Test System

Performance Summary

The difference between PCI-Express 4.0 and PCI-Express 3.0 is only a meager 1% when real-life applications are tested. When switching to the aging PCI-Express 2.0 interface, the differences become much bigger, though, reaching 4%.

One of the most recommended PCIe 3.0 SSDs is the ADATA SX8200 Pro using an SMI controller. It still manages to beat the Gigabyte Gen 4 SSD despite its Gen 3 vs. Gen 4 deficit.

An interesting data point for application performance is the gray bar "Intel". This is the performance result for the same test suite on our Core i7-7700K that powers the SSD review test system. While not exactly an apples to apples comparison, it provides interesting insight into how much performance can be gained by a system upgrade, while not touching the storage at all—much more what the upgrade from a PCIe 3.0 to 4.0 NVMe SSD can achieve.

Temperatures

While not really relevant to this review, several readers have asked for temperatures. I tested writing to the drive at full speed, which generates the most heat due to the flash-write process, and it writes more data in GB than random writes. There's zero airflow around the drive for this test as I've disconnected the chipset fan and the graphics card fan.


Without the heatsink, the drive will reach 100°C within 30 seconds, which is still good—that's 120 GB written in that short time span. Then throttling starts, dropping speeds to 300 - 500 MB/s, whatever is needed to stay at or below 100°C.


With the Gigabyte heatsink installed and the drive at full speed, temperatures reach 80°C without any throttling, which is very impressive.

Individual Benchmark Results