ADATA Gammix S70 Blade 2 TB PCIe4 NVMe SSD benchmarked

The ADATA Gammix series of NVMe SSDs has been shipping on Xenia laptops for a while now, but models are now available as standalone drives for anyone to purchase separately and install. The PCIe4 x4 Gammix S70 series in particular comes in two flavors: one with a larger aluminum heat spreader (called the Gammix S70) and another with a smaller heat spreader designed to fit in the Playstation 5 (called the Gammix S70 Blade). The manufacturer has sent a 2 TB Gammix S70 Blade for our impressions.

For testing purposes, we installed the Gammix S70 Blade onto our Intel NUC11PAQi7 Panther Canyon mini PC which fully supports PCIe4 x4 NVMe drives. The system also has a built-in metal heat sink for the SSD, but we'll first test the ADATA SSD with only its included aluminum heat sink for a better representation of what users will get at purchase.

The first thing we wanted to check was how close we can come to the advertised maximum read and write rates of 7400 MB/s and 6800 MB/s, respectively. In practice, we're able to reach read rates of up to 6500 - 7000 MB/s and write rates of up to 4500 MB/s according to ATTO and CrystalDiskMark. File sizes should be 8 MB or larger to reach such speeds as shown by our results below.

The second thing we wanted to check was for how long the drive can maintain its maximum real-world performance of 6500+ MB/s. When running DiskSpeed Read in a loop, our drive would sustain 6600 MB/s for only a few minutes until falling down to just 890 MB/s as shown by our graph below. A temperature threshold is the likely culprit for the performance drop.

When rerunning the above test with the larger Intel NUC SSD heat sink installed, our drive was able to maintain its maximum read rate of 6500+ MB/s for significantly longer as shown by our screenshots below. This suggests that the thin heat spreader included with our Gammix S70 Blade is not all that effective at dissipating enough heat for maintaining maximum performance over long periods. Thus, if you want to fully exploit the PCIe4 bandwidth and SSD on your PC, then you may want to skip the thin heat spreader included with the S70 Blade and go with a larger aftermarket solution instead or just purchase the regular S70.

Running the same DiskSpeed Read loop test on the Acer Predator GM7000 would result in a stable transfer rate of 7000 MB/s whereas our ADATA S70 Blade would eventually fall to 890 MB/s. The Kingston KC3000 would have issues maintaining high transfer rates as well. All three drives are PCIe4 x4 NVMe SSDs. 

The 1 TB Gammix S70 Blade is now shipping on Amazon for $149 USD with the larger heat spreader while the 1 TB version with the smaller heat spreader (as reviewed) is $129 on Best Buy.