The Multi-talented Samsung 990 EVO Plus

PCIe 4.0 x4 Or PCIe 5.0 x2, But DRAM-less Either Way

Samsung’s EVO line has a long standing reputation for offering a beautiful mix of performance and price, and the 990 EVO Plus is no exception.  The price is kept low thanks to the lack of an onboard DRAM cache, at it’s current price of $138 for the 2TB model it’s closer to $0.05/GB than $0.10.  That price will get you an advertised 7,250MB/s sequential reads and 6,300MB/s writes on the 2TB model, or 1,350,000 IOPS if you prefer.  For the most part, KitGuru saw better performance on a PCIe 5.0 x2 interface than they did on the PCIe 4.0 x4 interface, though in real life the difference is not noticeable.

The full review at Kitiguru reveals that the performance on either interface is not quite up to the advertised speeds, but by such a small margin it is hard to fault the performance of the 990 EVO Plus. You can see the results, and the effectiveness of Samsung’s Intelligent TurboWrite 2.0 technology to boost write speeds here.