How Much Does it Cost?
The drive looks much more expensive than it is. In fact, the current NVMe market is very much in the consumers favour. The drive is on Amazon at just £113.01 for the 512GB Aorus M.2 NVMe drive. Readers in the US can find it for just $119.99. Again, that’s very competitive. You can get the 256GB model even cheaper at just £71.21 and $79.99 too. However, the 256GB model has slightly slower read/write speeds.
Overview
Typically, the motherboard series this M.2 drive is designed to be paired with are used for gaming. It’s no shocker then that this drive would mostly appeal to the gaming crowd. It’s got a strong focus on aesthetics, but not at the cost of form and function. It’s more likely gamers will care about the RGB and stylish design than someone building a workstation would; at least that’s my take on it.
Performance
If you’re looking to shred your boot times down to a few seconds, it’ll certainly get the job done. What it really excels at, however, is quickly loading much larger files. When modern games are now clocking in from 50GB to 100GB, you’ll be dealing with huge assets when loading games. For some games, this can mean massive load times between sections of a game. With this drive, those times are gone in the blink of an eye. Like reading the tool-tips on loading screens? You may have to Google them instead. Not only did the read time come extremely close to the specifications, we actually exceeded the write times, which is a pleasant surprise.
Build Quality
This is by far one of the nicest M.2 drives I’ve ever laid my hands on. The fact it comes with the M.2 heatsink pre-installed makes it very user-friendly too. Just plug and play, and you can reap all those benefits right away. Sure, most motherboards come with their own shields these days, but you don’t have to use them. This one is thicker and more robust than even the stock AORUS ones, so I’d suggest using it.
the integrated RGB lighting is up there with the best too. Since it also offers customisation, you can sync it with your other hardware, pick any colour, or turn it off. The choice is really all yours.
Should I Buy One?
At this price, it would be rude not to. The prices of M.2 drives have dropped so much this last year alone. However, big performance, great build quality, and a competitive price go a long way to justifying this one.
