PNY's CS3150 XLR8 is the company's new flagship PCI-Express 5.0 solid-state-drive. It is based on the Phison E26 controller, paired with Micron 232-layer TLC NAND—just like all other Gen 5 SSDs currently on the market—these are all identical in terms of hardware components. While there's a bunch of drives out there rated for 10 GB/s maximum sequential speeds, the CS3150 XLR8 is a 12 GB/s drive, a DRAM cache chip is included, too. Unlike all other Gen 5 SSDs on the market, PNY's CS3150 is the only one that powers its cooling solution through an internal USB header, which also enables two-way communication between the drive cooling solution and host PC. In addition to that, a microcontroller in the cooler continuously adjusts the fan speeds based on SSD temperature, even without software on the PC, and offers several adjustable RGB illumination modes.

Synthetic performance results of the CS3150 are very impressive, especially when it comes to sequential transfers. We can confirm that PNY's "up to 12 GB/s" claim is accurate. Compared to our reference Gen 5 drive, the Corsair MP700 Pro, test results are identical (within margin of error). Marketing materials for Gen 5 all focus on blazing fast sequential transfers. The reason is that random IO performance is virtually identical to the results of PCIe Gen 4 drives, like the Phison E18-based Kingston KC3000.

Phison has a long history of optimizing their controllers for typical synthetic 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. In this testing the CS3150 XLR8 does very well, too, and comes out as the fastest SSD we've ever tested. The biggest gains are seen in tests that move lots of data around in a fairly linear fashion. Compared to Gen 4 SSDs, the performance uplift is around 5-10%, which is a repeat of what we've seen from the first Gen 4 drives, when compared to Gen 3 SSDs.

PNY's drive comes with an SLC cache size of 33% or 200 GB, which is enough to soak up all bursts of write activity, and it has the benefit that sustained rates are much better. The original Corsair MP700 (non-Pro) has a bigger SLC cache of 600 GB, but fills its whole 2 TB capacity at an average of 1.5 GB/s regardless, whereas the CS3150 almost doubles that to 2.8 GB/s—very impressive.

Our power consumption testing shows that the PNY drive really uses a lot of power. We've measured up to 10 W, which is basically 50% more than what we've seen on Phison's E18 Gen 4 controller. Hitting 10 W is quite rare though, you should rather plan with 5-6 W during typical loads, which is still a lot. Of course you're getting higher performance at the same time, but our numbers show that even when running at only 1 or 2 GB/s, the power consumption is still high. It seems that once the controller goes out of idle, it will always use 4 W at least, no matter how little actual work it does. This suggests that there's still lots of untapped potential in its power optimization. Compared to the older MP700 (which has older firmware), we're definitely seeing some optimizations here. Desktop idle power draw is a bit lower, and the drive can reach its lowest ASPM idle power state in the mobile scenario.

Gen 5 SSDs need serious cooling, so most vendors are opting for fan-cooled thermal solutions to avoid thermal throttling. Some of these solutions use SATA or Molex power connectors, which means that the fan is always running at a constant speed, with no temperature control at all. Such a design results in excess noise, because the fan speed must be tuned for worst case, and there is no way to relax the speed under light load. More recently, we've seen solutions that use a 4-pin PWM fan header that connects to the motherboard. This gives you control over the fan speed through your motherboard's fan control software or BIOS. The biggest drawback here is that you can't control the fans by SSD temperature, because the motherboard has no way to read these temperatures. PNY's innovation is that they are using an internal USB connection for communication. This is an elegant method, because virtually everybody has an unused internal USB port in the system. If you don't, there's splitters for internal USB or adapters that convert the connection to a standard external USB. As mentioned before, the RGB lighting effects on the CS3150 are user-controllable—over the same USB connection.

All these features are provided by PNY's Velocity X utility, which we know from our graphics card reviews where it gives you control over NVIDIA clocks speeds, fan settings and provides monitoring of the GPU's operating parameters. The support for XLR8 SSDs is nicely integrated, switching between devices is seamless. I also like that the software can be installed offline and portable, there is no requirement for an internet connection and it's pretty light on resources (unlike utilities from other vendors).

Using Velocity X, you can select from various lighting profiles, that can be further customized. You may also enable a mode that adjusts the lighting color depending on temperature, or turn off the lights completely. There's several options for fan control, too. If you want, you can set the fan speed to maximum, or apply a custom fan curve, through an easy-to-use intuitive curve editor that applies changes in real-time. I can confirm that fan stop works with the default curve, stopping the SSD fans completely, when the drive is lightly loaded. This requires pretty decent ventilation inside your case though, as the fan start level is set to a fairly conservative 44°C, which means that the fans will be always-on in warmer cases/countries, or it will bounce between stopped and running (every 30 seconds or so). When the fans start, they will start at around 10,000 RPM, a fairly noticeable difference to "no noise, fans stopped." A more gradual approach would have been better here, and I don't think we need to run the fans that quickly at those temps anyway.

Our thermal stress test confirms that there is no thermal throttling on the CS3150, maximum temperatures reached only around 60°C, which is very low, but the fan is louder than the Team Group T-Force Z540 for example, which runs much quieter, but will end up throttling a bit when very heavily loaded for 5+ minutes. I guess the optimum is somewhere in the middle. The good thing is that the fan curve is software controllable, I was able to find settings that are perfectly noise-free when system load is low (thanks to fan stop), and once you write more than a few GB to the drive, the fans will spin up very gradually, barely audible and become audible only when pushing data through at 10 GB/s+. I only wish the "100% fan speed safeguard" setting wasn't fixed at 70°C, which is pretty low and limits your options slightly.

According to PNY, the CS3150 XLR8 with sell for around $300+, you can also buy the heatsink separately for $25, look for "HS3000X." There's also a version with a 4-pin fan header, without RGB, selling for less than $25. Still, paying that much for a 2 TB SSD is A LOT of money. You can get great 2 TB Gen 4 SSDs for sub-$150 at the moment. Even though it is the fastest SSD we've ever tested I'm not sure if I'd be willing to spend that much for a little bit of extra performance. Compared to other Gen 5 SSDs, PNY's offering is similarly priced, but offers a much better cooling solution. Price-wise there's some strong competition from the Team Group Cardea Z540, which sells for $260 without heatsink, and supports 12 GB/s, too. The Gigabyte AORUS Gen 5 12 GB/s SSD does include a passive heatsink and sells for $265. Crucial's T700 is $310 with heatsink, $300 without. A good alternative are the various Gen 4 drives, which are extremely affordable right now. For example, the Samsung 990 Pro, the fastest Gen 4 drive we've ever tested sells for just $135—less than half the price of Gen 5 drives. WD Black SN770 is only $100, and the various Phison E18 drives even start at sub-$100. At launch there's only a 2 TB model available of the CS3150, but a 1 TB model will follow soon in a couple of weeks, and other capacities are planned, too.