It’s been a long time since I used a mechanical hard drive in a PC as that tech has long since been replaced by Solid State drives like the new Kingston Fury Renegade G5. Reason being, SSD’s are much, much faster and reliable than the old spin masters. Over time, they’ve gotten even faster thanks to improvements in the PCIe interface our computers use.
Gen 5 storage is the latest standard and compared to Gen 4, you get almost double the bandwidth to shove big files around and a bit more breathing room when the system’s doing lots of little reads and writes at once. On paper, it’s fireworks. In real life though, once you’re already on a fast NVMe, it’s more of a “nice to have” than a “my PC just evolved.”
I dropped the Kingston FURY Renegade G5 (2TB) into the Gen5 slot of an Alienware Area‑51 and braced for instant loads. Install was boring in the best way—standard M.2, click, done. Kingston claims up to 14,700MB/s read and 14,000MB/s write on the 2TB model. My best numbers? 12,200MB/s read and 13,606MB/s write. Still obscene, just shy of the marketing peak—and honestly, that didn’t change my day.
The drive behaved impeccably: no surprise thermal throttling mid‑copy, no stutters, just fast and steady. And here’s the honest bit: in games like Cyberpunk 2077, Doom: The Dark Ages, and Battlefield 6, nothing suddenly teleports. Level loads are quick, but they already were on a good Gen4 drive. Until Microsoft and games developers account for this faster hardware like the PlayStation 5 does, you won’t get any advantage using this drive over a Gen4.
In content creation, my 4K exports are clearly GPU‑bound; Gen5 doesn’t make the process any shorter. Where you feel it is the heavy lifting—moving chunky game installs, copying multi‑hundred‑gig projects, ingesting piles of camera footage. Those progress bars get shorter. If that’s your life, Gen5 helps but only if you are moving to and from another Gen5 drive.
Endurance is a quiet flex. The 2TB Renegade G5 is rated at 2.0PB TBW, which is “use it hard for years” territory. If you live in scratch disks and giant libraries, that’s comforting. And if you’re shuffling between rigs, it’ll still run in Gen4 slots—just at Gen4 speeds.
So, should you buy it?
If you’re building a top‑shelf Gen5 rig and want the fastest storage that won’t get in your way, the Renegade G5 is a safe, fast pick. But the price might make you balk. Starting at $289 for 1TB, $489 2TB and a whopping $879 for the 4TB, this is not a cheap investment.
So if your world is mostly gaming and typical creator work, here’s the money‑saving play: grab the Kingston KC3000 (Gen4). It’s cheaper, at $129 and widely available in 2TB(size is arguably more valuable than speed when it comes to gaming). In real day‑to‑day use it feels basically the same for most people. Benchmarks look prettier with Gen5, but your render won’t finish before you’ve taken a sip.
The Renegade G5 (2TB) is blistering on paper and rock‑solid in practice. I didn’t hit Kingston’s headline speeds, but I never hit a problem either. I can’t wait for the rest of PC architecture to catchup and make use of all this blistering speed. If you want to build a future proof rig, this will certainly sort you out. If you’re just a gamer though, I’d stick with a Gen 4 drive.
Kingston kindly provided the Fury Renegade G5 to PowerUp for the purpose of this review
