The Lexar NM800 Pro has been on the market since late last year, the "with Heatsink" variant is a bit newer. Under the hood, both drives are built using the Innogrit IG5236 controller that we've seen on other drives before, like the Acer Predator GM7000, Netac NV7000, or the Gammix XPG S70. Innogrit is a fairly young controller vendor that 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 IG5236 they are now able to target the high-end market—to compete with Phison's offerings. The IG5236 supports TLC NAND, DRAM cache, and eight flash channels. The other components on the Lexar NM800 Pro are two 3D TLC flash chips, using Micron 176-layer flash, and 2 GB of LPDDR4X DRAM for the mapping tables of the SSD.

Synthetic performance results of the Lexar NM800 are excellent, the drive is near the top of all charts, no doubt, the people at Innogrit know how to optimize their controller for typical reviewer workloads on an empty drive. That's why it's important to also include real-life testing. We're even running those tests with the drives filled to 80% capacity, not empty. This approach puts additional strain on the various algorithms and the SLC cache, just like in real-life. Here the NM800 does very well, too, being able to beat the Crucial P5 Plus by a good margin, close behind the Samsung 980 Pro and WD Black SN850. Drives like the Kingston KC3000 (Phison E18) and the Solidigm P44 Pro are little bit faster though. Compared to PCIe Gen 3 drives the performance uplift is around 10%, aging SATA drives are 30-40% slower.

Thanks to plenty of SLC cache, the NM800 Pro can easily absorb large incoming write bursts. With 592 GB, the SLC cache is big by today's standards, and that is definitely useful to handle busy writes. When writing to cache, the transfer rates reach over 3.5 GB/s, once it is full, you're still getting write speeds of over 1 GB/s, which is much faster than what the best SATA drives can offer—remember, you need to have a source that supports such speeds, too. Filling the whole 2 TB capacity completed at 1.5 GB/s on average, a very good result.

Our new power consumption tests show that the NM800 Pro has good energy efficiency in both read and writes, but idle power is a bit on the high side. While for desktops, one watt more or less in idle is really a non-issue, for laptops it matters a lot, because it affects battery life. With 1 W in our mobile power idle test, the numbers are 10x as high as the large selection of sub-0.1 W-idle drives in the test group. On the other hand, energy efficiency under load is excellent, which helps lower the drive's heat output. In our thermal stress test we saw no thermal throttling, which is an exceptional result. We're now using a watercooling AIO—like many of you—which means there's only minimal airflow inside the case.

The 2 TB version of the Lexar NM800 Pro with Heatsink can be found online for $130, which is a competitive price, especially considering the high performance and the fact that an excellent heatsink is included, too. Not too long ago, this amount would have only afforded you 1 TB of storage, but now the same amount of money will get you 2 TB. Prices in the SSD market have been coming down a lot in recent times, so there's a lot of competition, even at that price point. For example, the Samsung 980 Pro 2 TB is only $5 more at $135, and the WD Black SN770 is only $120. The WD Black SN850X is currently $150, a bit on the high side, just like the Solidigm P44 Pro. A strong alternative are the Phison E18 drives from various vendors, which are sitting at price points not far above $130, the Silicon Power XS70 2 TB is even only $115, just like the Team Group Cardea A440 Pro. If you absolutely want the lowest cost, then you can find cheap PCIe 3.0 NVMe drives like the Acer FA 100 at around $85 for 2 TB, or the HP EX950 and WD Blue SN570 for $100.