The Kingston HyperX Fury RGB SSD is one of only two illuminated SSDs on the market. Going beyond just illumination, it supports fully adjustable RGB colors, which means you can pick the exact color and brightness you want so that it perfectly matches the rest of your system. The only real competitor in the RGB department is the Team Group Delta RGB, which we reviewed a while back. While the Team Group SSD comes with only eight LEDs, the Kingston drive features 75 of them, which of course gives you much higher brightness and a more even illumination. On the other hand, the Team Group SSD lets you pick the color of each LED individually, while on the Kingston HyperX, all LEDs shine in the same color.

Getting RGB control to work was a breeze. It's really plug and play as long as you have a motherboard that supports RGB and comes with a 4-pin RGB header. Once the SSD is connected to the motherboard, it will show up in the motherboard's RGB control software, where you can define colors, patterns, etc. When the RGB cable is not connected to the HyperX SSD, it will light up in red (which can't be turned off unless you connect the SSD to the motherboard).

While its RGB effects are great, the drive does disappoint in storage performance. It is the slowest SSD we've tested in quite a while, slower than even the Mushkin Source, which is a DRAM-less design. What's surprising is that we've reviewed several drives with the Marvell 88SS1074 controller before (for example Crucial MX300), and those had much better performance. Overall, averaged over all our real-life tests, the HyperX Fury RGB is roughly 10% slower than other SATA drives in our test group, which, while not insignificant, is still much faster than any HDD.

It's good to see a pseudo-SLC buffer on the this TLC drive so that write bursts can be soaked up quickly because writing to SLC is much faster than writing to TLC. However, I'm puzzled by Kingston's choice to only run 4 GB in SLC-mode, which is pretty small. Competing drives do better here with larger buffers, so they can handle larger write bursts that are getting more common in today's applications.

The HyperX Fury RGB comes with a rock-solid metal case that looks and feels more high-quality than any other SSD I've tested in recent years. It does get fairly warm, though, because of the LEDs, which put out about 4 W of heat (it's far from overheating). Unfortunately, probably due to the LED design, the thickness of the drive is 9.5 mm, which means it won't fit many notebooks. But given the RGB lighting aspect of this SSD, it's highly unlikely that you'd ever want to install it in a notebook—where nobody can see the lights.

With a price of $125 for the reviewed 480 GB version, the HyperX Fury RGB is not cheap. You can find 480 GB SSDs for around $70 these days, and they'll have similar or better performance than the HyperX Fury RGB. These don't come with any sort of illumination, however, and I think that's what's affecting the price for the Fury RGB. The high number of LEDs certainly has an impact on cost, and being just one of two RGB SSDs on the market further drives up pricing. The bottom line is, if you are a casemodder and want to have an RGB-illuminated SSD, then performance is only secondary anyway, and you should definitely consider the HyperX Fury RGB SSD. Regular users should probably focus more on performance and pick one of the typical "price/performance" drives on the market.