Overall and Final Verdict

With the Crucial T700 being our first PCIe 5.0 drive to come into the office, I’ve been really excited to see what the new drives are capable of and the T700 does offer insane raw performance when it comes to sequential file tests. The same goes for our real-world file transfer tests where the T700 has shown the limitations of the test setup, writing faster than our base SSD can read. The same goes for its performance in PC Mark 10 which is also real-world focused with its mix of real-world tests, the T700 completely broke the scaling of our results compared to everything else tested. But like with the PCIe 4.0 drives the sequential performance doesn’t always translate to great performance in all situations and we saw that in some of the IOPS tests, especially write IOPS it struggled and would fall into the middle of the pack or in a few cases down at the bottom of the charts.  There were issues with write performance when the queue depths were cranked up. Those two issues together also hurt the real-world performance when it came to small files.

Another thing that is very clear is that with the T700 and all of the PCIe 4.0 and higher drives you really have to stay on top of their cooling. Crucial offers the heatsink version of the T700 in all three of their drive sizes but you also have the option to get the SD without the heatsink if you have a motherboard which already has integrated M.2 cooling. Either way though, in my testing I found that more important than anything else is having at least some airflow. M.2 drives, especially when you are using the priority PCIe 5.0 slot like the T700 needs get stuck right up against your video card which puts out heat and also blocks airflow. A low speed fan putting even a little airflow near our drive nomatter the heatsink helped a lot. It also showed in the performance in some tests. It would be crazy to buy a crazy fast SSD only to let it run slow because you didn’t keep it cool enough.

As for pricing I have a full breakdown of the T700 pricing above. The 2TB drives that I tested today will run you $339.99 for the base drive and $30 more for the model with the heatsink at $369.99. This is the latest and greatest and you do pay for it. Crucial’s pricing isn’t far off from the competition with just two 2TB 5.0 drives on Newegg as of me writing this. The MSI M570 is $349.99 and there is a second drive that won’t be out for another week at $259.99, both with heatsinks. The Microcenter Inland TD510 on the other hand is looking like a big value with it already having sale pricing of $249.99. For the Crucial T700, having the non-heatsink model is big here giving a cheaper option for those who already have expensive motherboards with a nice M.2 cooler on their PCIe 5.0 slot. I’m also exited to see Crucial not standing back and waiting, in the past some of their drives have been a little slower to market when it comes to the higher end models. Even without the Ballistix branding they are on top of things with the T700.

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.