TeamGroup’s T-Force Cardea IOPS ($149.99 for the 1TB model we tested), an internal solid-state drive geared to gamers, is cool times two. The reason why? It comes with a pair of heatsinks: a thin, copper-graphene heat spreader, as well as a hulking, finned aluminum dissipator. (You can install one or the other, or neither, if your PC has a built-in cooling solution for M.2 drives.) This M.2 drive is mid-priced and boasts a high durability rating, but despite being named for “input/output operations per second,” it yielded only average results in our battery of gaming and other performance tests. Still, it’s a solid mid-road pick among 1TB NVMe drives.
IOPS: What’s in a Name?
TeamGroup rates this M.2 SSD at 680K read and 670K write IOPS, boasting on its website that gamers will “never have to worry about the read/write speed. Game loading will be completed first and provide the key to winning every game without lagging.” Be that as it may, IOPS—which measures the overall capability of a drive independent of application—is not a stat that we formally measure, and have no comparison data across other products. In testing the Cardea IOPS’s gaming prowess, we took it through our normal PCMark 10, Crystal DiskMark 6, and AS-SSD testing—which includes game-loading and 4K read and write tests—and based our evaluation on those benchmarks.
The T-Force Cardea IOPS is a four-lane PCI Express (PCIe) 3.0 NVMe drive manufactured in an M.2 Type-2280 (80mm long) “gumstick” design. It employs the NVMe protocol over the PCIe 3.0 bus, and features a Phison PS5012-E12 controller. The drive is based on Toshiba’s 96-layer 3D triple-level-cell (TLC) NAND flash. (Puzzled by this lingo? Check out our handy SSD dejargonizer.)
The T-Force IOPS is rated to hit a maximum sequential throughput of 3,400MBps read and 3,000MBps write. The drive is unusual in that it only comes in a single capacity, 1TB, which at its $149.99 list price comes to 15 cents per gigabyte. This is in the middle of the cost spectrum for PCIe 3.0 internal solid-state drives. Looking at several Editors’ Choice award-winning models, the 1TB versions of the Intel SSD 670p, Crucial P5, and ADATA XPG Spectrix S40G also sell for 15 cents per gig, while the Samsung SSD 980 (the non-Pro version) goes for 13 cents per gigabyte.
TeamGroup backs the IOPS with a five-year warranty, which is typical of the better internal SSDs we encounter. The drive also comes with an excellent durability lifetime rating of 1,665TBW (terabytes written). Among the abovementioned 1TB competitors, the ADATA S40G is rated at 640TBW, the Samsung SSD 980 and Crucial P5 at 600TBW, and the QLC-based Intel 670p at 370TBW.
Two Ways to Beat the Heat
TeamGroup is one of the more creative companies in developing ways to keep its SSDs from overheating, as we saw with the ceramic cooler for the recent TeamGroup T-Force Cardea Ceramic C440.
The IOPS comes with two cooling solutions. The first, suitable for laptops or tight spaces on motherboards, is a flat, thin graphene heat spreader—similar to the one found on the company’s T-Force Cardea Zero Z440—which attaches to the drive with a sticky strip.
The other is a hulking aluminum heatsink for roomier desktop environments. This black, finned device is similar to but more conservatively colored than the red heatsink that comes with the T-Force Cardea II, which is a good fit for windowed gaming rigs. (That said, if you’re looking to bling out your PC, you can’t get an internal SSD that’s much more rad than the programmable, RGB-lit ADATA Spectrix S40G mentioned earlier.)
We tested the Cardea IOPS drive, however, with the standard over-slot heatsink that is in place on our Asus Prime X299 testbed’s mainboard, for consistency of results. With this large in-place heatsink, which spreads over the slot and extends northward over the chipset as well, it should allow for greater surface area and cooling than any passive add-on heatsink with the footprint dimensions of an 80mm M.2 drive.
Testing the T-Force Cardea IOPS: Perfectly Okay-OPS
We test all of our Serial ATA (SATA) and PCI Express 3.0 SSDs on PC Labs’ main storage testbed, which is built on that mentioned Prime X299 Deluxe motherboard with an Intel Core i9-10980XE Extreme Edition processor. The system has 16GB of DDR4 Corsair Dominator RAM clocked to 3,600MHz and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Ti Founders Edition graphics card. (See more about how we test SSDs.) PCIe 4.0 drives are tested on a different, AMD Ryzen-based desktop with 4.0 support.
PCMark 10 Overall Storage Test
PCMark 10’s overall storage benchmark, from UL—the world’s leading independent benchmark developer—runs a full suite of typical drive-access tasks. The scores below tagged as the Overall Score are the software’s sanctioned results, representing how well a drive does throughout the entire PCMark 10 run.
After that are some more granular measures derived from PCMark 10’s background “traces.” These represent a simulation of how quickly a drive is capable of executing the key kinds of file reads to launch a particular program, or in the case of the Windows 10 trace, completing the operating system startup procedure.
Next comes a game-launching test set, which simulates how quickly a drive can read shallow-depth small random 4K packages, one of the more commonly used file-block sizes for game installations. The drives are also put through a launch test for Adobe creative apps. As anyone who works with video or images in Adobe Premiere Pro or Photoshop can tell you, these powerful programs can leave you waiting while they launch.
Finally, the PCMark 10 copy tests are also derived from PCMark 10 traces. 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.
The T-Force IOPS turned in an overall PCMark 10 score of 1,938, in the middle of the pack of our PCI Express 3.0 comparison drives but trailing the Intel SSD 670p (2,304) and Samsung SSD 980 (2,450). Its game-launching scores were also middling, beating the ADATA S40G but falling well short of the Intel 670p, the Samsung 980, and the SK Hynix Gold P31.
Crystal DiskMark and AS-SSD Testing
Moving on from PCMark 10 numbers, our Crystal DiskMark 6.0 sequential tests simulate best-case, straight-line transfers of large files. Meanwhile, the utility’s 4K or random read/write tests simulate typical processes involved in program and game loads or bootup sequences.
After that are a series of file and folder transfers done in the benchmarking utility AS-SSD. This trio of tests involves copying large files or folders from one location on the test drive to another.
In the 4K testing, the Cardea IOPS did well in the write portion, joining a large group of drives clustered near the top of the pack. In the read portion, it was close to the bottom of a relatively narrow range of scores. Although it doesn’t set the pace among the PCIe 3.0 SSDs we’ve tested, the IOPS proved to be an overall respectable performer for its class.
Keeping Cool for the Long Run
You can find a slightly cheaper or quicker M.2 solid-state drive, but the TeamGroup T-Force Cardea IOPS is worth a look for system builders satisfied with its 1TB size. Its choice of heatsinks should appeal to longevity-minded buyers, as should its impressive lifetime terabytes-written rating.
We’d just keep a close eye on cost per gigabyte at the 1TB capacity, since list prices are one thing but street prices fluctuate all the time. Since its performance will be largely indistinguishable from most of the PCIe 3.0 drive set, look at it as a value and longevity play, if the pricing goes a bit lower than the pack.
