Neo Forza is a relatively young player on the SSD market, and while this is only my second review of their products, I really can't complain much. The eSports NFP075 SSD performs very well and comes at competitive pricing. Under the hood, the drive uses the super-popular Phison E12S controller on the Phison reference PCB, so no experiments there. The 3D TLC flash chips are 96-layer 3D TLC by Toshiba—another big name. As expected for a high-end drive, a DRAM chip is included for the mapping tables of the SSD, too.

In our real-life performance tests, we saw good numbers from the NFP075, comparable with other high-end PCIe Gen 3 SSDs. For example, the NFP075 pretty much matches the Kingston KC2000, ADATA SX8200 Pro, Seagate FireCuda 510, and Crucial P5. It is a few percent faster than the Samsung 970 EVO, Kingston A2000, and WD Blue SN500 NVMe. QLC-based M.2 SSDs are up to 10% slower, and SATA drives are at least 20% slower. This year, we've seen a push for SSDs with PCI-Express 4.0 support—these have a 5–8% performance lead over the NFP075, which is not a lot considering how expensive these new SSDs are, but still an option for those who want the absolute highest performance.

A major con of the Neo Forza eSports is the SLC cache of just 48 GB, which can be considered small by today's standards. Large bursts in write activity can fill this cache in just a few seconds. Once the SLC cache is full, the drive has to juggle flushing the cache and handling incoming writes, which results in 1 GB/s sustained write speed—still pretty good. You also have to put 48 GB in perspective. Nearly all everyday write bursts are smaller, so unless you're a power user, you might never exhaust that SLC cache. Of course, momentarily stopping the write activity has the SLC cache free up capacity immediately, so full write rates are available as soon as you give the drive a moment to settle down.

Thermals are fine, there's a little bit of throttling in our worst-case heavy-write test, and reads never throttled. Just like on all other M.2 NVMe SSDs, the hottest part of the SSD is the controller. It's nice to see that the thermal throttling is well behaved. It will gradually reduce write rates until the target temperature can be sustained. On other drives, write rates just fall of a cliff, and throttling is so strong that performance is noticeably impacted. Given the "eSports" enthusiast positioning of the NFP075, I feel like I could wish for a simple heatspreader, even if it's just a metal foil like on the Team Group Cardea IOPS.

With a price of around $220, Neo Forza has picked a competitive price point for their 1 TB SSD. It's priced lower than the HP EX950 ($250) and Crucial P2 ($235). The Crucial P5 is much more expensive at $290, just like the Sabrent Rocket ($280). Strong competition comes from the ADATA SX8200 Pro, which performs a bit better and costs $220, too. The Seagate FireCuda 510, WD SN750, Samsung 970 EVO, and EVO Plus are just way too expensive at around $300 and up. If you are willing to live with slightly lower performance, other options to consider are the ADATA Swordfish, WD Blue NVMe, and other QLC-based drives, which go down to only $200 (for 2 TB). On the other hand, if you want the latest and greatest, be prepared to spend at least $350 for a decent PCIe 4.0 SSD—not sure if the performance gained is worth the huge increase in cost, though. Neo Forza also hinted at an upcoming promo on Newegg in a few weeks which will bring down the price of the NFP075 even further.