Patriot Viper VP4300 PCI Express 4.0 NVMe M.2 SSD Review

In this review we looked at the Viper VP4300 NVMe SSD.  This drive supports PCI Express 4.0 and is available in two capacities, 1TB and 2TB as was featured in this review.  When Zen 2 was launched during Computex 2019 they talked about the speed benefits of PCI Express 4.0 and Gigabyte even had a 4-Way NVMe RAID demonstration on PCI Express 4.0 offering 15GB/s of sequential read across a massive 8TB array.

The Viper VP4300 didn’t deliver a 15GB/s read but did hit the advertised 7GB/s and a very respectable 6.7GB/s write when the drive was run on a PCI Express 4.0 based system.  These numbers dropped to 3GB/s on PCI Express 3.0 systems still making it one of the fastest drives I have ever tested on either platform.

As expected, the 2TB drive featured in this review does offer a faster write speed when compared to the 1TB version.  I suspect this is due to how the controller is configured and the ability to split read and write data across multiple NAND chips.  I’m not going to tell you that you need the 2TB drive but, you need the 2TB drive if you care about storage performance.

One feature about the Viper VP4300 that surprised me the most is the inclusion of two additional thermal solutions for the drive.  Many modern enthusiast grade motherboards come with integrated thermal solutions for M.2 storage devices and they work extremely well making the extras a bit of a mystery.  Well, turns out that many mainstream motherboards, OEM machines and servers have no thermal solution for M.2 storage.

The aluminum heatsink comes with a rubber style thermal pad which can be replaced with the Graphene strip if you want better thermal performance or your build has limited space.  These coolers can be used together or separate making them quite useful.

They are held in place with pre-applied adhesive which seems to be the preferred method though I would have preferred something more mechanical.  Due to the adhesive the Graphene thermal strip can only be used once.

Great Performance
Small Form Factor
Super Fast NVMe
Available in Sizes up to 2TB
PCI Express 4.0 Support
Dual Thermal Solutions Included
2000TB Terabytes Written Lifespan

Extra thermal solutions held on with adhesive