Samsung's 970 EVO is a more budget-oriented sibling to the 970 Pro we reviewed last week, which left us thoroughly impressed. Unlike the 970 Pro, the 970 EVO uses more economical TLC, which also means that write speeds will be lower. To mask this effect (that any TLC drive has), Samsung has chosen to enable pseudo-SLC caching on the 970 EVO. While sequential read speeds and random-access read IOPS both match those of the 970 Pro, probably because both use the same controller, write speeds are lower with 1.7 GB/s instead of 2.4 GB/s. Random IOPS are cut in half, but still deliver a decent 180,000 IOPS.

When run through our real-life test suite, the Samsung 970 EVO is roughly on the same level as Intel's 760p SSD, which seem to be the biggest competitor. The 970 Pro is 3% faster, but the ADATA SX8200 has a 5% advantage. The majority of today's applications see only limited gains from these super-fast NVMe drives because most of the bottleneck has shifted away from storage, to things like CPU and software algorithms, since the introduction of even the first SSDs. One curious result in our test suite is the Microsoft Office installation, which performs some operations NVMe drives don't like; especially Samsung SSDs do very badly here. I have reproduced this behavior many times on many drives, and Office is one of the most installed applications on the planet, so it's a valid result.

Thermal throttling during heavy loads is an issue on most NVMe SSDs, especially when used without a heatsink. The Samsung 970 EVO is the big exception here. We hammered the drive with full-speed writes for 10 minutes and only in the last two minutes did some minimal throttling became apparent, which had a negligible effect on performance numbers. It seems Samsung's controller is more power efficient than those of other drives, which run into their thermal limits much quicker. Still, for everyday usage, any NVMe drive without a heatsink should be fine; it's highly unlikely that you will write hundreds of GBs of data at full speed in such a short time.

Write intensive usage did show very good numbers considering the 970 EVO is based on TLC. We measured 663 MB/s on average when writing at full speed for 15 minutes, which is better than any other TLC-based drive we reviewed before. Of course, MLC-based drives, like the 970 Pro, will do much better here because they can write to MLC flash directly, which is much faster than using TLC+pSLC, with the pSLC buffer getting exhausted quickly in this test.

With a price of $150 for the reviewed 500 GB version, Samsung has positioned their SSD competitively to other affordable high-performance NVMe drives. For example, the Intel 760p, which is very similar in performance, costs $150, too. Both come with a five-year warranty and are made by two of the most reputable brands in the industry. If you are looking for the best bang for the buck, though, then our recommendation has to go to the ADATA SX8200. It's currently $110 for the 480 GB version, which is over 30% more cost effective per GB of storage. Also, the SX8200 is a bit faster than both the 970 EVO and 760p, but comes with "only" three years in warranty.