PATRIOT Viper VPR100 RGB M.2 1TB SSD Review

By Nathan Kirsch

Final Thoughts & Conclusions

The Patriot Viper VPR100 series looks great and will certainly be appealing for those looking for an M.2 SSD with RGB lighting. The black aluminum heat spreader looks great and the RGB lighting looks great. We managed to exceed the 1TB drives rated speed of 3,300 MB/s read and 2,900 MB/s write on our test platform, but that was with the RGB lights disabled. If you enable certain RGB lighting effects it can decrease performance by as much as 30%. So, be aware of what lighting mode you are using and understand using your favorite lighting mode may impact overall system performance with respect to your drive speeds.

Patriot Viper VPR100 RGB SSD

The VPR100 1TB drive that we reviewed had a 1,600 TBW endurance rating and is backed by a 5-year warranty. That means you can write ~876.7GB of data to the drive daily over the course of warranty period and still be covered. That is a very generous endurance rating as the average consumer or enthusiast doesn’t come close to writing that much data to their drive on a daily basis.

When it comes to pricing the Patriot Viper VPR100 1TB capacity model that we reviewed is $189.99 shipped. At $0.19 per GB you are paying a bit extra for the RGB lighting as you can find similar drives without RGB lighting powered by the same Phison E12 controller and Toshiba TLC NAND Flash for around $129.99 shipped. So, you are looking at spending around $60 extra bucks to get RGB lighting that may or may not lower your performance by up to 30%. That is a tough pill to swallow and that really stinks as the Patriot Viper VPR100 series looks really good. Patriot just needs to find a way to pull off the RGB lighting without impacting performance and they would have a winner.

Legit Bottom Line: The Patriot Viper VPR100 series delivers impressive performance and looks amazing, but once you enable RGB lighting effects the performance might be negatively impacted.