Photos and Breakdown

So normally we would take a quick look at the packaging but in this case being a pre-launch device the 750 Series came to us in a sealed static bag with the full height PCI slot cover as well. I will say though, packaging or no packaging, when the drive came in I was a kid again for a short period of time digging into it all to get my hands on the drive.

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Once out of its bag. I could finally get a good look at the drive. While the 750 Series shares a LOT with Intel’s P3700 enterprise PCIe SSD. That said the 750 Series went a much lighter silver color where the P3700 went with a black strip over the front. The drive is a half-height device to make sure it supports small builds when needed but it does come with a full height PCI slot for fitting the drive in your new gaming PC. To get things hooked up you will have to hook it up to a PCIe x4 slot or larger, this shouldn’t be an issue though because most PCs these days have a bunch of extra PCIe x16 slots, even if a lot of them only have the bandwidth to push x8 or even x4. This still works out because the 750 Series only needs x4. All of the needed power is pulled over the PCIe slot as well, so you won’t have to worry about hooking up external power.

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Typically, I would pull the entire drive apart but while digging into the 750 Series had trouble pulling the heatsink off without risking damage to the drive itself. So that leaves us officially with a photo of the backside but I will also still go over what is inside. Right above the PCIe connection you will find the 18-channel NVMe-capable controller. This is the exact same controller found in the P3700 enterprise drive. In fact, really the only difference you will be able to see between the two drives at the PCB level is there are four missing NAND chips. We can actually see this in the photo below of the back of the PCB. This is partially due to overprovisioning that enterprise drives see but also because the P3700 was available in larger 1.6TB and 2TB models.

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Just like the P3700 enterprise drive that the 750 Series is based on, we have a heatsink that runs the length of the SSD to keep everything cool. It is a little over a half-inch thick and has eight main fins that stick up. It is interesting though because Intel puts a stick on panel right on top of the fins to get all of the branding on the drive covering up a lot of the potential airflow that the drive could see. That said, it just needs a little bit of cooling to prevent issues if it gets tucked in between two hot video cards.

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Before jumping into testing I did have to swap to the full height PCI slot cover, here is a shot of the drive with it.

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garfi3ld's Avatar
garfi3ld replied the topic: #36562 02 Apr 2015 18:59
Today I take a look at a monster of an SSD from Intel. It is available in both PCIe and 2.5 inch models so it will fit in your main PC or your LANrig as well!
Sideout's Avatar
Sideout replied the topic: #36572 03 Apr 2015 19:40
Maybe Intel will give us one to throw in the LANOC server for the lan parties??!!!! (Hint hint wish wish???)

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