Overall and Final Verdict
With the NM790 Lexar is refreshing their non-pro lineup with a new top tier PCIe 4 drive. While PCIe 5 drives are starting to hit the market, PCIe 4 is still the bread and butter with Intel and AMD both having full support for them for a few years now. For the NM790 Lexar has kept their simple two-tone styling that makes it easy to spot a Lexar SSD while also helping make it clear where the drives stand in their lineup as well. The silver and black two-tone look also look great on the Lexar NM790. The Lexar NM790 has a wide range of capacities starting at 512GB up to 4TB which covers anything you might need which is nice to see.
For performance, the Lexar NM790 did well in our tests falling right in with the other higher-end PCIe 4.0 drive tests. There were a few exceptions to that, namely in any of the IOPS tests where its write IOPS performance held it back. It also dropped off later in our ATTO tests, most likely because of it being a DRAMless design. But it really stood out in the AS SSD copy benchmark as well as in our own real-world file transfer tests. The Lexar NM790 is a great drive if you are moving files around on it but a drive like Lexar’s NM800 Pro which has onboard DRAM will be the better option in situations where you aren’t writing to the drive as much.
Being DRAMless does help keep costs down and the Lexar NM790 2TB drive that I have tested today costs $109.99 right now. For comparison, drives with similar performance from lesser-known brands start at $90 but drives like the Crucial P5 Plus are $117 and they go up in price from there on Newegg right now. The Lexar NM790 was previously $99.99 which I would love to see it back down at that price. At $109.99 it is getting close to Lexar’s own NM800 Pro which is $122.99 on Amazon right now.
Live Pricing: HERE
