Month: May 2023

Crucial has launched the T700 Pro M.2 SSD, which offers incredible read and write speeds of 12,400MB/sec and 11,800MB/sec respectively – easily one of, if not the fastest consumer M.2 SSD on the market. We’ve seen some speedy models already with Corsair’s MP700 offering speeds around 10,000MB/sec – yes that’s a whole gigabyte in a second and fast enough to transfer a 4GB video file in under five seconds.

However, Crucial has dialled things up to reach even higher speeds, coming in several thousand megabytes a second higher than the Corsair Mp700. As a result, though, the company is also charging slightly more. For example, the 2TB model will cost you $339.99 for the bare SSD and $369.99 with a large heatsink. Corsair’s Mp700 costs $289.99 for the same capacity. You also get a slightly higher TBW endurance rating with the Corsair SSD at 1400TBW for the 2TB versus 1200TBW for the Crucial.

Both SSDs use the Phison E26 controller and require a PCIe 5.0 compatible M.2 port to offer their rated speeds, although they are backwards compatible with older motherboards, albeit with reduced speeds. Along with Micron 232-layer 3D TLC NAND, the T700 Pro uses Micron LPDDR4 DRAM at a rate of 1GB per 1TB for cacheing. It also supports Microsoft DirectStorage technology, which can reduce game load times and reduce CPU loads.

One issue with PCIe 5.0 SSDs is their operating temperatures, which are one reason Corsair opted to remove the heatsink from its MP700 and ship it without. Crucial offers the bare SSD as well as a heatsink-equipped model for an extra thirty bucks if your motherboard doesn’t have one. The thermal limit for throttling – reducing the speed of the SSD – is 81°C, and the heatsink-less model topped this quickly during a stress test and the system shut down allowing it to cool off. Clearly you’ll want to avoid that.

The heatsink-equipped model kept the temperature at 80°C, with that falling to 75°C with some airflow directed at the motherboard, with similar results using the heatsink-less version sat under the large heatsink on my Asus ROG Strix X670E Gaming WiFi motherboard. However, it took a little longer to hit this temperature thanks to the larger heatsink on the motherboard. You’ll definitely need to use an M.2 heatsink with this SSD and ideally a large one with plenty of local airflow too.

The heatsink-equipped model is 20.5mm tall and is cooled on both sides. This can result in compatibility issues with motherboards that cool M.2 SSDs on both sides as you can’t close the securing latch many are equipped with. In this case, you’ll need to remove the lower thermal pad on your M.2 port so it fits properly.

Testing and benchmarks

I used an Asus ROG Strix X670E Gaming WiFi motherboard with an AMD Ryzen 9 7950X CPU and Windows 11 with the latest updates. Tests were carried out using CrystalDiskMark and UL’s storage benchmarks.

Performance discussion

The T700 Pro was a little hotter than the Corsair Mp700, but the latter has a slightly lower thermal throttling temperature, with both SSDs sitting slightly below these using a large motherboard heatsink during an extended stress test.

The speeds are fastest I’ve seen from a consumer M.2 SSD, hitting the advertised numbers, with slightly higher figures recorded in the write test and getting on for double those of slower PCIe 4.0 SSDs such as Samsung’s 990 Pro. It’s Random 4K Q1T1 speeds in CrystalDiskMark were pretty average and didn’t offer any benefits from the rest of the field.

The random 4K Q32T16 result was exceptional, adding a few hundred megabytes a second to the fastest SSDs previously tested. It also managed the fastest game load performance speeds along with the lowest game access times.

Conclusions

Alongside the requirements for a modern motherboard that supports PCIe 5.0 SSDs, current pricing for SSDs such as Crucial’s T700 Pro are understandably high, and don’t offer amazing value per gigabyte, even though there’s no doubting they’re extremely fast. The T700 Pro is currently the fastest consumer M.2 SSD out there, with lightning fast speeds across the board so if you need the fastest SSD around that shoves data around at insane speeds and also benefits game load times, this is it.

From the emergence of the very first rumours about Samsung’s 2023 TV range way back in November 2022, I found myself struggling to understand the brand’s new Quantum Dot OLED S90C series.

Sure, it made sense for Samsung to expand its QD OLED offering after the technology’s debut TVs, Sony’s A95K and Samsung’s S95B ranges, proved such a critical and commercial success in 2022. And it made sense, too, for that range expansion to offer a cheaper point of entry for cash-strapped QD OLED fans alongside the new flagship S95C range.

The problem was, Samsung didn’t seem sure at all about exactly what the new, cheaper S90Cs were going to be beyond the basic idea that they needed to be cheaper than the S95Cs. At first there was a suggestion that the S90Cs would use the same ‘debut’ QD OLED panels used in the S95B range, leaving the new flagship S95C models to benefit alone from the latest 2nd-gen QD OLED panels. That would be a slightly disappointing development, perhaps, but one that was at least reasonably easy to understand as a simple way for Samsung to offer clear differentiation between the S90C performance and that of its new, truly 2nd-gen S95C QD OLED flagships.

Things became far more confusing, though, during a garbled ‘soft launch’ of the S90Cs at the CES in January. Here Samsung initially suggested that the S90Cs were in fact going to have the same picture quality as the S95Cs, relying on other features and audio quality differences to explain why the S90Cs were cheaper. But then the brand suddenly pivoted in discussions with some CES attendees to hinting that the S90Cs having the same picture quality as the S95Cs was actually merely a goal, not a definite result, and that the S90Cs may after all end up using left-over 2022 panel stocks.

Even as late as a press event in Frankfurt at the end of February, just weeks before Samsung’s 2023 TV range was set to hit stores, the brand continued to struggle to explain exactly how the S90Cs were going to differ from the S95Cs. We did at least learn at this stage – after much harassing of multiple Samsung representatives – that the S90Cs were going to be using second-gen QD OLED panels like the S95C flagships, but that due to vague ‘processing’ differences, the S90Cs would be delivering substantially less brightness than their more expensive QD OLED siblings. Which kind of made it sound as if the S90Cs were simply deliberately hobbling the potential of their panels to create a price gap between Samsung’s new entry level and flagship QD OLED options.

Now, though, that I’ve had the chance to spend quality time with an S90C alongside most of 2023’s most important and premium TVs (as part of the TV reviewing work I do when not contributing to this Forbes channel), I’m surprised and delighted to say that actually the S90Cs have turned out to be potentially my favourite all-round TVs of the year to date.

While I’m not going to tack here into a full review of the S90C, I do want to share a quick overview of why I like the S90Cs so much even in a year that’s already given us other truly great TVs such as the LG G3 and C3 OLEDs, Samsung’s S95C QD OLED and QN95C flagship mini LEDs and Sony’s A80L 2023 mid-range OLED.

The first thing to say about the S90Cs is that while their picture quality is indeed not as dazzlingly bright as that of their step-up S95C siblings, its brightness is still a step up both from last year’s S95B QD OLEDs, and more importantly, the latest mid-range rivals from LG and, especially, Sony. While this brightness boost is clearly observable in side by side tests, with both peak light highlights and full screen bright HDR content, you can measure the difference too.

The LG OLED65C3 tops out at just under 900 nits on a 10% white HDR window and just under 200 nits on a 100% white HDR window (the latter only in Vivid mode, too). Sony’s 65A80L tops out at around 800 nits on a 10% white HDR window, and around 203 nits on a 100% window (though again this latter measurement is only achieved if you use its largely unwatchable Vivid mode, and drops to around 190 nits in the best of the other actually usable presets). The Samsung 55S90C, however, hits 1094 nits on a 10% HDR window in Standard mode, while achieving up to 247 nits with a 100% white HDR window.

In an HDR world where brightness matters, these differences in the S90C’s favour compared with its mid-range competitors are big attractions.

It is true, of course, that the S90Cs’ brightness is no match for the 1400 nits or so brightness peaks on 10% white HDR windows achieved by Samsung’s S95C and LG’s G3 TV ranges this year. But this brings me to the second reason I have so much love for the S90Cs: Their price.

In many retailers now the 65S90C, for example, costs £2,799 in the UK and $2,499.99 in the US. That compares with £3,299/$3,299.99 for the LG OLED65G3 and £3,499/$3,299.99 for the Samsung 65S95C, as well as £2,699.99/$2,399.99 for the mid-range LG OLED65C3, and £2,499/$2,599.99 for the mid-range Sony 65A80L. In other words, the S90C range still gives you a palpable QD OLED-inspired brightness performance benefit over its similarly priced mid-range rivals, while simultaneously maintaining a significant affordability advantage over the TV world’s latest flagship models.

Of course, brightness isn’t the only thing that matters about a TV’s picture quality. But the S90C range’s second-generation QD OLED panel also continues to deliver the stunning black levels we’ve come to associate with self-emissive OLED technology, ensuring that its extra brightness contributes as well to a fantastic local contrast performance. In fact, the S90C joins the S95C in benefitting from new filtering that makes its black levels much less susceptible to interference from ambient light than the S95Bs were.

The S90C’s colour, meanwhile, benefits from the extra volumes you get with more brightness, as well as the improvements in subtlety and naturalism delivered by Samsung’s AI-bolstered 2023 image processing system. A processing system which also helps the S90C to deliver more finely textured and noiseless 4K images than its predecessor.

The S90C range’s surprisingly perfectly pitched pictures aren’t just great with video sources, either. They also contribute to stunning looking gaming imagery when partnered with an Xbox Series X, PS5 or high-end PC card. In fact, the S90Cs produce arguably the all-round best gaming graphics, taking their combination of clarity, colour, contrast but also balance and cohesion into account, that I’ve seen on a TV.

Samsung’s own S95C and LG’s G3 models this year clearly deliver graphics and video alike with much more sheer brightness-infused impact than the S90Cs. So for pure spectacle those can’t be topped if you’ve got the necessary extra cash to step up to them. But there seems to be something slightly more controlled and balanced about the S90C’s more restrained approach, especially when gaming, that creates an arguably more consistent, less fatiguing and therefore immersive experience over long viewing sessions. It’s worth adding, too, that in its fastest response mode the S90Cs get input lag in their Game presets down to just 9.2ms.

The S90Cs aren’t quite as well built overall as the S95Cs (though I actually prefer how much thinner their panels are at the screen’s edges). Nor does the S90Cs’ 2.1-channel 40W audio system sound as powerful and accurate with its sound effect placement as the object tracking sound system in the S95Cs. Facts which, in the end, when partnered with my enduring love of the most spectacular experiences in AV life, would just about still have me reaching for an LG G3 or Samsung S95C if my pockets were limitlessly deep.

With their pricing fairly taken into account, though, and in full consideration of the sort of competition that pricing pitches them up against, the S90Cs have gone in my estimation from potentially horribly misjudged zeroes to true 2023 heroes. Proof, I guess, that sometimes the greatest chaos really can give birth to the finest art!

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Related reading

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Samsung’s 2023 TV Line-Up Explained

Google’s next Pixel Watch could have significantly improved battery life according to a new report.

9to5Google claims that Google is planning to release a second version of the Pixel Watch later this year – called the Pixel Watch 2 – with better battery performance. To make that possible Google is looking at switching to Qualcomm architecture and ditching Samsung’s 2018 Exynos 9110 chip that powers the 2022 Pixel Watch.

The Pixel Watch 2, however, will be supported by Qualcomm’s latest Snapdragon W5+ Gen 1 platform, which should be vastly more efficient and lead to better battery performance. The report says that the battery may not be much bigger, but Google’s testing is showing a day’s usage with the with always-on-display (AOD) enabled.

It’s a bit vague because “a day of usage” could mean 12 hours, which is where the Pixel Watch is at right now. But the new chipset will improve things and it seems like with some power saving efforts, the new wearable could last 48 hours without a charge.

Looking for a new phone for your Pixel Watch? Google has found the perfect balance with its new Pixel.

My Pixel Watch needs careful power management to make it to 24 hours. With unhindered fitness tracking and an AOD enabled, I need to reach for the charger before bedtime. This was always the main drawback of the Pixel Watch, especially up against the Apple Watch and Samsung Galaxy Watch 5 Pro. So if this report is accurate then the next device will be a huge improvement.

The report also mentions that the Pixel Watch successor will have more health tracking sensors similar to that of the Fitbit Sense 2. The current Pixel Watch doesn’t have what FitBit calls a body response sensor, which continuously measures electrodermal activity to monitor stress levels. Nor is there a body temperature monitor on the existing Google wearable. Both are drains on the Sense’s battery, so any gains made by the more efficient chipset could be eaten up by new features.

Despite the battery woes, the Pixel Watch was a mostly impressive debut wearable for the company. Syncing with other Google tech worked well, which may be a low bar to clear but if you experienced the mess of the original Pixel Buds – you will understand.

It’s also nicely designed, with the curved display and rotating crown being particular highlights. The Fitness and health tracking felt smooth, although integration with FitBit features could do with some refinement. But all of that is hard to appreciate because of the short battery life. Google has the foundation of a slick smartwatch in the Pixel Watch, hopefully the next iteration can iron out those issues to make a more well-rounded device.

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