CONCLUSION

   It’s no secret that I delayed doing any Gen 4 SSD reviews until my new test rig was up and running but since the Intel Z490 motherboards (or more accurately the new Core i9 CPU’s) don’t support that standard I had to look for a temporary solution and that was using the Ryzen 9 3950x system a graphics designer friend of mine has in his office. Now I may try to make a pretty much identical system for future PCIe 4.0 (and Gen 4 SSD) reviews but since AMD is announcing their new CPU’s in a few weeks I’m waiting to see what those bring to the table. Of course, I doubt the results will vary much between systems but for now do keep in mind that this is not a system located in the lab (and of course also not the same used in my previous M.2 reviews). Moving back to today’s review it’s clear from the charts that Gen 4 M.2 NVMe SSDs offer much better performance levels compared to Gen 3 models, at least in regular tests. The reason I say this is due to throttling which became painfully evident in our SNIAA reviews. Yes, the US70 did surpass every other model in the charts in those too but with a rather tiny margin (compared always to other tests). Out of curiosity I did some tests with our Z170 based test rig as well to see how the US70 performs on a Gen 3 system and well, the results just didn’t do it for me (KC2000/KC2500/EX950 all did better). This obviously means that Gen 4 models weren't designed and developed for use with Gen 3 mainboards/slots and well that actually makes sense.

   Its current retail price of USD164.99 inside the USA (Amazon.com) and 227.23Euros inside the EU (Amazon.de) certainly needs some work, at least on this side of the Atlantic (in the USA it’s actually very attractive). With that out of the way the US70 1TB NVMe Gen 4 SSD by Silicon Power delivers on both things that truly matters for storage media, performance and endurance and that’s why it clearly deserves our Platinum Award.

PROS

- Top of The Charts Performance (5000MB/s Read & 4400MB/s Write)
- Endurance (1800TBW / 1.7 Million Hours MTBF)
- 5 Years Warranty
- Silicon Power Software
- Price (USA)

CONS

- Thermal Throttling (During Our SNIA Tests)
- Price (EU)