XPG Gammix S50 Lite Gen4 NVMe SSD Review – A Cooler Low Cost Gen 4 SSD Appears

REAL WORLD FILE TRANSFER COMPARISON

We have put the XPG Gammix S50 Lite NVMe SSD beside a few of the best PCIe 4.0 SSDs in the business for our true to life data testing.  In this test, we simply place 15GB files representing music, video, pictures and operating systems onto the target drive.  We then copy each file from one place on the target disk to another, recording the time taken for the transfer.

REVIEW ANALYSIS AND FINAL THOUGHTS

I will be honest in saying that when I first read the company announcement with respect to the XPG Gammix S50 Lite, I thought to myself, “What the heck?”  Why would anyone market a Gen 4 SSD that brings performance just a bit higher than what we are seeing in gen 3 today?  So we considered everything that comes along with this SSDs release.

PRICE

This 1TB Gen 4 XPG Gammix S50 Lite gets us better performance at a lower price than most premium Gen 3 SSDs of the same capacity.  A quick look at Amazon showed us the 970 EVO and EVO Plus, Crucial P5, WD SN750 Black, and XPG SX8200 Pro, all of which cost more and can’t compare to the performance.

COMPONENTS

TLC Memory.  When the world is switching off to QLC everywhere, it is great to see someone stay pat with TLC memory, and at such a low price point to boot.  The XPG Gammix S50 Lite contains the newest SMI 2267 NVMe Gen 4 controller with Micron 96-layer (IMFT) NAND flash memory.  It utilizes an SLC cache and has a SKHynix DRAM buffer.

OPERATNG TEMPERATURE

If you tried to use a typical Gen4 SSD without some type of cooling attached to it, the SSD would heat up to well above 80°C and throttle the SSD so that data transfer would drop to a crawl.  We tested the S50 Lite without any addition cooling and then left it in the PC running for most of the day, typical temperatures being similar to that of a Gen 3 SSD.  This is what we will need to see if we expect to find Gen 4 ultrabooks available in the future; a low power and low temperature Gen 4 SSD.

FINAL THOUGHTS

The XPG Gammix S50 Lite NVMe Gen 4 SSD comes in with decent performance, low temps, a 5-year warranty, as well great pricing, something we really don’t expect to see these days with TLC memory on board.  XPG has changed my mind; this is a definite recommendation.

Check XPG Gammix S50 Lite Gen 4 SSD Pricing at Amazon.