Gigagbyte's AORUS Gen5 10000 2 TB PCIe 5.0 NVMe SSD pops up on Newegg for US$339.99

Intel was the first to offer PCIe 5.0 support on the desktop Alder Lake platform as early as 2021 and AMD caught up last year offering PCIe 5.0 support with the latest Zen 4 processors. However, support without actual components that take advantage of the improved speeds is quite pointless. The latest GPUs from Nvidia and AMD are still PCIe 4.0, so we will need to wait until 2024 to see any changes in the GPu sector. In 2022, it looked like some NVMe SSD makers could launch PCIe 5.0 models by the end of the year, but, alas, this did not happen either, most likely due to overheating concerns. Without any notice from Gigabyte, we now see the AORUS Gen5 10000 2 TB NVMe SSD pop up on sites like Newegg and Amazon, and, surprisingly enough, the prices are reasonable.

This model is not actually in stock at any of the retailers, but Newegg lists it at US$339.99 and it can be backordered. While the price somehow makes sense since the last gen AORUS Gen 4 7000s is now on sale for exactly 50% less (US$169.99), we were expecting some price gouging considering this is the first consumer model to go on sale. As far as performance uplift goes, the Gen 5 10000 write speeds have been bumped from 5.5 GB/s to 8.5 GB/s, whereas the read speeds should now reach 9.5 GB/s instead of 7.7 GB/s. Not exactly a big leap, but Gigabyte does plan to release a faster model with 12.5 GB/s read speeds and 10 GB/s write speeds soon.

Even though the official site does not specify the NVMe controller brand, Gigabyte includes a pretty hefty heatsink, which suggests that a Phison controller may be involved. It is unclear if the heatsink is mandatory as it comes detached.

Buy the Aorus Gen 5 10000 2 TB PCIe 5.0 NVMe SSD on Amazon