The Kingston Fury Renegade is fast, well priced, and equipped with a decent endurance rating. The price undercuts that of many PCIe 4.0 drives, and its performance is competitive, if not the fastest we've seen. You’ll need a heatsink for it, though, and the 4TB model is far too expensive.
Pros
Good value
Excellent endurance rating
Fast performance
Cons
Can get hot without a heatsink
Cheaper SSDs are nearly as fast in real-world performance
4TB model is very expensive
With many PCIe 4.0 M.2 SSDs using the same flash memory and controller, it's often down to each manufacturer's firmware tweaks, pricing, and durability to make their drives stand out. With a speedy Phison E18 controller under the hood, the Kingston Fury Renegade is certainly no slouch, and it costs just $220 for a 2TB drive as well.
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But can it stake a claim as the best SSD for gaming? We've put the Kingston Fury Renegade through our extensive benchmarking systems here in the lab to find out.
Our review sample is the 2TB model, which boasts a massive 2,000 terabytes written (TBW) endurance rating, but even the 1TB model offers 1,000 TBW, which is significantly more than the WD Black SN850, Samsung 980 Pro, and other Phison-based SSDs such as the Corsair MP600 Pro. Only the slower WD Red SN700 offers more, and that's designed for NAS boxes, so credit to Kingston for stumping up such a good durability rating, and backing it up with a five-year warranty.
Meanwhile, the Kingston's Micron-made 3D triple-level cell (TLC) NAND flash memory can dish out a claimed read speed of 7,300MB/s in sequential transfers, which is the same for all models, while Kingston claims the 2TB model can sequentially write at up to 7,000MB/s, with this figure dropping to 6,000MB/s and 3,900MB/s for the 1TB and 500GB models respectively.
Sadly, economies of scale don't work here, as the 4TB model is no faster than the 2TB model, but it costs three times as much, so you'd have to really want 4TB on a single drive to consider it.
In of the module itself, the Kingston Fury Renegade doesn't have a full heatsink, although it does have a sliver of graphene on top of the SSD to keep it cool while under load. However, the SSD still hit 71°C in the CrystalDiskMark benchmark in our back-to-back stress test, which occasionally saw speeds drop by several hundred megabytes a second.
Fitting our test motherboard's heatsink to the Kingston saw this peak temperature drop to 46°C with no further throttling, but the extra cooling headroom failed to boost the top speeds any further.
Performance
In CrystalDiskMark, the Kingston's sequential read and write speeds of 7,025MB/s and 6,792MB/s respectively are only a fraction slower without the heatsink, but both figures are some way below the claimed top speeds.
Meanwhile, the Kingston hit 2,165 MB/s in our 4K random 32-queue-depth read test with four threads, which was bettered only a little by the WD Black SN850, with other Phison E18 SSDs coming south of 2,000MB/s. However, other Phison E18 drives closely match the Fury Renegade's 1,794MB/s write speed in this test.
AS SSD offered up read and write sequential speeds that were a little faster than the likes of the Corsair MP 600 Pro too, with the Kingston's 5,510MB/s read speed being around 200MB/s quicker, although the 4K random read and write speeds were a bit faster on the Corsair SSD.
Price
The Kingston Fury Renegade 500GB will set you back $79 (£71) for a 1TB drive, $220 (£181) for a 2TB SSD, and $629 (£535) for a 4TB model. However, regular savings can be found on all capacities if you shop around for deals.
Verdict
Based on its endurance rating alone, the Kingston Fury Renegade is a better bet than many Phison-based PCIe 4.0 SSDs, especially as it has a decent warranty. However, you'll need to ensure your motherboard has a heatsink for it (or buy one separately), as it can get toasty when running at full pelt.
This is why other SSDs are a tad faster in some tests, as most similar models are equipped with much larger heatsinks. Thankfully, the Kingston Fury Renegade is also well priced for an SSD that offers a 6,800MB/s write speed, and it's the price that really makes this SSD so tempting, especially with its durability rating. If you want one of the fastest M.2 SSDs available for an affordable price, and with guaranteed reliability, then this is a great option.
If you haven't upgraded an SSD before, make sure you also read our full guide on how to install an M.2 SSD, where we take you through the whole procedure, including fitting a heatsink.
