other vendors don't do that.