 There are loads of rumors going around that Linus has a very, very fast car. But I actually have a very, very fast SSD, so I've got that going for me, which is nice. Stay subscribed to Linus Tech Tips for more videos on very, very fast things. The Corsair HX1200i Power Supply delivers 80 plus platinum efficiency for quiet, efficient power for Corsair Link Digital and advanced monitoring and control. Click now to learn more. So let's kick this off with a statement you won't often hear me repeating, unless you've seen all the takes for this shot. This is the fastest consumer SSD on the market. This is the fastest consumer SSD on the market today. This is the fastest consumer SSD on the market today. HCR, HCR, oh, why do I keep tripping on things? This is the fastest consumer SSD on the market today, hands down. There's been a lot of hype around these drives and now it's easy to understand why. The Intel 750 series SSDs post some seriously ridiculous performance numbers, thanks to Intel utilizing a controller based on the NVM Express protocol, which is designed to replace the AHCI architecture we've seen on SATA drives for a while now. AHCI was designed predominantly for spinning media or hard drives, and VME has been developed entirely for non-volatile memory storage, which means it doesn't have to deal with the extra weight and the legacy support built into AHCI, resulting in a more streamlined command set, which can be, which can work beautifully in parallelism, which can benefit from modern multi-core CPUs. But before we delve into the performance of these drives and the impact that NVMe has had, of course we need to talk about the drive itself. We only have the 2.5 inch drive in office right now. We may be getting a PCIe add-in card version for a special project that we have coming up soon, so stay tuned and stay subscribed to the channel if you want to see all about that. But it doesn't really matter, because in terms of performance, the add-in card and the 2.5 inch form factor drive both have the exact same components inside, just with a different physical appearance, layout, and obviously the connector. But why did they even create two versions of the same components? More on that in just a moment. First, the physical overview. The front is fairly reminiscent of past Intel enthusiast SSDs, but here we notice the first shift from gaming performance to data center performance. The old skull logo has been replaced by serial numbers and product specs. When we turn the drive to its side, you'll notice a significant difference in thickness when compared to the previous generations of Intel SSDs. It is not a thin drive by any means, at 15 millimeters, and because of that it will not fit into many height-restricted SSD mounts. Just a heads up. When we finally flip to the back of the drive, we see one of the reasons why this drive is so thick. The massive badass looking heatsink, no more super rough looking finish on the back of your Intel SSD. Last but not least, we have the 8639 connector, which splits twice to receive power through a standard SATA interface and to send data through an SFF8643, also known as Mini SAS HD connector, which finally connects to a HyperKit from ASUS. Now the HyperKit is quite a special little connector designed by ASUS, which allows you to go from the Mini SAS HD connector into the HyperKit module, then into an M.2 interface, which is able to fully connect to the PCIe Gen 3 lanes all the way directly to the CPU, which is why it is able to offer the same amount of performance as the add-in card, which is great because say you had an ITXX99 motherboard that was compatible with the HyperKit. You'd be able to have a powerful graphics card and an NVMe drive, which is pretty sick. A quick reminder, this is using PCIe lanes on your CPU, which is great, but something you may want to take into account for certain setups, possibly SLI stuff, things like that. The drives will still be awesome if you have to connect it through something like the PCH, considering you ran out of lanes, but if you want the best possible performance, you will want it to directly access the CPU through those PCIe lanes. And with that all out of the way, on to benchmarking. We put the Intel 750 Series up against an enthusiast grade traditional style, if I can call it that, SATA SSD, the Samsung 850 Pro. The 850 Pro is well regarded as a high-end SSD, and honestly it's pretty damn badass, but man, it got absolutely destroyed by the Intel 750 Series drive. First up, we have Crystal Disk Mark, which is the most important benchmark in our suite by far. The reason for its importance is that Intel worked with the developers of Crystal Disk Mark to ensure that the program will be able to deploy multiple workers. With the 750 Series drives feeding directly into the CPU through the PCIe lanes, you'll need a benchmarking worker per CPU thread, including hyper threads, to fully utilize the drive. As you can see, the 750 killed it, getting five times faster sequential reads, almost three times faster sequential writes, both running on one thread, seven freaking times faster 4K reads, and a bit over four times faster 4K writes at eight threads. On to more standard, less optimized benchmarks. We have the Intel drive with displayed reads five times greater than that of the Samsung drive, as well as write speeds approximately two and a half times greater than the Samsung drive in Ato Disk Mark. The Blackmagic Disk Speed test results were showed Intel having a read speed almost four times higher than its competitor, and a write speed approximately 2.4 times greater. Now, it is important to keep in mind that all of these tests are synthetic and different for various reasons, and may not be perfectly representative of real-world situations. We did attempt a few standard real-world SSD benchmarks, but we ran into a fairly strange issue. The Intel drive was simply too fast to produce meaningful results in our normal real-world test suite, as it was bottlenecked by other components in our system. In other real-world benchmarks we have attempted, this wasn't really a problem, and naturally we'll find ways to go around this, but for now, damn. So I guess that leads fairly well into our conclusion for this video. This is a new drive from Intel, and it's ridiculously fast. It is without a doubt the fastest consumer-grade SSD on the market today, but that speed does come at a cost. NVMe is still very new to the consumer space, and if you don't want to take up a PCI slot on your motherboard, the two and a five inch drive with the HyperKit solution is the only currently officially supported by a few motherboards. We haven't even received word yet on whether other motherboard manufacturers will support this drive, and even if they do, we have no clue when their solutions will be available. What do you guys think of NVMe? Let me know in the comments down below, or honestly, preferably over on the forum, but while you're here before you go to the forum, like, dislike, favorite, subscribe, share, all that kind of fun stuff. In the description below this video you can see any links you need to see. You can also see cool links to buy awesome shirts and stuff like that. If you check out the support us link over on the forum, you can see how to do things like change your Amazon affiliate code, which helps us out a ton, install the forum helping add-on for Firefox or Google Chrome, which can do things like tell you when you get PMs and change those Amazon links for you, if you enable it. Also become a contributor on the forum, it's super duper freaking helpful. Anyways guys, thanks for watching and I'll see you next time.