Introduction

With revenue in the multi-billion dollars range, Kingston is the largest DRAM and flash memory products vendor in the world. While their strongest suit is memory modules and USB/flash card storage, they are also a major player in the SSD market, having released famous products such as the KC2500, KC3000, NV1 and NV2.



Today we'll be reviewing the new Kingston Fury Renegade with preinstalled heatsink. The Kingston Fury Renegade without heatsink has been out roughly one year, and was launched to provide a gaming-oriented counterpart to the KC3000. The only noteworthy difference between the two drives is that the KC3000 comes with less overprovisioning, otherwise the drives are identical, physically, too. Back when it was released, Kingston talked about "PS5 Ready" for the Fury Renegade, but Sony's requirements for M.2 SSDs in the PlayStation 5 clearly mandate that a heatsink must be installed. That's how the Kingston Fury Renegade Heatsink was born. Thanks to the solid metal heatsink temperatures should be low enough to avoid thermal throttling—which is something we will test in this review. As expected, the SSD controller used is the Phison E18, which is one of the fastest controllers available at this time. 2 GB of DRAM cache are included, too, for the mapping tables of the SSD.

The Kingston Fury Renegade comes in capacities of 500 GB ($100), 1 TB ($128), 2 TB ($220) and 4 TB ($570). Endurance for these models is set to 500 TBW, 1000 TBW, 2000 TBW and 4000 TBW, respectively. Kingston includes a five-year warranty with the Fury Renegade SSD.

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 Fury Renegade connects to the host system using PCI-Express 4.0 x4, doubling the theoretical bandwidth.


On the PCB you'll find the controller and eight flash chips, two DRAM cache chips are installed, too.


Kingston's heatsink is pretty awesome. It looks great thanks to a matte surface coating. Grooves have been cut out to improve heat transfer to the surrounding air. Unlike many other vendors, Kingston uses screws to attach the heatsink, which makes sure it stays firmly in place.


The heatsink uses the typical approach with a clamshell construction holding the PCB in-between two metal pieces that have thermal pads between them.

Chip Component Analysis

The Phison PS5018-E18 is Phison's PCI-Express 4.0 controller with eight channels. It is produced on TSMC's 12 nanometer node and uses five Arm Cortex R5 CPU cores. The E18 supports NVMe 1.4, TLC, DDR4 memory, and up to 32 dies.


The eight flash chips are Micron 176-layer 3D TLC NAND B47R. Kingston buys the wafers in bulk, tests and processes the chips, and packages them with their own branding.


Two Kingston DDR4-2666 chips provide a total of 2 GB of fast DRAM storage for the controller to store the mapping tables.

Test Setup