Corsair Neutron and
Neutron GTX 240GB SSD
EDITOR’S CHOICE
AWARD
ERP: $209.99 | $249.99 | Website: www.corsair.com
Test Machine
Intel Core i7 3770K
GIGABYTE Z77X-UP7
Kingston HyperX 3K 240GB
CoolerMaster Silent Pro M2
1500W
Windows 7 64-bit SP1
W
e’ve been looking at
SSD’s in every issue
of TheOverclocker
for almost two years.
Depending on the popularity
of the controller and NAND
memory at any given time,
the performance was rather
predictable, or at least, the
differences between the
best and the worst similarly
configured drives were
negligible.
We hadn’t had the best
experience with CORSAIR
drives, so going into this
review we weren’t expecting
much if anything at all. So it
was with this attitude that we
were pleasantly surprised
to find not only the fastest
12 The OverClocker Issue 21 | 2012
SSD from CORSAIR ever, but
one of the fastest consumer
SSDs around. The GTX is
certainly the quickest drive
we’ve tested here, eclipsing
our previous favourite the
Plextor M3 PRO by some
margin as well. We had no
previous experience with the
LM87800 controller, so this
kind of performance was
truly surprising. In a sea of
SandForce powered SSDs
the Link A media controller
stands out for all the right
reasons and as far as we’re
concerned, there’s really
no reason to consider any
SandForce drive from here
on in.
We’ll not bore you with the
appearance of the drives;
they are standard SSD’s with
CORSAIR stickers on them.
Worth noting is that both
drives are 7mm in height,
making them “ideal” for ultrabooks and other portable
platforms where height and
weight is an issue. Short of
that, it’s business as usual.
What makes the drives tick
besides the shared controller
is a total of 256MB of DDR2
800MHz DRAM, used for
cache. These are two 128MB
chips on each drive but the
differences between the GTX
and the regular drive actually
stem from the different NAND
used. The GTX uses the more
expensive and evidently faster
Toshiba Toggle Mode 24nm
NAND, while the normal drive
settles with 25nm Micron
NAND. During testing we
saw that while the difference
between the drives is easily
measured, it may not be
worth the additional cash
for the GTX drive because
they really are that close in
performance. Having said
that, the price difference is
less than $40 between the
two, so ultimately you’ll have
to decide if the performance
advantage of the GTX drive is
worth the asking price.
On to the results we
obtained, well what can we
say? We moved to a different
and more consistent testing
suite that’s why you won’t