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In the world of M.2 drives, Patriot's Viper VPR100 RGB is a bit of a rarity, in that it is one of a very few drives that have RGB lightning – and even rarer still the RGB effects are controlled by RGB APP Sync software. In fact, the VPR100 is the world's first M.2 drive using it. Patriot's Viper RGB APP software has eight standard effects including a Dark mode that switches the RGB off. The software also allows the colour of the five lighting zones in the heatsink to be changed as well as the speed and brightness of the effects.
The Viper VPR100 uses the same Phison PS5012-E12 controller and Toshiba 3D TLC NAND combination as the standard non-RGB Viper VPN100. Although the RGB-equipped heatsink cooling the VPR100 RGB drive looks impressively large, it's still 3.5mm lower than the lump that keeps the Viper VPN100 cool, but the RGB heatsink is 3mm wider.
Patriot quotes Sequential performance figures for the 1TB model as up to 3,300MB/s for reads and up to 2,900MB/s – looking at the spec sheet, these are the figures from ATTO testing. Also listed in the specs are the Sequential performance figures for the drive when tested with CrystalDiskMark; 3,900MB/s for reads and the same 2,900MB/s for writes. When tested with ATTO 4, we couldn't quite get to those maximum ATTO scores, the review drive producing figures of 3,180MB/s for reads and 2,830MB/s for writes.
Random performance is quoted as up to 700,000 IOPS for reads and up to 650,000 IOPS writes. We couldn’t match those figures with our standard 4-threaded tests, where the best read score we got was 367,566 IOPS and 184,572 IOPS for writes. The only time we saw figures approaching the official figures was when the drive was tested with the Peak Performance profile in CrystalDiskMark 7. The drive produced a read figure of 719,491 IOPS with writes at 622,990 IOPS, both figures at a QD of 32 using 16 threads.
Now to a rather important little nugget contained in the specification sheet. To quote Patriot, “RGB sync may decrease up to 20-30% Read/Write speed” which sounds a little concerning, to say the least. We tested the drive as a system drive (Windows 10) and as a secondary drive, using all eight standard RGB modes in the Viper RGB software with Crystal Disk Mark 7's Peak Performance test to push the drive and saw hardly any movement in the Sequential read/write figures.
However, when we then pushed the drive with CrystalDiskMark and used the RGB sync software of our two test rig motherboards; ASUS AURA and MSI's Mystic Light, then we saw some pretty dramatic drops in performance as per the note in the specification sheet.
The first thing that comes to mind after seeing these drops in performance is that maybe the drive is getting too hot and throttling back – but although the drive does get very warm on occasions, some of the bigger drops occur when the drive is actually running cooler than others.
It appears that the Phison PS5012-E12 controller has real problems when the drive is being pushed hard and using certain RGB modes at the same time. With some RGB modes, Sequential Read performance is affected but by far the biggest performance drops occurred during our Sequential write tests.
Patriot quotes a TBW endurance figure of 1600TB for the VPR100, which although impressive is less than the VPN100 which gets a rating of 1665TB.
The VPR100 1TB is available from Amazon UK for £179.99 HERE.
Pros
- Overall performance.
- Endurance rating.
- RGB.
Cons
- 4K performance didn't match official maximums in some tests.
- RGB sync has the potential to affect read/write performance.
KitGuru says: Patriot's Viper VPR100 combines good performance with very good endurance, but just bear in mind that certain RGB sync options may cost you a chunk of read/write performance.
