Patriot Viper VP4100 Gen4 1TB SSD Review
SSD Temperature & Conclusion
When it comes to SSD temperature testing we figured out that this is a really tricky thing to measure and that is why most review sites don’t show temperature results. At first we were going to use the minimum and maximum temperatures reported by S.M.A.R.T. and call it a day. That looked good, but while looking closer at the data we noticed that some of the drives with the highest peak value actually averaged out to be much cooler over our entire test suite that takes over three hours per pass to complete. For example, the Intel Optane 905P 960GB drive has the second lowest maximum temperature of all the drives that we have tested, but it also happens to be tied as having the highest average temperature. Seeing high temperatures on a drive might persuade someone not to buy that particular model, so the average temperature result seems to be very important result to include.
All temperature testing was done in a Corsair iCUE 465X RGB case ($129.99 shipped) with an extra Corsair LL Series LL120 RGB fan added to the back of the case to help as an exhaust fan. We then set the fan speed in the UEFI of the ASUS TUF Gaming X570-Plus (Wi-Fi) to run at 50% fan speed.
The drive being tested was then screwed down in the primary M.2 slot that is located between the CPU socket and the primary PCIe 4.0 x16 slot that holds the AMD Radeon RX 5600 XT 6GB graphics card. The tempered glass side panel was then placed back on the case before our test suite was run. Ambient room temperature at the time of testing was 21C or right around 70F.
Using the S.M.A.R.T. temperature sensor we found the Patriot Viper VP4100 1TB drive had a minimum temperature 0f 39C, a maximum temperature of 67C and an average of 43C inside our test system with the tempered glass panel on during our period of testing.
The heatsink on the VP4100 did a great job keeping the drive cool! There was no thermal throttling experienced during testing and there should be no heat concerns in a properly cooled system.
Final Thoughts & Conclusions
The Patriot Viper VP4100 is not a new drive by any means, but it still remains to be one of the fastest SSDs on the market today. Phison’s E16 controller appears to run better than ever with v13.0 firmware and this drive should be appealing to those that have a platform that can take advantage of the PCIe 4.0 interface. We were able to reach the drive top rated read speed of 5,000 MB/s and came fairly close to the 4,400 MB/s write speed in CrystalDiskMark. The heatsink that comes on the VP4100 PCIe Gen4 SSD keeps it from overheating as heat these drives to generate a fair bit of heat.
Not only does it run fast, but it also looks good thanks to the aggressive looking black heatsink that Patriot is using. This is a mature drive that has delivered solid performance for more than a year, so there really isn’t anything to be concerned about on that front. It comes backed by a 5-year warranty and the 1,800 TBW endurance rating is about as good as you are going to get on a 1TB drive. That comes out to just over one complete drive write per day over the 5-year warranty period!
Legit Bottom Line: The Patriot Viper VP4100 PCIe Gen4 SSD is fast, but they are getting tough to find at a good price this late in the product life cycle.