XPG GAMMIX S70 Blade NVMe M.2 SSD Review – 7GB/s at Low Temps in a 11th Gen Laptop

We have been testing a new SSD that is about to be introduced by XPG and something about this SSD caught our eye.  It is in the XPG marketing pitch actually. A highlight of this marketing states that the XPG GAMMIX S70 Blade NVMe Gen 4 SSD is ‘Perfect for Compact and Thin Devices’ and that this SSD is ‘Cool in the Heat of Battle;  20% Cooler’.  This, in itself, is a very bold statement that has yet to be made in the storage industry with respect top Gen 4.0 M.2 storage.  This may open a new door in the PCIe 4.0 laptop industry in fact.

Right now, we challenge anyone to find a Gen 4 laptop anywhere that comes with  a Gen 4 SSD capable of 7GB/s speeds.  We covered that in this previous report and we will explain once again here.  Gen 4 SSDs up until today have been too hot to place in laptops and this is one of the reasons the world has accepted, and is buying 11th Gen laptops with PCIe 3.0 storage, many only capable of using previous Gen 3 SSDs.  Some are buying PCIe 4.0 laptops with PCIe 3 configured M.2 slots that will never exceed 3.5GB/s top speed. The XPG GAMMIX S70 Blade M.2 NVMe SSD can change that and we will demonstrate what we mean throughout this report.

The XPG GAMMIX S70 Blade is a M.2 form factor 2280 (80mm) PCIe 4.0 x4 (4 lane) SSD that uses the latest NVMe 1.4 protocol.  It will be available in one and two terabyte versions, performance of which is listed at up to 7.4GB/s read and 6.8GB/s write with up to 750K read and write IOPS.

The S70Blade comes with a 5-year limited warranty and MSRP pricing at the XPG website right now shows $139.99 (1TB) and $299 (2TB).  Check Amazon pricing here. The XPG GAMMIX S70 Blade is also PS5 compatible.

The XPG GAMMIX S70 Blade contains the Innogrit ‘Ranier’ IG5236 8-channel NVMe SSD controller which is teamed up with 4 pieces of Micron’s latest 176-layer 3D NAND TLC flash memory, two on each side of the SSD, along with two chips of DDR4 DRAM cache memory. This SSD comes with a metal heatsink with ADATA branding to assist in heat dissipation away from the components.

Additional features of the S70 Blade include 256-Bit encryption, RAID engine support, end-to-end data path protection, along with LDPC error correction.

It might be worthy of note that the branding sticker in use is a security measure where, if you try to remove it it will rip.  This will void ones warranty.

For our testing today, we will do a full regimen on our Intel Test Bench followed by additional testing on our Dell Inspiron laptop.