Kingston KC3000 PCIe 4.0 NVMe Review

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Kingston’s PCIe 4.0 NVMe drives were a bit slow on the market, but they launched two new drive models late last year. The Kingston KC3000 is geared towards work and professional computing, while the Kingston Fury is geared towards gaming.

The main difference between the two new models is that the Kingston Fury has around 5% faster read speeds and a significantly improved battery life rating of 25%. The 2TB Kingston KC3000 I reviewed today is rated at 1.6PBW, which is already the best, but the Fury is rated at 2.0PBW.

Sony Playstation 5 Compatibility

Kingston advertises the Fury as being compatible with the PS5, however, both drives meet the specifications required for the PS5. The recommended drive read speed is only 5500MB/s, which most/all PCIe 4.0 drives should achieve.

I think the Kingston Fury’s high durability allows gamers to install and remove large games with confidence.

However, neither drive has a built-in heatsink, which is a recommendation for any drive used with the PS5.They are cheap and there are many Compatible coolers on Amazon.

Kingston KC3000 vs Fury NVMe vs KC2500 Specs

Kingston KC3000 vs KC2500 Performance/Benchmarks

My current system includes:

• AMD Ryzen 7 5800X
• MSI MEG X570 UNIFY
• Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080
• 32GB Kingston Fury Renagade 360​​0Mhz RAM

The Kingston KC3000 is now used as my main Windows drive, whereas I was previously using the excellent PCIe 3.0 based Kingston KC2500.

thermal throttling

When I initially installed the drive, it didn’t have a heatsink, I didn’t really think about it. However, some benchmarks I ran produced unusual results. The results are still good, but the performance occasionally degrades. The ATTO Disk Benchmark was especially odd, slowing down towards the end of the benchmark when it wrote larger files. When I used it as my primary Windows drive, my initial assumption was that other applications were blocking read/write. No matter what I do, these issues persist and I end up with thermal throttling.

Once I installed the heatsink, the benchmarks produced what I expected.

Heatsinks for NVMe drives have been around for years, and many motherboards now have them as part of their design. In the past, I haven’t noticed much of a difference in performance when not in use, but it seems that the increased performance of PCIe 4.0 drives means more heat.

Benchmarks stress the drive more than most real life scenarios, so for most workloads throttling might not be a significant issue, but considering you can buy cooling for less than 10 devices, I think they are a must buy. This applies to all NVMe drives, not just Kingston, which is why the PS5 also needs a heatsink.

Crystal disc marking

As you might expect, all benchmark results are significantly improved. Sequential speed is a significant improvement over more than doubling the read and write speeds of the Q8T1 and Q32T16.

Even looking at random 4k Q1T1 results, your read and write performance improved by 30% and 39% respectively.

ATTO Disk Benchmark

ATTO mirrors the Crystal Disk Mark results and also shows a significant improvement in IO/s. In the screenshot above, you can see that the drive starts to degrade significantly at the end of the test.

The graph below shows roughly doubling the I/O performance for most file sizes.

Anvil Storage Utility

Again, the KC3000’s score is almost double that of the KC2500. Here, we see significant improvements in IOP and response time.

I had to rerun the write test twice before adding the heatsink to get the expected results

Final Fantasy XIV: Shadowbringers Benchmark

How does the Kingston KC3000 get such a high benchmark score compared to the KC2500, how does that affect the game?

Final Fantasy XIV: Shadowbringers is still a benchmark, but it should provide insight into how the Kingston KC3000 improves game loading speeds.

For this test, I ran the benchmark at its default settings (i.e. high and 1080p).

In this case, the load time between each scene was reduced by 36.8%.

Kingston KC3000

Load time by scene

• Scenario #1: 1.736 seconds
• Scenario #2: 2.063 seconds
• Scenario #3: 3.258 seconds
• Scenario #4: 1.301 seconds
• Scenario #5: 0.612 seconds
• Total load time: 8.97 seconds

Kingston KC2500 NVMe

Total Benchmark Score: 12829

Load time by scene

• Scenario #1: 2.146 seconds
• Scenario #2: 3.509 seconds
• Scenario #3: 4.172 seconds
• Scenario #4: 2.887 seconds
• Scenario #5: 1.509 seconds
• Total load time: 14.223 seconds

3DMark Storage Benchmark

3DMark has a new SSD benchmarking utility that simulates gaming-related activities to measure real-world gaming performance.This includes tests such as

• Load Battlefield V from launch to the main menu.
• Load Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 from boot to the main menu.
• Load Overwatch from startup to the main menu.
• Use OBS (Open Broadcasting Software) to record 1080p gameplay video at 60 FPS while playing Overwatch.

For comparison, 3DMark posted median scores for several 1TB drives on Steam when the benchmark was launched:

I should point out that many users with similar PCIe 4.0 drives got similar results to me, with some getting over 4K. Again, this is most likely a difference in cooling.

Price and Alternatives

At the time of writing, the Kingston KC3000 is priced at:

Amazon

• 512GB: £114.26
• 1024GB: £152.83
• 2048GB: £355.44

Insight:

• 512GB: £96
• 1024GB: £156
• 2048GB: £312

Kingston’s Wrath

• 512GB: £102
• 1024GB: £164
• 2048GB: £307

Samsung 980 PRO

Reduced write speed and 25% lower endurance

• 512GB: £88
• 1024GB: £160
• 2048GB: £335.97

WD_BLACK SN850

Reduced write speed and 25% lower endurance

• 512GB: £85
• 1024GB: £140
• 2048GB: £250 to £350 (if available)

As always, storage prices often vary widely. The Kingston KC3000 isn’t quite as attractively priced on Amazon, but it’s only been on the market for a few months, while competing models have been on the market for much longer.

comprehensive

The Kingston KC3000 PCIe 4.0 is an excellent drive with a significant performance boost over the PCIe 3.0 based KC2500.

Compared to other PCIe 4.0 drives, it has one of the best specs on the market. Its write speed and endurance are significantly higher than those from Western Digital and Samsung. It probably won’t make much of a difference in the real world, but Kingston’s price is attractive enough that it should be a serious consideration from other brands.

Last updated on 2022-03-05 / Affiliate Links / Image from Amazon Product Advertising API