Team Group's new T-Force G70 Pro is built using the older Innogrit IG5236 controller, but is paired with YMTC 128-layer TLC NAND, and it even has two dedicated DRAM cache chips. We've seen the IG536 on several designs in the past, it's a decent alternative to controllers from Phison. Team Group is offering the G70 Pro in two variants—one with a metal aluminium heatsink (the one in this review), and the other variant uses a Graphene heat spreader, which could be an option if you expect only light loading on the drive and want to save a few dollars.

Synthetic performance numbers of the G70 Pro are not that impressive, the drive sits roughly in the middle of our test group. However, synthetic test results are one thing, what's much more important is to also include real-life testing. We're even running our real-life tests with the drives filled to 85% capacity, not empty. This approach puts additional pressure on the various algorithms and the SLC cache, just like in actual use.

Our real-life testing confirms that the T-Force G70 Pro is not a top-end drive by today's standards, the MAP1602-based NM790 is almost 10% faster; the WD Black SN770 is 5% faster. That doesn't mean that the G70 Pro is hopeless—not at all. It actually offers very decent performance that clearly beats what older Gen 3 drives offer, and it can also outperform drives like the Kingston NV2, Samsung 970 EVO Plus, Crucial P5 Plus, Samsung 980 and WD Blue SN570. Interesting alternatives with higher performance at similar pricing are the Lexar NM790, Crucial T500, WD SN580 and Lexar NM710.

Team Group's drive comes with a large SLC cache that fills nearly all the drive's capacity first, which ensures it can soak up all bursts of write activity. Once the SLC cache is exhausted, performance is still very reasonable, and you're getting around 2 GB/s until the drive is nearly full. Filling the whole drive completed at 1266 MB/s—a very decent result that's better than many competing drives.

Our power consumption testing shows good numbers for idle in laptops, which is a very important metric for battery life, because the SSD will be idle virtually all the time in such devices. In a desktop, idle power consumption is a bit on the high side, with 2 W it's the highest Gen 4 result in our test group, but in absolute terms it's not a huge difference. Energy efficiency during read operations is alright, writes could be a bit more efficient though. The relatively low power efficiency affects heat output, too, because power gets converted into heat.

Thermal testing in this review shows that the T-Force G70 Pro will throttle fairly quickly when under heavy writes, and even heavy reads can lead to throttling—despite the included heatsink installed. For light usage scenarios this won't be any issue at all, but power users might want to consider getting a bigger heatsink or adjusting the airflow in their case accordingly. It seems that Team Group was extremely careful with their thermal limits—the drive will throttle as soon as it reaches 75°C, which is a very low cutoff point. Typically, we see this setting at 100°C in competing drives, or even a bit higher, which gives those drives much more thermal headroom to avoid throttling. The thermal throttling itself is extremely well-behaved though, performance changes gradually and never falls off a cliff.

The T-Force G70 Pro 2 TB with aluminium heatsink is currently listed online for $150, the model with the Graphene heat spreader sells for $145, so definitely get the one with the heatsink as long as you have the space for it. At that price point the drive is a bit too expensive to make a big splash. There are several alternatives that offer better performance, are cheaper, or both. For example, the Lexar NM790 is $135 right now, and offers almost 10% higher performance. The Lexar NM710 roughly matches the G70 Pro in performance but sells for just $115. WD's SN580 is the one of the fastest value drives on the market—almost 8% faster than the G70 Pro—for just $110. These drives do lack a physical DRAM cache though (and are still faster), so if you run a workload that really needs DRAM, then the G70 Pro could be an option. For everyone else Team Group needs to make a price cut, something closer to $120 would put the drive into the "solid option when you want something highly affordable that's fast enough for light workloads" territory.