Is Kingston KC3000 Gen4 NVMe SSD good?

[Chiyawa]

I saw one of my local PC shop having most of their SSD price cut significantly. I've been eyeing Kingston KC3000 ever since it launch, now that it falls in the price range where I can afford it, I wonder should I get 1?

 

I'm going to replace my main OS boot drive. My current OS drive is Gigabyte M.2 NVMe SSD, which is Gen3. I will be using this (Gigabyte) as my storage drive if I get KC3000 because I have additional M.2 slot. I know I won't see lots of performance improvement switching from Gen 3 to Gen 4, but at least KC3000 has DRAM cache, which means I won't stress out my SSD that much when use it as boot drive.

 

Hmm... That reminds me, should I buy M.2 cloner to clone all data from old M.2 drive to the new M.2 drive, or should I fresh install everything? Or should I go for cloning software instead...

 

PC summary:

CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 3600

MoBo: Gigabyte Aorus X570 Pro WiFi

M.2 Slot 1: Gigabyte M.2 NVMe SSD 960GB

M.2 Slot 2: empty

SATA #1: Kingston A400 2.5 inch SATA SSD 960GB

SATA #2: Hitachi Travelstar 2.5 inch HDD 750GB

SATA #3: Seagate 3.5 inch HDD 2TB

SATA #4: Toshiba X300 desktop 3.5 inch HDD 4TB

SATA #5: LiteOn Blu-ray writer drive

SATA #6: DVD Writer drive (from old HP desktop)

 

Regards,

Chiyawa

[kokosnh]

Phison E18 + DDR4 + 176l TLC micron 

it’s top of the PCIe 4.0 M.2 NVMe SSD’s 

[191x7]

The KC3000 is a good SSD, one of the fastest Gen4 drives. It's successor, the Kingston Fury Renegade, costs about the same and uses the same controller, but has provisioning so it's more durable and a tiny bit faster.

 

But, here's some info for you:

That means your system will run PCI-E Gen3 till you upgrade the CPU. Ryzen 5600 or 5700X soon?

[Chiyawa]

5 minutes ago, kokosnh said:

Phison E18 + DDR4 + 176l TLC micron 

it’s top of the PCIe 4.0 M.2 NVMe SSD’s 

Not sure what those translate too. Guess it's their controller specs? Sorry, it's just that I'm not certain about Phison E18 other than 'it's a good controller'. Same to 176I TLC Micron.

 

How do you check which controller and NAND flash they are using without peeling the label?

[Chiyawa]

1 minute ago, 191x7 said:

The KC3000 is a good SSD, one of the fastest Gen4 drives. It's successor, the Kingston Fury Renegade, costs about the same and uses the same controller, but has provisioning so it's more durable and a tiny bit faster.

 

But, here's some info for you:

That means your system will run PCI-E Gen3 till you upgrade the CPU. Ryzen 5600 or 5700X soon?

Oh? I see. I thought my Ryzen 3600 is capable to run Gen 4 NVMe.

 

But yeah, I'll be upgrading my CPU soon, too, since I'm aiming for RX 6800 XT as well.

[Chiyawa]

8 minutes ago, 191x7 said:

*Snip

I think there's a little error on Gigabyte's manual. I remember now that the 3rd gen Ryzen and 2nd gen Ryzen means Ryzen 3000 series CPU and Ryzen 2000 series CPU. At that time (4 or 5 years ago I think) they follow what Intel used, like 1st gen Core i series is only 3 digit but 2nd gen Core i series known as 2000 series. AMD prefer to use Zen generation instead of 3000 series, so, guess it's quite confusing here. My BIOS allows me to set PCIe Gen 4 for my GPU PCIe slots, so it supports PCIe 4.0.

[191x7]

1 hour ago, Chiyawa said:

I think there's a little error on Gigabyte's manual. I remember now that the 3rd gen Ryzen and 2nd gen Ryzen means Ryzen 3000 series CPU and Ryzen 2000 series CPU. At that time (4 or 5 years ago I think) they follow what Intel used, like 1st gen Core i series is only 3 digit but 2nd gen Core i series known as 2000 series. AMD prefer to use Zen generation instead of 3000 series, so, guess it's quite confusing here. My BIOS allows me to set PCIe Gen 4 for my GPU PCIe slots, so it supports PCIe 4.0.

There are Zen (1000, 2000G), Zen+ (2000, 3000G, 1000AF), Zen2 (3000, 4000) and Zen3 (5000) and there are some 5000 CPU-s that sit between Zen2 and Zen3.

Zen 2 Ryzen 3600 does support PCI-E 4.0 but a board might use the PCI-E4 only for the main PCI-E slot and the rest might be PCI-E3 if the CPU lacks lanes.

[Chiyawa]

13 hours ago, 191x7 said:

There are Zen (1000, 2000G), Zen+ (2000, 3000G, 1000AF), Zen2 (3000, 4000) and Zen3 (5000) and there are some 5000 CPU-s that sit between Zen2 and Zen3.

Zen 2 Ryzen 3600 does support PCI-E 4.0 but a board might use the PCI-E4 only for the main PCI-E slot and the rest might be PCI-E3 if the CPU lacks lanes.

Indeed. Thanks for your information, but for this case, Gigabyte's motherboard manual causes a little confusion. Instead of listing the CPU as Ryzen 3000 series, they list it as 3rd gen Ryzen, and it was only recently they list the CPU as Ryzen 5000 series instead of 5th gen Ryzen (well, I mean Ryzen sure has a confusing naming scheme at one point). I was confused last time, and the kind shopkeeper kindly explain me of this, told me that my motherboard is PCIe Gen 4 capable (for every PCIe ports). I bought my system one or two months after Ryzen 3000 series CPU and X570 motherboard launched.