The SSD Review The Worlds Dedicated SSD Education and Review Resource | 
3D MARK STORAGE GAMING BENCHMARK
UL Solutions has created a new storage gaming benchmark that we will start to use as new SSDs come in. The 3DMark Storage Benchmark DLC extends 3DMark Advanced Edition with a dedicated component test for measuring the gaming performance of SSDs and other storage hardware. It supports all the latest storage technologies and tests practical, real-world gaming performance for activities such as loading games, saving progress, installing game files, and recording gameplay video streams.
The XPG Mars 980 Blade Gen5 1TB SSD did great with 5878 total points, placing it 13th of all SSDs tested to date.
3D MARK MS DIRECT STORAGE FEATURE TEST
As our XPG Mars 980 Blade 1TB SSD is MS DirectStorage compatible, we thought we might take advantage of the 3DMark DirectStorage Feature Test and see how this SSD fared. MS DirectStorage, in very basic terms, allows direct transfer of data from your SSD storage directly to your GPU, eliminating its historical necessary passage from the SSD through the CPU to RAM, back through the CPU and finally to the GPU VRAM. This is, for the most part at this time, intended on faster game load times,reducing CPU overhead and providing more detailed graphics.
In our testing, data transfer achieved a 153.4% faster transfer of data than with MS DirectStorage disabled.
ADATA is an SSD manufacturer that produces and sells XPG branded SSDs. Their SSD Toolbox provides a range of utilities for maintaining ADATA and XPG SSDs. These include Drive Information, Diagnostic Scan, Utility, System Optimization, Clone Drive and benchmark as shown here:
REPORT ANALYSIS AND FINAL THOUGHTS
There was a time when DRAM-based SSD were the norm but that time has long passed. SSDs such as the XPG Mars 980 Blade today can only be considered upper-tier SSDs these days and prices are reflective of such. This SSD reaches data throughput highs of 14GB/s and we also reached 1700K IOPS. If IOPS are a key factor in purchase, bumping up to the 2TB version which reaches 2000K iops might be a thought.
The only other factor worthy of mention once again is that this is a two-sided SSD and care should be taken if you are buying this as a replacement for an ultrabook or similar device that is very small in size. Not only would fit be a consideration, but also the heat put off by the two-sided nature of this SSD.
CHECK XPG 980 BLADE PRICING AT AMAZON.
