Kingston Fury Renegade G5 4096GB PCIe 5.0 NVMe M.2 SSD Review

We could pardon anyone for thinking that controllers come from Taiwan and memory products from Singapore or Korea, as nearly everything we test is equipped that way. Elder builders may remember when Japan was also a producer (classic rock, anyone?), yet few may be aware that Toshiba spinoff Kioxia is still rolling dice out of Iwate Prefecture. In its Fury Renegade G5 series, Kingston is using the firm’s latest BiCS8 NAND to take on the memory goliath Micron:

Fury Renegade G5 Features

The Fury Renegade G5 is packed in a windowed box that lets shops scan the drive without opening it to verify its contents. Secured top and bottom with tamper-resistant tape, the back of the box also features a pull-up tab that would allow shop owners to hang these on a rack…if they thought such a think prudent.

Nothing but the drive itself is inside the box, because why would you need anything else? First-time builders should look to their motherboard manuals for M.2/NVMe installation instructions, as Kingston merely prints its warranty instructions on the inside of the Fury Renegade G5’s box rather than include any additional paper.

Silicon Motion’s SM2508G is the same part that made Crucial’s T710 so fast, and even the 32-gigabit Micron DDR4 cache is common to both. Since both drives completely fill the SM2508G’s flash rom interface, the speed at which the different NAND of these competing drives operates becomes the only significant pathway to performance differentiation.

While Crucial retains Micron branding on the G9 NAND of its T710, Kingston rebrands Kioxia’s BiCS8 218-layer NAND with it own part numbers (click to enlarge).

The Renegade G5 also carries the same 5-year warranty as its competitor, though the warranties of both are also limited by their endurance factors. This is where Kingston has a clear upper hand before we even begin testing, as the 4000TBW (terabytes written) endurance rating of its 4TB G5 is 67% greater than that of the 2400TBW of Crucial’s 4TB T710.

We’ve updated our classic test platform to AMD’s Ryzen 9 for the most recent two generations of drive analysis:

Test System Configuration
CPU	AMD Ryzen 9 7950X: 16C/32T 4.5-5.7 GHz, 64MB L3 Cache, Socket AM5
CPU Cooler	Alphacool Core 1 Aurora, VPP655 with Eisbecher D5 150mm, NexXxoS UT60 X-Flow
Motherboard	ASRock X870E Taichi, Socket AM5, BIOS 3.16 (12-20-2024)
Graphics	Powercolor Red Devil Radeon 6750 XT: 2324-2623MHz GPU, 12GB GDDR6
Memory	Crucial Pro OC Gaming Edition DDR5-6400 2x16GB (32GB) CL32-38-38-96 1.30V

Fury Renegade G5 Performance

With a peak test temperature of 54° in a 21° room, the Renegade G5 runs cooler than the T710 when mounted under the same motherboard-included heat spreader. Charted with the temperature of the room subtracted, this evidence appears to confirm rumors of Kioxia’s BiCS8 running cooler than Micron’s G9.

The actual rumor we read was that BiCS8 runs both cooler and faster than G9, and the performance side of that rumor is confirmed in both Sandra and AIDA64 with Micron parts leading only one (Sandra IOPs) of the six tests.

The Fury Renegade G5 continues its lead through 3DMark, though Crucial’s older T705 leads PCMark’s “Quick Test”.

The ATTO 128K Read test results were so skewed towards the T710 that was just retested our old T710 to confirm that these were still valid, with ‘valid’ being used loosely as we are still suspicious of a potential anomaly in the benchmark code.

CrystalDiskMark results are far closer to those of other tests, as it shows the Renegade G5 leading by slim margins.

As for a real-world large file transfer test, DeskBench pushes the Renegade G5 into a class of its own.

When we previously awarded the T710 as a viable replacement for the T705, we had no idea that the T705 would still be available in quantity all these months later. Had we imagined the long-term viability of both products, we’d have stuck with the earlier version.

But then something else happened: The Fury Renegade G5 beat both of those drives in the average of each field and the average of all fields. It’s just a faster drive, and it runs cooler too. Though both the T705 and T710 are priced low enough to retain our value-referencing Approved award, only the Fury Renegade G5 currently has enough performance to hold the crown of Excellence.

Kingston Fury Renegade G5 4TB (SFYR2S/4T0)
Pros	Cons
Fastest drive ever tested Coolest PCIe 5.0 drive tested Superior endurance rating	Currently very expensive
The Verdict
Though certain producers have better secured their prices against recent market surges, buyers who can afford the Fury Renegade G5’s superior performance will be delighted in its purchase.

Finally, those who would like to confirm the above results should feel free to click the below screenshots to see larger versions.