Introduction
We’ve had this memory for the past 1 year and it was our first Gen4 SSD in the lab. I procrastinated on doing the review as I have not received any Gen4 SSDs since. With the new Ryzen coming out and Intel looking to receive PCIe Gen4 capabilities next year, the relevance of SSDs will now come to light instead of being just an AMD bonus feature that no one will use due to the pricing disparity that Gen3 and Gen4 SSDs now. With controllers and pricing evolving since the first wave, I decided to break-out this SSD again from the shelf and take a look again how it fares with some of the newer Gen3 SSDs we’ve checked out over the past months.
The Patriot Viper VP4100 sports a Phison E16 controller and comes in at 512GB, 1TB and 2TB capacities. The one we have for review is the 1TB capacity model and is rated for 5000MB/s read speeds and 4400MB/s write. The drive is also rated for 1800TB written. Read on to find out more!
Specification and Features – Patriot Viper VP4100
- Phison E16 Series Controller
- 2280 M.2 PCIe Gen4 x4, NVMe 1.3
- External Thermal sensor
- Low profile heatshield design
- Advanced Wear Leveling
- Operating Temperature: 0 – 70 Degree Celsius
- TBW: 1800TB
Closer Look
Patriot packs the VIPER VP4100 in a nice cardboard box with a molded plastic shell inside. The front is a flip cover which reveal a view of the heatsink side of the M.2 SSD. Patriot also uses the flip cover to put some story on the Viper VP4100.
Compared to the original VPN100, the VP4100 is definitely slimmer but with the heatsink still installed, M.2 slots with covers will likely be unusable. The heatsink itself is a solid, single piece of metal with a nice tooling design. The height is also largely reduced as mentioned. The back is covered by a label sticker.
Much of the observation from other drives is their heatsink usage. AORUS uses a nearly fused, full copper heatsink while Corsair chooses to go with a tall heatspreader like what Viper did before. For this iteration, Viper’s choice was relatively better but I really do feel that with motherboard makers already including M.2 covers for most boards, that SSD makers should make their heatsinks an accessory in the package I do get that bad installation may cause damage and that’s definitely a concern.
Here’s a side profile of the heatsink and how it lays on the components on the board.
Here’s a shot of the Patriot Viper VP4100 installed on a board. On a pure black board, its definitely looking good. It should match most boards unless you’re on an OEM green PCB or blue one but for most enthusiasts board, the design works nicely.
Performance Testing – Patriot Viper VP4100
Test Setup
Processor: AMD Ryzen 9 3900X
Motherboard: ROG Crosshair VIII Formula
Memory: G.Skill TridentZ DDR4-3600 16GB
Storage: WD Blue SSD 1TB SATA (OS), Patriot Viper VP4100 1TB
PSU: Seasonic Platinum 1050w
Cooling: Corsair H150i 360mm AIO
Monitor: Viewsonic VX2475smhl-4K
VGA: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti FE
Potential Performance (ATTO Disk Benchmark)
ATTO Disk Benchmark benchmarks a drive’s read and write speeds with increasing file sizes and graphs them.
AS SSD Benchmark
AS SSD benchmarks SSDs and provides a score. In our charts, we’ll show you the performance results instead. AS SSD uses synthetic read/write tests with selectable test size.
Crystal Disk Mark v6
Crystal Disk Mark is storage benchmarking software was developed by “hiyohiyo” of Japan, and is available for free. This benchmark measures sequential, and random read/write speeds of storage devices.
ez IOmeter
ezIOmeter is a user-friendly port of the popular IOmeter benchmark. IOmeter is a professional load testing tool for measuring storage performance for enterprise solutions.
Conclusion
Despite being a headlining feature for AMD’s 3rd-gen, PCIe Gen4 hasn’t really took off with only a handful of Gen4 SSDs being released to market and Gen4 itself not offering a significant boost to graphics card as well. That said, aside from the Patriot Viper VPN4100, we’ve only had the chance to try the AORUS for a quick try but we didn’t list the results here because that wasn’t a formal review test.
Anyway, going back to the Patriot Viper VP4100, I think the immediate question is that is it a good choice? Peformance-wise, the quick answer is yes, There’s really not a lot to go with here in term of options and for the most part, a lot of the current players right now are from mainstream brands that offer excellent products as well as support.
Patriot themselves and their Viper brand has managed to rekindle their previous enthusiast glory days and has pulled away from other Taiwanese companies by focusing heavily on high-performance products rather than purely RGB-fying their stack. The Patriot Viper VP4100 is a good example of a performance part offers great pricing and value. At around Php9999, the 1TB Patriot VP4100 offers the best value amongst all the locally available Gen4 drives. While international options put it a bit pricier, its a good thing local prices is a bit shifted.
All in all, the Patriot Viper VP4100 is a great gen4 SSD if you performance for a good price. Its influenced more by the price of Gen4 drives right now but with more Gen4 SSDs hopefully pouring in the coming year, that should help drive prices down but as of right now, the Patriot Viper VP4100 is the best choice right now.
Patriot backs the Viper VP4100 with a 5-year warranty. We give it our B2G Gold Award!
