Kingston NV3 SSD Review: The Budget Gen 4 SSD King is Back

There’s a reason why Kingston hold the record streak as the Number one SSD manufacturer globally for few years, because they know what they are making, catering a wide consumer base with options for everyone. Among all the SSDs they have made, the NV Series holds the record for best price-per-GB in our opinion and in this Kingston NV3 SSD review, it’s safe to say that the Budget Gen 4 SSD king is back for another round.

Kingston NV3 SSD Review

Packaging and Specification

Kingston’s effort in keeping the packaging absolutely clean and straightforward is a good sign – this keeps the cost of obtaining a new SSD lower and whatever you pay is going more towards the hardware than the packaging. That said, once you slice it open, you have the SSD all in its glory. It’s been a while since Kingston included an Acronis TrueImage key bundled with their SSDs, and it looks like it’s gone for good. The NV2 didn’t come with one and the NV3 doesn’t come with one either.

Immediately when you do look at the SSD, you have the following. Starting with the NAND Flash chips, which in this case, is a 3D NAND TLC chip made by Kingston that’s being utilized under the hood. We received a 2TB SSD for this review, and it comes with two NAND flashes – which should mean that its 1024GB each – unlike the Samsung EVO 990 Plus we reviewed, which uses a single 2TB NAND flash. (Crazy!).

As for the controller, Kingston is using Silicon Motion SM2268XT2G controller, which is made for PCIe Gen 4×4 NVMe 2.0. We are no strangers to Silicon Motion controllers as they are widely used by many SSD manufacturers. The Kingston NV Series has always been a DRAM-less SSD till date and it remains to be the same with the NV3. As for the rest of the specification of the Kingston NV3 SSD, you can find it below:

• 3D NAND TLC PCIe 4×4 NVMe SSD
• 2 2280 Form Factor
• Read and Write Speeds (2TB) – 6000MB/s and 5000MB/s

Note: Kingston NV3 comes in different storage configurations and the Read and Write speeds vary. SSDs with 2TB and above follows the speeds mentioned above whereas 1TB has a lower 4000MB/s write speed and 500GB gets a lower 5000MB/s Read and 3000MB/s write speeds.

Performance

For testing the SSD, we resorted to our usual tools: CrystalDiskMark and ATTO Disk Benchmark with CrystalDiskInfo as a way to monitor the temperature and such. Right off the bat, we must say, we were impressed with the numbers we were looking at. Both the Read/Write speeds in Sequential1M surpassed the “on-paper” specification, with 6416MB/s read and 5965MB/s write. We then proceeded to perform a few more test to see if the temperature affects the performance, which is true for any SSD. While the temperature did see a rise, the NV3 held up like a champion in its performance department with R/W speeds of 6446/5963MB/s.

We then proceeded with our next benchmark, ATTO Disk Benchmark, which gave us numbers we’d expect with SSDs like this – there are moments where we do see the SSD hitting the 6GB/s mark and the write speeds surpassing the 5GB/s mark. This proves one thing right, that Kingston is serious about giving more than they should and the advertised figures are more of a realistic one.

Temperatures with the NV3 was as one could expect: idle temperatures were hovering in the 37-40 degree Celsius mark and during intense benchmark moments, we saw the temperature rise as high as 60 degrees. Otherwise, the SSD was performing as one would expect.

The lack of a DRAM might be a dealbreaker for many but with HBM helping out, it isn’t a big deal breaker to be honest. In fact, at the time of writing, our PC is running two Kingston drives with DRAM-less which we have used for editing and day to day use and it has been performing well. Now you will require a DRAM SSD if you want to get for your PS5 as it doesn’t support HBM. But otherwise, this SSD is fantastic for every day use case scenarios.

Conclusion

Kingston has always been a value king with the NV lineup and the NV3 is no different. With the 2TB variant priced at RM 625 on Shoppe, I must say that this is a pretty good deal for a 2TB SSD with decent performance. There’s a good chance you can find for much lower, for RM 500 or 550 – and if you do find it for that price, it’s a no brainer. And once again, Kingston has trumped the budget value for money per GB again with their NV lineup.

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