CrystalDiskMark is a useful benchmark to measure the theoretical performance levels of hard drives and SSDs. We are using v8.0.
Using the CrystalDiskMark 4K QD1 1thread benchmark, the read score of 83.06MB/s for the Lexar NM790 is a little slower than the last Lexar drive we looked at, the heatsink version of the Professional NM800 Pro, but the write performance of the NM790 is significantly faster.
Looking at the benchmark result screens, we can confirm the official Sequential ratings of the drive of up to 7,400MB/s and up to 6,500MB/s for read and writes respectively with a best read test figure of 7,437MB/s and a best write result of 6,439MB/s. Although the write result doesn't hit the official maximum it certainly is in the ballpark.
Those Sequential test results of 7,437MB/s and 6,439MB/s for read and writes respectively are good enough to see the drive in the top five of the Gen 4 consumer drives we've tested to date.
Peak Performance Profile
Again we could confirm the official figures with the Peak Performance profile test although this time the write result of 6,418MB/s was further off the official 6,500MB/s maximum rating.
We haven't seen an official 4K random performance rating for the NM790 but the controller supports up to 1,000K IOPS for both read and writes. Using the Peak Performance profile test we saw a best-read result of 931,606 IOPS, slower than the controller rating with writes at 1,048,635 IOPS, a little faster than the official figure,
Those 4K random read/write figures are the fastest we've seen to date for a Gen 4 x4 consumer drive by quite some margin.
Real World Profile
In the Real World profile default tests, the NM790 produced Sequential read/write figures of 5,011MB/s and 5,870MB/s respectively which makes it the second fastest Gen4 drive we've seen to date in this test behind WD's Black SN850X Heatsink model.