Kingston FURY Renegade PCIe 4.0 NVMe M.2 SSD Review vs Kingston KC3000 & KC2500

The Kingston FURY Renegade NVMe was announced at around the same time as the KC3000. They are both very similar drives with barely any difference in specification, but the FURY is targeted towards gamers, while the KC3000 is ambiguously targeting desktops and laptops.

Both drives meet the specifications required for the PS5. However, with the FURY Renegade, you have an option for a heat sink model, and this is designed to fit within the PS5.

Kingston FURY NVME vs KC3000 Specification

The specification indicates that there is barely any difference. The FURY is fractionally faster with its read speeds by 4.2% then the durability is 25% higher with the TBW rating. These small differences should help gamers as I assume there will be a higher level of writes due to downloading games etc.

Sony PlayStation 5 Compatibility & Installation

Most PCIe 4.0 NVMe drives are compatible with the PS5. The PS5 uses PCIe Gen4 x4 M.2 NVMe, and the only performance requirement is 5,500 MB/s or faster for sequential read speed.

However, with the PS5, you need effective heat dissipation with a cooling structure, such as a heatsink. The total size needs to fall within the limits of 110mm (L) x 25mm (W) x 11.25mm (H), and this is why you see a lot of drives advertising as compatible with PS5. You can install your own PS5 NVMe heat sink, but you will need to make sure the overall dimensions fall within those limits.

Installing the drive in a PS5 is quite simple, and Kingston has a useful installation video showing you how to install the drive on the FURY Renegade product page.

Design

I asked to be sent the heat sink model of this drive just because it is a bit different from the KC3000 I previously reviewed.

Benchmarks

I have compared my benchmarks against the KC3000, which is the only other PCIe 4.0 drive I have tested. The differences in results are so small it is hardly worth worrying about. Either drive is a superb choice. The KC2500 is a PCIe 3.0 drive and, therefore, understandably quite a bit slower.

When I initially reviewed the KC3000, I tested it without the heatsink from my motherboard applied. It then underperformed due to thermal throttling. Once I applied the heatsink, the performance improved. With the FURY Renegade, it performed as expected out of the box thanks to the built-in heat sink.

Crystal Disk Mark

FURY Renegad

Crystal Disk Mark shows incredible performance, with the sequential read speeds exceeding the question speeds for the product specification. For read speeds, it is slightly faster than the KC3000, but the KC3000 significantly outperformed the product specification, which gives a hint that these are likely the same underlying hardware.

The FURY Renegade does have significantly better performance for random writes and sequential 128K Q32T1. I suspect it is the heatsink of the drive allow it to sustain these higher write speeds vs my motherboard heatsink on the KC3000.