The ADATA XPG Gammix S70 (starts at $199.99 for 1TB; $399.99 for the 2TB version tested) internal solid-state drive has some “sins of the father” to atone for…and does it ever. Last year, ADATA drew fire after reports emerged that the company had switched out some components of its much-lauded XPG SX8200 Pro drive over its lifecycle.
That said, ADATA has earned more than its share of SSD medals in the past few years, and the M.2-format Gammix S70—not to be confused with the also-excellent Addlink S70 budget M.2 drive—is another winner. The only surprise this time around was a small hiccup in an otherwise flawless run: some slightly below-spec scores on our Crystal DiskMark test. Those aren’t enough to sully an otherwise premium SSD experience—as long as you can fit its chunky heatsink in your desktop. A big, bold, bodacious brawler among high-speed PCI Express (PCIe) 4.0 SSDs, the Gammix S70 adds another Editors’ Choice award to ADATA’s trophy case.
XPG Gammix S70
The ADATA XPG Gammix S70 is a four-lane PCIe 4.0 drive manufactured on an M.2 Type-2280 (80mm long) design. It employs the NVMe protocol over the PCIe 4.0 bus, features a new InnoGrit IG2536 controller, and is rated to hit a maximum throughput of 7,400MBps read and 6,400MBps write in the 2TB version we tested.
The drive is based on Micron’s 96-layer, triple-level-cell (TLC) V-NAND flash, and it’s available in two storage-volume sizes: 1TB and 2TB. (Check out our SSD dejargonizer to make sense of that acronym torrent, if need be.)
On first glance, it’s impossible to make any mistake: The XPG Gammix S70 is here to fill out a premium segment of the market, with premium speeds to match…
At 20 cents per gigabyte in both capacities, there’s no discount for going with the bigger drive this time around, and only offerings like the almost-as-quick and equally premium PCIe 4.0-based Samsung SSD 980 Pro surpass the Gammix S70. (That Samsung drive comes in at 22 cents per gigabyte MSRP, with street prices floating around the 20-cent-per-gig mark, for the 1TB version.)
And speaking of things that are bigger than they might need to be, let’s talk about that heatsink. In previous bulky PCIe 4.0 drives such as the Corsair Force Series MP600 and TeamGroup T-Force Cardea II, the chunky metal heatsinks all have had something in common: being easy to remove.
Reason states that the whole point of those screws being there is that once you loosen them, the heatsink comes off, right? Wrong. Although I only pried on it to the point at which I felt like I was going to do some damage, I had to go way outside my force comfort zone to even start to get the heatsink to budge. Don’t try this at home.
Ultimately it was left on for our testing, though usually we use our test motherboard’s included heat spreaders both to keep the drives secured in place and to control the temperature/cooling variables much as possible. Many might find its large size and weight a hindrance depending on the compactness of their desktop build and the positioning of the M.2 slots. (Forget about trying to get this thing in a laptop unless, again, you’re willing to risk physical damage to the flash chips themselves.)
As long as you don’t try and break into it, the Gammix S70 ought to endure reasonably. It is rated for 1,480 terabytes written (TBW) at the 2TB size variant, which, while it sounds impressive versus almost every PCIe 3.0 drive on the market (and tips above the Samsung SSD 980 Pro’s 1,200TBW rating), is still quite low versus other options in the PCIe 4.0 tier, such as the Corsair Force Series MP600 (3,600TBW at 2TB). Those who want a fast drive because they plan on copying large folders to and from the device all day, every day, might want to favor options with higher write-durability ratings instead.
ADATA’s full-featured SSD Toolbox makes its return yet again, providing the same wide range of controls and health checks designed to help users manage their drive’s health that we’ve seen in previous releases from the company. If it ain’t broke don’t fix it, right?
Testing the XPG Gammix S70: When Winning Runs in the Family
We test all of our PCI Express 4.0 SSDs on an MSI MEG X570 Ace motherboard, with an AMD Ryzen 9 5950X CPU installed. We use 16GB of DDR4 Corsair Dominator RAM clocked to 3,600MHz, and the system employs an Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Ti Founders Edition as its discrete graphics card.
PCMark 10 Overall Storage Test
First up is the overall PCMark 10 storage test, from UL, running the full storage suite. This score represents how well a drive does throughout the entire PCMark 10 run. It’s the sanctioned score presented by UL’s software at the end of each run. After that are some more granular measures derived from PCMark 10’s background “traces.” These PCMark 10-derived tests simulate how quickly a drive is capable of launching a particular program (or, in the first case, booting Windows 10). The Windows 10 trace simulates the full Windows 10 operating system startup procedure and records how quickly the drive can feed the kind of data requested. (See more about how we test SSDs.)
After that is a game-launching test set, which simulates how quickly a drive can read shallow-depth small random 4K packages; 4K is one of the more commonly used file-block sizes for game installations, though that composition does depend on the title you’re playing. The drives are also put through a very important test for creative types, measuring launch speeds for Adobe programs. As anyone who regularly works in programs like Adobe Premiere or Photoshop can tell you, a constant pinch point is the time it takes for these programs to load.
Finally, our PCMark 10 copy tests are also derived from PCMark 10 traces. At first, these numbers might look low compared with the straight sequential-throughput numbers achieved in benchmarks like Crystal DiskMark 6.0 and AS-SSD, charted further down. But that’s due to the way this score is calculated and the nature of (and differences between) the source data sets.
In our PCMark 10 testing, the Gammix S70 posted the fastest results in booting Windows 10, launching Adobe Premiere, and performing the file-copy test. It did all this while also marking the highest overall PCMark 10 score to date, 2,795, edging out the Samsung SSD 980 Pro (1TB) at 2,655.
It tied for second with several drives on Photoshop launching, including both Samsung SSD 980 models (non-Pro and Pro), as well as just barely beating out the SK Hynix Gold P31 in the same test. Overall, the Gammix S70 performed above and beyond the call of duty (no game-launching pun intended) in our PCMark 10 tests, which makes its results in Crystal DiskMark 6.0 sequential runs a little confounding…
Sequential Speed and Copy Tests
Moving on from PCMark 10-derived numbers, the Crystal DiskMark 6.0 sequential tests simulate best-case, straight-line transfers of large files. After that is a series of file and folder transfers done in the SSD benchmarking utility AS-SSD. This trio of tests involves copying large files or folders from one location on the test drive to another.
This is where things fell a bit below five-star status. We actually received our first XPG Gammix S70 sample a few weeks before requesting the replacement drive that was recorded for this review. However, after testing both, we saw the same mild “problem”: slightly lower sequential read and write speeds (more so, writes) than advertised. Now, for what it’s worth: Even when the Gammix S70 is behind by ADATA’s own standard, it’s still beating the competition with all-time highs in sequential read speeds, just barely taking the crown from the Samsung SSD 980 Pro.
Crystal DiskMark 4K and AS-SSD copy tests were a bit middling from there, with both the T-Force Cardea II and Sabrent Rocket Q4 holding onto their respective positions in the growing lineup of PCIe 4.0 contenders. But the differences are slight, and there is no doubt there is some serious speed on tap here.
A Spectacular PCIe 4.0 Speedster
The Gammix S70, at least as tested today, is by a modest margin the fastest PCIe 4.0 SSD you can buy on shelves. Now, will that change if ADATA decides to swap out the spectacular InnoGrit IG2536 controller for something a little less flashy down the line? Possibly, but after the response we saw from the enthusiast community on the topic of component switching in the ADATA SX8200 Pro, hopefully the buck stops with the Gammix S70.
And this drive has upside: The current controller isn’t perfectly tuned just yet. We used the current sequential speed record-holder, the stellar Samsung SSD 980 Pro, as our control when troubleshooting those Crystal DiskMark results, and that drive had no problems nailing its rated spec on the testbed both before and after the S70 was run from the very same slot. Two different test drives with two different firmware versions failed to solve the Gammix S70’s slight sequential-speed shortfall, but that is tempered by the fact that those speeds are still the fastest we’ve tested. (In the end, it’s a bit like complaining that the filet mignon isn’t quite tender enough.) Possible further firmware tweaks allow room for improvement.
The drive may be less write-durable than some, but it is rated to outlast the Samsung SSD 980 Pro, and at both this price and performance tier, it’s really the only competitor worth mentioning. If you have a slender M.2 slot and need a drive with a (safely) removable heatsink, we’d recommend the Samsung instead. But if you’re just on the hunt for the most performance you can get today from a PCIe 4.0 entry, the Gammix S70 hands the mainstream M.2 SSD crown once again back to ADATA. Let’s see how long it can hold onto it this time!
