Kingston NV3 PCIe 4.0 NVMe M.2 2TB SSD Review

The drive pormises to deliver up to 6000 MB/s read and 5000 MB/s write, so obviously, it’s exceeding that level of performance here, with 6271.70MB/s and 5716.32MB/s respectively. At least, this is the case with the controller our particular version has, with the BOM design, though I suspect there will be some variance throughout the range but would also expect it to still be hitting the claimed numbers as a minimum.

We saw this reflected in the IOPs too, with consistant performance, and RND4K hitting around the 260K mark, which we would have expected for a drive of this specification.

We run two DiskBench tests, one for 64MB of smaller files, which gave us 213.520 MB/s which is about right for such a small set of files.

However, on our 50GB test, which is less files but much bigger in size, we saw the copy speed coming in over 3000 MB/s. I would have liked this a bit higher, but honestly, it’s about right for this price range and specification of drive.

We see this reflected in the ATTO test too, with the drive not getting up to full speed on the read speeds until we get to 512KB blocks, and write speeds from around 4MB blocks, so depending on compression and file types, the drive will take a little while to get up to speed.

ANVIL’s results always come in lower than what we see in CrystalDiskMark, but still we’re seeing around 4700 MB/s for the Sequential 4MB test on both read and write speeds, which is very good, and again coming in higher than 250K IOPS on the 4K QD16 read test and just under for the 4K QD4 write test.

AS SSD scored strongly, with again similar speeds to ANVIL’s, and an overall score of 8730 which is on-par for a mid-range Gen4 drive on this price and nature.

AS SSD’s copy benchmark test shows very fast times for IOS, Program and Game, with fast speeds in each test too.

Read speeds are pretty consistent in our compression benchmark, and while the write speeds see a slight wobble here and there, they’re largely in the ballpark of 5000 MB/s, so nothing to complain about there when looking at a sustain test like this.

If you’re using this drive for content creation, you’ll be glad to see it can read and write 5K RED 10bit YUV uncompressed video files with no issues giving speeds around 5000MB/s in both the read and the write performance.

When it comes to gaming, the drive is plenty fast to handle the latest games, and it crushed our Endwalker Benchmark scoring “extremely high” overall with some really fast load times for each scene so loading up games in a real world scenario should reflect similar results.

In 3DMark it scored well again, with a score of 3734, but most importantly, we saw good average access times for all games and scenarios, which is going to help alleviate stuttering when loading assets mid-game.

As I said before, cooling wouldn’t be an issue, and doesn’t require a hefty heatsink bolted onto it. Most motherboards now have an included M.2 shield, which is how we tested the drive and with the NV3 nestled comfortably beneath it, we never managed to see temperatures over 42c, which means that thermal throttling is unlikely to ever be an issue.