Patriot Viper VPR400 Gen4 NVMe M.2 SSD Review

For years the ongoing joke in the enthusiast PC world was based on three little letters, RGB.  The new lighting scheme had taken the world by storm since it was first introduced during Computex on the MSI X99 Godlike motherboard.  Since then, you can find RGB on everything from fans and watercooling gear to computer cases, motherboards, video cards memory and even storage systems.

In this review we will be looking at a new M.2 NVMe SSD from Patriot called the Viper VPR400.  This is the performance oriented NVMe SSD from Viper Gaming and is currently available in two capacities from 512GB up to 1TB.  The drive is powered by the latest Innogrit IG5220 Gen4x4 controller supporting PCI Express 4.0 on a single 2280 module.  While this drive is not the fastest in the Patriot lineup it is no slouch when it comes to performance with Sequential Read and Write performance up to 4600MB/s.

To help compliment the speed and capacity of the new Viper VPR400 the drive features onboard RGB lights.  These lights are controllable using the Patriot RGB Sync App or will work with all of the major RGB software implementations.

The integrated Aluminum heatspreader features a very ornate design that helps to regulate drive temperatures under load while also allowing for a brilliant display of RGB lighting. 

By now most hardware enthusiasts know about NVMe SSDs and the benefits the NVMe controller brings to flash-based storage systems.  What is new in this arena is the transfer rate due to the PCI Express generation.  PCI Express Gen4 is the new standard when it comes to NVMe performance and is a perfect match for the latest AMD and Intel Rocket Lake and Alder Lake processors featuring PCI Express 4 and PCI Express 5.

While you can buy drives using PCI Express Gen3 and they will work in any modern system you miss out on the performance advantages you get from upgrading to the latest storage technology.  Historically, storage has always been a bottleneck which is no longer true provided you are using the correct storage platform in your builds.

NVMe or Non-Volatile Memory Express is an SSD specification for drives connected directly to the PCI Express bus.  They work much like a standard SSD but take advantage of low latency parallelism of PCI Express and allow the SSD drives to move data extremely fast by splitting the transfer over different paths.  One thing to remember is that NVMe is simply a specification which is being updated all the time to both increase performance and longevity of SSDs. The interface can offer performance gains but the controller and NAND chips are where the real performance is.

• Read Speeds: 4600MB/s – Write Speeds 4400MB/s
• Built with the latest Innogrit IG5220 Gen4 x 4 high-speed
• controller
• Capacities: Up to 2TB
• Aluminum Heatshield
• Thermal throttling technology
• Operating Temperature: 0 ~ 70°C
• Downloadable toolbox at viper.patriotmemory.com
• Terrabytes Written (TBW): up to 800TB
• 4K Aligned Random Read: up to 600K IOPs
• 4K Aligned Random Write: up to 500K IOPs
• Sequential Read (ATTO): up to 4,600MB/s
• Sequential Write (ATTO): up to 4,400MB/s
• Sequential Read (CDM): up to 4,600MB/s
• Sequential Write (CDM): up to 4,400MB/s
• O/S Supported: Windows® 7*/8.0*/8.1/10