Kingston FURY Renegade PCIe 4.0 NVMe M.2 SSD 1TB SSD (Heatsink Version) Review

The Kingston FURY Renegade PCIe 4.0 NVMe M.2 SSD is going to step up your storage game.

We previously reviewed the Kingston FURY Renegade SSD a couple of months back, although, that was the 500GB version and one that had the slim graphene heat spreader. Fast forward to today and Kingston did send us the upgraded variant with 1TB capacity and that chunky heatsink. And with that said, that’s what we’re going to look at today.

Kingston FURY Renegade Technical Specifications

Form Factor	M.2 2280
Interface	PCIe 4.0 NVMe
Capacities	500GB, 1TB, 2TB, 4TB
Weight	Heatsink Version: 500GB-1TB – 32.1g 2TB-4TB – 34.9g
Controller	Phison E18
NAND	3D TLC
Sequential read/write	500GB – 7,300/3,900MB/s 1TB – 7,300/6,000MB/s 2TB – 7,300/7,000MB/s 4TB – 7,300/7,000MB/s
Total Bytes Written	500GB – 500TBW  1TB – 1.0PBW  2TB – 2.0PBW  4TB – 4.0PBW
Price and Warranty	₱7,150.00 (1TB) Limited 5-year warranty with free technical support

 

PACKAGING AND CLOSER LOOK

Presentation-wise, the Kingston FURY Renegade SSD comes in a carton packaging as opposed to the familiar blister pack we’ve seen from the company’s usual approach when it comes to packaging some of their M.2 SSDs and DIMMs. 

Once you open up the box, encased in a plastic shell is the Kingston FURY Renegade in all its chunky glory, and there’s also an Acronis key bundled here that you can easily encounter without having to flip the box or tear it apart. And that’s about it for what comes in the box.

As for the FURY Renegade itself, we can’t stop mentioning the chunky heatsink here. Well, chunky compared to a sheet of graphene so to speak. Now, while we don't have a PlayStation 5 to test out compatibility and performance, Kingston does indicate that it is compatible, so this could be an option should you wish to upgrade its storage.

Kingston's heatsink for the FURY Renegade is definitely one of the best looking ones available. It's subtle, and the grooves add up to the overall design. A shame this will likely be covered up by your graphics card. But ehh, you'll be in it for the performance anyway, so aesthetics will probably the least of your worries here when all is said and done. But if showcase is your thing, yeah this is certainly an option.

PERFORMANCE

The Kingston FURY Renegade 1TB SSD (both the graphene heat spreader and the heatsink) feature 7,300/6,000MB/s sequential read/write speeds. And for our setup, we're doing our tests on a Ryzen 5 3600X CPU on an AORUX X570 ELITE Motherboard. 

 

Test System Setup

Motherboard	AORUS X570 ELITE
CPU	AMD Ryzen 5 3600X
GPU	COLORFUL iGame GeForce GTX 1080 Vulcan X OC
RAM	ZADAK 16GB DDR4 @3600MHz
Cooler	Noctua NH-D15
Motherboard	GIGABYTE X570 AORUS Elite
PSU	CORSAIR RM750 80 Plus Gold
Case	Thermaltake Core P3
OS	Windows 10 Pro
Monitor	ASUS VP249QGR 144Hz 24-inch Monitor

PCMark 10 - Full System Drive Benchmark

PCMark features a full system drive benchmark that utilizes a wide-ranging set of real-world tracer from popular applications and common tasks. 

Crystal Disk Mark

CrystalDiskMark is an open source benchmark software used to measure the transfer speed of different media data storage drives including such as HD, SSD, USB memory, SD card and NAS

AS SSD Benchmark

AS SSD tests the sequential or random read/write performance without using the cache. There's also a compression test and copy benchmark included in the software.

Anvil Storage Utilities Benchmark

Anvil Storage Utilities is a benchmark tool that offers its users a simple way of assessing the read and write performance of SSDs and HDDs.

ATTO Disk Benchmark

ATTO Disk Benchmark is an industry leading benchmark that help measure performance of system storage such as hard drives, solid state drives, RAID arrays, and so forth.

Final Fantasy XIV Endwalker Benchmark Tool

The Final Fantasy XIV Endwalker Benchmark Tool is a convenient tool that measures your computer's hardware performance and at the same time also logs the total loading time between runs.

Final Fantasy XV Windows Edition

Final Fantasy XV has very long load times during start up, so we'll be using this opportunity to log the time of drives to boot up the game from the main menu to the start of a new game when the loading screen appears.

Temperature

Our temperature test here will be based on PCMark 10's Drive Performance Consistency Test,  which is a long-running and extremely demanding test with a heavy, continuous load for expert users. The test includes a degradation phase, a steady state phase, and a recovery phase. In-depth reporting shows how the performance of the drive varies under these conditions. Temperature is tracked on AIDA64, and only the initial part of the graph is used.

CONCLUSION

The Kingston FURY Renegade easily tops the charts in our tests. It's great to see the numbers skyrocket, truly. Storage heavy applications will greatly benefit from it, and of course, who wouldn't want that kind of performance in their systems. Those who are looking to squeeze any and every performance they can get can certainly expect great things from the FURY Renegade SSD.

Now, when it comes to pricing, at the time of writing, the 500GB and 1TB heatsink versions do command a huge premium compared to its heatspreader counterparts. Around Php2,720 and Php914 respectively at the time of writing. You could use that for a game or two on a good sale. However, it's a bit confusing however when you jump to the 2TB variant, with the heatpsreader being more expensive than the heat sink version. 

When all is said and done, if money is no object and you want to spare no expense in getting the best, the Kingston FURY Renegade SSD can easily deliver the performance you're looking for. Its best-in-class performance makes it stand out against the competition. And of course, there's Kingston's solid reputation and 5-year warranty backing it up.