In Conclusion
These tests leave us with two solid conclusions, the new generation of PCIe 4.0 SSDs are significantly faster than the original generation, and that the extra bandwidth will have little to no impact on your gaming. The difference in synthetic benchmarks between the Sabrent Rocket and the SK hynix Platinum P41 is as significant as that between the Rocket and the Intel 660p. If you have workloads which can make use of the extra overhead provided by the Platinum P41 then paying the extra three cents per gig is a no-brainer. If you will be primarily gaming, unless you are very diligent about how many games you install then purchasing at least a 2TB SSD is more important than the controller’s generation.
SK hynix have done a brilliant job bringing even more performance to PCIe 4.0 drives which is very good news considering the price of the first of the PCIe 5.0 drives. They have also managed to implement these improvements with no noticeable increase in temperatures, something else that makes actively cooled PCIe 5.0 drives less attractive. Your system overall may feel more responsive as the tests did show very little difference in the Platinum P41’s performance between the fresh Windows installation and normal conditions with many background applications running. It is that fact that justifies the increased cost per gigabyte you pay for the new generation of SSDs. If you find your system slowing down when Windows decides it is time for it to do some cleanup, install an update or just reindex your drive for it’s own amusement, then moving your Windows install to a Platinum P41 will resolve that problem completely.
The Platinum P41 is your friend if you are a game streamer, with enough spare IOPS in both read and write operations to keep up with high end CPUs and GPUs. They are not quite yet $0.10/GB yet, but the MSRP is awfully close and sales can bring it down to that wonderful number, at least in the US. It is unclear why there is such a premium here in Canada, but it is enough that we can’t recommend it for our Canuck readers. It doesn’t make sense to pay twice the price per gigabyte for the performance numbers we saw, eh?
Finally, we would like to thank SK hynix for sending the Platinum P41 over for review. Hopefully you found our take on it entertaining, perhaps even a little handy.
