If you’re after the speed, storage and reliability of an internal SSD that’s going to give you the edge on any virtual battleground, WD_Black is where it’s at.

Western Digital have been the pioneers and forerunners of digital storage for decades and over the past few years have been producing game drives with the knowledge and understanding that a solid drive is needed for solid game time.

Recently Western Digital released their WD_Black SN770 NVME SSD the smaller sibling of their SN850 and SN750.

To kit out your Rig or laptop, first make sure you have PCIe compatibility, otherwise the WD_Black SN series wont fit or run.

It’s also important to check any manufacturer warranty before your crack open your PC gaming powerhouse.

That aside once installed on an already existing setup running Windows 11, Windows will recognise the SN770 right away.

Western Digital also have free software for you to manage and maximise their SSDs. If you’re new to the realm of NVME drives, I’d recommend installing it.

I received the 1TB model and installed in to an existing setup as a game drive to run Steam games from.

But first some basic read / write formalities.

The WD_Black SN770 has a read of up to 5GB/s (5,150MB/s) – but this can be slowed down by a secondary drive if, say you’re copying from data from an older or slower SSD to this one.

The SN770 is PCIe4 but is also compatible to PCIe3. If you have a PCIe3 motherboard, your speed throughput wont be maximum.

To copy a 250GB folder with 4K produced video it was super quick. Less than 2 minutes (copying from another SSD, PCIe3).

To write to the SN770 via rendering out 4K video of 20 minutes in length took less than 4 minutes.

Impressive.

Installing and playing some rather large Steam games on was flawless with game load times virtually zero.

On average the SN770 manages to read at 5.2GB/s but of course slower to write, coming in at 4.8GB/s.

Still, this isn’t exactly slow at all.

The WD_Black SN770 offers up superior data read and write speeds no matter what you’re going to throw at it – and is less costly than say, it’s bigger sibling, the SN850.

It handles well, handles its own, keeps cool under pressure and is a cost effective solution to give you a PC based gaming advantage.

The post WD_BLACK SN770 NVME SSD REVIEW appeared first on Shane the Gamer.

Get some Fury into your gaming with Kingston’s newly released turbo charged FURY Renegade 2TB PCIe Gen 4 NVMe M.2 SSD.

Gaming on your Rig or high performance laptop doesn’t just need the prowess of a grunty graphics card and top of the line processor, your device’s read and write capabilities come in to play, as does the all important digital storage.

Games from Steam, Epic and more can be have a massive sized footprint, some getting way up there to 50+ GBs.

If you’re like me, you’ll likely have a lengthy games list in your PC library – but have to uninstall one or maybe two in order to install a new one. A vicious cycle of needing to go through the time and patience of picking and choosing.

Kingston’s FURY Renegade 2TB PCIe Gen 4 NVMe M.2 SSD provides amply storage for you to install the best of your collection (or entire collection, depending) whilst also giving you the need for speed you’ll need to be at the top of your game.

STG received one of their FURY Renegade 2TB PCIe Gen 4 NVMe M.2 SSD’s and I installed in a capable motherboard as a secondary drive.

(Note: Make sure your motherboard or gaming laptop is compatible first and if your device is still under warranty we advise that you get a certified professional to install any new hardware).

With a listed 7,300mbps read and 7,000mbps write I wanted to test out how the Fury Renegade could cope with simple read/write with larger folders.

A 600GB folder with 4K video from an already internal SSD transferred to the FURY Renegade saw speeds of up to 481mbps.

Given that the bottle neck was likely from the internal SSD, this was a surprise as the FURY Renegade syphoned the data.

Then using Adobe Premier to write (output) a test 4K video of 22 minutes, it took no time at all. Export finishing in less than 2 minutes.

This proves to me that the FURY Renegade 2TB PCIe Gen 4 NVMe M.2 SSD is just as excellent for serious content creators as it is for gaming.

Now back to games.

Lag, jitters and stutters during gameplay or high action moments can be caused by a few things. Graphics card (GC), RAM (memory) and processor capabilities. Your storage drive can also be a culprit.

Borderlands 3 suffered none of the above and upon initial game load, there was hardly any load to speak of – infact reinstalling the game from Steam was alot faster than I was used to (approx. around 3 minutes), my local telco’s bandwidth being the foot dragger.

Borderlands played beautifully, as hoped.

Forza Horizon 5 from Microsoft Store saw the same bandwidth slowdown, but the FURY Renegade 2TB PCIe Gen 4 NVMe M.2 SSD was installing as fast as it could get get the data from the cloud.

This one saw a few graphical stutters – this ended up being due to the GC. Once I’d toned down the graphics settings a bit all was sweet.

Call of Duty Vanguard was flawless.

Whatsmore the FURY Renegade 2TB PCIe Gen 4 NVMe M.2 SSD remains cool and calm throughout.

Kingston’s FURY Renegade 2TB PCIe Gen 4 NVMe M.2 SSD is absolutely more than capable of handling anything you run on it – likely, as in my case, other hardware may struggle to keep up.

This is the SSD you need to look at for a serious upgrade – but when compared with other PCIe NVMe SSD’s out there, the FURY Renegade is on the pricier side. It’s expensive.

Still even though you’re paying a premium for the FURY Renegade 2TB PCIe Gen 4 NVMe M.2 SSD you are getting a piece of premium hardware.

So if you’re building a Rig or looking to upgrade the internal storage of your gaming laptop, and price is not a factor, this is a strong contender to future proof and kit out your weapon of choice.

The post Kingston FURY Renegade 2TB PCIe SSD Review appeared first on Shane the Gamer.

Samsung, producers of the top Android based smartphones in the market.

But they don’t stop there – smart TVs, home appliances, PC monitors (including gaming specific) and also SSDs.

A couple of years back the South Korean tech giant released an external small form factor SSD designed to be used with both Android phones and tablets aswell as PC.

Now, Samsung have released an internal high speed PCIe NVMe SSD that will out run the competition. The 980 Pro.

The Samsung 980 Pro PCIe NVMe SSD comes in three storage variations; 250GB, 500GB and 1TB. STG received a 1TB to review.

Firstly before investing in one of these you’ll need to check if your PC or Gaming RIG’s motherboard is PCIe compatible. Installing the Samsung 980 Pro is super easy – if you use as a secondary storage.

Able to run at 7,000MB per second for reading and 5,000MB per second writing data makes the 980 Pro one of the fastest SSDs out there.

For this review, I installed the 980 Pro on to a test Gigabyte Z390 ATX as a secondary storage and installed a few Steam games on to the drive.

Gears 5, Forza 7 and Borderlands 3 – flawless play.

All games were super quick to load – local play saw no lags or stutters even during some fierce action filled moments.

Using the Samsung 980 Pro PCIe NVMe SSD as a main OS drive was neither overwhelming or underwhelming. Windows 10 loaded as quickly as hoped, but there was not a noticeable difference in the load time than what I currently experience on my ASUS Zenbook Duo laptop which has a 1TB M.2 NVMe PCIe 3.0 SSD. This I place down to potentially being the Windows 10 OS itself.

The Samsung 980 Pro is 4.0, but backwards compatible to 3.0 – what this essentially means is that it will perform exceedingly well in a lower end, slower port.

Speed test results for the Samsung 980 Pro PCIe NVME SSD 1TB reflect the speeds that Samsung themselves have stated the drive is capable of – I received on average over 5000MB write and slightly under 4000MB read.

Well impressive.

And you’re not needing to sell off a vital organ to get one of these Samsung 980 Pro PCIe NVMe SSDs either, with the 256GB starting at just over a hundred dollars (NZD).

If you’re a PC gamer then it is a definite recommend to place one of these in to your RIG. If you’re an average mid-range user and have a moderately new PC (again check your motherboard specs first) and need that extra oomph in speed the Samsung 980 Pro PCIe NVMe SSD is the way to go.

The post Samsung 980 Pro PCIe NVMe SSD Review appeared first on Shane the Gamer.

When I originally got my hands on Nintendo’s latest console, the Nintendo Switch, I came away impressed. An ambitious device, it attempts to be both the best handheld console ever, and a fantastic home console. After spending nearly a week with it, Nintendo have pulled off one, if not both of these goals.

The hardware enhances the feel of flow, yet at the same time enabling a robust variety of interactions, justifying each’s existence without feeling too gimmicky. This must also be balanced against players expectations, cost and feasibility. In short, it’s no easy task to create a quality hardware console. Hardware reviews can be dull, full of screenshots explaining system preferences and close-up shots of air vents. But hardware is only as good so far as it supports excellent games, and Nintendo have created a console that (only) enables playing games, perhaps in whole new ways.

Hardware

To the hardware itself. The Switch is well-built, and again I was astounded by how small the package is. The Wii and Wii U were the smallest of their respective generations, and the Switch is much smaller still. Yet, it’s quite wide for a handheld with the Joy-Con attached either side.

It nevertheless fits into the hand well and felt comfortable even after a couple of hours play. The screen is high quality, without question the best display Nintendo has put in a device. Game Cards are very small, somewhere in between a standard and micro SD card size.

The Joy-Cons are surprisingly comfortable, even for longer periods of use in the included Joy-Con Grip. It is unfortunate that Nintendo chose to nickle and dime its customers in not including the Joy-Con Charging Grip. For those people who will play the Switch mainly in its console mode, the lack of charging on the Grip will be frustrating. The only other way to charge the Joy-Con is through attaching them to the Switch console itself, so you must either remember to attach them once you’re done charging, or play for a while in the handheld mode. It’s a pain, and one that could have been easily avoided.

You can make the Joy-Con slightly larger by attaching the included Straps, which make them slightly more symmetrical and greatly improve the accessibility of their shoulder buttons. Unfortunately, trying to get them off once they’re on is legitimately frightening. They require an inordinate amount of force to remove, and as a result of that force, come out somewhat dangerously. It’s a bizarre oversight on Nintendo’s part and extremely unpleasant. I hope future hardware revisions will make it easier, because it is unacceptable at the moment.

Software

Nintendo has worked with NVIDIA, creators of the System on a Chip powering the Switch, to create a unique, low-level software environment for the Switch. The operating system software is very quick, a blessed relief from interminable Wii U loading screens, and I would go so far to say as the fastest console (in terms of operating system responsiveness) on the market today.

At present it is very barebones though, even with the day one 2.0 patch. There’s no Virtual Console, friend codes are still a thing, you can’t share videos and saves are locked down to system storage – an inexplicable decision on the face of it. It is slightly disheartening to deal with at the moment.

The introduction of fast suspend and awake is a huge boon, and a first for a Nintendo home console. Nintendo should require that all games support regular Autosaves and / or the ability to Save anywhere though. Even though the Switch has console and PC class games, it is still inherently a mobile device, and must have the capabilities to support that. Games with Save points half an hour apart feel positively antiquated on this impressive hardware, and don’t take into consideration the real-world consequences of running on a battery.

Conclusions

The Switch is brilliant hardware, and it is the software that needs the most work. The good news is that the issues in software are mostly fixable, and even the quibbles I’ve had with the hardware could be addressed either in a small revision or whatever the next version of the Switch might be.

These are a dozen small papercuts that somewhat undermine the otherwise pure joy of using the Switch. But the Switch as it stands now is still a fantastic value ivestment.

Nintendo’s pitch to you is this: take console quality games, Nintendo quality games, wherever you go. At home, with friends and on the go. That’s it. It doesn’t make promises about being a fantastic Virtual Console machine, or yet another Netflix device.

Yes, those features are currently lacking, and should be there. But lamenting their absence misses the point. Having those things may make the machine better, but for now they are better understood as the ideal type, the dream version of a Nintendo console created by so many journalists and media outlets since the Switch’s reveal as the NX. This dream machine doesn’t exist at the moment, and lamenting its shortcomings distracts from what it can do. I think that gamers buy machines for what the consoles do, and if you want the best Nintendo console to date, for the latest Nintendo (and indie) games, then the Switch can do that. That’s enough for many people, and, personally, it’s enough for me.

Taken on its merits, right now, the Switch already justifies itself.

You have the best Legend of Zelda game that you can now take with you, new ways of interacting in the Joy-Con in 1 2 Switch (which must be a pack-in title by the end of the year, surely), and truly mobile local multiplayer, best shown in Snipperclips. As always for Nintendo, the joys of a new console come in discovering, exploring and pushing to the limits the opportunities of what the new console offers. It’s about new games, enabled by new hardware. Not in rehashing past games or being another me-too device. And the Switch definitively isn’t a me-too device.

Despite its appearance as “yet another black tablet”, through some unique hardware, the Switch truly delivers on its promises.

The post Nintendo Switch First Impressions appeared first on Shane the Gamer.