Many of you readers won’t remember a time when a 2TB, 3.5-inch, mechanical hard disk drive was the pinnacle of PC gaming tech. In fact, it was so overkill because the largest games at the time were around the 20-30GB mark. Well I definitely do and as impressive as that was over a decade ago, Kingston’s new Renegade Fury 2TB NVMe M.2 Solid state drive makes that look positively ancient and crude.
Boasting speeds in excess of 7000MB/s, the Fury Renegade runs laps around your traditional mechanical HDD just like an F1 race car would, a Toyota Corolla. The Fury Renegade comes in two variants; one with a Heat Spreader for PC motherboard use and the other with a built-in Heatsink for use in PlayStation 5. Our review unit is the $289 heat spreader variant in 2TB size but you can also get them in 500GB($132), 1TB($175) and a whopping 4TB($639). If you want the Heatsink variant, those prices go up by about 10% to account for the cooling solution.
And all gamers know these infallible truths; size matters and speed wins games. At 2TB with an average read/ write speed of close to 7000MB/s, the Fury Renegade satisfies both those requirements and then some. If you like to have a massive collection of games ready to play, then this will certainly satisfy that itch. Additionally, if you do professional work loads like video editing that require speed, then you too will find much to like here.
Kingston Fury Renegade PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD
I am consistently surprised by how small these SSD’s are especially when you consider how much they can actually store. The Fury Renegade is no longer than my pinky finger at just 80mm, its 22mm wide and just 3.5mm thin. It looks like a stick of chewing gum and compared to the thick, heavy, 3.5-inch hard drives I grew up with, you can’t help but be mesmerized.
This tiny form factor allows the Fury Renegade to be installed on any modern motherboard that supports PCIe 4.0 M.2 2280 drives. Of course, your motherboard has to have a heatsink to keep the drive from frying itself — speed means heat after all. Fortunately for me, my Aorus motherboard has space for two SSD’s and a massive heatsink to cool both.
Installation is a breeze. Just angle the drive into the right slot, click it in and then lower it into place and use the restraining screw to lock it down. Some motherboards have a clip which makes things a lot easier. Once installed, my PC BIOS had no issues detecting the drive and all I had to do was use Windows Disk Utility to set it up as a volume, format and voila.
In terms of performance, while the Fury Renegade is a serious beast, if you’re already using an SSD like I am, you will not feel a real world difference in speed. But if you are coming from an older PCIe 3.0 SSD, 2.5-inch SATA SSD or a 3.5-inch mechanical HDD, the difference will be immediately noticeable. Personally, I couldn’t feel a difference between the Fury Renegade and my Samsung 990 Pro.
That said, looking at synthetic benchmarks shows just how quick the Fury Renegade is. Kingston says its has a sequential read speed of 7,300MB/s and write of 7000MB/s however in my repeated tests, I was never able to cross the 6951MB/s in read and 6,783MB/s write. While this is short of Kingston’s claims and slower than my Samsung 990 Pro, I put that down to my specific motherboard rather than the drive itself. Nevertheless, this is still an absurdly fast drive that I doubt any gamer would complain.
The power draw of the Fury Renegade is almost negligible with a maximum draw of 9.9W during write operations and 2.8W during read. Temperatures are good too with the drive averaging 37-39C at idle and 51C at peak load which is really nothing to worry about. Obviously, your temperatures will differ from mine depending on your motherboards heatsinks but It’s worth noting that the Fury Renegade run much cooler than my Samsung 990 Pro by almost 10C in some scenarios which is impressive.
Temperature will have a huge impact on how well and how long the SSD will live but Kingston estimates a lifespan of 2 million hours of usage. That translates into several years if you are just using it for games though video editors who do a lot of writes will have a shorter life span though I can’t say by how much. I do video editing for my YouTube and TikTok channels but this isn’t a concern and I doubt I’ll have any trouble with this drive for years to come.
Overall, transferring files, loading games and running apps is incredibly quick with only the games themselves being the bottleneck to performance. Unlike the PlayStation 5 games which are designed for the quick architecture these drives provide, PC games still rely on older data access models so they can work on a range of hardware. You will see varying benefit from having the Fury Renegade as your game drive; the biggest beneficiaries being those coming from a HDD or 2.5-inch SATA SSD.
Verdict
So it doesn’t really matter if you are just gaming or doing professional work, the Kingston Fury Renegade is an excellent choice. We all know that AAA games are increasingly large — CoD MW3, Horizon Forbidden West and Starfield all exceed 150GB installation size. Have more than five such games and you’ll be quickly out of storage so having large storage that is also really fast is more necessary today than ever before.
Price is still a consideration when it comes to SSD’s though. These top tier drives are expensive with prices increasing exponentially with storage size. The budget conscious will not be disappointed if they opt for slower 3000-4000MB/s SSD’s as performance to the untrained eye will still be excellent compared to hard disk drives. Plus, if space is all you want, you can easily get an 8TB HDD for less than a 2TB M.2 SSD. But if you want the best of the best, they generally all fall within the same price range and it’s hard to get any better than the Fury Renegade.
Kingston kindly provided the Fury Renegade 2TB PCIe NVMe SSD to PowerUp for the purpose of this review.
