The SSD Review The Worlds Dedicated SSD Education and Review Resource | 
REPORT ANALYSIS AND FINAL THOUGHTS
What’s cookin’ good lookin’? Boy, isn’t the Corsair NX500 sleek and stylish? With its carbon fiber finish, we are sure it will turn heads. All it needs now is some RGB LEDs to really set it off and match it to all the new RGB components in production, or would that be pushing it? That said, let’s get back on track.
While you know we really like its looks, it has come to that part of the report at which we analyze the performance data we took over the course of testing. Just how well did the new Corsair NX500 do? Did it kick everyone else’s butt? Did it put shame to its “older” brother, the MP500? Well….not quite. Over the course of testing, it pretty much performed the same as the MP500, just how we expected it to, honestly. There is only so much performance one can get out of the Phison E7. Expecting anything more than what we have seen would really be naive of us, to say the least. With greater provisioning, the NX500 was, however, able to outperform every other Phison E7 powered SSD out there during PCMark 8’s extended test, most apparently in the degradation and steady state phases. In addition to this, it has enabled greater endurance as well.
But, of course, you can’t always have your cake and eat it too. As you should know, while over provisioning does have its pros, the big con is the loss of end user allocated space. At just 400GB, or 372GB as shown in Windows once formatted, the NX500, just as the Intel 750, ranks low in value per GB. Furthermore, with no significant performance increase, as seen in our multiple benchmark results, it is hard to quantify performance as a value proposition for this over other E7 SSDs.
What we can say, on the other hand, is that this drive definitely has its place in the market thanks to its combination of both looks and performance. Looking for good heavy workload performance and want it to keep cool under your bombardment of data manipulation? Need higher endurance than other NVMe SSDs? Want a sweet looking carbon fiber covered SSD to show off to your friends? The Corsair NX500 offers a good mix of all the above. Oh, and it carries a 5-year warranty to sweeten the deal.
Considering the current competitors and pricing of said competitors, one can easily see that there is a cosmetic tax associated with the Corsair NX500, just as there is with the Intel 750, (or in Intel’s case it is really just an Intel brand tax). The beautiful carbon wrapped heat sink demands a premium price tag over say, the Samsung 960 Pro, which is a heat sink-less M.2 design. It’s blacked out style is not for the faint of wallet, but, it is for sure one of our favorite designed SSDs. Therefore, we are awarding it our Editor’s Choice. Sometimes it’s not about being the cheapest price or being the best in performance, sometimes looks go a long way too.
Decent bit of kit,but the Corsair tax kills it……………………..
I think you are being too kind. An extra $100 for a 400GB drive that performs in the middle of the pack is closer to extortion than a tax.
Seriously, for $210 you can buy a BPX 480GB drive or similar with a cheap heatsink and for the extra $100 saved buy a decent hard drive for archiving needs.
Guys could it be possible to have a dropDown in the reviews so you know where to go (with article sections like other websites do) instead of clicking through the pages to find crystalMark tests for example ?
Cheers
Thank you for the time you spent for this review. As usual I enjoy all your reviews.
As far as I can see from the numbers this particular drive makes no sense in the market. At an incredibly hefty price for the cooler and the extra onboard circuit components the performance is at best on par with MyDigitalSSD BPX 480.
I do not own a BPX 480 but from other reviews I read its controller runs hot. So for an extra $10 one can purchase a heatsink for it for a net price of about $210. The drive is 480GB costs $100 less than the NX500 and performs incredibly close (sometimes beating NX500 sometimes losing).
I concur. The BPX is still a much better value and as you stated. You can get some cheap heat sinks to keep the controller nice and cool for a much cheaper price. It is one of my favorites out atm. It just isnt as good looking at something such as this, NX500, which to some people, matters more.
“Furthermore, with no significant performance increase, as seen in our multiple benchmark results, it is hard to quantify performance as a value proposition for this over other E7 SSDs.
What we can say, on the other hand, is that this drive definitely has its place in the market thanks to its combination of both looks and performance”
So you mean it has looks?
The performance it delivers is still very good…more performance than what most will ever need. Whoever buys it will simply be focused more on the brand or looks rather than top performance.