![]() All this is housed in a Praxis Wetbench open-frame case. The boot drive is an ADATA Legend 850 PCIe 4.0 SSD. It sports an AMD R圜PU using an AMD stock cooler and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 2070 Super card with 8GB of GDDR6 SDRAM and it is powered by a Thermaltake Toughpower GF1 Snow 750W PSU. It consists of an ASRock X670E Taichi motherboard with an AMD X670 chipset, 32GB of DDR5 memory (two Crucial 16GB DIMMs), one PCIe 5.0 x4 M.2 slot (with lanes that have direct access to the CPU), and three PCIe 4.0 slots. In benchmarking the FireCuda 540, we used our latest storage testbed desktop, designed specifically for testing PCIe 5.0 M.2 SSDs. The chipset is not a guarantee, just an indication that the motherboard maker could include one some of these boards will have only PCI Express 5.0 x16 expansion card slots, and not compliant M.2 SSD slots. ![]() Important: You'll also have to be sure the board actually has a PCI Express 5.0 M.2 slot implemented. AMD fans must have a Ryzen 7000 series processor and an AM5 motherboard with an X670, X670E, or B650E chipset. Intel users will need a 12th or 13th Generation Core CPU with a motherboard based on Intel's Z690 or Z790 chipset. Only the latest high-end desktops are likely to support PCI Express 5.0 off the shelf, so you may have to build your own PC from scratch or perform a major update on an existing desktop. This new generation of SSDs promises a speed boost, but you'll only be able to enjoy it if your hardware is new enough to support the PCIe 5.0 standard. Testing the FireCuda 540: A New Gaming Benchmark Champ Seagate also provides three years of Rescue Data Recovery Services coverage against unexpected data loss for any mechanical, accidental, or natural disaster, which includes one in-lab data recovery attempt. But the drive's durability rating is such that unless you're writing huge amounts of data to the SSD, it's a safe bet that the 540 will last the full warranty period. Seagate warranties the FireCuda 540 for five years or until you hit the rated TBW figure in data writes, whichever comes first. The terabytes-written spec is a manufacturer's estimate of how much data can be written to a drive before some cells begin to fail and get taken out of service. At the other extreme, the Mushkin Delta, which uses less-durable QLC memory, is rated at just 200TBW for 1TB, 400TBW for 2TB, and 800TBW for 4TB. The Aorus 10000 is rated at 700TBW for its 1TB stick and 1,400TBW for 2TB, and the Crucial T700 is rated at 600TBW and 1,200TBW for 1TB and 2TB respectively.Ī few PCI Express 4.0 drives offer substantially higher durability ratings the MSI Spatium M470, for example, is rated at 1,600TBW for 1TB and 3,300TBW for 2TB. Still-faster Gen 5 SSDs are on tap, like the MSI Spatium M570 Pro-with a maximum 14,000MBps sequential read speed (matching the PCI Express 5.0 theoretical limit)-which we recently saw demoed at Computex.Īs for durability, expressed in terms of lifetime write capacity in total terabytes written (TBW), the FireCuda 540 rules the roost among the Gen 5 drives we have tested. In terms of raw speed, none of these drives can keep up with the Crucial T700, whose 2TB and 4TB models are rated at up to 12,400MBps for read speed and 11,800MBps for read speed, with ratings of 11,700MBps read and 9,500MBps write for its 1TB model. The Corsair MP700 Gen5 M.2 SSD has the same rated speeds for both its 1TB and 2TB models, as does the Gigabyte Aorus 10000 Gen5 SSD, except that the Aorus 10000 2TB model's write-speed rating is a little lower (9,500MBps). This is similar to several other PCI Express 5.0 SSDs we have tested. The 2TB version of the 540 that we tested is rated at up to 10,000MBps for both sequential read and write speeds the 1TB model has a rated read speed of up to 9,500MBps, and a 8,500MBps rated write speed. The 540 is backward-compatible with PCI Express versions 4.0 and even 3.0, but will revert to the maximum throughput of those older interfaces, which defeats the purpose (and expense) of buying a Gen 5 drive in the first place. To fully support the FireCuda 540 or a similar PCIe 5.0 SSD, you must either buy one of the few Gen 5-compatible boutique desktops or build your own with a brand-new CPU and motherboard (we will go into detail below on the system requirements). ![]() You will need to use the heatsink included with your motherboard over the PCI Express 5.0-capable M.2 slot, or otherwise an aftermarket heavy-duty cooling solution. At the speeds this and other Gen 5 drives are capable of, an effective heat dissipation solution is necessary. Available in 1TB and 2TB capacities, the 540 ships without a heatsink.
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