Review: Kingston FURY Renegade SSD is fast*

In March, Kingston reached out to me regarding their FURY product lines and asked if I’d be willing to review any of their items. They were rolling out the new FURY Renegade Pro DDR5 modules and while I don’t have a DDR5 computer, I was excited by the opportunity to try an upgrade to 32GB DDR4 RAM. They also offered me to try the FURY Renegade SSD. Thanks to Kingston for providing me with a 2TB sample for this review, although it’s important to note that all thoughts below are my own. You can buy your FURY Renegade right now from Kingston.

First, let’s talk about the specs. The FURY Renegade is a PCIe 4.0 NVMe M.2 SSD. It has the option of having a heat sink, but I decided to do without it due to height issues. Kingston announces that the drive can achieve up to 7,300/7,000 MB/s read/write and up to 1,000,000 IOPS. You can get it in various capacities ranging from 500GB up to 4TB. I also want to note that the drive is compatible with the PS5 if you’re looking to upgrade the storage on this one.

So how did the FURY Renegade SSD perform in my tests? Well, I installed it in my wife’s computer since it actually has a PCIe 4.0 slot while mine is just a PCIe 3.0 slot. He ran a Ryzen 7 5800X, an NVIDIA RTX 3060, and 16GB of 3200MHz DDR4 RAM. His computer used a 512GB PCIe 3.0 drive from Micron, and I ran the same tests as best I could on both drives. I ran them on Micron, cloned Micron to FURY Renegade (you can use Kingston’s cloning software for free with purchase), removed Micron and installed FURY Renegade into PCIe 4.0 slot, then ran the same benchmark tests. I also timed the loading of Guild Wars 2 and uploading Civilization VI for my real-world testing.

When we look at the test results on AS SSD Benchmark, the FURY Renegade demolishes the Micron! Scores for the 4K test aren’t a big deal, but sequential tasks and 4K-64Thrd tests are vastly different!

So, we look at the ATTO drive benchmark in bytes and the Micron achieved write speeds of up to 1.08GB/s and read speeds of up to 2.08GB/s. Meanwhile, the FURY Renegade achieved 6.47GB/s write speeds and up to 6.92GB/s read speeds. While this doesn’t quite match the advertised specs, it’s really close and I’m sure I could have optimized my tests better.

If we convert the ATTO Disk Benchmark to IO/s, we see the FURY Renegade continuing to dominate due to its faster interface speeds. The Micron achieved read/write speeds of 107.25K/95.75K, while the FURY Renegade jumped to 64.59K/63.59K. That’s far short of 1 million IO/ s advertised by Kingston, but I’m willing to say a good part of that has to do with the fact that I messed up a setting in my testing.

The benchmarks are all fine, but how does the drive fare in real-world applications? When starting Windows 11 with Micron, the computer took about 13 seconds versus about 12.6 seconds with the FURY Renegade. Loading Guild Wars 2 from the launcher to the character select screen took about 9.6 seconds on the Micron, but only 7.7 seconds on the FURY Renegade. Then when you select your character, the instance went from loading in 14.5 seconds to about 11.5 seconds. Meanwhile, if you like to play Civilization VII found that the load time from the 2K launcher to the main menu went from about 31.8 seconds on the Micron to 29.6 seconds and then to load a game went from 24.1 seconds to 21.9 seconds.

What does this mean? In my tests, the FURY Renegade performed better. However, it won’t necessarily be a difference between day and night. Maybe if you are uploading giant files it will be different. I asked my wife that she uses the computer regularly and she admitted that she didn’t notice any real difference in her use of the machine stating “once you get to a certain point, fast is just fast”. At the end of the day I’d say if you can afford the FURY Renegade (starting at $49.99) it’s a good drive that’s faster than older PCIe 3.0 drives even though my meager real-world testing doesn’t show much improvement. Feel free to let me know if you’ve done a similar update and found a huge difference in the comments below.