Specifications and Closer Look
FEATURES:
• Phison E12 Series Controller
• 2280 M.2 PCIe Gen3 x 4, NVMe 1.3
• DRAM Cache: 1GB
• External Thermal sensor
• Heatshield design
• RGB APP sync up
• Operating Temperature: 0 ~ 70°C
• TBW: 1600 TB
• 4K Aligned Random Read: up to 700K IOPs (RGB unsync)
• 4K Aligned Random Write: up to 650K IOPs (RGB unsync)
• Sequential Read (ATTO): up to 3,300MB/s (RGB unsync)
• Sequential Write (ATTO): up to 2,900MB/s (RGB unsync)
• Sequential Read (CDM): up to 3,900MB/s (RGB unsync)
• Sequential Write (CDM): up to 2,900MB/s (RGB unsync)
• O/S Supported: Windows® 7*/8.0*/8.1/10
*May require driver
*RGB sync may decrease up to 20-30% Read/Write speed
(depending on RGB mode selected)
Patriot is not providing additional software, and it’s not really required. Windows is covering the driver part while firmware can handle everything else. Below is a screenshot from a popular CrystalDiskInfo in 8.4.0 version. As we can see, there are no issues with our drive. Health status is showing 100%, and a low temperature of 37°C. The temperature under high load was around 62°C. It’s below specified maximum and far from a throttling point.
Closer Look
The packaging is similar to that of previously reviewed Patriot SSD like VPN100 or VP4100. The drive is well protected in a small box.
Exterior tells us about everything we need to know about the drive so, besides capacity, we can read about the key features, declared performance, or find info about the support.
The drive is designed to run at up to 3300MB/s read, and 2900MB/s write. It’s not the fastest as Patriot’s own VP4100 SSD can reach a higher bandwidth. However, for a PCIe 3.0 SSD, it’s still a respectable result and not much lower than the maximum possible on the M.2 PCIe 3.0 x4 socket. We will see how high it can really go in our tests, but that’s on the next pages of this review.
The drive is covered by a five-year warranty that is pretty long. It points out that Patriot believes in the high quality of its product.
The drive looks fantastic, mainly when we synchronize all LEDs with everything else on our PC. The VPR100 is compatible with all popular motherboards, and LEDs can be controlled by the software which comes with these motherboards.
Below are four screenshots showing how the drive works if the motherboard doesn’t support any RGB Sync technology. In short, we will still be able to see RGB lighting and the Viper mode.
When we install the drive on a motherboard with RGB Sync, then we can set all colors and modes as on the photos below. As you see, even LED colors are perfectly matched.
The only disadvantage of the RGB sync is the fact that we may notice a performance drop. It’s mostly visible in synthetic bandwidth benchmarks, so it shouldn’t really affect our experience, but it’s still worth mentioning.
On the next page, we will take a closer look at the performance and mentioned differences in the bandwidth with enabled and disabled LED sync.
