Final Words & Conclusion
Final Words & Conclusion
The Spectrix S40G left me with some very mixed feelings as the product feels unfinished. I need to elaborate on that, of course. You will have misses a number of benchmarks in this review, Sandra, IOMeter and HDTune all had weird issues while testing, sometimes returning values of 100 MB/sec on writes. You'll notice that ATTO writes is lower than expected, and Anvil as well as scores lower. With that complexity in mind, I started updating to the newest firmware, with the same results. It seems like this SSD is tweaked best for software like CDM and AS SSD. The rest was off or off a bit. The real-world test in sustained writes is really good though. However we see that the SSD performs weird in certain workloads, and that is something you do not see with other brand controller anno 2019.
Heat - performance
My main worry, however, is heat. The Realtek RTS5762 controller runs towards 81 Degrees C in our measurements, at that point the controller will start throttling massively even lowering writes towards 200 MB/sec. This would not have been a problem if ADATA applied a proper heatsink. Instead they gave priority towards RGN, and when you look a bit closer at that RGN cover, it's only sticky insulation tape (which we know does not conduct heat well), then a plastic layer to reflect RGB light coming from the PCB, and then to make it seems like its a heatsink with a thin metal plate. But that sits on top of that plastic layer. The nice-looking RGB design thus traps heat, and you cannot place the SSD under a motherboard M2 heatsink either, as the RGB cover is nearly glued on there. So yes, that is a big miss as with continued and hefty workloads this product will overheat and throttle down.
Concluding
The Spectrix S40G is not at all a bad product, the names overheat issues come into play after liong complex workloads, and up to that point it is a fast SSD. It performs well overall but certainly isn't an enthusiast-class product. I mean it's fun to see 3500 MB/sec in one benchmark, but it's the overall real-world performance that counts. And it's here where the numbers quickly change from enthusiast towards mainstream to high-end M.2 NVMe 1.3 performance. While I like the RGB implementation, ADATA should not have given it priority over actual cooling, that is a design flaw as plastic on top of that controller just ain't gonna work. The oddities we had with the controller I have no doubt woubt will be solved with future firmware updates, this Realtek controller is a new one. ADATA does give the product a nice 5-year warranty, the TWB values, however, are fairly low 320 TB Written for this 512 GB model and 640 TB written for the 1 TB model. So that isn't looking very competitive compared to what Samsung, for example, is doing. We need to end with pricing, the cutthroat NAND market is driving prices on M2 down, the 512GB model as tested can be purchased for 79 USD and 1TB for 179 USD and that's 15 to 17 cents per GB. That's not expensive, but it ain very cheaply either. At this point in time, the competition has better and cooler running products available often with better TBW values at lower prices. It's a nice looking M.2 SSD in your game PC of course but we'll leave the awards at home today.
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