As SSD manufacturers have been slowly filling out their PCIe Gen 4 SSD options one of the trends that some of them did with past M.2 drives was sprinkle in a little RGB lighting into the mix and so far except for the WD SN850 which had a small light no one has done that with their new 4^th Gen drives. Viper Gaming which is the gaming brand of Patriot just introduced their new Viper Gaming VPR400 which does exactly that by mixing their Viper Gaming VPR100 design that I previously reviewed with a new Innogrit Gen 4x4 controller. Today I’m going to take a closer look at the VPR400 and then put it through our test suite to see how it performs, lets's go!

Product Name: Viper Gaming VPR400 1TB RGB PCIe Gen 4x4 SSD

Review Sample Provided by: Viper Gaming

Written by: Wes Compton

Amazon Affiliate Link: HERE

Photos and Features

The packaging for the Viper VPR400 is similar to the last Viper SSD I took a look at, almost the same. They have a flip-out front which on the front has a bright red background and a picture of the VPR400 with its RGB lighting on. They have the read and write speeds listed as well as the capacity using a sticker which ours in the 1TB model. Up in the top half, the Viper branding is in a large font but the RGB is the largest font and clearly what they want you to see the most. Below the Viper brand name, they have the VPR400 model name in a small font and next to that they let you know this is a PCIe M.2 drive running at Gen 4 speeds x4 lanes. Also on the front, it has the Viper “rating” system which lets you know where this falls in the product lineup, this is their top of the line expert. The front opens up and you have a window to see the Viper VPR400 on the heatsink side and on each side they have the read and write speeds repeated. On the back side of the front door, they talk about the performance then about the heatsink and its 5-year warranty. Then around on the back they just have a few details listed out and repeated across multiple languages. It's important to note here that they list this being available from 512GB to 2TB but at least right now I don’t see the 2TB as an option on their website or in stores so maybe that is coming in the future.

Inside the box the Viper VPR400 is the only thing that you get, there aren’t any stickers or any documentation. I’m surprised on the stickers because Viper does include those sometimes but it's not a big deal at all. The Viper VPR400 comes in a clear plastic tray which was needed so it could be seen through the front window on the box.

If you saw our previous Viper VPR100 review the overall look of the Viper VPR400 may look familiar, that is because they share the same heatsink design. The heatsink on the Viper VPR400 is aluminum with a textured black finish. In the center, they have the Viper brand name and logo. Then moving out from there it has angled cuts in the heatsink that give a little more surface area and match up with the logo in the middle. Those cuts also give us a peek at the LED diffuser bars that run across the top and bottom for the RGB lighting. The Viper VPR400 is available in 512GB and 1TB capacities right now but the packaging and some documentation does allude to a 2TB model in the future as well and it is a 2280 length M.2 which is the standard length you would see.

The back side of the Viper VPR400 doesn't have too much going on. We can see the black PCB along with a few components. Specifically, along the top and bottom edges, we can see the fives spots on each row where they have the RGB LEDs on the other side. Beyond that, they have a white sticker that covers most of the rest up. This sticker has all of the normally required certification logos and manufacturing location information. It has the full model number which is VRP40-1TB28H and the serial number with a bar code. It also has the capacity of the drive printed on it as well in the biggest font so it is easy to spot.

The side view of the VPR400 gives a much better look at how the diffusers run down the edges to soften up the RGB lighting, we can also see that the middle of the heatsink is thicker and does run down the middle where the DRAM and controller are to pull some of that heat away. It also wraps around the sides as well.

The heatsink is attached just with the thermal pads on both ends, the middle of the heatsink is also hollow to allow for the RGB lighting of the logo in the middle.

With the heatsink off we can get a better look at what the VPR400 has going on under the hood. The biggest thing is we can see that 2TB support is in the future for sure as this is the 1TB model and they have two NAND pads empty. The VPR400 has small surface-mounted RGB LEDs in 5 locations along the top and 5 along the bottom but if you look closely you can see four more in the center sitting on the left and right of the third NAND pad. As for what makes the SSD itself tick it has two NAND chips with  8FC00585 and AC-W012-220103013 etched in them which doesn’t bring anything up on a search but seem to be 176-Layer Micron TLC NAND. The VPR400 is Dram-less so there isn’t any memory on here for cache. Then down at the end near the M.2 connection is the controller which is an Innogrit IG5220. The Patriot P400 that I reviewed back in March had the same controller.

I did also take a look at the lighting once I had the VPR400 installed. By default, the center lighting stays on and rotates through colors and the top and bottom edge lighting has a breathing effect while switching between colors. All of the popular motherboard software is supported so you can also tie the lighting in with your other lighting or use Vipers software to set the lighting to something you like or matching your build.

Test Rig and Procedures

Performance

Before getting into testing the Viper Gaming VPR400 I did check the drive out using CrystalDiskInfo just to confirm that it was connected using the correct interface. The drive runs on PCIe 4.0 and needs 4 lanes to get the best possible performance and we were connected and running at that. I also like to do this to document the firmware revision we are running on for testing because those do change from time to time which we are on V1.5A.

My first round of testing was to run the Viper Gaming VPR400 through Crystal Disk Mark 8. Sequential testing is usually a best-case scenario and is what companies use for their specifications and on the front of the box to advertise drive speeds which in the case of the Viper Gaming VPR400 the box and the specifications say the VPR400 should see up to 4600 MB/s for its reads and 4400 MB/s for its writes. Below I have the drives labeled in orange if they are PCIe 4.0 and blue for older 3.0 drives for reference. The Viper Gaming VPR400 did a lot better than the packaging suggested with its read performance reaching 5163 MB/s. Even on the write performance, it did better as well at 4780 MB/s which is nice to see. This is still lower than most of the PCIe 4.0 drives tested, however, so it's great it outperformed what Viper said it would but there is still room for improvement.

While testing in CrystalDiskMark 8 I did also check out the drive’s IOPS performance with the random 4k queue depth of 32 and 1 thread results. I stacked the read and write performance together here because I do believe that the overall drive performance is important, not just one result or the other. The Viper Gaming VPR400 struggled here being the lowest of all of the drives tested when the results were combined. Its rear IOPS were in the middle of the pack and in line with drives like the SN770 but with the write IOPS being the second lowest it handicapped the overall result.

In AS SSD I skipped over the standard test because it is very similar to the CrystalDiskMark tests I prefer to check out one of its sub-tests, the copy benchmark. This moves three files, one that is an ISO, one that is a program, and then a game and times how long each takes. With these being timed, lower is better here. I have all three results stacked to see which drives are best overall. The Viper Gaming VPR400 came in tied with the MSI Spatium M480 Play that I recently tested and was right in line with the WD Blue SN550 as well which were both WAY behind the rest of the drives in this test. It didn’t do too bad with the ISO portion but really struggled with the program files and wasn’t great on the game files as well.

Next up with PassMark Performance Test 10 I ran their combined synthetic benchmark to get a look at their DiskMark rating. The Viper Gaming VPR400 did well, coming in ahead of 2/3 of the drives tested with just the Renegade, the M480 Play, and the P5 Plus out in front.

I then changed my focus back over to IOPS performance and ran the Viper Gaming VPR400 in Anvil’s Storage Benchmark focusing on the 4k queue depth of 16 results from the main test. The read IOPS here were higher than everything but the M480, P400, and the Renegade. The write IOPS were better here as well which combined put the Viper Gaming VPR400 in the middle of the pack.

Sticking with Anvil’s Storage Utilities I did a few more tests. Here I wanted to check out how the drive would react to different queue depths so with the file size set to 4K I ran tests ramping up double each time starting at 1 and up to 128 for reads and 64 for writes. This lets us see if the controller gets overloaded. For the read, queue depth tests the Viper Gaming VPR400 started off on its read queue depth test in the middle but did jump up in performance at a queue depth of 4 and ran with the top drives (and even was the fastest at 64QD) until the last test at 128 queue depth where it dropped down slightly. For the write queue depth test it started in the middle of the pack for the first test and stayed there the rest of the way up.

For ATTO Benchmark I set it to a queue depth of just 1 but ramped up the file size slowly to see how it would affect performance. For the read test in ATTO, the Viper Gaming VPR400 hung with the top drives up until 128KB and then drops down and recovers but ends up closer to the middle of the pack leveling off around 4400 MB/s for the last 8 tests. For the write test, Viper Gaming VPR400 again ran right in the top pack up until 512KB where it leveled off and dropped slightly in performance coming in with 5 drives ahead of it.

Next up I wanted to look at more real-world performance and for this, I started with PCMark 10 which has an overall full system benchmark for storage and then one focused on data storage drives. In the full system drive benchmark, the Viper Gaming VPR400 would be right in the middle of the pack for its full system drive benchmark results but the data drive tests didn’t do as well with just two drives that performed lower.

Next, up for more real-world resting, I did our file transfer tests. You don’t get any more real-world than this. For each drive, I copied the folder filled with files to the drive tested and then back to the Rocket Q4 in our test bench. I used three file types, movies which are large single files, a folder filled with RAW and JPG photos, and then a folder filled with word documents. Starting with the movie files the Viper Gaming VPR400 did 2360 MB/s when moving the files to the SSD but was a little slower when reading and moving those back to the PC. I will say ran this test multiple times and there were a few times where the drive seemed to overheat and struggle and drop to a very low number like in the picture below the table. For the photos, the VPR400 did great, outperforming all of the other drives tested when copying the files to the SSD, and didn’t do too bad going back to the PC as well. Then last up the word documents were slow moving to the Viper VPR400 but were the fastest out of all of the drives tested going back to the PC.

Overall and Final Verdict

With most new builds supporting PCIe 4.0 M.2 drives not to mention consoles like the PS5 as well it has been exciting to see everyone update their product lineups to include 4.0 drives. Patriot had the P400 that I previously took a look at and under their gaming brand Viper Gaming they did have the VP4300 as well but this is the first drive from Viper Gaming that also has the same heatsink and RGB lighting that Viper had with their VPR100. They paired it up with an Innogrit controller and currently they have 512GB and 1TB options but the packaging and the drive itself shows that a 2TB capacity option is in the works as well. The lighting on the Viper Gaming VPR400 looks great but I do know that not everyone is going to care about lighting. I think a bigger issue however is that with so many motherboards now using integrated M.2 coolers there is a good possibility that lighting might not be visible and you may even have to remove integrated heatsinks like the one on the VPR400. Thankfully if that ends up being the case the heatsink was easy to remove. But if you don’t have a motherboard M.2 cooler having the heatsink does help absorb some of the heat and even without the lighting, the black finish looks great.

As for performance the Viper Gaming VPR400 did well in most of our tests but is a little late to the party now with some of the highest-end drives getting up into the 7000-8000 range. The VPR400 did outperform its advertised performance by a surprising amount and overall it was often in the middle of the pack with the other PCIe 4.0 drives that I tested. It did struggle in the AS SSD file copy tests and while overall it did well in our real-world file transfer tests I did have a few issues with it seemingly overheating or hiccupping and dropping in performance for a second and sometimes longer.

Overall the Viper Gaming VPR400 falls into a relatively specific nitch with you needing to have a setup where you can even see the M.2 drive and also needing the consumer to love RGB lighting to the point that every component needs it. But for that nitch, the Viper Gaming VPR400 is the only option out there. This is the first PCIe 4.0 drive with RGB. It is listed at $134.99 for the 1TB model that I tested which is in line with heatsinked 4.0 M.2 drives without the lighting and at one point I saw the Viper Gaming VPR400 1TB selling for $99.99 which would be a steal I don’t know if that was a mistake though. Even if you don’t want the lighting but need a heatsink if this pricing stays it could still be a good option but I do hope that we still see a Viper Gaming SSD soon that reaches that 6000-8000 MB/s range soon.

Live Pricing: HERE

Author Bio

Author: garfi3ldWebsite: http://lanoc.org

Editor-in-chief

You might call him obsessed or just a hardcore geek. Wes's obsession with gaming hardware and gadgets isn't anything new, he could be found taking things apart even as a child. When not poking around in PC's he can be found playing League of Legends, Awesomenauts, or Civilization 5 or watching a wide variety of TV shows and Movies. A car guy at heart, the same things that draw him into tweaking cars apply when building good looking fast computers. If you are interested in writing for Wes here at LanOC you can reach out to him directly using our contact form.