The Lexar NM790 is an impressive performer with up to 1M IOPS random reads.
Lexar’s NM790 PCIe 4.0 SSD is our ‘best cheap PCIe 4.0 SSD for gaming’ pick, offering extremely rapid speeds. It maxes out at 7400MB/s reads and 6500MB/s writes, near the boundary of the PCIe 4.0 standard, and random read/write figures are impressive too despite lacking a DRAM cache, using HMB instead. So I thought it worth mentioning that you can now pick up this 2TB high-end drive for £85, following a price drop from £93 at Amazon UK.
So those read/write figures - the top PCIe 4.0 drives like the Samsung 990 Pro and WD SN850x are able to top 1M IOPS, and the NM790 comes darn close with a 1M IOPS read rating and a 0.9M IOPS write rating - impressive stuff, even if it’s a shade below the very top options.
Here’s what hardware maven James had to say about the 790 after testing it:
I’m actually currently testing the larger 4TB model for Eurogamer, and the drive recorded some impressive speeds in both synthetic and real-world testing. In fact, I also named the NM790 one of the best PCIe 4.0 SSDs over at Eurogamer, so you’re getting a double-rated SSD at a great price.
In any case, this is a solid deal for an NVMe SSD of this size, especially one that comes with RPS and Digital Foundry seals of approval.
