All the rage in today’s market are M.2 NVMe SSD drives, improving internal appearance of your PC as well as decreasing application loading times. How does the XPG SX8200 fair in our tests?
Product on Review: XPG SX8200 NVMe SSD
Manufacturer: ADATA XPG
Street Price: 240GB – £81.01 / 480GB – £131.67 / 960GB – £250.17
XPG are an ADATA company, particularly aimed towards the gaming community with the black PCB and red accents. Back in March, XPG released the SX8200 series NVMe SSDs, available in 240GB, 480GB and 960GB capacities.
Today we get to bring you the SX8200 480GB SSD, featuring SLC caching, Error Correcting Code (ECC) and a DRAM Cache Buffer for increased performance. The SX8200 utilises the NVMe 1.3 standard and operates using 64-layer 3D NAND flash paired with an SM2262 Flash controller.
The 480GB and 960GB drives claim read and write speeds of 3200MB/s and 1700MB/s respectively, while the 240GB drives write speed is limited to 1100MB/s. IOPS are rated at 310,000 read and 280,000 write.
Those numbers look dangerously close to the recognised market leader, Samsung so pricing is the key factor here. With the 240GB being available for £80 and the 480GB available for £130, while the 960GB can be had for just over £250; pricing certainly seems good, but how does the performance stack up? Read on to find out.
XPG on the SX8200:
The SX8200 M.2 2280 SSD is our fastest SSD to date, designed for PC enthusiasts, dedicated gamers, and overclockers. It features an ultra-fast PCIe Gen3x4 interface, offering sustained peak R/W speeds of 3200/1700MB per second, outpacing SATA 6Gb/s by a huge margin. NVMe 1.3 qualified, the SX8200 delivers superior random read/write performance and multi-tasking capabilities. With SLC Caching, DRAM Cache Buffer, and LDPC ECC technologies, it maintains high speeds and data integrity during even the most intense gaming, rendering, overclocking, and other high demand applications.
Technical Specifications
Capacity 240GB / 480GB / 960GB
Form Factor M.2 2280
NAND Flash 2nd Generation 64-layer 3D TLC
Controller SMI
Dimensions 22 x 80 x 3.5mm
Weight 8g / 0.28oz
Interface PCIe Gen 3 x 4
Performance (Max) Read 3200MB/s , Write 1700MB/s
Maximum 4K random read / write IOPS: up to 310K / 280K
*Performance may vary based on SSD capacity, host hardware and software, operating system, and other system variables
Operating temperature 0°C – 70°C
Storage temperature – 40°C – 85°C
Shock resistance 1500G / 0.5ms
MTBF 2,000,000 hours
Warranty 5 years
Packaging, Bundle & Closer Look
The packaging is simple and explanatory, with a full-size image of the SSD on the front. There’s also a few pointers as to the type of memory used, the interface and the capacity.
The reverse side of the box is taken up by multiple languages, instead requiring you to check the exact specifications on their website. There’s a 5-year warranty badge there, though, which certainly bodes well for longevity.
The SX8200 adheres to the M.2 2280 form factor, measuring 80mm in length and 22mm in width. The PCB is double sided, with 3D-NAND Flash on both sides; this helps with cost, due to lower density chips, but it does hinder heat dissipation somewhat, especially if intensive tasks are planned.
The controller, where most of the heat is generated, is located on the “front” of the M.2 drive, under the silver portion of the drive. XPG included a thin metal sticker, with thermal compound pre-applied. However, due to the notch cut-out on the sticker, and the strategic placement of thermal compound, the sticker can only be orientated in one direction. That single direction happens to be upside down in most systems. XPG could’ve included another sticker to remedy this situation.
Test Setup & Methodology
Our test system is formatted and a fresh version of Windows is installed with just drives in place – no additional applications. Windows is then updated to the latest release and the drivers are installed.Included in the list of benchmarks are the following applications:
Benchmarks
Anvil Pro
AS SSD
ATTO Disk Benchmark v2.46
Futuremark PCMark 8
AIDA64
AS SSD
ATTO Disk Benchmark v2.46
Futuremark PCMark 8
AIDA64
Test system
CPU: Intel Core i7 7700K
Motherboard: MSI Z270 Gaming M7
Graphics: EVGA GTX 1070 SC
Memory: 16GB CORSAIR Vengeance LPX 3200MHz DDR4
SAMSUNG SM961 256GB NVMe
ADATA XPG SX8200 480GB NVMe
PSU: BeQuiet Straight Power 11 650W
OS: Microsoft Windows 10 Pro 64-Bit
Monitor: ASUS ROG PG279Q
Motherboard: MSI Z270 Gaming M7
Graphics: EVGA GTX 1070 SC
Memory: 16GB CORSAIR Vengeance LPX 3200MHz DDR4
SAMSUNG SM961 256GB NVMe
ADATA XPG SX8200 480GB NVMe
PSU: BeQuiet Straight Power 11 650W
OS: Microsoft Windows 10 Pro 64-Bit
Monitor: ASUS ROG PG279Q
Benchmarks: Anvil Pro
Anvil Pro from Anvil Storage utilities is one of the most popular storage benchmarking utilities today thanks to the large suit of tests available. You can test pretty much anything from Read/write Speed to IOPs with many variables to tweak allowing you to get either a single or host of results to compare with other likeminded enthusiasts. In our test we ran the standard suite 5 times, subtracting both the highest and lowest scores and determined the final result from the average of the remaining three results.
Benchmarks: AS SSD
AS SSD Benchmark is a straightforward tool for measuring the speed of your SSD drive.
Simply launch the program, choose your drive, click Start, and it’ll test your SSD’s read and write speed in a variety of ways, delivering a score for each when it’s done. And if that’s not enough, there are also additional file copy and compression-related benchmarks available from the Tools menu. (The author’s support page is German only, but if you need further English explanations then there’s a thread on the program at the OCZ Technology forum.).
Simply launch the program, choose your drive, click Start, and it’ll test your SSD’s read and write speed in a variety of ways, delivering a score for each when it’s done. And if that’s not enough, there are also additional file copy and compression-related benchmarks available from the Tools menu. (The author’s support page is German only, but if you need further English explanations then there’s a thread on the program at the OCZ Technology forum.).
Benchmarks: ATTO
The ATTO Disk Benchmark performance measurement tool is compatible with Microsoft Windows. Measure your storage systems performance with various transfer sizes and test lengths for reads and writes. Several options are available to customize your performance measurement including queue depth, overlapped I/O and even a comparison mode with the option to run continuously. Use ATTO Disk Benchmark to test any manufacturers RAID controllers, storage controllers, host adapters, hard drives and SSD drives and notice that ATTO products will consistently provide the highest level of performance to your storage.
Benchmarks: AIDA64
With this module, we can measure the performance of the PC’s storage devices, including (S)ATA or SCSI hard disk drives, RAID arrays, optical drives, solid-state drives (SSD), USB drives and memory cards. It also allows us to perform write tests, which helps us detect fake products and errors on the devices. In order to attain reliable benchmark results we have to make sure to close all background applications.
Benchmarks: PCMark 8
We use the Futuremark PCMark 8 utility to measure storage via Photoshop performance under both light and heavy loading conditions. Accelerated (open CL) is used to perform this test. The test is measured in seconds to complete.
Conclusion
ADATA may not be quite as prominent within the storage sector as Corsair, Western Digital or Samsung, for example, but the XPG SX8200 shows they certainly deserve some respect.Our testing showed some outstanding results, mixing with the big guns in a lot of tests. Throughput and IOPS are up there in all tests, showing no noticeable weakness to the drive.
240, 480 and 960GB capacities have the market just about covered. If you plan some light use, the 240 will be ideal, those looking for a boot/games drive will likely choose a 480 while the 960 would be perfect as a total system drive, offering plenty of space and rapid access to all of your files.
The optional heatsink sticker is useful for those with motherboards featuring a built in heatsink system, which many do these days. Being able to choose whether you use it or not is great.
Getting onto price, which we mentioned in the introduction. Looking at current pricing at some major retailers, the £80 price tag on the 240GB model will get you an M.2 SSD of a similar capacity (240/250/256GB), but you won’t receive the NVMe interface, instead utilising the SATA 6GBPS bandwidth; this limits speeds to around 550MB/s and 50k IOPS. The 480GB can be had for roughly £130, which is only a smidge more than the asking price of a Samsung 250GB drive. We can’t help but think XPG are offering a bit of a bargain here – buy one before they realise their prices are too low!
Oh, and did we mention? This drive comes with a 5-year warranty.
The XPG offers incredible value but doesn’t sacrifice any performance in doing so.
Pros
+ Brilliant value for money
+ Looks great
+ Great performance
+ 5-year warranty
+ Optional heatsink sticker
Cons
– Heatsink sticker is upside down
+ Brilliant value for money
+ Looks great
+ Great performance
+ 5-year warranty
+ Optional heatsink sticker
Cons
– Heatsink sticker is upside down
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