Kingston FURY Renegade PCIe 4.0 NVMe M.2 SSD 500GB Review

The Kingston FURY Renegade SSD is a PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD built for gamers and enthusiasts looking to further improve their gaming setups

Next gen is here, but the competition is still as fierce here in the PCIe 4.0 storage space. What we have here today is Kingston's FURY Renegade SSD, a PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD built for gamers and enthusiasts looking to further improve their gaming setups with a storage upgrade. Let's see how it fares.  

Kingston FURY Renegade Technical Specifications

Form Factor	M.2 2280
Interface	PCIe 4.0 NVMe
Capacities	500GB, 1TB, 2TB, 4TB
Weight	500GB-1TB – 7g  2TB-4TB – 9.7g
Controller	Phison E18
NAND	3D TLC
Sequential read/write	500GB – 7,300/3,900MB/s 1TB – 7,300/6,000MB/s 2TB – 7,300/7,000MB/s 4TB – 7,300/7,000MB/s
Total Bytes Written	500GB – 500TBW  1TB – 1.0PBW  2TB – 2.0PBW  4TB – 4.0PBW
Price and Warranty	Php5,450 (500GB) Limited 5-year warranty with free technical support

 

PACKAGING AND CLOSER LOOK

Kingston has been shipping its storage solutions in that familiar blister pack, and the same goes for the FURY Renegade. The drive is enclosed in a plastic shell, while the size is indicated up front. To note, be careful with the plastic shell in there when you're opening it up. It's not interlocked so the SSD itself might tumble out.

There also seems to be a key for Acronis True Image HD. Similar to the KC3000 we've reviewed a couple of months back, this also isn't explicitly stated, so don't chuck the packaging out right away when you've finished installing.

And now here's FURY Renegade in all its glory. Note the slim graphene aluminum heat spreader here that bears similar aesthetics to the company's FURY memory lineup, which is a nice touch for design consistency. I personally prefer the sleekness of the KC3000, but this isn't bad at all. And hey, this will likely sit behind the GPU so there's really not much you can ask for when it comes to that.

PERFORMANCE

Kingston rates the FURY Renegade with a 7,300MB/s read and 3,900MB/s write speed for the 500GB version, which is a step up by 300MB/s read speed compared to the KC3000 regardless of the capacity option. Let's see how it stacks up against the 1TB version.

Test System Setup

Motherboard	AORUS X570 ELITE
CPU	AMD Ryzen 5 3600X
GPU	COLORFUL iGame GeForce GTX 1080 Vulcan X OC
RAM	ZADAK 16GB DDR4 @3600MHz
Cooler	Noctua NH-D15
Motherboard	GIGABYTE X570 AORUS Elite
PSU	CORSAIR RM750 80 Plus Gold
Case	Thermaltake Core P3
OS	Windows 10 Pro
Monitor	ASUS VP249QGR 144Hz 24-inch Monitor

PCMark 10 - Full System Drive Benchmark

PCMark features a full system drive benchmark that utilizes a wide-ranging set of real-world tracer from popular applications and common tasks. 

Crystal Disk Mark

CrystalDiskMark is an open source benchmark software used to measure the transfer speed of different media data storage drives including such as HD, SSD, USB memory, SD card and NAS

AS SSD Benchmark

AS SSD tests the sequential or random read/write performance without using the cache. There's also a compression test included in the software.

Anvil Storage Utilities Benchmark

Anvil Storage Utilities is a benchmark tool that offers its users a simple way of assessing the read and write performance of SSDs and HDDs.

ATTO Disk Benchmark

ATTO Disk Benchmark is an industry leading benchmark that help measure performance of system storage such as hard drives, solid state drives, RAID arrays, and so forth.

Final Fantasy XIV Endwalker Benchmark Tool

The Final Fantasy XIV Endwalker Benchmark Tool is a convenient tool that measures your computer's hardware performance and at the same time also logs the total loading time between runs.

Final Fantasy XV Windows Edition

Final Fantasy XV has very long load times during start up, so we'll be using this opportunity to log the time of drives to boot up the game from the main menu to the start of a new game when the loading screen appears.

CONCLUSION

So, here we are. Kingston has built a solid lineup of NVMe SSDs both for budget and extreme segments in the consumer space, and the FURY Renegade makes it all the more evident. While, yeah, PCIe 3.0 and SATA can still do the trick for the average consumer, there are still those willing to go the extra mile looking to squeeze out any performance they can get out of their setups. There's no argument here that even the 500GB version can offer blazing fast speeds to get rid of those loading screens as quickly as possible and thereby inadvertently skipping the tips that come along with them for first-world problems. It's that fast.

As we check here on PCHub's online store and Lazada listing, the FURY Renegade comes with a Php5,450 for the 500GB version at the time of writing. It's also backed with that longstanding 5-year warranty by Kingston.