Package and its Contents
The retail package is cardboard with a blister window that presents the product inside. We won’t find much information on the package besides basic information like the product name, maximum bandwidth, and contact for support, so if we wish to know more details, we have to visit the Viper Gaming website.
The VP4000 Mini is designed for handheld gaming consoles and mobile computers (with a focus on the first option), so installation can be a little tricky. The installation is straightforward, so it doesn’t require any manual. However, first, we must remove the console/laptop back cover. To help with the disassembly, Patriot adds a simple but functional pick. It looks like a guitar pick; you can see it in the attached photos. It’s the only brand that adds it, and it is really helpful.
The VP4000 Mini has a very thin heatsink, which isn’t anything special but better than nothing, as even 2-3°C may save us from more significant thermal throttling and performance reduction.
The VP4000 Mini is designed to work with PCIe 4.0 x4 bus. In reality, consoles like Steam Deck use PCIe 3.0 x4, limiting us to about 3.2-3.5GB/s maximum bandwidth. It’s still more than enough for games, and the most important random bandwidth in low queue operations remains almost as high as that of PCIe 4.0. To show the full potential of the VP4000 Mini, we decided to use a more standard PC but still based on a mobile chipset and CPU.
The SSD has a black PCB and a black front label with the Viper Gaming logo and the SSD name. It presents well on gaming motherboards and every other device. The label is also a thin heat sink that should perfectly fit small laptops and other slim devices. However, it isn’t essential how the SSD looks when we close it inside a computer.
Above are additional photos taken after the installation in a Steam Deck.
We will show you how the VP4000 Mini SSD performs on the next page of this review.
