Neo Forza's NFP455 is the first PCI-Express 4.0 SSD released by the company. It's built upon the high-end Innogrit IG5236 controller we've seen in a couple of other reviews before; for example, the Acer Predator GM7000, ADATA Gammix S70, and S70 Blade use the same controller. What's unique about the Neo Forza NFP455 is that its 128-layer 3D TLC flash is made by YMTC. YMTC is a fast-growing NAND manufacturer from China who's been making impressive progress in recent times. As expected for a high-end drive, a DRAM cache is included for the mapping tables of the SSD. What's noteworthy is that fast DDR4-3200 is used, which is the fastest DRAM speed rating I've seen on any SSD.

The PCI-Express 4.0 interface has become mainstream due to the success of AMD's Ryzen processors. Intel finally added support for PCIe 4.0 with their Rocket Lake CPUs, which should help the push for PCIe 4.0 SSDs. You can also pair these drives with "Ice Lake" or "Tiger Lake" notebooks to have them work at maximum speed, and of course the Sony PlayStation 5. Neo Forza made sure the heatsink of the NFP455 fits into the space constraints of the PS5 chassis, which makes this an excellent candidate to upgrade the storage on your PS5.

Synthetic performance numbers are very impressive. The NFP455 has higher random IOPS than the Samsung 980 Pro and WD Black SN850. Sequential throughput is also very impressive as it is one of the leading drives in these tests, too. The Innogrit controller has clearly been optimized for synthetic tests on an empty drive, which is how most reviewers test.

That's why our extensive real-life test suite is so important. It makes things even more challenging for the controller because everything is tested with the SSD at 80% full, which puts additional stress on the SLC caching mechanism. While other IG5236-based drives did well in this testing, too, the Neo Forza NFP455 stands out even further. It's 2% faster than the Gammix S70 Blade; I am not sure whether that is due to YMTC flash, DDR4-3200 DRAM, firmware changes or a combination of those. These results make it one of the fastest PCIe Gen 4 SSDs we've ever tested, right behind the WD Black SN850, Kingston KC3000, and Samsung 980 Pro. Typical high-end PCIe 3.0 drives are around 3–5% slower, SATA SSDs are 25% behind, and SATA QLC even 40–50%.

With a pseudo-SLC cache size of 313 GB, the NFP455 pretty much maximizes the SLC cache for a 1 TB TLC SSD. In TLC mode, three bits are written into one cell, and in SLC mode that same cell is filled with only one bit—much faster, but triple the storage requirements. 313 GB x 3 = 939 GB, which is close enough to 1 TB. With 1.2 GB/s on average to fill the whole 1 TB capacity, the NFP455 does well in this test, but some more premium Gen 4 drives are considerably faster in this test. Of course, momentarily stopping write activity will have 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.

Neo Forza includes a preinstalled metal heatspreader foil with the NFP455. Certainly better than nothing, it's not a real heatsink as it only serves to spread the heat of the controller over a larger area, but it works reasonably well in delaying the thermal-throttling point. Since modern consumer workloads are very bursty, the ability to soak up some heat is usually good enough because the activity will stop after few seconds anyway, after which the drive can cool down. In our thermal stress test, which hammers the drives with multiple GB/s of incoming writes, the NFP455 throttled after around 90 seconds, which is sooner than I expected considering the preinstalled heatsink. However, unlike many other drives, the thermal throttling is well-behaved. The performance drop is relatively small, from 5 GB/s to 3.5 GB/s, which is still very fast. Ideally, I would have liked a meatier heatsink on the NFP455, but given the price point, the current solution is totally adequate.

Neo Forza let us know that the NFP455 will start shipping in April, priced at $130. For a 1 TB PCIe 4.0 M.2 NVMe SSD that's a great price point. At that price, the NFP455 clearly offers better value than the WD Black SN850 ($155), Samsung 980 Pro ($160), and Kingston KC3000 ($170). There's strong competition from the MSI Spatium M480 ($138), Crucial P5 Plus ($135), ADATA Gammix S70 Blade ($123), and the MSI Spatium M470 ($110). Just a few days ago, WD released their WD Black SN770 for $130, which could be interesting, too, review coming soon. Last but not least, the $110 ADATA XPG Atom 50 is the current PCIe 4.0 value king, but only available in the US. Of course, PCI-Express 4.0 comes at a price premium. If you can live with slightly lower performance, drives like the HP EX950, ADATA SX8200 Pro, WD Blue SN570, and Hynix Gold P31 can be interesting alternatives. Please also note that SSD prices are always in flux and can change quickly. Just this week, we saw an announcement by Western Digital that one of their factories lost a lot of production, which could mean higher SSD prices due to shortages. Always check your favorite vendors for the latest prices and base your buying decisions on that.