**House Gaming Test using Anvil Storage Utilities**

In our testing process, we utilized Anvil storage utilities which can be downloaded for free. However, we've modified these settings to better reflect real-world use cases. We've used 67% incompressible data, which is a fairly realistic representation of the type of data that's commonly encountered in gaming applications.

**Performance Comparison**

We compared the performance of various SSDs in different scenarios. The results showed that the HyperX PCI SSD excels in many cases, particularly when it comes to loading games quickly. However, we also noticed that some of these tests were not entirely representative of real-world usage. For example, our heavily modded version of Skyrim, which is a large and fast-travel-heavy game, didn't show any significant difference between the Samsung 850 Pro and the HyperX PCI SSD. In fact, the disparity was less than 1 second in both cases.

**Transfer Rates**

When it comes to file transfers, such as copying data, we see massive gains with an M.2 SSD compared to a traditional SATA SSD. The HyperX PCI SSD outperformed other SSDs by more than two times and three times in these tests. However, beyond this point, the performance gains are relatively small and may not be noticeable in most users' applications.

**Usability Considerations**

One important aspect of choosing an SSD is usability. If your motherboard does not support M.2 slots, using a PCI Express-adapted M.2 SSD can provide better performance. However, this comes at the cost of consuming a PCIe slot, which limits SLI and Crossfire capabilities on certain motherboards. Z97 and lower boards have limited lane availability, which means that even with an X16 video card, there may not be enough lanes left for another SSD.

**Endurance and Durability**

When it comes to endurance, it's difficult to test in a timely fashion due to the nature of the technology. However, we do run passive and endurance tests in the background if we find any issues. We also consider factors such as the controller and Nand used, which can indicate the device's long-term durability.

**Comparison with Other SSDs**

We compared the HyperX PCI SSD to other popular SSDs, including the Samsung 850 Pro and the Predator from HyperX. The results showed that while the Predator is faster than the HyperX PCI SSD in some tests, it's also more expensive and comes with full AES drive encryption and OPAL compliance.

**Conclusion**

In conclusion, our testing process highlights the importance of considering multiple factors when choosing an SSD, including performance, endurance, and usability. While speed is important, it's not the only consideration. We hope that this article provides a comprehensive understanding of how we test SSDs and what to look for in a device.

**Critical Considerations**

If you're curious about any aspect of our testing process or want to know more about specific devices, feel free to leave a comment below. We respond quickly on Twitter and would be happy to help answer any questions you may have.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey everyone today we're talking about the new hyperx PCI Express SSD and this is called the hyperx Predator it is actually an m.2 SSD and m.2 has been around for a little while it is very common in smaller mobile devices but it's worked its way into some desktops as well including x99 and some high-end z97 systems however m.2 is not always a usable form factor for ssds when we're putting them into desktops and there are a few reasons for this that we'll go into momentarily the hyperx predator Drive although it is an m.2 SSD it actually uses a a PCI Express adapter card about this big and it's a half height half length adapter card and what we do is plug the m.2 SSD into that card uh it ships already connected if you buy it that way and then plug that into a PCI Express slot so a few things about this device uh in terms of specifications the hyperx Predator SSD is using a marll controller the 9293 controller it is a dual core S SSD controller it's effectively uh akin to a flash processor unit as LSI used to call it but most other vendors including Samsung and now LSI or san force and of course Marvel call it a controller and the 9293 is a dual core unit it is capable of four lane uh connection via the PCI Express Bus which bypasses some of the abstraction layers faced by uh SATA the device is connected by eight channels as most controllers do with the flash modules so the eight channels go to different flash modules uh Kingston is present using the Toshiba a19 toggle nand for its nand flash but of course that can always change and the a19 nand is 64 gbit it is the present Toshiba generation of nand for Consumer devices and that's what they're using here the hyperx Predator ships in two capacities presently 200 40 GB and 480 GB now if you do the the math on this it's actually 512 as most 480 ssds as all 480 ssds are uh but you lose some of the data and you lose that to things like over-provisioning which we've explained in the past so the hyperx Predator ships at about a dollar per gig a little bit lower and you won't see these prices right now but as retailers continue to sell and adopt the drive for retail you will see that the 480 GB model sells for about $470 240 GB model sells in the $2 and all that information is available Linked In the article in the description below please check that out for more details so talking about device performance that's what everyone cares about here ssds are both easy and hard to Benchmark properly our SSD test methodology has been peer-reviewed by Kingston by Samsung and a couple of other vendors by LSI and controller manufacturers it's been peer-reviewed and analyzed and they' provided feedback for us to make sure we're testing it properly the reason it's easy is because a lot of it can be done using synthetic software we don't have to manually run around in games like we do with GPU testing it requires a lot of manual effort with ssds we can run a lot of software but the hard part is taking all of that information which is very dense and then stripping out the parts that are irrelevant to most users like Gamers and uh production power users like us and then uh further the challenge we face next is presenting that data in a matter which is actually comprehensible rather than just pasting screenshots of atto which is I I have trouble understanding that and I look at it all day so that's that's the challenge we face so some things I want to talk about before we get started here I did an intensive study of IO during games so this used HT tune to log the io transactions made when games were loading and when games were playing and this tells us how many IO requests were made during each game during each sequence of the game during loading and then it further tells us why type of IO that is what how long the io is so 4K 16k and so on and then we look at the Q depth which is another important factor that's effectively how many files or excuse me how many IO requests are lined up in sequence to be executed by the device and in the case of gaming we found that Q depth of one and two are very common and after that it sort of Fades depending on what type of game you're playing what files you're loading in terms of IO length we learned that 4K random of course still very important 4K random qd1 especially and then after that the reads and the reads are most popular at 16k 32k and then the rights are at 16k and of course 4K as I mentioned before uh some of the higher size rights occur at 64k depending on the game and I have all of that shown in the charts on the article if you can't catch that through YouTube fast enough we take all of this data and then use a mix of benchmarking software like Anvil storage utilities to run tests the fitting of those transactions so it's a simulation of gaming uh but it is a a scientifically designed one the problem though is that even with a very high transaction speed we still face issues in the software bottlenecks where uh you you hit a point of diminishing returns very rapidly and this occurs with the PCI Express device that we're talking about today and all other PCI Express devices in such a fashion that uh once you put an SSD in a system you really don't you stop seeing any Improvement beyond that to your game performance but there's a large Improvement to things like uh workload tasks so Photoshop video editing and Premier After Effects and uh other software in that effect there's better compression and then of course better file copy and transfer speeds so let's let's get to the benchmarks finally first I want to show you the PC Mark performance this is a a synthetic utility that executes real world traces so the developers future Mark took traces of applications like Photoshop Premier illustrator every Adobe suite program they took traces of some games and of office and then they execute those on the SSD in a fashion that is replicable on all devices without as much test error as if it were being done manually by me so this is why we use that you can see the largest improvement with Photoshop transactions so uh photoshop's execution time of heavy workload batches is about 4% faster than the 850 Pro when using the PCI Express drive and you'll notice that there are no other PCI Express drives on here right now that's because the hyx Predator is the first one we're testing we hope to look at Intel 750 SSD in short order uh but do keep in mind that all these Computing devices we're showing are not necessarily actually Computing they're in different price points and they use the SATA interface so the biggest Improvement between pcie and SATA is in Photoshop as seen here and then we can look at file copy speeds so this is a test called as SSD which uses incompressible data that means that the data has already been compressed to a point that windows can and SSD can no further compress it so Technologies like San Force's durite uh really don't play it too well here because they they really they have nothing to do it's already been done for them the files that are incompressible are generally MP3s uh movies like m p4s and images jpegs are are already very heavily compressed as many of you know so this is considered incompressible data in our incompressible test you can already you've seen the numbers now while I've been babbling for a minute and the fastest speed we ever saw with the hyperx pcie SSD the Predator using compressible data was almost 1.4 GB that is tremendous it's extremely fast and no SATA drive can possibly reach that speed because the SATA interface after overhead is about 550 megabytes per second before overhead it's closer to 750 but you'll never see that speed uh because there's all kinds of overhead and abstraction in the in the transfer our In-House Gaming test using Anvil storage utilities which you can download for free uh but we've we've modified with these settings and you can also replicate these we use 67% incompressible data which is fairly realistic to uh Live use and you can see that the hyperx PCI SSD does excel in many cases and some of them like 4K it's fairly similar or even surpassed uh by the Samsung 850 Pro note well that as I said before this does not really reflect an in-game improvement so in our heavily modded version of Skyrim which is very large fast travel loading nonell uh was a difference of less than a second so between the 850 Pro the hyperx 3K which is slower the OWC drive and the Predator we see a disparity of less than 1 second between 8 and 9 seconds every time to load White Run uh so you will not see a gain in gaming however concluding everything that we've just gone over you will see performance gains in photoshop's workloads at about 4% from the Samsung 850 Pro 4% isn't a lot if you are a production user who is using Photoshop all day whether it's automated or not you may want to consider something like a PCI Express drive because uh when you're using it that much 4% can actually be fairly a fairly good result for heavy intensity workloads in file transfers like copying we see a massive gain more than two times the transfer rate more than three times the transfer rate of a lot of SATA ssds um but beyond that uh the the performance gains are really at a point where they're unnoticeable in many core user applications so all the speed data aside it's also important to talk about usability you would want a pcie adapted m.2 SSD in the case where one your motherboard has no m.2 support two you're on a z97 board where there actually is a performance disparity between M2 and the adapted pcie version this is something that's been tested inous by Kinston and other man manufacturers excuse me the downsides to using PCI Express are also obvious you consume a pcie slot so you've suddenly limited your SLI and Crossfire capabilities on Haswell and z97 Z87 whatever there's a very limited Lane availability so you've got 16 Lane L from the CPU and eight from the chipset if it's Z87 or better and that means you've got about 24 Lanes total exactly 24 lanes and those are dived up between your m.2 or pcie SSD and your uh your video cards so if you have an x16 video card that's 16 Lanes gone immediately if you have another one you're depending on your configuration you could be at 24 or 32 Lanes it might be a multiplex board that allows that um and then beyond that that point you really have no room for an SSD so there will be some throttling or limitations in that regard and in that case you would really want an x99 board which has upwards of 40 lanes available so those are some of the concerns here uh with solid state drives I want to really emphasize that you need more than speed it's very important to pay attention to endurance at this point uh endurance is very difficult for us to test in a timely fashion in that it is impossible to test in a timely fashion by the nature of it so we do run a sort of passive and endurance tests in the background if we ever find a problem we'll update but that might be a point at which you've already purchased the device so beyond endurance items to consider would be things like the controller and the nand used which can be used as an indicator of the endurance and this is all stuff we discuss in the article in full detail if you need help deciding if I have this combination of Nan controller and this manufacturer is it really going to survive in the long term and then there's things like encryption the 850 Pro is more affordable far more more affordable than the hyperx predator and it's got full AES Drive encryption and it has opal compliance and a couple of other business class features that uh I'm not 100% sure if the Predator offers all of those although the Predator is faster so that's your your disparity and pricing so that's the full review of The hyperx Predator I know it's pretty in- depth but this is our first SSD review we've done a video of so I want to make sure everyone understands how we test and the critical aspects of determining which SSD you should buy please leave a comment below if you're curious about anything we do a lot of SSD content I'll help you out if I can uh tweeting at us is really the best thing to do Gamers Nexus on Twitter I respond very quickly on there and thanks for watching I will see you all next timehey everyone today we're talking about the new hyperx PCI Express SSD and this is called the hyperx Predator it is actually an m.2 SSD and m.2 has been around for a little while it is very common in smaller mobile devices but it's worked its way into some desktops as well including x99 and some high-end z97 systems however m.2 is not always a usable form factor for ssds when we're putting them into desktops and there are a few reasons for this that we'll go into momentarily the hyperx predator Drive although it is an m.2 SSD it actually uses a a PCI Express adapter card about this big and it's a half height half length adapter card and what we do is plug the m.2 SSD into that card uh it ships already connected if you buy it that way and then plug that into a PCI Express slot so a few things about this device uh in terms of specifications the hyperx Predator SSD is using a marll controller the 9293 controller it is a dual core S SSD controller it's effectively uh akin to a flash processor unit as LSI used to call it but most other vendors including Samsung and now LSI or san force and of course Marvel call it a controller and the 9293 is a dual core unit it is capable of four lane uh connection via the PCI Express Bus which bypasses some of the abstraction layers faced by uh SATA the device is connected by eight channels as most controllers do with the flash modules so the eight channels go to different flash modules uh Kingston is present using the Toshiba a19 toggle nand for its nand flash but of course that can always change and the a19 nand is 64 gbit it is the present Toshiba generation of nand for Consumer devices and that's what they're using here the hyperx Predator ships in two capacities presently 200 40 GB and 480 GB now if you do the the math on this it's actually 512 as most 480 ssds as all 480 ssds are uh but you lose some of the data and you lose that to things like over-provisioning which we've explained in the past so the hyperx Predator ships at about a dollar per gig a little bit lower and you won't see these prices right now but as retailers continue to sell and adopt the drive for retail you will see that the 480 GB model sells for about $470 240 GB model sells in the $2 and all that information is available Linked In the article in the description below please check that out for more details so talking about device performance that's what everyone cares about here ssds are both easy and hard to Benchmark properly our SSD test methodology has been peer-reviewed by Kingston by Samsung and a couple of other vendors by LSI and controller manufacturers it's been peer-reviewed and analyzed and they' provided feedback for us to make sure we're testing it properly the reason it's easy is because a lot of it can be done using synthetic software we don't have to manually run around in games like we do with GPU testing it requires a lot of manual effort with ssds we can run a lot of software but the hard part is taking all of that information which is very dense and then stripping out the parts that are irrelevant to most users like Gamers and uh production power users like us and then uh further the challenge we face next is presenting that data in a matter which is actually comprehensible rather than just pasting screenshots of atto which is I I have trouble understanding that and I look at it all day so that's that's the challenge we face so some things I want to talk about before we get started here I did an intensive study of IO during games so this used HT tune to log the io transactions made when games were loading and when games were playing and this tells us how many IO requests were made during each game during each sequence of the game during loading and then it further tells us why type of IO that is what how long the io is so 4K 16k and so on and then we look at the Q depth which is another important factor that's effectively how many files or excuse me how many IO requests are lined up in sequence to be executed by the device and in the case of gaming we found that Q depth of one and two are very common and after that it sort of Fades depending on what type of game you're playing what files you're loading in terms of IO length we learned that 4K random of course still very important 4K random qd1 especially and then after that the reads and the reads are most popular at 16k 32k and then the rights are at 16k and of course 4K as I mentioned before uh some of the higher size rights occur at 64k depending on the game and I have all of that shown in the charts on the article if you can't catch that through YouTube fast enough we take all of this data and then use a mix of benchmarking software like Anvil storage utilities to run tests the fitting of those transactions so it's a simulation of gaming uh but it is a a scientifically designed one the problem though is that even with a very high transaction speed we still face issues in the software bottlenecks where uh you you hit a point of diminishing returns very rapidly and this occurs with the PCI Express device that we're talking about today and all other PCI Express devices in such a fashion that uh once you put an SSD in a system you really don't you stop seeing any Improvement beyond that to your game performance but there's a large Improvement to things like uh workload tasks so Photoshop video editing and Premier After Effects and uh other software in that effect there's better compression and then of course better file copy and transfer speeds so let's let's get to the benchmarks finally first I want to show you the PC Mark performance this is a a synthetic utility that executes real world traces so the developers future Mark took traces of applications like Photoshop Premier illustrator every Adobe suite program they took traces of some games and of office and then they execute those on the SSD in a fashion that is replicable on all devices without as much test error as if it were being done manually by me so this is why we use that you can see the largest improvement with Photoshop transactions so uh photoshop's execution time of heavy workload batches is about 4% faster than the 850 Pro when using the PCI Express drive and you'll notice that there are no other PCI Express drives on here right now that's because the hyx Predator is the first one we're testing we hope to look at Intel 750 SSD in short order uh but do keep in mind that all these Computing devices we're showing are not necessarily actually Computing they're in different price points and they use the SATA interface so the biggest Improvement between pcie and SATA is in Photoshop as seen here and then we can look at file copy speeds so this is a test called as SSD which uses incompressible data that means that the data has already been compressed to a point that windows can and SSD can no further compress it so Technologies like San Force's durite uh really don't play it too well here because they they really they have nothing to do it's already been done for them the files that are incompressible are generally MP3s uh movies like m p4s and images jpegs are are already very heavily compressed as many of you know so this is considered incompressible data in our incompressible test you can already you've seen the numbers now while I've been babbling for a minute and the fastest speed we ever saw with the hyperx pcie SSD the Predator using compressible data was almost 1.4 GB that is tremendous it's extremely fast and no SATA drive can possibly reach that speed because the SATA interface after overhead is about 550 megabytes per second before overhead it's closer to 750 but you'll never see that speed uh because there's all kinds of overhead and abstraction in the in the transfer our In-House Gaming test using Anvil storage utilities which you can download for free uh but we've we've modified with these settings and you can also replicate these we use 67% incompressible data which is fairly realistic to uh Live use and you can see that the hyperx PCI SSD does excel in many cases and some of them like 4K it's fairly similar or even surpassed uh by the Samsung 850 Pro note well that as I said before this does not really reflect an in-game improvement so in our heavily modded version of Skyrim which is very large fast travel loading nonell uh was a difference of less than a second so between the 850 Pro the hyperx 3K which is slower the OWC drive and the Predator we see a disparity of less than 1 second between 8 and 9 seconds every time to load White Run uh so you will not see a gain in gaming however concluding everything that we've just gone over you will see performance gains in photoshop's workloads at about 4% from the Samsung 850 Pro 4% isn't a lot if you are a production user who is using Photoshop all day whether it's automated or not you may want to consider something like a PCI Express drive because uh when you're using it that much 4% can actually be fairly a fairly good result for heavy intensity workloads in file transfers like copying we see a massive gain more than two times the transfer rate more than three times the transfer rate of a lot of SATA ssds um but beyond that uh the the performance gains are really at a point where they're unnoticeable in many core user applications so all the speed data aside it's also important to talk about usability you would want a pcie adapted m.2 SSD in the case where one your motherboard has no m.2 support two you're on a z97 board where there actually is a performance disparity between M2 and the adapted pcie version this is something that's been tested inous by Kinston and other man manufacturers excuse me the downsides to using PCI Express are also obvious you consume a pcie slot so you've suddenly limited your SLI and Crossfire capabilities on Haswell and z97 Z87 whatever there's a very limited Lane availability so you've got 16 Lane L from the CPU and eight from the chipset if it's Z87 or better and that means you've got about 24 Lanes total exactly 24 lanes and those are dived up between your m.2 or pcie SSD and your uh your video cards so if you have an x16 video card that's 16 Lanes gone immediately if you have another one you're depending on your configuration you could be at 24 or 32 Lanes it might be a multiplex board that allows that um and then beyond that that point you really have no room for an SSD so there will be some throttling or limitations in that regard and in that case you would really want an x99 board which has upwards of 40 lanes available so those are some of the concerns here uh with solid state drives I want to really emphasize that you need more than speed it's very important to pay attention to endurance at this point uh endurance is very difficult for us to test in a timely fashion in that it is impossible to test in a timely fashion by the nature of it so we do run a sort of passive and endurance tests in the background if we ever find a problem we'll update but that might be a point at which you've already purchased the device so beyond endurance items to consider would be things like the controller and the nand used which can be used as an indicator of the endurance and this is all stuff we discuss in the article in full detail if you need help deciding if I have this combination of Nan controller and this manufacturer is it really going to survive in the long term and then there's things like encryption the 850 Pro is more affordable far more more affordable than the hyperx predator and it's got full AES Drive encryption and it has opal compliance and a couple of other business class features that uh I'm not 100% sure if the Predator offers all of those although the Predator is faster so that's your your disparity and pricing so that's the full review of The hyperx Predator I know it's pretty in- depth but this is our first SSD review we've done a video of so I want to make sure everyone understands how we test and the critical aspects of determining which SSD you should buy please leave a comment below if you're curious about anything we do a lot of SSD content I'll help you out if I can uh tweeting at us is really the best thing to do Gamers Nexus on Twitter I respond very quickly on there and thanks for watching I will see you all next time\n"