Test Setup

At first, I tried running the R1608A in our 2024 SSD Test System (Core i9-13900KS and ASUS Z790 Dark Hero), but performance was much lower than expected.

Turns out that the card ran only at PCIe 5.0 x8, which was indicated correctly by the status LED showing "yellow" instead of "blue."

HighPoint confirmed that there's known compatibility problems with the card and Intel systems, but was unable to provide any technical reasons why this is happening (I asked).

I also tried running the card in other Intel motherboards, but couldn't get it to work at full speed.

• ASUS Z790 Dark Hero: Yellow / x4 5.0
• EVGA Z790 Dark: Yellow / x4 5.0
• MSI Z790 Carbon: Red / x16 1.0
• ASUS Z790 Taichi: Green / x8 5.0

Once I moved to an AMD X670E AM5 system I no longer had any issues and the card immediately ran at full speed (Blue LED status / x16 5.0)

That's why all testing in this review is performed using the ASUS ROG Crosshair X670E Hero. All comparison drives were retested on this board, using the same hardware configuration.

The list of real-life tests is a bit shorter than in my usual SSD reviews. That's for two reasons, first, some tests require the tested drive to be the boot drive, but due to a Windows limitation, booting off RAID-0 is not possible. Game load time testing isn't possible either, because running both a graphics card and x16 5.0 expansion card for storage isn't possible on consumer platforms, due to a lack of PCIe lanes.

Synthetic Testing

• Tests are run with a 20-second-long warm-up time (result recording starts at second 21).
• Between each test, the drive is left idle for 60 seconds, to allow it to flush and reorganize its internal data.
• All write requests contain random, incompressible data.
• Disk cache is flushed between all tests.
• During these tests, M.2 drives are tested with additional active fan-cooling, to ensure thermal throttling can't happen

Real-life Testing

• After initial configuration and installation, a disk image is created; it is used to test every drive.
• Automated updates are disabled for the OS and all programs. This ensures that—for every review—each drive uses the same settings, without interference from previous testing.
• Our disk image consumes around 700 GB—partitions are resized to fill all available space on the drive.
• Partitions are aligned properly.
• Disk cache is flushed between all tests.
• In order to minimize random variation, each real-life performance test is run several times, with reboots between tests to minimize the impact of disk cache.
• All application benchmarks run the actual application and do not replay any disk traces.