support this interface and card, well that
is essentially all UEFI systems that have
been updated can support this card. A PCI
Express 3.0 compliant motherboard of
course will be necessary as well, but there
is no reason why systems as far back as
P67 platforms may not be able to use the
INTEL 750.
What you should also know but perhaps
of lesser importance to you is that this
drive does come in a 2.5” form factor as
well. The difference here however is that
the connecting interface is SFF-8639 and
seeing as there are no motherboards
that support this interface that I’m aware
of. You will need an add-in PCI-Express
card to facilitate this connection method.
Or alternatively use the ASUS Hyper-Kit,
which will allow you to use this drive
on their supported motherboards, via
connectivity to the M.2 slot. Of their
boards. Since this is an additional cost,
one would imagine that the PCI-Express
version of the 750 is more preferable if
only because it is a simple drop in upgrade.
Finally we come to the performance of
the 750. The benchmark results speak for
themselves. Initially the graphs included a
number of 2.5” SATA SSDs for comparison,
but given just how much faster these
PCI-Express solutions were, it made the
graphs look nonsensical for the most part.
Thus it was only fair that we only showed
you results from the Samsung XP 941
used as a reference against the 750 and
the Phoenix Blade. Keep in mind that the
barring the newer SM951, the XP 941 was
the fastest M.2 drive we could find, easily
out doing all SATA based SSDs on the
market, by some margin as well.
It is clear from the results that the 750
is far ahead of the XP941, in all disciplines
tested. There’s simply no comparison
between the two drives. It is often hard
to contextualize the performance of this
drive in isolation, or against other high
performance SSDs which most people
may not be familiar with. Against the much
celebrated XP941, the 750 shows that it is
a generation ahead with incredible results
all across the board. It is also worth adding
that the results are very consistent as well
right across the drive. Easily the fastest
SSD performance tested here to date, with
sequential performance that is staggering
to say the least.
Pricing aside, the INTEL 750 is a
staggeringly fast drive that delivers far
more than I could have ever hoped for. One
can only imagine where INTEL will take the
performance envelope next.
G.SKILL PHOENIX BLADE 480GIB
The Phoenix Blade is an older drive than
the INTEL counterpart in this editorial.
It features no NVMe support and it only
requires PCI-Express 2.0 x8 bandwidth.
By numbers, this should be the equivalent
of PCI-Express 3.0 x4, so there isn’t much
between these two drives in how they
connect to the system.
When this drive initially made its way
to market, it carried an extraordinary
price tag and what you see here today is
a price that’s been reduced by as much
as 30%. Certainly an appreciated change
and adjustment by either G.SKILL or its
retailers. At the original price, it would
have made its existence that much
harder to justify, especially of late with
such strong competition from the likes of
KINGSTON and others.
Despite the Phoenix Blade relying on
an older AHCI interface. It is no slouch
and the performance it brings with it is
truly something to marvel at. Especially
given how simplistically, (or relatively
so) G.SKILL achieves this. The Phoenix
Blade is in essence a RAID setup that is
transparent to the system. It carries four
SF-2282 controllers which work in tandem
to deliver blisteringly fast performance.
How G.Skill goes about this (or at
least its OEM) is via a custom SBC2082 controller that in-turn is fed via the
SF-2282 controllers. NAND is courtesy
of Toshiba 19nm chips, all of which
G.Skill would have us believe result
in a symmetrical 2GiB/s in read and
write performance. Oddly enough 4K
Read performance while impressive
isn’t amazing at 90K IOPS, but write
Issue 34 | 2015 The OverClocker 23